What Is Knopf Waiting For?

Early in 2002, Jane Garrett, Michael Bellesiles's editor at Alfred A. Knopf, told Danny Postel of the Chronicle of Higher Education that the publisher "stands behind" Arming America despite everything the book's critics had to say about its scholarly failings. "I realize that he made some errors," Garrett admitted, "but they certainly were not made intentionally. They were the result of some over-quick research," she said, adding that Knopf was "satisfied" with what Bellesiles "has done to explain things," and particularly his attempt at "getting his mistakes corrected." This was quite a concession for Garrett to make because months earlier, in a statement to Melissa Seckora of the National Review, she refused to acknowledge that there was any reason to be concerned about the growing chorus of criticism being leveled at Arming America. "Hosts of reputable scholars continue to defend [Bellesiles's] methods and his conclusions," she wrote. "Controversies of this nature are not uncommon in the historical profession. That's what makes history so interesting."

Today, however, what is almost as "interesting" is how Knopf is going to handle Arming America now that it has been judged to be seriously flawed and deceptive, perhaps even fraudulent, by Emory University's independent investigative panel and the trustees of Columbia University, who on Dec. 7, 2002 rescinded the Bancroft Prize the school awarded the book in April 2001. Last Spring, when I spoke to a representative of Knopf at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Washington, D.C., he said that a new edition of Arming America was in the works and they were only awaiting the report promised by Emory University before they went ahead with it. But since the issuance of the Emory Report and Columbia's announcement revoking the Bancroft Prize, little has been heard from Knopf other than a statement that despite Columbia's decision, the Vintage paperback edition of Arming America, "which already includes corrections, will remain in print."

But should historians or the reading public be satisfied with Knopf's decision to keep the presses rolling with the paperback edition or should Knopf do what many critics of Arming America have urged and, like other producers of clearly defective products, recall the book? Some months ago, even before the Emory Report and the decision of Columbia's trustees, Alexander Cockburn of the Nation magazine, implied they should, and many people agree with him. As Cockburn observed with the biting wit he is known for, Knopf, which was home to Julia Child, has long been celebrated for its best selling cookbooks. "Suppose," he wondered, "Bellesiles had suggested putting dried Amanita phalloides into the risotto. I don't think Garrett would be so forgiving." And nor would such a cookbook or the cook and the guests who tried the risotto remain in circulation for long.

Alfred A. Knopf, the founder of the firm which bears his name, was legendary for his loyalty and commitment to his authors, and many Knopf editors who've succeeded him have carried on famously in that tradition. It is thus completely understandable why Garrett and others at Knopf would want to go slowly before they abandoned one of their authors. Yet with Emory University's independent Investigative Committee and Columbia University's trustees both concluding that Bellesiles "violated basic norms of scholarship" and engaged in "falsification" of evidence, among many other scholarly sins, it is difficult to justify Knopf's decision to keep Arming America in print and not recall books already in circulation. Apparently, Knopf's editors must still believe that Bellesiles only made some insignificant, unintentional "mistakes," minor errors that he has already "corrected" in the Vintage paperback and others that he might "correct" in a future edition.

But Knopf's present contention that the paperback it intends to keep in print "already contains corrections" is puzzling. In an interview with John Lofton, a reporter who writes for various conservative publications and organizations, Megan Hustad, an assistant in the editorial department at Vintage, said that the so-called "corrections" only amounted to fixing "a few typographical errors and cleaning things up." According to Hustad, although there were internal discussions at Knopf about addressing Arming America's scholarly criticism, "In my discussions with Michael we decided we did not want to do that. He might want to address some of those questions in articles and other forms."

Similarly, Eric Martinez, also of Vintage, told Lofton that the idea of making substantial changes in the paperback edition was rejected; it "didn't go through," he said. It is not clear, however, who in authority at the publishing house blocked it. According to a reliable source, an editor at Random House, which is Knopf's corporate big brother, provided people at its subsidiary with specific detailed lists of Arming America's misrepresentations and falsifications. But senior editors at either Knopf or Vintage decided against making the substantial, even massive corrections those lists would have required before releasing the paperback edition over a year ago. Now, as the reputation of Arming America has completely collapsed, Knopf and Vintage appear to be attempting to promote the impression that they included substantive "corrections" and responded to specific scholarly criticisms in bringing out the paperback edition. Yet the book being sold today appears to be the same paperback edition introduced in Sept. 2001, the edition for which Hustad said the "corrections" consisted only of straightening out "a few typographical errors and cleaning things up."

And, indeed, a comparison of the hardback edition of Arming America with the Vintage paperback reveals how disingenuous Knopf's assertion of "corrections" really is. When weighed against the multitude of falsifications and errors that plague the book, the supposed "corrections" are so minor as to be almost nonexistent. For example, Bellesiles misquoted the 1792 Militia Act in the first edition but replaced it in the paperback version with false statements about the relationship between the 1792 and 1803 Militia Acts. Similarly, Bellesiles removed from the Vintage version some of the "errors" -- though not all of them -- he made concerning the Providence probates (pp. 109-10) but included one new error in their stead. He added the probably false claim that he read 11,170 probate inventories and replaced his false claim about probate inventories, that "they all reported each and every object. . . belonging to the deceased," with a less extreme, but still false, claim. Similarly, the paperback edition changed the false claim that 53 percent of the guns in frontier inventories, 1765-90, were reported as dysfunctional to a still spectacularly false claim that "[r]oughly half" were dysfunctional (pp. 266-67).

And these were the only significant changes that critics have noticed in the paperback edition that Knopf hopes to keep in print. Moreover, as further evidence of how dubious Knopf's contention that the paperback version has repaired the flaws of the original is the fact that virtually everything the Emory Report found wrong, deceitful, and "evidence of falsification" in Bellesiles's work remains for all to read in the Vintage paperback.

But how would Knopf even know what parts of Arming America needed correcting? Garrett asserted in her interview with the Chronicle that in editing the book she relied entirely on the integrity of the author and seemingly never questioned his use of sources or his evidence. "There's nothing we could do," she said. "We can't go and re-research the book -- and neither can the people who review manuscripts for us. So we simply have to trust the author. It's a difficult thing." And, of course, she's mostly correct. Nobody should expect editors or outside readers to rummage through the archives checking hundreds and thousands of footnotes for accuracy. Such a task is beyond the scope of any publishing house, and those who think otherwise are living in an unreal world. If books are expensive now, think of how expensive they would become under a regime where squads of fact checkers were dispatched to archives near and far on a regular basis to compare an author's footnotes with the actual sources.

But today, after the findings of such scholars as James Lindgren, Randolph Roth, Clayton Cramer, Gloria Main, Ira Gruber and many others have exposed and brought to light the many errors, misrepresentations, misquotations, falsifications, and other abuses of scholarly norms embedded in Arming America, it is hard to imagine how any editor at Knopf anxious to put out a paperback edition can simply "trust the author," Bellesiles in this case, to correct the "errors" he is accused of manufacturing for his original version. That's analogous to trusting the insiders at Enron and Worldcom who deliberately hid millions if not billions of dollars in company losses and dishonest personal gains from analysts and regulators to willingly come clean and reveal every dubious transaction they engaged in to those seeking to uncover and repair the damage they caused.

Yet this is precisely what Knopf did with the Vintage version of Arming America. No editor ever invited Lindgren or Cramer or Roth or any other critic whose criticisms, by and large, formed the basis of the Emory Report and Columbia's revocation of the Bancroft Prize, to review the manuscript. On the contrary, in turning out its "new," supposedly "corrected" paperback edition of Arming America Knopf relied not on those critics who could have pointed out where the bodies were buried but on the presumed honesty of the very person who hid those bodies and whose scholarly integrity his own institution's investigative panel subsequently found to be seriously wanting.

And if the editors at Knopf think that all of the concerns about Arming America's questionable scholarship which can be raised have been raised, they are in for a nasty surprise. More articles and studies about its stunning evidentiary flaws and problems are in the pipeline with others in the early stages of development. Justin L. Heather, for example, who co-authored with James Lindgren, "Counting Guns in Early America" in the William and Mary Law Review, the study which first exposed Bellesiles's misrepresentation of probate records, will soon publish in the Journal of Law and Politics a devastating analysis of how Bellesiles misrepresented the use of bladed weapons, knives, and axes in his sources. Clayton Cramer has a book-length manuscript, "Armed America: Firearms Ownership and Hunting in the United States," detailing Bellesiles's many fabrications about that subject ready for publication and he is still compiling lists of gunsmiths which give the lie to much of what Bellesiles says about their scarcity in Early America.

It is clear that the impact of this scandal on Knopf's reputation as the premier publisher of history trade books is likely to be considerable. If Knopf continues to stand "behind" Arming America and fails to confront the fact that it is not simply a slightly flawed book that can be tinkered with and fixed with a few "corrections" here and there but it is rather a deeply dishonest book, one that is racked by invented, falsified, and grossly distorted renderings of the historical record, then Knopf will be doing itself and its great publishing tradition a monumental disservice. More importantly, however, by keeping Arming America in print and not recalling it Knopf will be doing an even greater disservice to the reading public. It will be saying to those who care about history that even America's leading publisher is more concerned with profits than integrity, and is more interested in selling deceitful, though politically correct books than works of enduring merit. The editors at Knopf need to rethink their position, just as Emory University and Columbia University reconsidered their positions. And they need to do so quickly. They should cease printing the Vintage paperback of Arming America and recall all remaining copies from the bookstores. They can do no less and live up to the example of the firm's founder who, though he valued loyalty to his authors, valued scholarly integrity and intellectual honesty even more.