Charles A. Beard | |
|---|---|
 Beard in 1917 | |
| Born | Charles Austin Beard (1874-11-27)November 27, 1874 Knightstown, Indiana, U.S. |
| Died | September 1, 1948(1948-09-01) (aged 73) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Spouse | |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | The Office of Justice of the Peace in England (1904) |
| Academic advisor | Frederick York Powell[1] |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline |
|
| School or tradition | Progressive historiography |
| Notable works |
|
| Influenced | William Appleman Williams[2] |
Charles Austin Beard (November 27, 1874 – September 1, 1948) was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor atColumbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the fields of history andpolitical science. His works included a radical re-evaluation of theFounding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed to be more motivated by economics than byphilosophical principles. Beard's most influential book,An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States(1913), has been the subject of great controversy ever since its publication. While it has been frequently criticized for its methodology and conclusions, it was responsible for a wide-ranging reinterpretation ofearly American history.[3]
An icon of the progressive school of historical interpretation, his reputation suffered during theCold War when analyses of economicclass conflict were dropped by most United States historians. The consensus historianRichard Hofstadter concluded in 1968, "Today Beard's reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography. What was once the grandest house in the province is now a ravaged survival."[4] The end of Cold WarAnticommunism has rekindled scholarly interest in Beard's historical methods and findings, particularly his later work on the domestic economic origins of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century.[5][6]
Charles Austin Beard was born on November 27, 1874, inKnightstown, Indiana, in theCorn Belt. His father, William Henry Harrison Beard, was a farmer, contractor, part-time banker, and real-estate speculator.[7] In his youth, Charles worked on the family farm and attended a localQuaker school,Spiceland Academy. He was expelled from the school for unclear reasons but graduated from the public Knightstown High School in 1891. For the next few years, Charles and his brother, Clarence, managed a local newspaper. Their editorial position, like their father's, was conservative. They supported theRepublican Party and favoredprohibition, a cause for which Charles lectured in later years. Beard attendedDePauw University, a nearbyMethodist college, and graduated in 1898. He edited thecollege newspaper and was active indebate.[8]
Beard went to England in 1899 for graduate studies atOxford University underFrederick York Powell. He collaborated withWalter Vrooman in foundingRuskin Hall, a school meant to be accessible to the working man. In exchange for reducedtuition, students worked in the school's various businesses. Beard taught for the first time at Ruskin Hall and lectured to workers in industrial towns to promote Ruskin Hall and encourage enrollment in correspondence courses.[9] He returned to the United States in 1902, where Charles pursued graduate work in history atColumbia University. He received his doctorate in 1904 and immediately joined the faculty as a lecturer.[10] Beard married his classmateMary Ritter in 1900. As a historian, her research interests lay infeminism and the labor union movement (Woman as a Force in History, 1946). They collaborated on many textbooks.[11]
After receiving his doctorate fromColumbia University, he joined the faculty as a lecturer. There, he provided his students with a number of reading materials that were hard to acquire. He compiled a large collection of essays and excerpts in a single volume:An Introduction to the English Historians (1906), acompendium which was an innovation at the time.[12] An extraordinarily active author of scholarly books,textbooks, and articles forpolitical magazines, Beard saw his career flourish. He moved from the history department to the department ofpublic law and then to a new chair in politics and government. He also regularly taught a course in American history atBarnard College. In addition to teaching, he coached the debate team and wrote about public affairs, especially municipal reform.[13]
Among the many works that he published during his years at Columbia, the most controversial wasAn Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), an interpretation of how the economic interests of the members of theConstitutional Convention affected their votes. He emphasized the polarity betweenagrarians and business interests. Academics and politicians denounced the book, but it was well respected by scholars until it was challenged in the 1950s.[14]
Beard strongly supported American participation in theFirst World War.[15] He resigned from Columbia University on October 8, 1917, charging that "the University is really under the control of a small and active group of trustees who have no standing in the world of education, who are reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion. I am convinced that while I remain in the pay of the Trustees of Columbia University I cannot do effectively my part in sustaining public opinion in support of thejust war on the German Empire."[16] After a series of faculty departures from Columbia in disputes about academic freedom, his friendJames Harvey Robinson also resigned from Columbia in May 1919 to become one of the founders of theNew School for Social Research and serve as its first director.[16][17]
Following his departure from Columbia University, Beard never again sought a permanent academic appointment. His financial independence was secured by lucrativeroyalties he had received from his textbooks and other bestsellers, includingThe Rise of American Civilization (1927), and its two sequels,America in Midpassage (1939), andThe American Spirit (1943). The pair also operated a dairy farm in ruralConnecticut that attracted many academic visitors.[13] Beard was active in helping to found theNew School for Social Research in theGreenwich Village district ofManhattan, where the faculty would control its own membership. Enlarging upon his interest in urban affairs, he toured Japan and produced a volume of recommendations for the reconstruction of Tokyo after the1923 Great Kantō earthquake.[18]
Beard had parallel careers as an historian and political scientist. He was active in theAmerican Political Science Association and was elected as its president in 1926.[19] He was also a member of theAmerican Historical Association and served as its president in 1933.[20] He was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1936.[21] Inpolitical science, he was best known for his textbooks, his studies of the Constitution, his creation of bureaus of municipal research, and his studies of public administration in cities. Beard also taught history at theBrookwood Labor College.[22]
Beard was a leading liberal supporter of theNew Deal and an intellectual leader in the Progressive movement.[15] However, Beard was very critical of the majoritarian vision of democracy that most Progressive leaders endorsed. In fact, "Beard refrained from endorsingdirect democracy measures as a blueprint for reform, focusing instead on streamlining the American system of government to incorporate in a transparent fashion, both political parties and interest groups."[23]
Beard opposed PresidentFranklin Roosevelt's foreign policy. Consistent with Beard's Quaker roots, he became one of the leading proponents ofnon-interventionism and sought to avoid American involvement inWorld War II. He promoted "American Continentalism" as an alternative and argued that the United States had no vital interests at stake in Europe and that a foreign war could lead to domestic dictatorship.[15] He continued to press that position after the end of World War II. In his last two books,American Foreign Policy in the Making: 1932–1940 (1946) andPresident Roosevelt and the Coming of War (1948), Beard blamed Roosevelt for lying to the American people to trick them into war, which some historians and political scientists have disputed. He was criticized as anisolationist because of his views.[24] The views that he espoused in the final decade of his life were disputed by many contemporary historians and political scientists.
However, some of the arguments in hisPresident Roosevelt and the Coming of the War influenced the "Wisconsin school" andNew Left historians in the 1960s, such asWilliam Appleman Williams,Gabriel Kolko, andJames Weinstein. On the right, Beard's foreign policy views have become popular with "paleoconservatives" such asPat Buchanan. Certain elements of his views, especially his advocacy of a non-interventionist foreign policy, have enjoyed a minor revival among a few scholars of liberty since 2001. For example,Andrew Bacevich, a diplomatic historian atBoston University, has cited Beardian skepticism towards armed overseas intervention as a starting point for a critique of US foreign policy after the Cold War in hisAmerican Empire (2004).[25] Beard died inNew Haven, Connecticut, on September 1, 1948. He was interred inFerncliff Cemetery,Hartsdale,Westchester County, New York, joined by his wife, Mary, a decade later.[26]
By the 1950s, Beard's economic interpretation of history had fallen out of favor; only a few prominent historians held to his view ofclass conflict as a primary driver in American history, such asHoward K. Beale andC. Vann Woodward. Still, as a leader of the "progressive historians", or "progressive historiography", Beard introduced themes of economic self-interest and economic conflict regarding the adoption of theConstitution and the transformations caused by theCivil War. Thus, he emphasized the long-term conflict among industrialists in theNortheast, farmers in the Midwest, and planters in theSouth, whom he saw as thecause of the Civil War. His study of the financial interests of the drafters of theUnited States Constitution (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution) seemed radical in 1913 since he proposed that it was a product of landholding Founding Fathers who were economically determinist. He saw ideology as a product of economic interests.[27]
The historianCarl L. Becker'sHistory of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (1909) formulated the progressive interpretation of the American Revolution. He said that there were two revolutions: one against Britain to obtain home rule and the other to determine who should rule at home. Beard expanded upon Becker's thesis, in terms of class conflict, inAn Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) andAn Economic Interpretation of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915). To Beard, the Constitution was a counter-revolution set up by rich bondholders ("personalty" since bonds were "personal property"), against the farmers and planters ("realty" since land was "real property"). Beard argued the Constitution was designed to reverse the radical democratic tendencies unleashed by the Revolution among the common people, especially farmers and debtors. In 1800, according to Beard, the farmers and debtors, led by plantation slaveowners, overthrew the capitalists and establishedJeffersonian democracy. Other historians supported the class conflict interpretation by noting the states confiscated great semifeudal landholdings ofLoyalists and gave them out in small parcels to ordinary farmers. Conservatives, such asWilliam Howard Taft, were shocked at the progressive interpretation because it seemed to belittle the Constitution. Many scholars, however, eventually adopted Beard's thesis and by 1930, it had become the standard interpretation of the era.[28]
In about 1950, however, historians started to argue that the progressive interpretation was factually incorrect because the voters had not really been polarized along two economic lines. The historians were led by Charles A. Barker, Philip Crowl,Richard P. McCormick, William Pool, Robert Thomas, John Munroe, Robert E. Brown and B. Kathryn Brown, and especiallyForrest McDonald.[29] In Forrest McDonald'sWe The People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (1958) argued that Beard had misinterpreted the economic interests involved in writing the Constitution. Instead of two conflicting interests, landed and mercantile, McDonald identified some three-dozen identifiable economic interests operating at cross purposes, which forced the delegates to bargain.[14] Evaluating the historiographical debate,Peter Novick concluded: "By the early 1960s it was generally accepted within the historical profession that... Beard's Progressive version of the... framing of the Constitution had been decisively refuted. American historians came to see... the framers of the Constitution, rather than having self-interested motives, were led by concern for political unity, national economic development, and diplomatic security."[30] Ellen Nore, Beard's biographer, concludes that his interpretation of the Constitution collapsed because of more recent and sophisticated analysis.[31]
In a strong sense, that view simply involved a reaffirmation of the position that Beard had always criticized by saying that parties were prone to switch rhetorical ideals when their interest dictated.[32] Beard'seconomic determinism was largely replaced by the intellectual history approach, which stressed the power of ideas, especiallyrepublicanism, in stimulating the Revolution.[33] However, the legacy of examining the economic interests of American historical actors can still be found in the 21st century. Recently, inTo Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution (2003), Robert A. McGuire, relying on a sophisticated statistical analysis, argues that Beard's basic thesis regarding the impact of economic interests in the making of the Constitution is not far from the mark.[34]
Beard's interpretation of the Civil War was highly influential among historians and the general public from its publication in 1927 to well into theCivil Rights Era of the late 1950s. Beard downplayed slavery, abolitionism, and issues of morality. Beard ignored constitutional issues ofstates' rights and even ignored American nationalism as the force that finally led to victory in the war. Indeed, the ferocious combat itself was passed over as merely an ephemeral event. Charles Ramsdell says Beard emphasized that the Civil War was caused by economic issues and was not basically about the rights or wrongs of slavery.[35]
Thomas J. Pressly says that Beard fought against the prevailing nationalist interpretation that depicted "a conflict between rival section-nations rooted in social, economic, cultural, and ideological differences." Pressly said that Beard instead portrayed a "struggle between two economic economies having its origins in divergent material interests."[36] Much more important was the calculus of class conflict. Beard announced that the Civil War was really a "social cataclysm in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South", arguing that the events were a second American Revolution.[37] Beard was especially interested in the postwar era, as the industrialists of the Northeast and the farmers of the West cashed in on their great victory over the southern aristocracy. Hofstadter paraphrased Beard as arguing that in victory,
the Northern capitalists were able to impose their economic program, quickly passing a series of measures on tariffs, banking, homesteads, and immigration that guaranteed the success of their plans for economic development. Solicitude for the Freedman had little to do with northern policies. TheFourteenth Amendment, which gave the Negro his citizenship, Beard found significant primarily as a result of a conspiracy of a few legislative draftsman friendly to corporations to use the supposed elevation of the blacks as a cover for a fundamental law giving strong protection to business corporations against regulation by state government.[38]
Dealing with theReconstruction Era and theGilded Age, disciples of Beard, such as Howard Beale andC. Vann Woodward, focused on greed and economic causation and emphasized the centrality of corruption. They argued that the rhetoric of equal rights was a smokescreen to hide the true motivation, which was to promote the interests of industrialists in the Northeast. The basic flaw was the assumption that there was a unified business policy. Beard's economic approach was rejected after the 1950s, as conservative scholars who researched specific subgroups discovered deep flaws in Beard's assumption that businessmen were united on policy. In fact, businessmen were widely divergent on monetary or tariff policy. Pennsylvania businessmen wanted high tariffs, but those in other states did not. The railroads were hurt by the tariffs on steel, which they purchased in large quantities.[39]
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