Our discussion on Historians in Trouble by Jon Wiener provided many interesting insights into the profession of history. The first and most important insight I found was that attacks on powerful structures, especially structures that make money, are far more damaging on a career than attacks on the “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct” published by the American Historical Association. All of the authors who were fired or pushed out of history were notable for publishing attacks against institutions that made money. Michael Bellesies, who resigned from Emory, was attacked by the pro-gun lobby, a lobby that protects a large civilian gun market in the United States. Although David Abraham did not attack any companies directly, he implicated big businesses in the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. Finally, Mike Davis was attacked by a blogger for having the temerity to show the underside of Los Angeles and threaten the developers and land owners who profit from selling the image of glamor and fame that Los Angeles is famous for.
Jon Wiener titled the section profiling these authors “Targeted by the Right,” but I am unsure whether political ideology is the binding force in these cases. While it is true that conservative groups targeted Bellesies and that two conservative historians targeted Abraham, that does not mean that the Right targeted certain left-wing historians. For example, Mike Davis appears to have fallen victim to an attack by an angry developer who happened to be conservative. I believe that the only case that can be attributed with certainty to politics is the Bellesies case; the Abraham case points to the problems of jealousy within the academic world and the Davis case shows that bloggers often have an inordinate amount of power. In my opinion, money is a much more important factor, and I think that proof of this is found in the John Lott case. Even though John Lott committed an offense that was much worse than Bellesies’s error in a book on the gun rights issue, his book was not attacked successfully; one should note that the pro-gun lobby is backed by an industry that makes millions, but the anti-gun lobby does not have any businesses or industries behind it. No one makes money if guns are illegal.
One reason why attacking powerful and monied institutions is far more dangerous to a historian’s career than flouting ethical standards is that the ethical standards are weak and rather pathetic, a point noted in Wiener’s conclusion. For example, Wiener states that ” [Weinstein's] offer to consider requests does not satisfy the AHA requriements of ‘free, open, equal, and nondiscriminatory access [to historical material],” but the word “requirement” seems strong when the statement says that “historians favor free, open, equal and nondiscriminatory access.” Indeed, many of the sentences in the Statement contain such qualifying words as “favor” and “should,” which appears to be the American Historical Association’s favorite word. If the writers of the statement were trying to indicate more moral authority, they could have used words like ought, must, or shall, but they chose to qualify almost all their statements and include loopholes. In the Weinstein case, the Statement on Standards says that the association “[recognizes] the legitimacy of restricting access to some sources for national security, proprietary, and privacy reasons,” giving several ways for a author witholding information to justify his or her refusal. Overall, I believe that Statement on Standards gives an outline of what all historians would like other historians to do, but it appears that the American Historical Association does not have the authority to force any historian to be professionally responsible.
