Charles A. Beard
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Charles Austin Beard | |
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| Born | November 27, 1874 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 in the decades following World War II, made this assessment in 1968: "Today 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]
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[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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]
[edit] 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.
From the time Beard published An Economic Interpretation, the trustees of Columbia University considered him suspect, but his departure from the school was his own decision. He watched as a number of faculty members were dismissed, usually for some combination of personal conflicts and unorthodox political views. Though he completely supported American participation in the First World War, he nevertheless submitted his letter of resignation on Oct. 8, 1917, charging that "the University is really under the control of a small and active group of trustees who have no standing in the world of education, who are reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion. I am convinced that while I remain in the pay of the Trustees of Columbia University I cannot do effectively my part in sustaining public opinion in support of the just war on the German Empire." [8][9] In a sarcastic editorial titled "Columbia's Deliverance", the New York Times hailed his resignation, saying the university would be better off without the services of those "teachers of false doctrines sheltering themselves behind the shibboleth of academic freedom." [10] He later helped to found the New School for Social Research in New York and advised on reconstructing Tokyo after the earthquake of 1923.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.[11] He was also a member of the American Historical Association and served as its president in 1933.[12] 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).
[edit] References
- ^ Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (1968), 344
- ^ Clyde W. Barrow, More Than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard (2000) Page 5 online
- ^ 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
- ^ 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
- ^ See Forrest McDonald, "Colliding with the Past," Reviews in American History 25.1 (1997) 13-18
- ^ Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. 1968
- ^ Hofstadter 1968
- ^ Michael, Rosenthal, Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 236ff.
- ^ New York Times: "Quits Columbia; Assails Trustees" Oct. 9, 1917
- ^ New York Times: "Columbia's Deliverance" Oct. 10, 1917
- ^ Past Presidents List, APSA website.
- ^ Past Presidents List, AHA website.
[edit] 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)
[edit] Primary sources
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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
[edit] 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
