Beard, Charles Austin 1874-1948

BEARD, CHARLES AUSTIN 1874-1948

Historian

National Reputation

Charles A. Beard has had an enduring influence upon the interpretation of the American past. He was born on a farm in Indiana and educated at a small Quaker academy nearby. After graduatingfrom DePauw University, he undertook graduate study at Oxford, where he helped to found Ruskin Hall, a workingmen's college. He returned to the United States and married Mary Ritter, who later became his lifelong collaborator. After receiving a doctorate from Columbia University in 1904, he accepted a faculty position there, where he was a popular teacher and highly productive scholar until 1917. Among his influential historical texts produced during this period were American Government and Politics (1910), American City Government (1912), Outlines of European History (1912-1914), The Supreme Court and the Constitution (1912), American Citizenship (1914), and Economic Origins of jeffersonian Democracy (1915). However, his fame began in earnest in 1913 with the publication of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, an "intellectual bombshell" in which Beard claimed that the Constitutionwas designed to protect the commercial interests and property rights of the framers.

Controversial View of the Constitution

The book brought Beard both praise and a storm of criticism. According to the historian John Braeman, Beard admired the wisdom and realism of the framers of the Constitution yet insisted in his book that the Constitution was the work of the propertied few and designed to safeguard the economic interests of their class against popular majorities. His book was denounced by conservatives and hailed by reformers, according to Braeman, for "removing a major intellectual obstacle to the program of federal government action to regulate business and assist the less favored numbers of American society." Beard used bio-graphical data and Treasury Department records to conclude that the Constitution was essentially undemocratic, reasoning that the vast majority was unable to participate in its ratification because of the restrictive property qualifications on suffrage. Beard claimed that if the small farmer had been allowed to vote, the Constitution would have been rejected. Later historians believed that much of the data Beard used was inadequate to provide such conclusions; however, few disagreed with his premise that the men writing the Constitution were men of property with a vested interest in the creation of a stable social order. Moreover, many later historians concluded that except for the secession crisis, American politics could most usefully be studied as a series of sharp antagonisms within a class consensus. After Beard's early work, no American historian was able to ignore the role of economics as a potent, although not necessarily singular, influence on the nation's history. Even scholars who profoundly disagreed with Beard could not ignore him.

Champion of Civil Liberties

Beard was a lifelong champion of civil liberties because of his commitment to preserving the free marketplace of ideas. At Columbia University he brought on himself the wrath of the trustees when he spoke out against demands that radical speakers be barred from public schools because one had reportedly declared, "To hell with the American flag." "We could not expect to have liberty without someone's abuse of it," Beard argued, "and between having too much authority or too much liberty, I preferred the latter." Yet he insisted that education inculcate in youth the basic values, that it should "instill in students knowledge of and respect for this country's distinctive and unique heritage." Beard's commitment to civil liberties ended his academic career. In 1917, although Beard supported America's entry into World War I, he resigned from his professorship at Columbia to protest the dismissal of colleagues who had publicly opposed the war. His resignation marked a lifelong commitment to academic freedom, and although he never again held an academic appointment, he did not lose faith in the importance of education in a democracy. In 1919 he helped found the New School for Social Research, based in New York City. Founded as a center for "discussion, instruction and counseling for mature men and women," and offering courses dealing exclusively with matters of concern to the newly emerging social sciences, this was America's first university for adults, and the first to be run by its own faculty, free from the interference of trustees or state legislators. Beard was again embroiled in controversy in the late 1930s and early 1940s when he clung to an isolationist position in the face of Nazi aggression.

Beard's Legacy

Unencumbered by teaching or other academic responsibilities, Beard produced a steady stream of books and articles from the 1920s until his death in 1948, many in collaboration with his wife, Mary. Both The Rise of American Civilization (1927), marked by Mary's ardent feminism, and A Basic History of the United States (1944), their most popular book (widely used as a textbook), were hailed as landmark publications by historians. Sales of Beard's historical texts totaled more than eleven million volumes. Historians, including Beard's sharpest critics, cited him as one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American historical thought. At a centennial celebration of his life and work held at DePauw University in 1974, John Braeman explained that "Throughout his life, Beard's overriding commitment was to the fulfillment of the promise of American life. In Beard's own words, he desired 'a high standard of life for the whole mass of the American people, a land without the degradation of poverty and unemployment on one side or the degradation of luxury, rivalry, and conspicuous waste on the other.'" Historian Henry Steele Commager summed up Beard's influence at the centennial celebration: "The contemporary historian has first to dispense with him before he can get on with the job, and that is not true of any other historian of our times."

Sources:

"Charles Austin Beard," in Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, edited by Roland Turner (Chicago: St. James Press, 1987);

Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (New York: Knopf, 1969);

David A. Marcell, Progress and Pragmatism: James, Dewey, Beard, and the American Idea of Progress (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974);

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

Marvin Swanson, ed., Charles A. Beard: An Observance of the Centennial of his Birth (Greencastle, Ind.: DePauw University Press, 1974).