by David Milne
If the Spanish-American War had driven Beard toward Bryanite anti-imperialism, it didn’t particularly show in an article he wrote for an Oxford student magazine, New Oxford, in November 1901. The essay considered whether imperialism, on the whole, was a good or bad thing. In the case of the United States, Beard believed British imperial endeavor had been vindicated because “the Americans, as bad and half-civilized as they are, are better than the howling, scalping Comanches whose places they have taken.” The British colonial legacy in America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand was beneficial enough to inspire pride, not shame. Yet in surveying America’s recent imperial efforts, Beard recorded some strong words about America’s forlorn adventure in the Philippines. Sending hundreds of “expensively equipped teachers to the Philippines to instruct naked natives while thousands of white children in American cities” were “under-fed and under-educated” suggested that the likes of McKinley and Roosevelt were not “brute imperialists but self-destructive lunatics.”42 Only when the United States and the nations of Europe had attended to their own problems should they attempt to improve the lot of the poorer nations.
Only at this juncture did Beard believe that development could be encouraged under the auspices of an “international bureau” charged with directing irrigation, swamp drainage, land reclamation, and large-scale infrastructure projects. In words that would have repelled Jane Addams and Keir Hardie, Beard suggested that the work would be completed by “mongol and negro” workers “always under white foremen,” suggesting that the hierarchical notions learned through his privileged childhood were still present. And while one should be careful not to set great store in anyone’s scribblings in a student magazine, Beard is more culpable than most, having already published his first book and, thanks to his editorship of a newspaper, being far from naïve when it came to the permanence of the printed word. Beyond the racism contained in some of the language, however, the article’s primary significance lies in Beard’s mixed views on well-meaning global activism. This was the first time that Beard privileged national self-improvement over overseas missionary work, a prioritization that defined his later views on foreign policy.43
After politely rebuffing the attempts of Ramsay MacDonald (who became Labour’s first prime minister in 1924) to convince him to stay in Britain to assist the fledgling Labour Party, Beard returned home to commence his postgraduate study at Columbia University in 1902, gaining his master’s degree a year later, and submitting his Ph.D. dissertation the year after that—all testament to the scholarly benefit derived from his four years traversing England’s many local archives.
It is important to note that Beard’s Ph.D. was in political science, not history. At Oxford, as the historian Mark C. Smith writes, Beard learned from Frederick York Powell that “history’s purpose was not to praise institutions or theories but to understand them; history was a science, rather than theology or ethics.”44 The political science emphasis in Beard’s early years is notable, although it remained present throughout the entirety of his career, particularly as he turned his attention toward foreign policy. Indeed, the political scientist Clyde Barrow categorizes twenty-eight of Beard’s forty-nine books as falling within the field of political science, with topics including political theory, comparative politics, municipal reform, and public administration.45 Columbia appointed Beard as a lecturer in history in 1904, later moving him to an adjunct position in politics and government.
At Columbia—then at the height of its powers as an institution that challenged disciplinary boundaries—Beard was greatly influenced by Professors James Harvey Robinson and E.R.A. Seligman, two giants in the historical field. Robinson was at the vanguard of the so-called New History movement, which expanded beyond narrow political history to emphasize the social, cultural, scientific, and intellectual roots of society formation. The New History was something of an amalgam of history and political science, which explains why it roused Beard’s admiration. Seligman’s major work, The Economic Interpretation of History, was published in 1902 and it came to exert a profound influence on Beard’s scholarship. Seligman taught Beard to follow the money when tracing the taproots of political motivation, an emphasis he pursued subsequently. Columbia was thus a good intellectual home for the young, idealistic advocate of social reform, and he stayed happily there until his resignation fifteen years later. He also embraced New York City and assumed a stake in maintaining its upkeep and development. A true believer in the science of politics, Beard pursued his interest in urban planning by working for the New York Bureau of Municipal Research; his interests were myriad, as were his talents. He was much like certain of the Founding Fathers, who lived and extolled the merits of the generalist intellect. Beard was an engaged public citizen, a much-loved teacher, and a highly regarded scholar.
Beard’s politics were a fascinating amalgam of Jeffersonian idealism, midwestern self-reliance, and urban cosmopolitanism. He was a man of the left, but his journey to that position was atypical. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Beard’s contemporary at graduate school, remembered him as “in no sense a Marxist or single track economic determinist,” but someone who “endowed everything he said with a bracing air of realism” and whose “recurrent theme” was “the role of material self-interest in America’s political and constitutional development.”46 Yet even this recurrent theme conceals complexity in the manner of its formation. When Beard began work on An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, his admiration for the Founders soared, in spite of the fact that the book served mainly to identify and skewer the self-interested way the Constitution was framed and the disingenuous manner of its public presentation. In 1935, Beard declared that Jefferson was the greatest of the Founders because he “combined in his person the best of both the Old World and the New.” Yet he also praised the two main authors of The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, and compared that book favorably to anything written in Europe during the Enlightenment.47
Beard is the most left-wing, but also the most conventionally patriotic, of all the individuals this book surveys. He reveled in his nation’s unique virtues. Every chapter of Charles Beard’s career can be explained, to varying degrees, in reference to his love for the United States. In 1927, Beard wrote that “among the many historic assemblies which have wrought revolutions in the affairs, it seems safe to say that there has never been one that commanded more political talent, practical experience, and sound substance than the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.”48 This was a proudly conventional and patriotic description of the founding generation. Indeed, Beard had something of a proprietary interest in the United States, which is not surprising given his family’s long history in the colonies and the nation. William Appleman Williams, the University of Wisconsin scholar who embraced New History revisionism with fewer interpretive qualms, did not deny that Beard had offered “radical insights into the malfunctioning of the existing system.” Nonetheless, Williams distilled his mixed feelings in describing Beard as a “Tory-Radical,” a man “torn between concern for his fellow men and a personal and philosophic commitment to private property.”49
Beard’s character and raison d’être are similarly complex in origin and evolution. His friend the writer Matthew Josephson wrote that he had “never met anywhere a man who so thoroughly enjoyed his own sense of freedom or who was so jealous of his intellectual and moral independence.”50 This singularity is reflected in his decision to leave Columbia, as well as in the thrust of his scholarship, which is almost willful in its hostility to bland ingratiation. Another constant throughout his career was his belief that “objectivity” in historical scholarship is unattainable—although he did not believe that this should discourage anyone from trying. Beard contested the Germanic ideal of scholarship, as famously expressed by Leopold von Ranke, that the historian’s task was “to describe the past as it actually was,” not to judge it through the lens of preconceived ideology.51 A skeptical Beard believed that this imperative was a
“noble dream.”52 “Every historian’s work, that is, his selection of facts, his emphasis, his omissions, his organization, and his methods of presentation—bears a relation to his own personality and the age and circumstances in which he lives.”53 For Beard, history was necessarily a relativist, political activity.
Accompanying Beard’s critique of the self-deluding sanctimony that accompanied the Rankean search for “truth” was his belief that historians must make their work accessible to a general audience and address, so far as possible, the most pressing problems of the contemporary world. Convinced that “specialization in particular, cut off from wider relations, leads to mere thoughtless scholasticism,” Beard’s ambitions as a historian became increasingly divorced from his profession as a whole—and indeed from the discipline of political science, the field in which he earned his doctorate.54 His ability to speak persuasively to two audiences garnered him the unique distinction of being elevated by his peers to the presidency of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association.
Yet Beard believed that political science was as blameworthy as history in its embrace of the margins. In 1918, he complained that too much political science was “concerned with minutiae, not great causes and ideas … The only way we can know the state is through concrete manifestation of power … The only way to find the manifestation is to discover its historical circumstance.”55 Scholars should serve their public not by seeking ever-narrower “truths,” but by engaging accessibly with the wider forces that govern political affairs. In his presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 1926, titled “Time, Technology, and the Creative Spirit in Political Science,” Beard observed that relying solely on mathematical modeling to address narrow phenomena was “myopic” and “barren”—denying the rightful role of creativity and intuition. He called on his fellow political scientists to dare “to be wrong in something important rather than right in some meticulous banality.”56 He chided historians and political scientists alike for parochialism and obscurantism. History needed to draw more from political science and political science needed to attend more to history. Beard believed that the United States was improvable if scholars from both disciplines set their goals higher—if they communicated with the general public rather than with themselves.
Achieving this goal, of course, assumed confidence in the ability of ordinary Americans to react constructively to compelling testimony, and in this respect Beard was unashamedly optimistic. Unlike Walter Lippmann, who viewed the American people as a “phantom public” lacking the ability to distinguish between sophistry and substance—an artless mass that responded more to sound bites and crude stereotypes than to measured analyses—Beard believed that political progress had been driven by “the activities of millions of men and women, most of them unknown to the pages of written history.” The general public yearned for knowledge and possessed an irresistible latent power. It might take only “a word, an article, a pamphlet, a speech, or a book [to] set in train forces of incalculable moment.”57
The reverse was also true: where ignorance reigned, susceptibility to extremism was heightened. Beard held German historical scholarship partly responsible for that nation’s failure to lay strong pluralist foundations, thus permitting strong-willed despots to run amok. Although historians were vested with a grave duty to illuminate the past as widely as possible, German historians had failed to write an accessible, panoptic history of the nation for its people. Brilliant as certain of them were, German research historians sought their “truth” by narrowing horizons and developing jargon: an abdication of responsibility. Beard came to assume his role as a public intellectual with high seriousness, for the stakes were high in interwar America.
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The United States emerged from the First World War as the world’s largest economic power by a considerable margin.58 The conflict had hollowed out the European belligerents, whose populations had been devastated and whose debts—owed to the United States primarily—had assumed gargantuan dimensions. The United States’ gold reserves were vast, and the nation’s economic output was equivalent to its next six competitors combined. As battlefield deaths and disease took a wrecking ball to European demography, America’s population increased by 30 percent between 1900 and 1920, constituting 106 million in total—compared to 44 million in Great Britain, 37 million in France, and 64 million in Germany.59 Major economic shifts were also occurring in the complexion of America’s overseas trade, as the historian Odd Arne Westad has observed. During the 1920s and 1930s, the United States became the hub of the global economy, yet more and more of its trade spokes were connected to the Third World. In Latin America, for example, the United States displaced Britain as the primary provider of capital investment. America’s exports to South Asia tripled between 1920 and 1940. And this increased influence and visibility went beyond the reach of cold cash. As Westad writes, “This influence was far more profound than just American models for production and management. In urban popular culture, in Europe and in the Third World, America established itself as the epitome of modernity, conveying ideas that undermined existing concepts of status, class and identity.”60 The global economy throughout the 1920s was coming to resemble the interconnected trading entity that Alfred Mahan prophesized would benefit the fluid, innovative American economy more than its competitors. For these reasons, the term “isolationism” must be treated with great caution when considering U.S foreign policy between the wars.
The League of Nations was a toxic entity in American political debate in 1920. President Warren Harding’s inaugural address of 1921 had lambasted global multilateralism: “A world super-government is contrary to everything we cherish and can have no sanction by our republic.”61 For a time Harding forbade the State Department from responding to official correspondence from the league’s headquarters in Geneva, an action that in the genteel world of international diplomacy was truly obnoxious, not to say self-defeating. Attacking the nascent league was a bipartisan project, however. Wilson’s Democratic Party was cool toward the league in the 1924 general election, not that it did them much good. The Democratic candidate, John W. Davis, was trounced by Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge, a Vermonter of remarkable stillness and self-possession who was reelected to the presidency—which he had assumed following Harding’s death in 1923—in a landslide. Upon Coolidge’s death in 1933, Dorothy Parker had famously quipped, “How could they tell?” In losing to such an uncharismatic politician, the Democratic Party’s weaknesses were revealed.
While the 1920s were owned by the anti-Wilsonian Republican Party, its internationalist wing was active and influential. Conservative internationalists like Elihu Root, William Howard Taft, and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, all major figures in the GOP, fiercely defended the activist legacy bequeathed by McKinley and Roosevelt, steering Harding’s and Coolidge’s foreign policies away from narrow isolationism. In the early 1920s, American diplomats began to meet unofficially with league representatives and sit in on its meetings. In 1925, the United States sent official observers to the league. Of course, the League of Nations sans America was a low-key affair driven by two exhausted nations, Britain and France, with economic and colonial interests to protect and limited means to do so. Some minor territorial disputes were resolved, but important absences in membership prevented the league from enforcing anything close to “collective security,” Wilson’s original aim.62
Nonetheless, the United States came in time to interact freely with this flawed entity. Secretary of State Hughes wielded genuine foreign-policy influence during the Harding and Coolidge presidencies, carefully weaning America off an instinctive distrust of European involvement that had spiked in 1920 and 1921. Aware of the problems created by President Wilson’s overreach, Hughes’s approach was incremental and low-key, allowing him to present seventy-one treaties sufficiently modest to secure Senate approval. The maxim by which Hughes lived was “a maximum of securi
ty with a minimum of commitment,” which offers a neat summary of the tenor of U.S. foreign policy in the first half of the 1920s.63
Beard’s thinking on world affairs throughout the 1920s oscillated between a grudging recognition of the need for international engagement and a growing fear that the nation must avoid the type of economic entanglements, and grandiose diplomatic ambitions, that brought it into the First World War. During a trip to Paris in 1922, Charles and Mary hungrily purchased a “trunk load” of books on the banks of the Seine that documented the secret tsarist diplomatic activity that had been made gleefully public by Vladimir Lenin.64 Making good use of this material, Beard delivered a series of lectures at Dartmouth College, later published as Cross-Currents in Europe Today, which cast preponderant blame on France and Russia—in scheming to destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908—for causing the First World War. Beard was moving away from viewing Prussian militarism as some kind of insatiable geopolitical evil. Further lamenting that the “world is an economic unit and the United States is being woven into the very fabric of that unity,” Beard urged the United States to resist this trend by refusing to facilitate or protect the “foreign trade or investments of American citizens,” granting the Philippines independence so that U.S. interests did not extend beyond Hawaii, and focusing much more on internal development. Such a stance, Beard wrote, would “bend all national genius upon the creation of a civilization which, in power and glory and noble living, would rise above all the achievements of the past.”65 He continued to delineate this theme in The Rise of American Civilization, a two-volume history of the United States, coauthored with his wife, considered among his and their finest works. The Beards observed that America’s vast material abundance—not its ideology, government, or westward-facing development—was its most important defining characteristic. It was thus the duty of government both to spread this natural bounty more equitably and to avoid any overseas adventures that might challenge the primacy of internal development.66 Beard described his prioritization of the domestic sphere as “continentalism” and decried those who sought to characterize his advocacy of selective retrenchment as “little Americanism.” Replying to an appreciative review of The Rise by the historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford, Beard echoed Thomas Paine’s revolutionary intentions: “We have to create the new world, not dig it from the past.”67