Charles A. Beard: the Formative Years in Indiana

Charles A. Beard: The Formative Years in Indiana John Braeman* Charles A. Beard’s multifarious achievements and activities were more than sufficient to fill several lifetimes.’ Besides playing an influential role in reorienting political science in the United States from the description of the formal machinery of government to the analysis of “how things are actually done,”* Beard was one of the Progressive Era’s top experts on municipal government, an apostle of the gospel of efficiency, and a pioneer in the development of public administration as a field of study. He served as supervisor of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research’s Training School for Public Service and then as director of the Bureau, and he was instrumental in the Bureau’s reorganization into the Institute of Public Adminis- tration. He was one of the founders of the Ruskin Hall workers’ education movement in England, the New School for Social Research, and the Workers Education Bureau of America. He was for many years active in the American Association for *John Braeman is professor of history at the University of Nebraska. ‘There exists no full-scale biography that attempts to cover the entire range of Beard’s interests and activities. The fullest available account of his early years is Paul L. Schmunk, “Charles Austin Beard: A Free Spirit 1874- 1919 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1957). Bernard C. Born- ing, The Political and Social Thought of Charles A. Beard (Seattle, 1962), is comprehensive, if pedestrian, on the topic. More perceptive, though narrowly focused, is Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Par- rington (New York, 1968), 167-346. Morton G. White, Social Thought in Amer- ica: The Revolt Against Formalism (New York, 1949), examines Beards role in reshaping American social thought. For his contributions to historical study, see Elias Berg, The Historical Thinking of Charles A. Beard (Stockholm, 19571, and Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (New Haven, 1958). Thomas C. Kennedy, Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy (Gainesville, 1975), traces his views and involve- ments in one area. Howard K. Beale, ed., Charles A. Beard: An Appraisal ([Lexington, Ky.] 1954), is a collection of appreciative appraisals and recollec- tions. * Charles Beard to George P. Brett, September 3, 1907, Beard file, Macmil- Ian Company Records (New York Public Library, New York). 94 Indiana Magazine of History CHARLESA. BEARDDURING HISYEARS AT DEPAUW Courtesy Archives of DePauw University. Greencastle, Indiana. Charles A. Beard 95 Adult Education. As the most influential member of the Amer- ican Historical Association’s Commission on the Social Studies and the primary author of the 1937 report of the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association, The Unique Function of Education in American Democracy, Beard made a major contribution to the revamping of the teaching of the social studies in the public schools. Via his articles, he brought his views on the public issues of his time before a wide audience. He was a lifelong champion of civil liberties and academic freedom, a leading advocate of national planning during the New Deal, and a respected spokesman for isolationism-or what he preferred to call “continentali~m”~-in the years before Pearl Habor. But Charles A. Beard exerted his largest influence as a historian. His An Economic Znterpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and Economic Origins of Jeffersoniun Democracy (1915) were pioneering attempts to apply an economic interpretation to American history. Whether accepted or challenged, his interpretation has continued to set the param- eters of historical debate on the period. The Rise of American Civilization (1927), which he co-authored with his wife, Mary, revolutionized the writing of history in this country by expand- ing its scope beyond politics to include the full range of human experience. And his concept of the Civil War as “The Second American Revolution”-which he set forth in that work-has had a lasting influence on Civil War and Reconstruction era scholarship. Beard‘s 1934 studies, The Open Door at Home and The Idea of National Znterest (both written in collaboration with G.H.E. Smith), provided the intellectual foundation for recent New Left revisionist writings on American foreign policy. By his championship of historical relativism he forced the profes- sion to reexamine its methodological premises, and he was the leading spirit behind the Social Science Research Council’s report, Theory and Practice in Historical Study (1946). Nor was his impact limited to the academy: he was probably the most widely read American historian of the twentieth century. Over 5.5 million copies of his books on American history were sold. His history textbooks sold equally well. Beard was, Lewis Mumford acknowledged in 1945, “the most powerful single fig- ure in the teaching of American history.” During the years 3Charles A. Beard, A Foreign Policy for America (New York, 1940), 13. 96 Indiana Magazine of History between the two world wars, John Higham has reaffirmed, “he came close to dominating the study of American hi~tory.”~ Over forty years ago, Carl L. Becker pointed out that given the way in which historians’ values, commitments, and biases shaped their interpretation of their data, historiography “should be in some sense a phase of intellectual history, that phase of it which records what men have at different times known and believed about the past, the use they have made, in the service of their interests and aspirations, of their knowledge and beliefs, and the underlying presuppositions which have made their knowledge seem to them relevant and their beliefs seem to them true.”5 More recently, John Clive has heralded the emergence of a new genre in the biographical art, which he termed Cliography. What, he asked, “can one expect to find in the biography of a historian that will best illuminate the relation of his life to his work as well as instruct current practitioners of the art of history?” “One obvious component of any answer to that question,” he concluded, comes readily to mind: formative influences. We want to know why the great historians chose to write history in the first place, and what it was that led them to write the kind of history they eventually produced. Childhood and family influences, intellectual and social environment, teachers and guides (living and dead), practical experience in the affairs of the world-all these are shaping forces that we expect to see delineated in any worthwhile biography of a major historian.6 At an intellectual level, Beard would have found no difficulty in approving this formulation. Along with Becker he played the leading role in awakening American students of the past to the extent to which “any written history inevitably reflects the thought of the author in his time and cultural setting.” The historian’s “selection and arrangement of facts,” he expounded in his presidential address to the American His- torical Association, was “an act of choice” dictated by his values and interests, “controlled inexorably” by “things deemed neces- sary, things deemed possible, and things deemed desirable.” Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (2 vols., New York, 1927), 11, 52-121;Beale, Beard, 310-12;Lewis Mumford to Van Wyck Brooks, February 11, 1945, in Robert E. Spiller, ed., The Van Wyck Brooks Lewis Mumford Letters: The Record ofaLiterary Friendship, 1921-1963 (New York, 1970), 273; John Higham, Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington, 1970), 131. Carl Becker, “What Is Historiography?” American Historical Review, XLIV (October, 1938), 22. John Clive, “English ‘Cliographers’: A Preliminary Inquiry,” in Daniel Aaron, ed., Studies in Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). 27, 31. Charles A. Beard 97 Despite his deep and abiding interest in “the development of historical conceptions in the minds of historian^,"^ Beard in his own writings failed to go beyond broad generalizations about the influence of the larger intellectual climate. The nearest he came to undertaking an individual case study was when after the death of former Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, Beveridge’s wife and publisher invited Beard to write his biography. Beard had advised Beveridge while the former law- maker was writing his monumental lives of John Marshall and Abraham Lincoln, and he was attracted by the suggestion that the proposed work would offer “a splendid opportunity to trace the developing ideals of historical and biographical writing in this country.” But after looking over the Beveridge papers he decided against the project, in large part because “his early days in the middle west and the social order from which he rose cannot be adequately covered from the collected paper^."^ That difficulty is the more formidable for the would-be biographer of Beard, for he was temperamentally averse to making public the man behind the published books. “As an old student of history,” he replied to a query asking for biographical data, “I suspect all memoirs and autobiographies which human beings write, and would apply the same suspicion to any of my own reflections about myself. Old men love to em- balm themselves as they would like to appear to posterity, and I never regard such undertaking operations seriously in respect of others. Why should I engage in anything of the kindY9 More fundamentally, as a perceptive interviewer observed, both he and his wife believed that “By our works shall ye know us.” Before his death, he destroyed the bulk of his personal corre- spondence. His wife did the same. “It is true,” Mary Beard explained to an aspiring biographer, “that precious things can be lost if letters are not kept.

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