An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
(In this famous study, the author turned the hagiography o...)
In this famous study, the author turned the hagiography of many earlier American historians on its head. Unlike those writers, who had stressed idealistic impulses as factors determining the structure of the American government, Beard questioned the Founding Fathers' motivations in drafting the Constitution and viewed the results as a product of economic self-interest.
(The sequel to the bestselling An Economic Interpretation ...)
The sequel to the bestselling An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, this volume focuses on the nation's early political history from the adoption of the Constitution through the end of the Jefferson administration. This period saw the rise and triumph of Jefferson's agrarian, slave-holding South over the mercantile-oriented urbanism of Hamilton's North, setting the stage for the ongoing clash between rural and urban America, a topic still highly relevant in the twenty-first century.
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941
(Conceived by Charles Beard as a sequel to his provocative...)
Conceived by Charles Beard as a sequel to his provocative study of American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War outraged a nation, permanently damaging Beard's status as America's most influential historian. Beard's main argument is that both Democratic and Republican leaders, but Roosevelt above all, worked quietly in 1940 and 1941 to insinuate the United States into the Second World War.
Charles Austin Beard was an 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. He was one of the intellectual leaders of the Progressive movement and of American liberalism.
Background
Charles Beard was born on November 27, 1874, in Knightstown, Indiana, the United States. The son of a substantial landowner and building contractor, Beard was raised on a farm near Knightstown, Indiana. His parents were old-fashioned rationalists and descendants of Quakers; this heritage gave Beard a lifelong sense of close personal and intellectual kinship with eighteenth-century America. Beard spent most of his youth reading books from his father’s large collection.
Education
In his youth, Charles Beard worked on the family farm and attended a local Quaker school, Spiceland Academy. He was expelled from the school for unclear reasons but graduated from the public Knightstown High School in 1891.
The down-to-earth, humane cast of mind that he derived from his upbringing was broadened at DePauw University through acquaintance with the writings of Karl Marx and especially John Ruskin, whose portrait always hung in Beard’s study. Summer in Chicago, spent partly at Hull House, brought Beard into direct involvement with current social unrest. On graduating from DePauw in 1898, he went to England to study English and European history at Oxford. His Oxford experience gave Beard a considerable familiarity with English literary culture, a distinctly uncommon attribute among American social scientists.
From his Oxford professors, notably Frederick York Powell, Beard learned of the growing aspiration for a science of man that would furnish an empirical understanding of human affairs without the intrusion of value judgments.
Beard returned to the United States in 1902, where he pursued graduate work in history at Columbia University. He received his doctorate in 1904 and immediately joined the faculty as a lecturer.
Initially, Beard had planned to become a Methodist minister, but under the influence of his professors, Andrew Stephenson and Colonel James R. Weaver, he found himself drawn to history. After visiting the Chicago slums in 1896, Beard was inclined toward reformation. In 1898, having completed his studies at DePauw, Beard attended Oxford University as an independent research history student. Then, one of his classmates, Walter Vrooman, approached Beard with the idea of founding a college for working men at Oxford. The college, called Ruskin Hall, opened in 1899. After returning to the United States he planned to attend Cornell University, but he went back to Ruskin Hall after his marriage. The couple lived in Manchester, England while Beard lectured to groups about the rise of man through scientific and technological advances. These ideas would later become the center of the Industrial Revolution, published in 1901.
Leaving Ruskin Hall in 1902, Beard returned to the United States to attend graduate school on a fellowship to Columbia University and received his master’s degree in 1903. Tn 1904, he earned his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia, and he stayed to work in the history department. After only three years, Beard became an adjunct professor in the public law department. Promoted to associate professor in 1910, he became a full professor in 1915 and taught a variety of classes. Bear’s public speaking abilities made him one of the most popular teachers on campus. While teaching, he produced many shorter pieces and books, including The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Current History (1907-1908), a two-volume work written with James Harvey Robinson. In 1910, Beard published American Government and Politics, a book that covered what he taught in the American government. It would later be the definitive text for American government courses and was released in ten editions.
Beard, concerned with the state of the government, took a position as a supervisor at the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, overseeing the Training School for Public Service. In 1919, Beard became director of the bureau. Hoping to widen the range of the organization, he authored a report detailing the reformation of the administration of New York State. By 1921, with Beard’s guidance, the bureau had been restructured into the National Institute of Public Administration, which covered a wider range of issues. Beard was also interested in the history of political organizations, and his next undertaking was to write a book considering the intent of the men who wrote the Constitution. Published in 1912, The Supreme Court and the Constitution express Beard’s views on the Supreme Court’s power to determine if Congress acted constitutionally. Beard ultimately decided that the Supreme Court does, in fact, possess this power, although he had begun his research with the reverse assumption. It later became clear that Beard wanted to accentuate how the authors of the Constitution wanted to protect private property, an idea which would be explored in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States in 1913.
In this book, Beard examines five pertinent theories borrowed from such influential thinkers as James Madison, Richard Hildreth, and Karl Marx. He first considers that two separate classes, the “personalty” and the “realty” created the boundaries in political thought. Those who could invest their capital formed the personalty group, while the realty consisted of farmers unable to pay off loans. Beard’s next point is that the Articles of Confederation created an environment hostile toward the personality, and he then asserts that most of those who favored the Constitution were members of the personalty. Beard emphasizes that the Constitution guaranteed the right to personal holdings and the security of the personality. Finally, he notes that the public showed little interest in electing those persons who would attend the conventions for ratification and the Constitution was passed due to unusual pressure placed upon the states. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States has been criticized over the years for several reasons, including Beard’s failure to account factors unrelated to the economy. However, it remains an important work because Beard’s down-to-earth description of the men who founded the country freed historians in their thinking.
Following An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Beard continued to focus on political dissension in his 1915 title, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. Lacking the clarity of its previous work, it is still regarded as Beard’s most thoroughly researched book. Some material gathered for this work was published in 1914 as Contemporary American History 1877-1913, a text that deals with the transformations brought on by the growth of industrial capitalism after the Civil War. It would produce a lasting effect on how Americans view that era. Beard further emphasized this in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), which he wrote with his wife. By 1916, Beard was lecturing at Amherst College on the connections he found between the state of the economy and the state of politics. Six years later, in 1922, The Economic Basis of Politics, was published. Noted political journalist Walter Lippman commented on this work in a 1922 issue of New Republic, “As a polemic against vacant political theorizing, this little book is invaluable.”
By 1917, Beard had become so frustrated with the political situation at Columbia that he resigned when three of his fellow professors lost their positions because they were against the war with Germany. In order to support his wife and their son, William, who was born in 1907, Beard accepted a position as director of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, but he resigned in 1920 due to his unhappiness with his administrative duties. The Beard family moved to a permanent location in Milford, Connecticut, where Beard began writing for a living. Most of his financial support came from royalties from American Government and Politics, as well as payments for his various articles in Nation and the New Republic. In 1921, Beard began traveling in Europe to discover the effect of World War 1 on the economy and society. His impressions were recorded in Cross Currents in Europe To-Day, published in 1922. Beard then visited Japan, where he was invited to research municipal government. His discoveries were reported in The Administration and Politics of Tokyo: A Survey and Opinions (1923). Beard was appointed the president of the American Political Science Association in 1926 and formed a committee to establish specifications for the growing areas of research in the discipline. Working in Yugoslavia in 1927 and 1928, Beard published his opinions on the structure of its system of government in 1929, under the title The Balkan Pivot: Yugoslavia, A Study in Government and Administration.
Together with his wife, Beard wrote The Rise of American Civilization (1927), one of his most impressive works, as illustrated by Carl Van Doren’s statement in New York Herald Tribune Books in 1927, “This is the bone and meat of history, the blood, and native color.” This text dealt with the time period between the election of Thomas Jefferson and the Reconstruction after the Civil War but was eventually expanded to encompass the entire history of the country. It dealt with cultural change in addition to political thought, for which Beard credited his wife. Its broad overview of history made it extremely popular. Beard then turned toward technology and a more widespread governmental influence to produce a healthy economy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal seemed to be the answer Beard was seeking, and in the 1933 title, The Future Comes: A Study of the New Deal, Beard optimistically assessed Roosevelt’s first one hundred days in office. The Great Depression tested his optimism, and in 1934 Beard published The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy in an attempt to direct the progress of the country. That same year, the related work, The Open Door at Home: A Trial Philosophy of National Interest was released. In this volume, Beard emphasizes the importance of an organized plan to more effectively use the country’s resources. His opinion was that a historian couldn’t view precisely, but rather, judge on available facts seemingly relevant to the historian. By the 1950s, the conflict this statement created had led to the development of historical relativism.
Continuing his work with the American Historical Association’s Commission on the Social Studies, Beard was determined to revamp educational practices to condition students for a collectivist democracy, which was the subject of a report Beard wrote for the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association. The Unique Function of Education in American Democracy, published in 1937, emphasized Beard’s belief in collectivism. Beard continued to promote the idea that the New Deal did not contradict the Constitution, but by 1938, he had begun to lose faith in Roosevelt. This disenchantment emerged in The Old Deal and the New (1940).
Beard opposed to the war in Europe, wrote increasingly more intense articles against American involvement. The outcome of World War TI confirmed his beliefs, and he began to write The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States with his wife. Published in 1942, it portrays ideas as forces capable of determining history. Following The American Spirit in 1944, A Basic History of the United States examines the history of the country and in laymen’s terms. It remains in print and has been updated by Beard’s son. Beard’s later writing expresses his respect for the balance in the American government and his belief that human will can mold the future. He continued to criticize Roosevelt and his foreign policies in American Foreign Policy in the Making 1932-1940: A Study in Responsibilities (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (1948).
Having accepted a position as a history professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1940, Beard left after one year when he failed to found an establishment for the comprehensive investigation of the history of American culture. Hoping to write a third text concerned with government relations during a war, Beard began his research. Unfortunately, having recovered from an affliction in 1945, he did not have the physical stamina to complete the third book and died on September 1, 1948.
Beard and his wife destroyed the bulk of their manuscripts and private papers shortly before their deaths. Many of the papers that survived are in the Beard collection, DePauw University archives.
Although his father was a self-proclaimed religious skeptic, Charles Beard attended Quaker services as a boy and began his formal education in a local Quaker-run school.
Politics
Though he had been a leading liberal supporter of the New Deal, Beard turned against Franklin Delano Roosevelt's foreign policy, consistent with his Quaker roots. He became one of the leading proponents of American non-interventionism seeking to avoid American involvement in Europe's wars. He promoted "American Continentalism" as an alternative, arguing that the United States had no vital interests at stake in Europe and that a foreign war could lead to domestic dictatorship. He continued to press this position after the war.
Views
Following his departure from Columbia, Beard never again sought a permanent academic appointment. Living on lucrative royalties from textbooks and other bestsellers, he operated a dairy farm in rural Connecticut that attracted many academic visitors.
The Beards were active in helping to found the New School for Social Research (a.k.a. The New School) in Greenwich Village, New York City, where the faculty would control its own membership. Enlarging upon his interest in urban affairs, he toured Japan and produced a volume of recommendations for the reconstructing of Tokyo after the earthquake of 1923. His financial independence was secured by The Rise of American Civilization (1927), and its two sequels, America in Midpassage (1939), and The American Spirit (1943), all written with his wife, Mary.
Membership
Beard was active in the American Political Science Association and was elected its President in 1926. He was also a member of the American Historical Association and served as its president in 1933.
Phi Beta Kappa
American Political Science Association
1926
American Historical Association
1933
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Karl Marks
Writers
John Ruskin
Connections
At DePauw, Beard met Mary Ritter, whom he would marry. Until the ratification in 1920 of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, Mary Ritter Beard was prominent in the women’s suffrage movement. Their son William was born in 1907.