I just tried to think what I had ever heard about their involvement.

1. Before the book came out, Charlton Heston criticized it in a column in a magazine (after Heston had read a news article on the forthcoming book). Bellesiles more than effectively responded with a direct assault on the NRA, enlisting several dozen scholars for his public letter sent to the NRA.

2. Much later Clayton Cramer asked the NRA for a small travel grant to check Bellesiles’s sources and he was turned down.

3. When the dispute was nearly over, I read about a Senator attacking Bellesiles in a speech at the NRA convention.

4. Other than a review co-authored by Cramer in Shotgun News and some additional very derivative news articles updating members on developments in the press, that’s all I remember seeing or hearing from the NRA over the 2-3 years of the dispute.

I didn’t regularly see what the NRA sent to members and I doubt that any of the other relevant academics or administrators did either. I think that if the NRA were involved in the Bellesiles affair in any significant way I would have heard something about it.

Just what is it that the NRA is supposed to have done when it wouldn’t fund — even modestly – Cramer’s researching the book?

And what is the process by which the NRA influenced the History Chair at Emory and Emory’s Provost to institute a formal investigation, or influenced Bellesiles’s colleagues at Emory to find against him, or influenced the outside panel (including a signatory to Bellesiles’ anti-NRA letter) to find against Bellesiles, or influenced the Provost at Columbia to instigate a review of the Bancroft Prize, or influenced me, or influenced Robert Churchill, or influenced Eric Monkkonen, or influenced the Wm & Mary Q. reviewers?

From what I’ve seen from afar, the NRA mostly concentrates on 3 things: raising money, publishing magazines, and lobbying Congress.

After the Bellesiles affair was over, I asked someone familiar with the NRA why the NRA was so savvy to stay out of it and let the academics handle it. The answer I got is that the NRA wasn’t savvy so much as it is suspicious of academics, whom they neither understand nor trust.

Spreading patently ridiculous NRA conspiracy stories is frankly ahistorical.

Jim Lindgren
Northwestern University
J.D. – Ph.D.

And, PorJ: I agree with you on the importance of policing our own, but I totally disagree with you that the Bellesiles case is a great example of the absence of this. As I said, in going to a trade publisher, Bellesiles wasn’t subjected to the traditional peer review that other serious books in our profession get. And like I said, professional historians were rendering their (dim) judgment of the book–see the William and Mary Quarterly entire issue devoted to pouring cold water on this in 2002. But, because well-funded political interests got the jump, Bellesiles got the gate. It wasn’t just so-called “outsiders” who were skeptical of Bellesiles’ claims, it was a lot of “insiders” (myself included.)

I maintain that it’s OK to be wrong when attempting to create new knowledge.

My point is that it wasn’t the profession that discovered his errors (or malfeasance) – it was outsiders. Even if it was an extremely well-funded NRA campaign against him, shouldn’t he have been protected by professional standards of historical inquiry? He cited archives that no longer exist, and he either “erroneously reported” or “fudged” or (use your own word)archival sources. This is trust is the basis of the entire profession: we take it for granted that after earning a Ph.D. a scholar is trustworthy enough to accurately report archival material. Otherwise the profession couldn’t exist; we can’t check every footnote in every book. He violated that trust, and it has nothing at all to do with interpretations or theories. He didn’t lose his tenured position because of his interpretation, he lost it because of the same kind of research irregularities that would get scholars in other fields fired.

As to the NRA, if we’re professionals it should be irrelevant who holds us to our professed standards, right? Where, precisely, does politics come into the premise that all historical evidence is presumed to be reported accurately (again: interpretation is a different question)?

Back to Hasan. Here’s my point and why the linkage matters. Its been reported that he made at least two professional presentations, one to a conference of psychologists and psychiatrists, and one to a class in a Public Health Masters program, in which he professed outrageous, questionable, and violent ideas. The people in the room did not report him. This could be for two reasons. In this article, one of the attendees in the Public Health seminar said he feared being called racist. That’s the easy way out.

The more difficult thing is to acknowledge that as Professionals we’re trained to protect our own in the interest of autonomy and professional responsibility. Obviously Hasan felt safe to profess his ideas in the confines of the seminar room or professional conference, because we can’t throw every nutball out of the profession for acting oddly or possessing and professing ideas that makes us uncomfortable, angry or scared. But if he were one of our students saying the EXACT same things, we’d have no problem reporting him to a supervisor.

There’s price to be paid for protecting our own, and we have to acknowledge it – regardless of the profession.

I don’t think the lesson of the Bellesiles case is that he won a big award and then ultimately lost his job. (Interesting that you chose his case as an example here, since it was the radical pro-gun/NRA types who targeted Bellesiles’s book whose work aids and abets these murderous rampages.) I think the big lesson of the Bellesiles case is that this is what happens when an organized and well-funded political movement decides to harrass and punish someone for writing a book, and when no one in his profession stands up for him. I don’t know if you read his book–I have, because it’s pretty close to my own research. I mostly disagreed with his conclusions and thought that he overlooked some evidence or read his evidence in curiously one-dimensional ways, but I can’t say that he set out with evil in his heart to commit fraud. (I cite his book in my book, both parts where we disagree and parts where we agree.) There are a lot of books in my footnotes that I regard in the same fashion: useful and solid in parts, mistaken in others.

A major point that gets lost whenever a case like this becomes national news is that we’re allowed to disagree with each other–everyone reading this who has published an article or a book knows that there are people in their profession who will disagree vehemently with their research and conclusions–but that doesn’t make us wrong. And even if we’re wrong–that’s OK too. That’s how scholarship works. (Think of Calvin Martin’s Keepers of the Game.–that’s what I think would have happened with Bellesiles’s book had it not come under political attack. It would be read because it’s a provocative idea, but most people would conclude that it was a mistaken one.

The book got a lot of buzz because it was published by Jane Garrett at Knopf, and I wonder how many people–either his supporters or detractors–actually bothered to read the damn book. (One of the hazards of trade publishers, apparently, is the lack of peer review.) The historical profession was caught flat-footed by the NRA, which apparently believes that there is only ONE right answer to any historical question or problem, but it’s a much harder idea to sell that history is an ongoing conversation rather than a game of Jeopardy. The more nuanced judgment of this book was starting to appear by 2002 (see the William and Mary Quarterly forum on the book), but the academic press and historians move too slowly to compete in the mainstream press with the NRA. Make no mistake–it was their money and muscle, and not Jim Lindgren, who brought Bellesiles down.

In neither version of the story does the historical profession look courageous or noble. The book didn’t deserve the Bancroft, but neither did it deserve infamy.

Now, in medicine, there’s the problem of malpractice which stymies a lot of serious introspection. A new group, however, is trying to get doctors to admit mistakes in exchange for malpractice protection (as a form of tort reform):

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/us/18apology.html

They are running into all kinds of difficulties. But medicine – and medical education, in particular – breeds a sense that practitioners must represent themselves publicly as almost invulnerable authorities. The psychological toll this takes has been written about and is a staple of TV (look at the difference between Dr. Marcus Welby MD and ER, or Scrubs, etc.).

Getting a history Ph.D. breeds a similar sense of authority. Mastering the norms and standards of the profession supposedly protects the scholarship from imposters and inaccuracy. The problem is: how does that profession look when Michael Bellesiles wins its highest award (the Bancroft Prize – since rescinded) and is then unmasked as a fraud by a legal scholar and community college instructor?

There are many, many cases of the professions incompetently policing themselves. Its not just psychiatry; if you’ve never read the rather amazing story of the surgeon Dr. David Arndt, I’d recommend it to you:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2004/03/21/what_went_wrong/

The Fort Hood murderer had been unable to find an appropriate wife, and it clearly played a role:

His failed search for a wife seemed to haunt Hasan. At the Muslim Community Centre in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, he signed up for an Islamic matchmaking service, specifying that he wanted a bride who wore the hijab and prayed five times a day.

Adnan Haider, a retired professor of statistics, recalled how at their first meeting last year, a casual introduction after Friday prayers, Hasan immediately asked the academic if he knew “a nice Muslim girl” he could marry.

“It was a strange thing to ask someone you have met two seconds before. It was clear to me he was under pressure, you could just see it in his face,” said Prof Haider, 74, who used to work at Georgetown University in Washington. “You could see he was lonely and didn’t have friends.

Now, on to the psychiatrist as particularly disturbed type of medical practitioner. There’s evidence for this:

http://www.slate.com/id/2234736/

But because the spam filter trapped me before, I am going to do another post with my larger point….