Everything about Charles Beard totally explained
Charles Austin Beard (
November 27,
1874 –
September 1,
1948) is widely regarded, along with
Frederick Jackson Turner, as one of the two most influential American historians of the early 20th century. While Beard published hundreds of
monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science, he's most widely known for his radical re-evaluation of the
Founding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed were more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles.
Progressive Historiography
As a leader of the "Progressive School" of historiography, he introduced themes of economic self-interest and economic conflict regarding the adoption of the Constitution and the transformations caused by the Civil War. Thus he emphasized the long-term conflict among industrialists in the Northeast, farmers in the Midwest, and planters in the South that he saw as the cause of the
Civil War. His study of the financial interests of the drafters of the
United States Constitution (
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution) seemed radical in
1913, since he proposed that the U.S. Constitution was a product of economically determinist, land-holding founding fathers. He saw ideology as a product of economic interests.
Beard's most influential book was the wide-ranging and bestselling
The Rise of American Civilization (1927) and its two sequels,
America in Midpassage (1939), and
The American Spirit (1943), written with Mary Beard.
Dealing with Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, disciples of Beard such as Howard Beale and
C. 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 hiding their true motivation, which was promoting the interests of industrialists in the Northeast. The basic flaw was the assumption that there was a unified business policy. Scholars in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated that businessmen were widely divergent on monetary or tariff policy. While Pennsylvania businessmen wanted high tariffs, those in other states did not; the railroads were hurt by the tariffs on steel, which they purchased in large quantity.
Forrest McDonald In
We The People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (1958) argued that Charles Beard had misinterpreted the economic interests involved in writing the Constitution. Instead of two interests, landed and mercantile, which conflicted, there were three dozen identifiable interests that forced the delegates to bargain.
Beard's economic approach lost influence in the history profession after 1950 as conservative scholars suggested serious flaws in Beard's research, and attention turned away from economic causation.
Labor education
Beard's interest in progressive higher education was an early one. In
1899, he collaborated with
Walter Vrooman at
Oxford in the founding of
Ruskin Hall, which was billed as an accessible school for the working man. In exchange for considerable reduction in tuition students worked at the school's various businesses.
After resigning from
Columbia University in protest in 1917, he helped to found the
New School for Social Research in
New York, and advised on reconstructing
Tokyo after the earthquake of 1923. Although enormously influential through his massive writings, he didn't have graduate students or build a school of
historiography.
Mary Beard
Beard attended and graduated from
DePauw University in 1898. It was at DePauw that he met one of the founders of
Kappa Alpha Theta (the first Greek-letter society for women),
Mary Ritter Beard. They later married. Many of his books were written in collaboration with his wife, whose own interests lay in
feminism and the
labor union movement (
Woman as a Force in History, 1946). Together they wrote a popular survey,
The Beards: Basic History of the United States.
Isolationist foreign policy
Starting as a leading liberal supporter of the
New Deal, Beard turned against
Franklin D. Roosevelt's aggressive foreign policy. Beard promoted "American Continentalism," arguing that the U.S. had no vital stake in Europe, and that a foreign war would threaten dictatorship at home. Beard was thus one of the leading proponents of
United States non-interventionism. After the war, Beard's last work (
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1948) blamed Roosevelt for lying to the American people and tricking them into war. It generated angry controversy as internationalists denounced Beard as an apologist for isolationism. As a result, Beard's reputation collapsed among liberal historians who previously had admired him. His whole interpretation of history came under widespread attack, though a few leading historians such as Beale and Woodward clung to the Beardian interpretation of American history.
Recently however, Beard's isolationist approach, especially his advocacy of a non-interventionist foreign policy, have enjoyed something of a comeback.
Andrew Bacevich, a historian of diplomacy from
Boston University, has used Beard's skepticism towards armed intervention overseas as a starting point for his own critique of post-Cold War American foreign policy. Beard is heavily cited in Bacevich's analysis of this policy,
American Empire. In addition, Beard's foreign policy views have become popular with supporters of
paleoconservatism, such as
Pat Buchanan. Beard's stress on economic causation influenced the "Wisconsin school" of
New Left historians
William Appleman Williams,
Gabriel Kolko, and
James Weinstein.
Leadership positions as Political Scientist, Historian
In the field of political science, Beard was active in the
American Political Science Association and was elected as its President in 1926. He was also a member of the
American Historical Association and served as its president in 1933. He was best known for his studies of the Constitution, and for his creation of bureaus of municipal research and his studies of public administration in cities, including a famous study of Tokyo,
The Administration and Politics of Tokyo, (1923).
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