Beard, Charles A.

Beard, Charles A. (1874–1948), historian, political scientist.Born in Indiana, Beard was reared in the political culture of civic republicanism, which found economic virtue in the widespread ownership of productive private property. Graduating from DePauw University in 1898, he came to maturity in a decade of crisis associated with the depression of the 1890s and the closing of the frontier, proclaimed by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, with dire implications for small landholders. Turner foresaw an urban‐industrial future of economic dependency. Beard, however, after a year at Oxford University (1898–1899), became convinced that industrial workers, as a democratic majority, could escape dependency by using the national government to curb corporate power. This was the hopeful message of his first book, The Industrial Revolution (1901).

Earning a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1904, Beard joined Columbia's history faculty that year. His best‐known work, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), contrasted virtuous owners of private property who respected the national interest with capitalists who were committed to self‐interest and a rootless international marketplace. He sought to demonstrate that the Founding Fathers were capitalists who had designed the checks and balances of the Constitution to frustrate majority rule and to protect economic hierarchy. He hoped this analysis would help Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt to regulate the great corporations. If the reformers succeeded, Beard believed, democracy and national interest would replace hierarchy and self‐interest.

Beard also believed that industrialization, as the product of a universal evolutionary process, would spread democracy worldwide. He supported the Allied cause in World War I, convinced that the war would liberate the German people, made democratic by industrialization, from their reactionary political leaders. But in 1917, when Columbia under President Nicholas Murray Butler dismissed several faculty members for their antiwar views, Beard resigned in protest. He never again held a permanent academic position, though he lectured widely, dividing his time between Washington, D.C., and a farm in Connecticut. He was president of the American Political Science Association in 1926 and the American Historical Association in 1933. With his wife, Mary Beard, he wrote the four‐volume Rise of American Civilization (1927). In the tradition of civic republicanism, the Beards contrasted virtuous, public‐spirited, private‐property owners with a corrupt capitalist class that pursued economic gain worldwide at the expense of the national interest. This corporate class, Beard now concluded, had pushed America into war in 1917.

Rejecting internationalism, Beard concluded that industrialism supported democracy only in nations with democratic traditions, as the United States. In 1939–1941, he opposed U.S. entrance into World War II as a threat to America's democratic tradition. His final book, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941 (1948), argued that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had maneuvered Japan into the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Beard's influence waned after his death, as a younger generation of historians rejected his nationalistic and class‐based views in favor of a “consensus” model that saw international capitalism as a necessary economic foundation for democracy. As historians explored America's racial and ethnic diversity, the absence of cultural pluralism in the work of Beard (and Turner) became painfully evident; other historians attacked Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution for various methodological flaws. Some radical historians of the 1960s praised Beard as an intellectual forerunner, however, and his seminal influence was widely acknowledged as the twentieth century ended.
See also Academic Freedom; Historiography, American; Isolationism; Political Science; Progressive Era.

Bibliography

Ellen Nore , Charles A. Beard, 1983.
Peter Novick , That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession, 1988.

David Noble