Charles Austin Beard

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(b. near Knightstown, Ind., 27 Nov. 1874; d. New Haven, Conn., 1 Sept. 1948), constitutional historian and political scientist. The son of William Beard, a farmer and banker, Beard received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1904. He served on the faculties of history and public law at Columbia until 1917, when he resigned to protest the university's decision not to reappoint several faculty members critical of United States involvement in World War I.

Beard was the foremost Progressive historian of judicial review and public law. In The Supreme Court and the Constitution (1912), he argued unequivocally that the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention had intended to clothe the justices with power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. Beard, like most Progressive writers on the Supreme Court, took his intellectual cues from sociological jurisprudence, which treated the Constitution not as divine revelation but as a political testament. The justices who interpreted it were, according to Beard, subject to human emotions and failings. In 1913, Beard published his most famous work, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, in which he asserted that the framers of the Constitution were actuated more by a concern for property rights than by either principles of political science or concern for the public good. Although recent scholarship has criticized Beard's faulty methodology and economic determinism, his work continues to enjoy currency in universities and public schools.

See also History, Court Uses of.

— Kermit L. Hall

Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948), American historian and political scientist, was probably the most influential historical scholar of his time. He is best known for his emphasis on the role of economic interests in American history.

Charles A. Beard was born into a well-to-do family on a farm near Knightstown, Ind., on Nov. 27, 1874. He graduated from DePauw University in 1898. His interest in social problems was stimulated by a visit to Chicago's Hull House and subsequent study at Oxford in England, where he came in contact with economic reformers and helped found Ruskin Hall, a workingmen's school. In 1900 he married Mary Ritter, whom he had met at DePauw; they had a daughter and a son.

After taking his doctorate at Columbia University in 1904, Beard taught there until he resigned in 1917 in the midst of a controversy over academic freedom and the right of professors to criticize the government's war policy. After that, except for his participation in the New School for Social Research, he never again held a regular academic post. Financially well-off and the author of highly successful textbooks, Beard worked at his farm in New Milford, Conn. An amazingly prolific writer, he published, alone or with collaborators (particularly his wife), some 60 books and 300 articles. Between world Wars I and II he was nationally and internationally prominent as scholar, adviser, publicist, and polemicist on questions of public administration and various aspects of social and foreign policy.

Beard caused an early sensation with An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), a study of the property holdings of the Founding Fathers; it concluded that they "were, with few exceptions, immediately, directly, and personally interested in, and derived economic advantages from, the establishment of the new system, " and maintained that "the Constitution was essentially an economic document." Viewing American history as a conflict between financial and agrarian interests, Beard carried his analysis further in his Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915) and most brilliantly in his and Mary Beard's The Rise of American Civilization (1927). The latter volume popularized a view of the Civil War as a "Second American Revolution, " in which capitalists carried out against the property interests of slave-holding planters "the most stupendous act of sequestration in the history of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence." In addition, the Beards charged that the 14th Amendment was planned from the beginning to be a bulwark for the property rights of corporations.

Ever a reformer and a longtime advocate of a planned democratic economy, Beard, in the manner of his teacher and colleague at Columbia, James Harvey Robinson, saw the writing of history as providing tools for progressive social change. By 1933, when he gave his presidential address to the American Historical Association, he was convinced of the radical subjectivity of historical knowledge: "written history" was merely "an act of faith, "and the ideal of objectivity, he later asserted, was only a "noble dream." As his economic determinist viewpoint lost rigidity, he was able to assess the Founding Fathers more traditionally in The Republic (1943).

During the 1930s Beard was a staunch continentalist and isolationist and vigorously opposed American involvement in World War II. His last years were devoted to a highly controversial study of the approach of war, in which he placed heavy blame upon Franklin D. Roosevelt: President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948). Since Beard's death on Sept. 1, 1948, his historical methods and characteristic views of American history have been seriously attacked by new generations of historians.

Further Reading

Some biographical material appears in Mary Beard, The Making of Charles A. Beard: An Interpretation (1955). Beard's career is insightfully discussed and appraised in Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968), and in Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (1958). Howard K. Beale, ed., Charles A. Beard: An Appraisal (1954), contains a number of useful assessments.

Additional Sources

Borning, Bernard C., The political and social thought of Charles A. Beard, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984, 1962.

Nore, Ellen, Charles A. Beard, an intellectual biography, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

Few academicians achieve the public recognition and professional respect accorded to historian Charles Austin Beard. His polemic An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States stirred debate among fellow scholars and the U.S. public by contradicting the popular understanding of how and why the United States was founded. A brilliant, original thinker, Beard achieved a unique prominence among twentieth-century historians and political scientists.

Beard was born to well-to-do parents in Knightstown, Indiana, on November 27, 1874. After graduating from Indiana's DePauw University in 1898, he sailed to England to attend the University of Oxford. While at Oxford, he helped establish Ruskin Hall, a college for British working men that represented to Beard the liberation of the English masses from upper-class domination. In Beard's mind, Ruskin Hall was a symbol and precursor of the true political democracy that would be ushered in by the industrial revolution.

In 1900 Beard returned briefly to the United States to marry Mary Ritter. An intellectual in her own right, Mary Ritter Beard became an invaluable critic and collaborator in the more than fifty books produced during Beard's prolific career. After his marriage, Beard resumed his studies in England, then returned permanently to the United States. He earned his doctor's degree from New York City's Columbia University and in 1904 accepted a teaching position in political science at Columbia.

In 1913, Beard published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. The book created a mild sensation because it suggested that the United States was not yet a true democracy. Even more disturbing to some U.S. citizens was Beard's argument that the U.S. Constitution was designed primarily to protect the property rights of the wealthy capitalists attending the Constitutional Convention. He insisted that self-interest, not democratic principles, motivated the Founding Fathers. To Beard, the Constitution was a tribute to the power of class, not democracy.

Although several U.S. politicians criticized Beard's unorthodox view of U.S. history, many of his colleagues praised his innovative approach. They understood how the private economic interests of the colonial ruling class could have had a far-reaching effect on the nascent U.S. government.

In 1917 Beard protested the firing of several Columbia University faculty members by resigning his own position. Beard had been outraged when the university dismissed his colleagues for their refusal to support the United States' involvement in World War I. In 1919 he helped found the New School for Social Research in New York City.

In 1927 Beard produced another remarkable tome, The Rise of American Civilization. Coauthored by his wife, it provided an overview of U.S. history with further insights into the government's origins. This sprawling, two-volume set was followed by America in Midpassage, in 1939, and The American Spirit, in 1942.

During the early 1930s, Beard wrote extensively about the nature of historical knowledge. He was particularly interested in historians' personal biases and the effect of those biases on the presentation of historical facts.

Although Beard was closely associated with the U.S. progressive movement and social reforms, he disagreed with several aspects of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs. In 1934 he began an acrimonious, decade-long campaign against Roosevelt's foreign policy. In American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940 (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of War (1948), Beard maintained that the United States had backed Japan into a corner and had forced the country into a war. His extreme isolationist views damaged his professional reputation to some extent.

Beard died in 1948, at the age of seventy-three. He is remembered as an accomplished historian who influenced the way U.S. citizens view their own history.

Quotes:

"I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and woman trample themselves in the mire and die. Something magnificent is taking place here amid the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail."

Charles Austin Beard
Born	November 27, 1874(1874-11-27) Knightstown, Indiana, U.S.
Died	September 1, 1948 (aged 73) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Historian

Charles Austin Beard (November 27, 1874 – September 1, 1948) was, with Frederick Jackson Turner, one of the most influential American historians of the first half of the 20th century. He published hundreds of monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science. His works included radical re-evaluation of the Founding Fathers of the United States, who he believed were more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles.

Richard Hofstadter, a leading historian of the 1960s, concluded:

Today [1968] 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."^[1]

Contents 1 Progressive historiography 1.1 Constitution 1.2 Reconstruction 2 Labor education 3 Mary Beard 4 Non-interventionist foreign policy 5 Leadership positions as Political Scientist, Historian 6 References 7 Bibliography 7.1 Primary sources 8 External links

Progressive historiography

As a leader of the "progressive historians," or "progressive 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 his wife, Mary.

Constitution

Historian Carl Becker in History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776 (1909) formulated the Progressive interpretation of the American Revolution. He said 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, in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and An Economic Interpretation of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915). To Beard, the Constitution was a counter-revolution, set up by rich bondholders (personalty; bonds were "personal property"), in opposition to the farmers and planters (realty; 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, said Beard, the farmers and debtors, led by plantation slave owners, overthrew the capitalists and established Jeffersonian democracy. Other historians supported the class-conflict interpretation, noting the states confiscated great semi-feudal landholdings of loyalists and gave them out in small parcels to ordinary farmers. Conservatives, such as William Howard Taft, were shocked at the Progressive interpretation because it seemed to belittle the Constitution.^[2] Many scholars, however, eventually adopted Beard's thesis and by 1950 it had become the standard interpretation of the era.

Beginning about 1950, however, historians started to argue that the progressive interpretation was factually incorrect. These 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 above all Forrest McDonald.^[3]

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.

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.”^[4]

It was largely replaced by the intellectual history approach, which stressed the power of ideas, especially republicanism, in stimulating the Revolution.^[5] However, the legacy of examining the economic interests of American historical actors remains enduring.

Reconstruction

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.^[6] 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.^[7]

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 in 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 did not 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 Mary Ritter. They later were 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.

Non-interventionist foreign policy

Starting as a leading liberal supporter of the New Deal, Beard turned against Franklin Delano Roosevelt's foreign policy. Beard promoted "American Continentalism," arguing that the United States 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 American 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, has 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, or revisionist, 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 its President in 1926.^[8] He was also a member of the American Historical Association and served as its president in 1933.^[9] 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).

References

1. ^ Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (1968) p. 344
2. ^ Clyde W. Barrow, More Than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard (2000) Page 5 online
3. ^ Robert Livingston Schuyler, "Forrest McDonald's Critique of the Beard Thesis," Journal of Southern History 1961 27(1): 73-80; Peter J. Coleman, "Beard, McDonald, and Economic Determinism in American Historiography," Business History Review 1960 34(1): 113-121
4. ^ Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (1988) p 336. Ellen Nore, Beard’s biographer, concludes his interpretation of the Constitution collapsed due to more recent and sophisticated analysis. Ellen Nore, "Charles A. Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Origins of the Constitution," This Constitution: a Bicentennial Chronicle 1987 (17): 39-44
5. ^ See Forrest McDonald, "Colliding with the Past," Reviews in American History 25.1 (1997) 13-18
6. ^ Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. 1968
7. ^ Hofstadter 1968
8. ^ Past Presidents List, APSA website.
9. ^ Past Presidents List, AHA website.

Bibliography

• Bacevich, Andrew J. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. (2002) (Argues that while Beard might have been wrong about the need to oppose Hitler, he assessed how American economic interests drive foreign policy.)
• Barrow, Clyde W. More Than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard. (2000).
• Borning, Bernard C. The Political and Social Thought of Charles A. Beard. University of Washington Press, 1962 online edition
• Brown, David S. Beyond the Frontier: Midwestern Historians in the American Century (2009).
• Brown, Robert Eldon. Charles Beard and the Constitution: A critical analysis of "An economic interpretation of the Constitution" (1954).
• Cott, Nancy F. A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard through Her Letters. (1991).
• Cushing, Strout. The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (1958) online edition
• Dennis, L. (1990) George S. Counts and Charles A. Beard: Collaborators for Change. (SUNY Series in the Philosophy of Education). State Univ of New York Press.
• Egnal, Marc. "The Beards Were Right: Parties in the North, 1840-1860," Civil War History, Vol. 47, 2001
• Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968), pp 167-346; detailed analysis of Beard's historiography.
• Kennedy, Thomas C. Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy (1975) online edition
• McDonald, Forrest. We The People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (1958)
• Nore, Ellen. Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (1983). online edition
• Radosh, Ronald. Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (1978)

Primary sources

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Charles A. Beard

• Works by Charles A. Beard at Project Gutenberg
• Beard, Charles. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913).
• Beard, Charles. Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, (1915) online edition
• Beard, Charles. The Administration and Politics of Tokyo, (1923) online edition

External links

• AHA Bibliography of the writings of Charles Beard
• Recent empirical research on Beard's thesis and economic factors behind the American Constitution from EH.NET's Encyclopedia.
• Beards's APSA Presidential Address
• Beard's AHA Presidential Address
• Class and Pluralism in America: The Constitution Reconsidered
• Article byNancy Cott from The Reader's Companion to American History (registration required)
• Charles A. Beard at Find a Grave

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