Charles A. Beard

American historian

• Born: November 27, 1874
• Birthplace: Near Knightstown, Indiana
• Died: September 1, 1948
• Place of death: New Haven, Connecticut

More than any other twentieth century scholar, Beard shaped how Americans viewed their past. His attention to social, economic, and intellectual developments contrasted strikingly with the narrowly political, dynastic, and military focus of most competing texts of the time. His approach to history was present-minded, aimed at using the past to illuminate contemporary problems.

Early Life

Charles A. Beard (beerd) was the younger of two sons of William Henry Harrison and Mary J. (Payne) Beard. His Beard forebears were Quakers who had settled in Guilford County, North Carolina. His father, at the start of the Civil War, had moved to Indiana, where he became a successful farmer, building contractor, and land speculator. Although his father was a self-proclaimed religious skeptic, Charles attended Quaker services as a boy and began his formal education in a local Quaker-run school.

After he was graduated from Knightstown High School in 1891, his father bought for him and his older brother a local newspaper. In 1895, however, Charles gave up journalism to attend DePauw University. Majoring in history, he finished his undergraduate studies in three years with an impressive academic record, culminating in his election to Phi Beta Kappa. He then went to Oxford University for further study in history. While at DePauw, he had begun to shift from his father’s loyalty to the Republican Party to a sympathy for reform. His awakening sense of social consciousness was reinforced by his experiences in England. In response, Beard played a leading role in establishing at Oxford, in early 1899, a workingmen’s college named Ruskin Hall after the English artist-reformer John Ruskin for the training of future working-class leaders.

Except for a brief return trip to the United States to marry his college sweetheart, Mary Ritter (also a noted historian), Beard stayed in England until the spring of 1902. From his base in Manchester, he traveled all over the country, promoting the Ruskin Hall movement in talks before workingmen’s and cooperative society groups. The major thrust of those talks and the theme of his first book, The Industrial Revolution (1901) was how advancing technology, if properly utilized for public benefit rather than private profit, had the potential for improving the human lot.

In 1902, after returning to the United States, he began graduate work at Columbia University. For his Ph.D. dissertation, he completed a study begun while he was at Oxford, on the evolution of the office of justice of the peace in England. He received his degree in 1904 and was kept on as a lecturer in the history department to teach the Western European survey and English history. Three years later, he was appointed an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Law, with the responsibility of inaugurating a new undergraduate program in politics. In 1910, he was promoted to associate professor; five years later, he was awarded a full professorship. With prodigious energy, he taught a broad range of different courses, trained a group of Ph.D. students who would go on to make reputations of their own in political science and history, and turned out almost a book a year along with an imposing roster of articles and reviews.

Life’s Work

Beard first attracted attention in academic circles when he collaborated with his older colleague James Harvey Robinson in writing a two-volume text, The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Current History (1907-1908). The authors focused on social, economic, and intellectual developments, a method that contrasted with the narrowly political, dynastic, and military focus of most of their contemporaries. Also, Beard and Robinson took a present-minded approach to history, aimed at using the past to illuminate contemporary problems. Beard’s 1910 American Government and Politics made a similarly innovative contribution to the teaching of political science by looking beyond the formal institutional structure of the American system to how things actually worked. Repeatedly updated and revised, the work remained for years the standard text for college-level introductory American government courses.

Beard’s dual concern with making government more responsive to the popular will and more efficient in its operations led him into involvement with the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, the United States’ first research organization for the improvement of public administration. He served as supervisor of the bureau’s Training School for Public Service (1915-1919) and as bureau director (1919-1920); he was instrumental in the expansion of its activities beyond the municipal level and its resulting reorganization into the National Institute of Public Administration; and he was the primary author of a set of recommendations for a far-reaching reorganization of New York state government that was carried out during the 1920’s.

The debate during the Progressive Era over the legitimacy of judicial review led Beard to undertake a reexamination of the intentions of the framers of the U.S. Constitution. In his 1912 book The Supreme Court and the Constitution , he concluded that the framers had intended to give the U.S. Supreme Court power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional because of their eagerness “to safeguard the rights of private property against any levelling tendencies on the part of the propertyless masses.” He amplified this theme in his highly controversial An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States , published the following year. The crux of his argument was that the Constitution was “an economic document” aimed at protecting the interests of the monied class in the face of threats from the largely debt-ridden small farmers that constituted local popular majorities. He went on to conclude that the Constitution was pushed through by undemocratic, even “irregular,” means. For supporting evidence, Beard relied heavily on long-forgotten Treasury Department records for the public securities holdings of those involved in the adoption of the Constitution. The prominence given this data fostered the impression that the framers were primarily motivated by the quest for personal financial gain. There is no question that Beard’s purpose in emphasizing the economic motivation of the framers was to demythologize the Constitution as a bulwark for the defense of the political status quo against reform.

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States has been sharply attacked by many later historians as simplistic or even simply wrong. Yet the work remains a landmark in the development of American historical scholarship. The volume was the first attempt to apply the prosopographical or collective biography approach to a major historical problem. Beard envisaged the book as the first in a series of studies that would apply the economic interpretation to the full span of American history. His 1914 survey Contemporary American History, 1877-1913 traced the political, legal, social, and intellectual changes resulting from the triumph of industrial capitalism in the years after the Civil War.

In the following year’s Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, Beard pictured the party battles of the 1790’s between the Federalists and their Republican opponents as a continuation of the struggle over the Constitution between “capitalistic and agrarian interests.” The climax of his attempt to apply an overarching economic interpretation to the study of the American past was the two-volume The Rise of American Civilization (1927), coauthored with Mary Beard. The aspect of this work that most impressed professional historians was his treatment of the Civil War as a “second American Revolution,” responsible for the triumph of Northern capitalism over its agrarian rival. Its portrayal of the clash of rival economic interests as the real root of historical change would exercise a pervasive influence on the generation that came to intellectual maturity in the 1930’s. At the same time, its wide popular appeal owed much to the breadth of the canvas on which the Beards sketched their story. Going beyond politics, the work aspired to treat the full range and variety of the American national experience: political, social, and economic thought, religion, literature, education, science, art and architecture, and even music.

Although Beard was personally a supporter of American involvement in World War I, he resigned his Columbia professorship in October, 1917, in protest at the firing of antiwar faculty members. He was one of the founders of the New School for Social Research in 1919, but he soon dropped out of active involvement to devote himself to freelance writing. His 1922 book Cross Currents in Europe To-day was a pioneering challenge to the widely held notion that World War I was caused solely by German aggression. That same year, he visited Japan, at the invitation of the Tokyo Institute for Municipal Research, to study and report on Japanese municipal government; he so impressed his hosts that he was brought back after the devastating Tokyo earthquake of 1923 to advise on rebuilding the city. In 1926, he was elected president of the American Political Science Association. An investigatory trip to Yugoslavia resulted in his writing, in collaboration with George Radin, The Balkan Pivot: Yugoslavia, a Study in Government and Administration (1929). Despite his lack of sympathy for the complacent politics of normalcy that dominated the United States in the 1920’s, Beard remained optimistic about the possibilities of a future of “unlimited progress.” He continued to see in the advance of technology the potential for bringing about “an ever wider distribution of the blessings of civilization health, security, material goods, knowledge, leisure, and aesthetic appreciation.”

Beard put forth this gospel of technological utopianism in magazine articles, in symposia that he edited such as Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization (1928), Toward Civilization (1930), and, most fully, in a 1930 book coauthored with his son William, The American Leviathan: The Republic in the Machine Age. Yet his confident assumption of inevitable, even automatic, progress was dealt shattering blows by the Great Depression, the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe, and, as the 1930’s went on, the darkening threat of another major war. Beard still retained his hope for a better world; the difference was that he now emphasized that its achievement would require purposeful and intelligent direction. To provide a guide for what policies should be adopted was the purpose of two works written with the research assistance of George H. E. Smith that appeared in 1934: The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy and The Open Door at Home: A Trial Philosophy of National Interest . On one hand, he called for national economic planning or what he termed “applied engineering rationality” to restore prosperity. On the other, he pleaded for insulation of the United States from international-trade conflicts and power rivalries through policies aimed at achieving national economic self-sufficiency.

At a more philosophical level, Beard centered his attack on any deterministic system including by implication his own earlier economic determinism that denied the role of “ethical and esthetic values” in shaping history. This new approach was inextricably intertwined with his championship of historical relativism. Starting with his December, 1933, presidential address to the American Historical Association, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” Beard sharply attacked the assumption of so-called scientific history in which the historian could “describe the past as it actually was.” While acknowledging the existence of verifiable facts, he argued that the historian’s selection and arrangement of those facts was a matter of choice that reflected his (or her) frame of reference: his values and interests; his political, social, and economic beliefs; his conception of “things deemed necessary, things deemed possible, and things deemed desirable.” Beard’s major platform for pushing the message of historical relativism was the Committee on Historiography of the Social Science Research Council. The committee’s influential 1946 report, Theory and Practice in Historical Study, affirmed that all written history “is ordered or organized under the influence of some scheme of reference, interest, or emphasis avowed or unavowed in the thought of the author.”

At the level of practical politics, Beard started out as an enthusiastic supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal as marking a break with the rudderless laissez-faire of the past. As the dominating member of the American Historical Association’s Commission on the Social Studies, he was the moving spirit behind its call for a major revision of the curriculum and teaching methods in the public schools to prepare students for the coming new age of democratic “collectivism.” By the late 1930’s, however, he had grown disillusioned with Roosevelt’s failure to adopt meaningful national economic planning. More upsetting still, he had come to suspect that Roosevelt’s foreign policies were leading the United States into war. He was convinced that whatever happened in Europe and Asia could not endanger United States security given this country’s high degree of economic self-sufficiency and its geographical position behind the buffer of two oceans. He even accused Roosevelt of looking for foreign adventures to divert public attention from the administration’s failure to restore domestic prosperity. He accordingly became a vocal spokesperson for maintaining American isolationism or, to use his preferred term, for pursuing a “continental” policy.

The outcome of the war confirmed Beard’s worst forebodings. American involvement had disrupted further reform at home, accelerated the centralization of power in the presidency and bureaucracy, and dangerously increased the influence of the military. Nor was the country’s physical security safeguarded. On the contrary, the United States now faced a more dangerous enemy, the Soviet Union. The result was to strengthen Beard in his hostility toward more overseas commitments. Once again, he turned to history to supply a guide to the path his fellow countryfolk should take. In a series of works most notably The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States (1942), The Republic: Conversations on Fundamentals (1943), and A Basic History of the United States (1944) he set forth what he saw as the essential elements that had combined to create in the United States a unique civilization. His theme was an exaltation of the American system of “constitutional government” with its balance between majority rule and the protection of “fundamental rights,” between centralization of power and local autonomy as “an eternal contradiction to the principle of authoritarian, totalitarian, dictatorial government.”

The reverse side of his praise for the realism, practical wisdom, and farsighted genius of the Founding Fathers was his obsession with demolishing what he saw as the Roosevelt myth. In the first two volumes of a planned trilogy on Roosevelt’s foreign policies American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940: A Study in Responsibilities (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (1948) he accused Roosevelt of deceiving and misleading the American people by talking peace while secretly plotting war. He went so far as to suggest that Roosevelt “was not surprised by the Japanese attack [on Pearl Harbor] when it came on December 7.” The volumes sparked angry, often personally vitriolic, attacks from Roosevelt’s admirers including many of Beard’s former friends that deeply pained him. He had suffered a serious illness in 1945, and his labors on the Roosevelt volumes further sapped his formerly robust constitution. He died on September 1, 1948, before finishing the research for the planned third volume on wartime diplomacy “a victim,” a former student eulogized, “of hard work induced by a passionate drive to tell the truth as he saw it.”

Significance

Beard was a major figure in the development of political science in the United States: He played a leading role in reorienting the study of American government from the description of formal institutional structures to a realistic analysis of how things actually operated; he was one of the Progressive Era’s foremost experts on municipal government; and he was a pioneer in placing the study of public administration on a scientific, empirical basis. He looms even larger in the development of American historical scholarship. His application of the economic interpretation to American history was at the time an immensely liberating intellectual force; he was the leading spokesman for and outstanding practitioner of a “new history” that would broaden the scope of study of the past beyond politics to include the full range of human experience; and he did much to sensitize historians to the role played by their personal values and biases in shaping their interpretations.

Nor was Beard’s influence limited to the academy. He reached, through his books and articles, a larger popular audience than probably any other American scholar of his time. As an activist in support of a wide range of causes, he achieved near-celebrity status. A 1938 survey taken by The New Republic of liberal-left-wing intellectuals ranked Beard second only to the economist and social philosopher Thorstein Veblen among those whose work had most influenced their own thinking. Shortly after Beard’s death, a poll of educators, editors, and public figures gave first place to The Rise of American Civilization as the book that best explained American democracy. Even hostile critics acknowledged that Beard had been the twentieth century’s “most powerful single figure in the teaching of American history.”

Bibliography

Barrow, Clyde W. More Than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000. Barrow argues that Beard’s ideas have new relevance in light of contemporary debates about U.S. foreign and domestic policies. His book reconstructs the sources of Beard’s thinking and explores Beard’s theory of American political development.

Beale, Howard K. Charles A. Beard: An Appraisal. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954. A collection of sympathetic and at times overly eulogistic appraisals of Beard as teacher, scholar, and public affairs activist by friends and admirers.

Benson, Lee. Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960. A sympathetic but not uncritical examination of Beard’s application of the economic interpretation to the study of American history.

Higham, John, Leonard Krieger, and Felix Gilbert. History. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965. An excellent and insightful survey of changing fashions in American historiography that illuminates Beard’s place in that larger context.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. A lucidly written and penetrating analysis of the forces shaping the so-called Progressive school of American historiography and its influence by a distinguished historian who also had been strongly influenced by Beard’s work.

Kennedy, Thomas C. Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1975. A detailed tracing of Beard’s view on foreign policy issues, with major focus on his 1930’s isolationism.

Marcell, David W. Progress and Pragmatism: James, Dewey, Beard, and the American Idea of Progress. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974. Shows how Beard fit into the larger American tradition of pragmatic philosophy.

Nore, Ellen. Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. A thoroughly researched and detailed account of Beard’s intellectual development, but somewhat lifeless on the personal side.

Strout, Cushing. The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958. A still-useful introduction to the thought of two leading American exponents of historical relativism.

White, Morton G. Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism. New York: Viking Press, 1949. An influential, if too abstrusely written, account of the role played by Beard, along with such other figures as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen, in reorienting American scholarship from formalistic description to realistic analysis.