Beard, Charles A(ustin)

Beard, Charles A[ustin] (1874–1948), historian and educator born in Indiana, after graduating from DePauw University (1898) attended Oxford, where he founded Ruskin College (1899) to train labor leaders. Returning to the U.S., he became professor of political science at Columbia (1904–17). He wrote a number of textbooks on European history, such as The Development of Modern Europe (2 vols., 1907–8), with J.H. Robinson, but about 1909 discovered “that American history is more interesting.” His most important early books on the U.S., reflecting his belief in economic determinism, are An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) and Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915). These volumes established him as a liberal historian, and profoundly affected the study of American history but alienated many traditionalists. Beard resigned from Columbia (1917) to protest the dismissal of pacifist professors, and the next year helped found The New School for Social Research. With his wife, Mary R. Beard, he wrote The Rise of American Civilization (2 vols., 1927), an analysis of U.S. institutions, emphasizing social and economic backgrounds; America in Midpassage (1939), a continuation; The American Spirit (1942), about the “idea of civilization” in the U.S.; and A Basic History of the United States (1944). Other works include The Economic Basis of Politics (1922, revised 1945); The American Leviathan (1930), a study of the machine age, written with William Beard; and A Charter for the Social Sciences (1932), a program of social planning for the U.S. Although Beard was once an adviser to Japan and Yugoslavia on governmental reforms, and was long known for activities to preserve civil liberties, he later held isolationist and conservative views expressed in The Idea of National Interest (1934) and The Open Door at Home (1934), both written with G.H.E. Smith as arguments for a continental economy. Other books illustrative of his later views include The Old Deal and the New (1940), also written with Smith; Public Policy and the General Welfare (1941); The Republic (1943); American Foreign Policy in the Making: 1932–1940 (1946), and its sequel, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (1948).