Beard, Charles Austin

BEARD, CHARLES AUSTIN (1874-1948). With the publication in 1913 of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Beard became one of the most famous, influential, and controversial historians in America. The enormous success and notoriety of this book initiated a trend that for two generations established the vital importance of the economic interpretation of American history. The more than forty books that he wrote during his legendary career—some of them with his historian-wife, Mary Ritter Beard (1876-1958)—sold in the millions of copies. He was esteemed and reviled for arguing that from the country’s very beginnings and at every turning point in its history, including the Second World War and the aborning Cold War, American politics had to be understood mainly through the motives and world view of the country’s economic elites.

The economic interpretation of history for which “Beardianism” became a synonym in American historiography originated in the young Beard’s passionate devotion to John Ruskin’s Unto This Last (1862), which he read as a college student at DePauw University in his native Indiana. In this scathing work of social criticism, Ruskin denounced capitalist society as a wanton force responsible for the decline of art, literature, and morality in the modern world’s calamitous disorder. Although Beard did not share Ruskin’s traditional Christian values, he fully endorsed his assessment of the socially and culturally deranging effects of the economic status quo. Another Englishman, the economist and fellow-Ruskinian John Atkinson Hobson, inspired him to adapt Ruskin’s ideas to a progressive political philosophy. Doing graduate work at Oxford University around the turn of the century, he met Hobson and would find in his Imperialism: A Study (1902) an incomparable guide for understanding the economic motor driving foreign policy in the modern industrialized world. That same year, another crucial work for Beard’s mental development appeared: Edwin R.A. Seligman’s The Economic Interpretation of History, a manifesto from a non-Marxist viewpoint celebrating the primacy of material factors in history. Beard encountered him at Columbia University where he completed his Ph.D. work in 1904. Ruskin, Hobson, and Seligman provided the intellectual foundation for the research and writing he would do for the next forty years.

As a faculty member at Columbia, Beard enjoyed a brilliant academic career, both in the classroom and in his voluminous writing. Mary remembered that for his book on the Constitution “he was fairly flooded with abuse,” but worse controversy engulfed him after the outbreak of the Great War, which the heavily Anglophile Beard saw as a clear case of German aggression. Advocating for American intervention on the side of the Allies became the supreme cause of his life during the war years. Yet, when Columbia fired two professors for their anti-war activities, Beard resigned, claiming that without untrammeled academic freedom the university could not survive as an institution of higher learning. He never would return to regular university teaching, spending the rest of his life as a private scholar and public intellectual.

The nearly precise correlation between the imperialistic secret treaties of the Allies and the Treaty of Versailles destroyed Beard’s faith in the moral rectitude of the Allied cause in the Great War. American intervention in that conflict he now believed to have been a tragic mistake. He became a leading figure in the revisionist movement, whose proponents in Europe and America sought to show how imperialist policies on both sides bore responsibility for the conflict. Mary, who would become a leading figure in the field of women’s history, shared without reservation his view of the war. In their greatest collaborative success and, arguably, the best survey of U.S. history ever written, The Rise of American Civilization (1927), they interpreted the Great War from the revisionist standpoint.

Beard continued to write books on his own as well. The Idea of National Interest, a seminal work for understanding Beard’s mature interpretation of American history, appeared in 1934. By then he had begun to supplement his one-dimensional economic interpretation of history with a greater appreciation for the power and the independent role of government, particularly the military, in national affairs. He also started to pay more attention to the phenomenon of charismatic leadership as a factor in the historical process, taking instruction on this point from Max Weber and Karl Mannheim. Articles that he wrote in the mid-1930s for The American Historical Review reveal the impact on his mind of European thinkers, most of all Benedetto Croce, with whom he engaged in correspondence. In Croce’s work, he especially admired its focus on the value of the moral lessons to be learned from the study of history. At about the same time, he came to regard The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History (1895) by Brooks Adams as the chief source in all American historiography for a realistic understanding of world history as a sequence of exploiting empires. It was now America’s turn, he learned from Adams, to exercise the kind of global economic and military power that in every previous empire ultimately had ended with the same results of decay and defeat.

In the light of his refurbished philosophy of history, Beard grew increasingly worried about the Roosevelt administration. By 1936, it seemed to him that the country was moving toward war again and for the same basic reasons as in the Great War. In The Devil Theory of War (1936), Beard hailed the Nye Committee hearings of 1934-1936 for uncovering in unexampled detail what those reasons were. Essentially, the country had entered the conflict to maintain and to guarantee the war economy that had elevated America out of its prewar recession and to prevent a financial collapse. Beard foresaw that with another conflict looming in Europe the same process of American intervention would occur again. Nearly all his subsequent work would consist of journalistic and scholarly critiques of American foreign policy. America in Mid-passage (1939), a mammoth analysis co-written with Mary of how the Depression had affected American life, belongs to this body of late work. It is the most striking example of their deepening hostility toward Wall Street as the chief impediment to a democratic society in America.

Inevitably, given his politics and reputation as the dean of American historians, Beard became the foremost historical authority for the isolationist America First Committee, which in 1940-1941 opposed President Roosevelt’s interventionist foreign policy. Though never joining this organization and faulting the term isolationism as an unfortunate misnomer, he agreed with the anti-interventionist aims of America First. In radio interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, congressional hearings, and such books as A Foreign Policy for America (1940), Beard resolutely opposed the President. After Pearl Harbor, he continued to write books critical of the administration’s war aims while recognizing the criminality of the regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan. He disputed the claim that a war fought alongside the egregious Joseph Stalin credibly could be presented as a struggle for the Four Freedoms. Following the pattern of Brooks Adams’s ideas, Beard thought it likely that the war would have an imperialist outcome no matter which side won. For these views, he came under a fierce public attack.

Beard’s two major anti-Roosevelt books appeared after the war: 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). Though commercially successful, both these works accelerated the decline and fall of Beard’s professional reputation. As the premier revisionist historian writing about World War II, he became a target for the consensus historians who would dominate the field in the dawning years of the American Century. His foremost intellectual heir, William Appleman Williams, would honor the Beardian tradition and develop it further at the University of Wisconsin, but for the profession as a whole the “good war” mystique continues to conceal the historical origins of the imperialistic and militaristic power structures currently in place.

Barrow, Clyde W. More Than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2000.

Beard, Charles A. The Economic Basis of Politics and Related Writings, compiled and annotated by William Beard. New York: Vintage Books, 1957.

Beard, Mary Ritter. The Making of Charles A. Beard. New York: Exposition Press, 1955.

Drake, Richard. Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York: Knopf, 1968.

Nore, Ellen. Charles Beard: An Intellectual Biography. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.