Charles A. Beard: The Formative Years in Indiana

John Braeman*

Charles A. Beard’s multifarious achievements and activi- ties 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 munici- pal 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 eco- nomic 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 re- port, 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 knowl- edge 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 diffi- culty 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 biog- raphy. 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 biographi- cal 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. Yet letters go to heirs of an estate and what is done with them is apt to violate conceptions of decency entertained by the letter writers and those who receive letters.” Charles Beard did not simply feel himself morally bound to safeguard the confidences of those who wrote

’Charles A. Beard, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” American Histor- ical Review, XXXIX (January, 1934), 220-21, 227; Charles A. Beard and Alfred Vagts, “Currents of Thought in Historiography,” American Historical Review, XLII (April, 1937), 461. 8Ferris Greenslet to Charles Beard, June 10, 1927; Beard to Greenslet, June 13, July 18, 1927, Houghton Mifflin Company Records (Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). 8Charles Beard to Fred B. Millett, February 23, 1937, Fred B. Millett Papers (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.). 98 Indiana Magazine of History him; he also believed that he should be free to say “off the record” in private letters whatever he felt without running the danger of having what he had written misread by strangers. “If one cannot write freely to personal friends, once in a while at least, without fear of confidences being betrayed in print, fear of the uses to which they may be put, then liberty as friendship can be sadly lost.”1° Yet Mary Beard was not without ambivalent feelings on the question. Unhappy with most of the writing about Charles Beard in the aftermath of his death, she began to collect mate- rials for a future “true biography.” “No one,” she confessed, “could be more anxious to have Charles Beard fully understood, if any one can be fully understood, than I am.” The problem was that he was such “a highly complicated person” that he “cannot be classified into any mere category of man, thinker, historian. He was not mentally static enough for that simplifi- cation.” As she looked back, trying to fathom the formative influences that shaped the mature Beard, more than simple biographical convention led her to begin her own interpretive sketch by noting that “independence of spirit, characteristic of Charles A. Beard, seems to have been a family trait.”” Protesting against a threatened budget cut for the Univer- sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1933, Charles A. Beard explained that “my ancestors on both sides of my house come from this State and that I have rightly inherited an affection for it. Therefore I venture to speak, if not as a son of North Carolina, then as a grandson.”12 The founder of the Beard family in the United States, John Beard, had migrated from Devonshire, England, to Nantucket, Massachusetts, about 1710. A widower, he brought with him two sons, John, Jr., and Richard, and Richard’s wife Dorothy. A grandson, Richard, Jr., was born in Nantucket in 1718. He married Eunice Macy when he was twenty-four, fathered five children who survived in- fancy, and in his fifties moved to near Deep River, in western Guilford County, North Carolina. A member of the Quaker Monthly Meeting in Nantucket, Richard was admitted in 1772

lo James A. Farrell, “America’s Eminent Historian: An Interview with Dr. Charles A. Beard, ’98,” DePauw Alumnus (January, 1940), 2; Mary R. Beard to Merle Curti, February 18, March 26, December 6, 1950; Merle Curti Papers (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison). l1 Mary R. Beard to Curti, January 3, November 11, 1950; February 14, 1952, Curti Papers; Mary R. Beard, The Making of Charles A. Beard: An Interpretation (New York, 1953, 9. ‘*Charles Beard to Frank P. Graham, January 16, 1933, President’s Pa- pers (University of North Carolina Archives, Chapel Hill, N.C.). Charles A. Beard 99

to the New Garden Monthly Meeting. The following year, his son William, who had been born in Nantucket in 1751, married Levina (or Levinah) Gifford; they had five children. Their third son, William Beard, Jr., was born in 1776 or 1777 (the records differ), and in 1798 he married Polly (or Polley) Brown. The couple was disowned by the Deep River Monthly Meeting for marrying “contrary to Discipline,” but they were readmitted to fellowships when they submitted papers “condemning” their “misconduct .”13 William Beard, Jr., fathered six children. Nathan, his only son, was born April 1, 1810. Marrying Caroline Martin at age twenty, Nathan, like his parents, was charged with “accom- plishing his marriage contrary to Discipline.” When he showed himself “not being disposed to make satisfaction,” he was dis- owned by the Meeting “as a member of our society.” Alienated from his family because of the marriage, Nathan had to strug- gle to make his way in the world. The couple started their household with two cups and saucers, a clay dish, and three dollars. By 1850 he had acquired a farm whose value he esti- mated at twelve hundred dollars, which made him one of the more prosperous landowners of the neighborhood. Having suf- fered financially because of his pro-Union views during the Civil War, Nathan Beard moved after the conflict to Indiana to join his son. His economic success there was limited: the 1870 census listed him as owning a farm worth fifteen hundred dollars, with another four hundred in personal property. At his death in 1883, he left an estate valued at $1,524.07. But he retained to the last a streak of stubborn independence and iconoclasm. A self-taught student of comparative religion, he amassed a library of six hundred volumes on the different religions of the world. “I ran a one-man church,” his grandson recalled him as declaring, “in which there can be no dissent.” Caroline Beard was similarly known as “very liberal” in her religious views, never joining any church. “She believes that the chief duty of life,” a contemporary newspaper sketch re- lated, “is to be truthful, honest and just, to contribute to the

l3 Beard genealogy, Beard Collection (DePauw University Archives, Greencastle, Ind.); Ruth Lindenberger, Beard Family History and Genealogy (Lawrence, Kansas, 1939, 16, 19, 23-26, 78, 83, 85-86; Alpheus Briggs, “Short History of Beard Family, 1772 to 1933,” (ca. 1933), Briggs Papers; New Garden Monthly Meeting Minutes, 7-25-1772; New Garden Monthly Meeting Records, I, 90; Deep River Monthly Meeting Records, I, 56, 159; Deep River Monthly Meeting Minutes, 10-1-1799, 12-2-1799, 2-1-1802; Deep River Monthly Meeting Women’s Minutes, 12-2-1799, 1-6-1800, 2-1-1802; all in Quaker Collection (Guilford College Archives, Greensboro, N.C.). 100 Iridiana Magazine of History Charles A. Beard 101 wants of the needy, and to be a father to the fatherless, and a protection to the suffering and afflicted.”14 The couple’s only son was born on July 5, 1840, in Guilford County, North Carolina. Family legend ascribed to Nathan’s enthusiasm for the Whig presidential nominee that year his naming the boy William Henry Harrison. William grew up on the family farm and apprenticed to a carpenter. He appears to have had more formal schooling than was typical for the time, and from boyhood he had a reputation as a voracious and wide-ranging reader. Before reaching the age of twenty-one, William had achieved a sufficient position in the community to be elected lieutenant of the local militia company organized after North Carolina’s secession. Balking at swearing alle- giance to the Confederacy, he fled north, following the path trod by so many neighbors and relatives to southeastern Indi- ana. He arrived at the village of Raysville, Wayne Township, Henry County, in September, 1861, and got a job teaching in the local school. The following spring he moved to neighboring Huntington County, where he worked as a carpenter, clerk in a warehouse, and county school master. Returning to Henry County in May, 1863, he married twenty-year-old Mary J. Payne. Neighbors recalled how the practical-minded bride-to-be had insisted that William save a thousand dollars before she would marry him. Their first child, Clarence H., was born March 11, 1869; their second son and only other child, born November 27, 1874, was Charles Austin Beard.l5 On his maternal side, as on the paternal, Charles Beard came from a family of what his daughter aptly called “seek- Mary Payne’s father, John, had been born in Stokes County, North Carolina, in 1805. At the age of twenty-four, he took four hundred dollars he had saved and moved to Indiana.

l4 Deep River Monthly Meeting Records, I, 159; Deep River Monthly Meet- ing Minutes, 1-6-1831, 2-3-1831, 3-3-1831, Quaker Collection; History of Henry County, Indiana (Chicago, 1884), 795-96; US., Seventh Census, Population Schedules for Guilford County, North Carolina, 1850, p. 322; US., Ninth Cen- sus, Population Schedules for Henry County, Indiana, 1870, p. 283; General Entry, Claim and Allowance Docket of Estates, 61218, Henry County Circuit Court (Henry County Courthouse, New Castle, Ind.); Hubert Herring, “Charles A. Beard: Free Lance Among the Historians,” Harper’s Magazine, CLXXVIII (May, 1939), 641; New Castle (Ind.) Courier, June 12, 1891. l5 Biographical data, unless otherwise cited, are from History of Henry County, 796-97; [B.F. Bowen], Biographical Memoirs of Henry County (Logansport, 1902). 232-33; New Castle Courier, April 18, May 2, 1907. For further details, see also: Herring, “Beard,” 641-42; Schmunk, “Beard,” 8, 10. l6 Miriam Beard Vagts to Mary E. Caldwell, December 27, 1972, Henry County Historical Society (New Castle, Ind.); Vagts to author, September 10, [12?], 1976, in possession of author. 102 Indiana Magazine of History

By “industry and good management,’’ he became one of Henry County’s leading citizens, at one time owning 1560 acres. In addition to farming, he ran a threshing operation, owned stores and houses in the county seat of New Castle, made real-estate loans, and was a founder and director of the Citizens’ State Bank of New Castle, Henry County’s largest. Even though he had given much of his land over to his children before his death, the official inventory of his estate reported assets of $44,000; local estimates put his worth as high as $150,000. But he combined entrepreneurial astuteness with a restless quest for religious certitude that carried him from the Baptist Church to Methodism and thence to spiritualism. His wife, the former Sarah Wilson, had been born in North Carolina and moved with her parents to Indiana. Although raised as a Quaker, she found the answer to her own religious yearnings in spiritu- alism, having, in the words of a local chronicler, “many mani- festations, some of them very comforting to her.” Charles re- membered her as the prototypical frontier woman--“strong, active, commanding, a mistress of many arts that lifted life.” Although he was only seven years old when she died, he re- tained fresh in his mind sixty years later how within “the dawning consciousness of my childhood hours she came as an unforgettable apparition, bringing joys and benediction^."'^ In his later years, Beard rarely spoke of his mother. Mary Payne Beards horizons were limited to her household activi- ties. She apparently favored his older brother Clarence, and her ill health-including a worsening deafness that Charles would inherit-probably made close ties difficult.18 William Beard loomed as the dominant figure in his youth. After working as a hired hand on a farm and as a carpenter, William in 1866 purchased an eighty-acre farm in Wayne Township north of the town of Knightstown for $3,200.19 Supplementing farming with work as a building contractor, he reported in 1870 ownership of

l7 History of Henry County, 517; [Bowen], Biographical Memoirs, 623-24; New Castle Courier, July 3, 10, 1891; General Entry, Claim and Allowance Docket of Estates, 71257, Henry County Circuit Court. Re his banking connec- tions, see George Hazzard, Hazzard‘s History of Henry County, Indiana, 1822- 1906, (2 vols., New Castle, 1906), 11, 1078-79; on Sarah Wilson Payne, see Charles Beard, letter to editor, New York Times, January 23, 1938; Charles Beard, “An Unforgettable Woman,” (microfilm) Beard Collection. 18Schmunk, “Beard,” 12, 27-28. Re Mary Payne Beard‘s domesticity, see Vagts to author, April 8, [1981]; her illness, New Castle Courier, August 19, 1892. lBDeed Record Books, XI, 403, &corder’s Ofice (Henry County Court- house). The location of the farm is shown in Higgins Belden & Co., An Illus- trated Historical Atlas of Henry Co. Indiana (Chicago, 1875), 16. Charles A. Beard 103

real estate valued at $4,000 and personal property of $1,150. “A short time previous to the great financial panic [of 18731,” relates the local county history, “he engaged in real-estate speculations, and during these anxious years, by judicious management and close calculation, he acquired a fortune which is sufficient for a life of the most pleasing luxury and ease.” Although he listed his occupation for the 1880 census simply as “carpenter,” William Beard had wide-ranging interests. He continued his building-contracting business, owned a number of farms, was active as a lender of money, remained deeply in- volved in land and town-lot speculation, and took in his later years a leading role in organizing three local banks: the Citi- zens’ State Bank of Knightstown, the Henry County Bank of Spiceland, and the First National Bank of Lewisville. At his death in 1907, he was estimated worth approximately one hun- dred thousand dollars.20 William Beard’s most salient personality characteristic was a restless, driving energy, which his younger son would inherit. “He was,” the author of his obituary wrote, “an incessant worker, both physically and mentally, and he seemed a ma- chine that never rested.” While not wealthy by the standard of the emerging plutocracy in the nation’s metropolises, he was a man of substance and position in his smaller world. “His life,” his eulogist concluded, “seems to have been of the class that helps to uphold the laws and give stability to our govern- ment.”21 Himself successful, he shared the booster spirit of the day. “There never was a land like the United States of Amer- ica,” he would declaim. “There never was a land of such pros- perity and progress.” Henry County was a Republican stronghold, and William Beard-whom Charles would charac- terize as an heir to the Federalist-Whig tradition-was a staunch backer of the Grand Old Party. His father, Charles was fond of relating, was “about as solid a citizen as Indiana ever produced.” He taught his son the value of the dollar and its importance in politics. “People ask me,” Beard told a younger historian friend, “why I emphasize economic questions so much.

2o US., Ninth Census, Population Schedules for Henry County, Indiana, 1870, p. 283; US.,Tenth Census, Population Schedules for Henry County, Indiana, 1880, p. 204B; History of Henry County, 797; Richard P. Ratcliff, Charles A. Beard, 1874-1948: A Native of Henry County, Indiana, With Ern- phasis on His Boyhood and Accomplishments Prior to 1917 (New Castle, 1966), 9, 13. Re his contracting business: Knightstown (Ind.) Banner, December 30, 1881; November 10, 1882; Knightstown Sun, December 18, 1885. His real estate transactions are recorded in the Henry County Deed Record Books. For his banking involvements, see Hazzard, Harzard’s History, 11, 1082-83, 1085-86. 21 New Castle Courier, May 2, 1907. 104 Indiana Magazine of History

They should have been present in the family parlor, when my father and his friends gathered to discuss public affairs.”22 Yet William Beard had his maverick side. An admirer of the famous agnostic Robert Ingersoll, he took pride in his repu- tation as the local skeptic. An “inveterate reader,” he built up a library of over a thousand volumes of history, science, free thought, and the classics.23 He had a yen for travel and gave expression to his frustrated literary aspirations by writing ac- counts of his trips for the local newspaper^.^^ In 1880, he moved his family to a 167-acre farm just west of the village of Spice- land to give his sons the advantages of the superior educational opportunities offered by the local Friends Academy.25 Given their forceful personalities, relations between William and his younger son were not without friction. “When I was young,” Charles recalled, “I thought I knew everything and that my father was fortunate in having instruction from me.” When in his teens he even ran away. His daughter remembers his tell- ing how he “dreaded to come home, thinking his father-a terrifying man-would explode . . . and blow him to pieces.” But William, weeping, embraced his son. And Charles, looking back, emphasized the positive side of his father’s influence. He “taught me to read hard books early in my boyhood days,” and “gave me money generously for books, education, and travel.”26 The Henry County of Charles Beards day was not far removed from the frontier stage. There were no electric lights,

22 Eric F. Goldman, “The Origins of Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XI11 (April, 1952), 234; Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York, 1952), 149; and Goldman, “Charles A. Beard: An Impression,” in Beale, Beard, 2. Re Henry County’s strong Republicanism: Hazzard, Hazard’s History, 11, 1034-35; on William Beard’s party affiliation, see Cline & McHaffe, The People’s Guide: A Business, Political and Religious Directory of Henry Co., Ind. (Indianapolis, 1874), 348. 23 James T. Shotwell, Oral History Memoir, 62 (Oral History Collection, Columbia University, New York); Charles Beard to Millett, February 23, 1937, Millett Papers. Most of the library was destroyed when the family home burned, but a few volumes remain in possession of Charles’s daughter, Miriam Beard Vagts, of Sherman, Conn. 24 New Castle Courier, February 22, 1884; March 23, 1888; Knightstown Banner, March 2, 1888. 25 Beard letter in Souvenir Booklet of the Spiceland Centennial (Spiceland, 1938), 15; reprinted in Clifton J. Phillips, ed., “Charles A. Beard’s Recollections of Henry County, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History, LV (March, 1959), 18-22. The purchase of this property, which also included two lots in the town of Raysville, is recorded in Henry County Deed Record Books, XXXVII, 500- 501; its location is shown in Rerick Brothers, The County of Henry Indiana; Topography, History, Art Folio ([Richmond, Ind., 1893]), 69-70. 26Charles Beard to James Putnam, July 12, 1947, Beard file, Macmillan Company Records; Vagts to author, September 9, [1976]; Charles Beard to Millett, February 23, 1937, Millett Papers. Charles A. Beard 105

telephones, refrigerators, or automobiles. A round-trip to the county seat of New Castle, ten miles from his home, “with a work horse in the shafts was an all-day journey, laborious for man and beast.” His father “believed that boys should be brought up on a farm, at hard work in field and forest. By the time I was fifteen I had had enough exercise to last me a life time. My muscles and body were hard as steel. I could ride wildhorses bare back, and split an oak log with a maul and wedge.” Although the stereotypical Hoosier has been regarded as provincial, narrowly patriotic, and distrustful of innovation, Charles found in his youthful environment values worth pre- serving: “a strong sense of individual responsibility,” tolerance for men and women of different nationalities and religions, a “spirit of neighborly helpfulness.” “Thoughtfulness” and “co- operation” were, he eulogized, the dominating motifs of his boyhood world. “In season and out, the neighbors were always helping one another, in the harvest fields, at threshing, in time of sickness and tragedy.”27 Although Spiceland was a straight-laced, even solemn, Quaker bastion, there was plenty of entertainment for young Beard: baseball, football, skating, sleighing, sledding, schoolboy debates and politicians’ speechmaking, torchlight parades, stage plays put on by local talent, and visits to fairs and circuses all were part of life in the community.28 Neighbors remembered Charles as a red-haired, freckled, lively boy, with an unruly forelock hanging down almost over his eyes and long dangling arms, mischevious, curious, argumentative, high- tempered, with a precocious fondness for “large words.” He was regarded as going around with a chip on his shoulder, always having just been in a fight or about to get into another.29 Charles’s relations with his brother Clarence-handsome, ath- letic, popular with the girls, but a weak character who would be afflicted in later years with alcoholism-were troubled. At times he felt so put upon by Clarence’s abuse and bullying that he fled to neighbors for refuge. Yet he also looked up to his

x7 Charles Beard, letters to editor, New York Times, January 23, February 13, 1938; Charles Beard to Millett, February 23, 1937, Millett Papers; Souvenir Booklet of the Spiceland Centennial, 15. Richard P. Ratcliff, Along the Banks of Brook Bezor: A History of the Spiceland Community (n.p., [ 19631); Souvenir Booklet of fhe Spiceland Centen- nial, 17. 29 Schmunk, “Beard,” 10, 27; Ratcliff, Beard, 3, 10; May Hood to Clifton J. Phillips, November 19, 1957; Loring A. Eilar to Phillips, December 23, 1957, Phillips Collection (DePauw University Archives); Ed Ogborne, “Whatever Be- came of Old Charlie? Here’s the Tale,” New Castle Courier-Times, April 7, 1954. 106 Zndiana Magazine of History rather dashing older brother. Clarence taught Charles to drink beer, wear fancy waistcoats, and play pool. Their escapades, though probably mild by present standards, shocked the staid and prim Quaker elders of Spiceland. In their later years the two grew apart, but Clarence had saved Charles from the priggish side of rural and small-town Quaker society.30 Still, the Quaker heritage would have its lasting impress. Despite his own free-thinking views, William Beard sent Charles to the local Friends services. He vividly recalled “sit- ting on the hard benches, my feet far from the floor. . . . No music. No song.’Just the silence of meditation; unless, forsooth, the spirit moved some aged saint to deliver a discourse, usually brief, always terse, generally ending in a quotation from the Scriptures.” There he “became acquainted with the majestic dreams of the Jews, the merciful teachings of Jesus, and the sonorous roll of the King James version.” The broader values of Quakerism-its concern for humanity, its belief in the innate dignity of the individual, its rejection of dogma, its ethical preoccupations, and its emphasis on the “inner light”-would animate Beard throughout his life. This Quaker influence simi- larly shaped many of his later personality traits, some large, such as his humility, awareness of his personal fallibility, and passion for high thinking, some smaller, such as his dislike for ostentation and “gossip” and his impatience with the trivial or frivolous. His daughter recalled how he used “thee” in speaking to her, “and often quoted or semi-quoted Quaker expressions.” “No branch of the Christian Church,” Beard would write with his Columbia University colleague James Harvey Robinson, “has ever shown their religion more consistently or beautifully in their lives than the Friends.”31 In the fall of 1880 Charles Beard was enrolled in the Primary Department and his brother Clarence in the Inter- mediate Department of the Spiceland Academy. The school had been founded in the 1820s by the Quaker settlers in Spiceland Township as a place to educate their children in accord with the Society’s principles. At the time of Charles’s enrollment, the academy offered a full program from the primary level

30Ratcliff, Beard, 10, 13; Schmunk, “Beard,” 17-18; Vagts to author, Au- gust 20, 1975, September 9, [1976]. For a biographical sketch of Clarence, see [Bowen], Biographical Memoirs, 411-12. 31 Souvenir Booklet of the Spiceland Centennial, 16-17; Peter A. Soderbergh, “Charles A. Beard, the Quaker Spirit, and North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review, XLVI (Winter, 1969), 19-32; Vagts to author, November 27, 1975, September [12?], 1976; James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard, The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Current History (2 vols., Boston, 1907-1908), I, 153-54. Charles A. Beard 107 through a three-year high school. “Special attention” was given “to preparing students for College.” The curriculum up to the high school level was devoted mainly to arithmetic, geography, composition, spelling, and reading, along with a survey of American history. The program throughout placed heavy em- phasis on “Elocution and English Literature,” while the high school provided a solid grounding in Latin, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, and included courses in English and “Gen- eral History,” political economy and government, logic, moral science, and the natural sciences. “Literary exercises” were required “of students in all grades, both in class work and before the whole school.” The guiding principle was “that man- hood is more important than scholarship, and that self-respect and self-control, on the part of the student, are important fac- tors in the formation of character.” The authorities were thus “very careful to make this an institution in which students . . . will be surrounded by good, moral influence^."^^ Beard fondly recalled his teachers at Spiceland Academy. There was Miss Ella Williams, who was “both gentle and stern” and “who led me into the mysteries of letters.” Mrs. Hannah E. Davis, “omniscient and indefatigible,” “loved good books,” brought back from her travels the “great news of strange lands,” and arranged for lectures that “gave us an opportunity to hear distinguished speakers from various parts of the coun- try and from many walks of life.” Thomas Newlin taught “the rudiments of American history and the elements of physics, with equal proficiency in my youthful eyes.” Thanks to Terrell Wilson, Beard “became acquainted with Wordsworth, Ruskin, Carlyle, and the great men of old.” And John E. Parker’s “love” for the “Latin tongue” was such “that he could scarcely wait for us to learn the conjugations, so eager was he for us to read Cicero and Virgil for ourselves.” The formal classroom work was supplemented by a wide range of extracurricular activities. The school libraries boasted over two thousand volumes rang- ing from sermons to Darwin’s Origin of Species. In the Academy’s literary societies students learned, in the words of the 1880-81 catalogue, “the rules governing parliamentary

32 The story of the school is recounted in Sadie Bacon Hatcher, A History of Spiceland Academy, 1826 to 1921 (Indiana Historical Society Publications, Vol. XI, No. 2, Indianapolis, 1934). The information on aims, curriculum, and ex- tracurricular activities is drawn from the Catalogue . . . of Spiceland Academy . . . for the Academic Year 1880-81 (Spiceland, 1881) and subse- quent volumes through 1890-91; complete photocopies of these catalogs are available in the Indiana State Library, Henry County Historical Society Museum, and the New Castle-Henry County Public Library. 108 Indiana Magazine of History

bodies.” Every Friday night Charles and his fellow debating society members assembled “to solve the burning problems of the hour. Shall the tariff be reduced? Is fame to be preferred to great riches? Should the Federal government regulate railway rates? Local option or pr~hibition?”~~ Beard attended the Spiceland Academy for ten years, up through the first year of the high school program. The frag- mentary surviving records show that his grades were mostly in the nineties-but surprisingly, in light of his future career, he did poorest in his courses in composition, government, and American history.34 Although the Academy catalog for 1890-91 still listed him among the “Irregularly Classified,” he trans- ferred in the fall of 1890 to the public high school in Knightstown. The circumstances remain murky. Several of his contemporaries reported that Charles was expelled for his par- ticipation in his brother Clarence’s pranks, which climaxed in a broadside printed by Clarence (then a student at Indiana Uni- versity) on a small hand press they owned attacking the Uni- versity’s administration and faculty. Others ascribed his diffi- culties to having drunk with his brother too much hard cider and then hanging the principal in effigy. Still others recalled Charles leaving on his own to avoid having to testify before an official church board about his brother’s reputed immoral be- ha~ior.~~Renting a room in Knightstown, Charles joined with a fellow student to put out a monthly school paper that the local newspaper called “a neat, spicy journal.” And he was suffi- ciently advanced in his studies to graduate from Knightstown High School in the spring of 1891, giving as his commencement oration an address, which unfortunately has not survived, en- titled “The American God.”36 Perhaps his father thought him too young to go away to college; perhaps Charles’s own future plans remained in a state of flux. At the same time, Clarence was at loose ends, having been expelled from Indiana University for his blast against the institution’s authorities. At any rate, in August, 1891, William

33 Beard’s recollections of his teachers and experiences are in the Souuenir Booklet of the Spiceland Centennial, 16. Eilar to Phillips, October 22, 1958, Phillips Collection. 35Catalogue . . . of Spiceland Academy . . . for the Academic Year 2890-92 (Knightstown, 1891), 10; Hood to Phillips, November 19, 1957; Eilar to Phillips, October 22, 1958 Sadie B. Symons to Phillips, April 8, 1959, Phillips Collection; Schmunk, “Beard,” 18-19; Ratcliff, Beard, 10, 12. 36 New Castle Courier, May 8, 1891; L.E. Rogers to Phillips, December 17, 1957, Phillips Collection; Fourteenth Commencement of the Knightstown High School . . . May 25, 2892 (n.p., n.d.), copy in possession of Mr. and Mrs. R. Thomas Mayhill, Knightstown, Ind. Charles A. Beard 109

purchased for his sons a struggling local weekly newspaper, the Knightstown Sun. At the start, the Sun consisted largely of advertisements, local gossip, and human-interest stories re- printed from magazines and larger city newspapers-it was a “ragged little sheet,” recalled a contemporary-but the new publishers upgraded its coverage of national and international news.37 Clarence was active in local Republican politics, and the paper took a bullish view of the present state and future prospects of the country, pouring its editorial scorn upon “The Howl of the Calamityite.”38 Townsfolk remembered Charles as a “tall red headed fellow . . . always very friendly . . . full of life and always interesting to talk to.” In the Sun office, he recalled, “I served my apprenticeship with the pen-writing ‘heavy editorials,’ news stories, and ‘locals.”’ The experience was “delightful enough” but largely “uneventful,” the two “most exciting” events being the introduction of electric street lighting and the construction of the water works. Yet, while running about Knightstown gathering news, he “learned a lot about human nature in the proce~s.’’~~ Despite the presence of a rival weekly, the long-established and entrenched Knightstown Banner, the brothers made the venture “pay.” In 1893, they moved into new and larger quar- ters and installed improved printing equipment. Within two years, however, the restlessness that was so much part of his family legacy and of his own personality was pointing Charles in a new direction. A Knightstown Methodist preacher, con- vinced that he was wasting his talents in small-town jour- nalism, inspired him to go in the fall of 1895 to DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, to study for the ministry.40 Founded in 1837 under the name Indiana Asbury by the Indiana Conference of the Methodist Church, DePauw in the 1890s remained permeated with evangelical piety. “The Bible,” the catalog prescribed, “is accepted as the unquestioned authority in all matters pertaining to morals and religion.” Students were required “to attend some one of the churches

37 Hazzard, Hazard’s History, 11, 1090; Beard letter, Knightstown Banner, July 23, 1948; Schmunk, “Beard,” 21-23. The few copies of the Knightstown Sun from this period that have survived are on microfilm in the Indiana State Library. 38 New Castle Courier, May 6, 1892; Knightstown Sun, August [?I, 1892. 39 Carl A. Bundy to Phillips, January 21, 1958, Phillips Collection; Charles Beard to Evelyn Waller, April 12, [1929], in possession of Evelyn Waller, Knightstown, Ind. ‘OHerring, “Beard,” 642; New Castle Courier, June 30, 1893; Schmunk, “Beard,” 24-25; Floyd B. Newby to Phillips, September 10, 1957; May D. Jackson to Phillips, January 7, 1958, Phillips Collection. 110 Zndiana Magazine of History

once each Sabbath,” to live in accordance with “the best senti- ment of Christian society,” and to eschew “immoral practices, such as gambling, drinking intoxicants, visiting saloons or like places.” The title of University was more honorific than real: the school was primarily an undergraduate liberal-arts college. Yet the winds of change were felt even at DePauw. After his appointment in 1889, President John P.D. John had attempted to upgrade the faculty by bringing in persons who had done graduate work abroad or in the new American universities, to broaden the curriculum by expanded offerings in science and modern foreign languages, and to allow students wider latitude in course requirement^.^^ In accordance with the school’s goal of striking a balance between “extreme specialization on the one hand and extreme diffusion on the other” and imparting what the catalog called “symetrical culture,” students were required to take a mini- mum number of courses from a basic core curriculum while simultaneously pursuing a “major line of work along with a “minor” in “at least one other Older than most of his fellow students and a young man in a hurry, Beard managed by taking courses during the summers to complete the work for his bachelor of philosophy degree after only three years. He majored in history, with a minor in political science. The rest of his program consisted of English literature, rhetoric and ora- tory, general biology and zoology, psychology, and two years of German, which he chose instead of the classical languages required for the Bachelor of Arts degree. Although his official transcript has no record of his grades, Charles had the reputa- tion of the “brainiest man” on campus, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his senior year, graduated “with the highest honors of his class,” and received from his major professors glowing rec- ommendations extolling his “very fine ability,” “zeal,” “keen insight into truth,” and outstanding qualifications “for ad- vanced work and original research.”43

41 Fifty-Seventh Year-Book of DePauw University for the Year 1894-95 (Greencastle, 1895), 24, 11; George B. Manhart, DePauw Through the Years (2 vols., Greencastle, 1962). I, 205-209. Clifton J. Phillips, “The Indiana Education of Charles A. Beard,” Zndiana Magazine of History, LV (March, 1959), 1-15, is a valuable pioneering examination of his DePauw years. 42 Fifty-Seventh Year-Book, 22, 31-35; Fifty-Eighth Year-Book of DePauw University for the Year 1895-96 (Greencastle, 1896). 22, 30-34. 43 Transcript, Beard Collection; Sixty-First Year-Book of DePauw University for the Year 1898-99 (Greencastle, 1899), 90; DePauw Palladium, November 15, 1897; May 30, 1898; recommendations by Professor Andrew Stephenson and James R. Weaver, n.d., folder 11, Beard Collection. Charles A. Beard 111

CHARLESA. BEARDAND MARY RITIXR AS DEPAUWSTUDENTS

Courtesy Archives of DePauw University, Greencastle. Indiana.

Perhaps the most important legacy of his years at DePauw was that it was there that he met his future wife. Born in 1876, Mary Ritter was in her junior year at DePauw when Charles came to Greencastle. Her father, Eli F. Ritter, was the son of North Carolina Quakers who had migrated to Indiana. A Civil War veteran and DePauw alumnus, he was a leading Methodist layman and prominent Indianapolis lawyer. He was involved in local Republican politics and held the rank of colonel in the Indiana National Guard. But his driving passion was the crusade against the liquor traffic, and Mary grew up in an atmosphere imbued with a commitment to moral earnestness and uplift. She attended the Indianapolis public schools, graduating as valedictorian of her high school class.44 A pert and vivacious young lady, more socially outgoing than Charles, she was active in the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and her junior year was elected class president. The annual published

-For fuller details, see Ann J. Lane, ed., Mary Ritter Beard: A Source- book (New York, 1977), 11-19, and Barbara K. Turoff, Mary Beard as Force in History (Dayton, 1979). 7-14. A biographical sketch of Eli F. Ritter is in Jacob Piatt Dunn, Greater Indianapolis: The History, the Industries, the Institutions, and the People of a City of Homes (2 vols., Chicago, 1910), 11, 774-76. 112 Indiana Magazine of History by the junior class describes her as “both practical and good, well fitted to command.”45 Campus legend ascribed the begin- ning of their romance to Charles’s rescue of her after her boat had capsized at a fraternity picnic. Before long, she and Charles were regarded as paired.46 In addition to this romantic attachment, the DePauw years marked a crucial phase in Charles’s intellectual evolution. He had his complaints about the academic program at DePauw: he thought that there was not sufficient required work in English, and he found the library facilities inadequate except in history and political science, areas in which a special library fee was assessed upon students to build up departmental collections. There were among his instructors men “who do nothing for the university but draw their salaries,” plodding and aloof figures who “might as well be wrapped in mummy clothes and in- tombed in the caverns of the Egyptian pyramid^."^' But he had the fortune to work with.others who were alive to the newer currents of scholarship, animated with the spirit of youth, and filled with a contagious enthusiasm. These men set high stand- ards for their students. The English history course had, in addition to the textbooks, a “minimum requirement” of 1,500 pages of collateral reading per term, while students in second- year German were expected to read Goethe and Schiller, write a weekly “prose composition,” and participate in “frequent col- loquial exercises.” Beard extolled Professor Arthur R. Priest’s courses in rhetoric and oratory as “without equals in enabling students to do clear, logical thinking on any questi~n.”~~He felt “unending gratitude” to his German instructor, Henry B. Long- den, for giving him his introduction “to that language and the world of thought which it unlocks” and even more for Long- den’s own example of “selfless service to the good life.” “I wish you would,” he told an interviewer years later, “mention the fact that the faculty at old DePauw did more for me than I could ever

45 Greencastle Daily Banner Times, December 9, 1895; Greencastle Demo- crat, December 14, 1895; DePauw University Mirage ’97 (Indianapolis, 1896), n.p. 46 Newby to Phillips, September 18, 1957, Phillips Collection; Indianapolis Star, October 9, 1966; DePauw University Mirage ’99 (Indianapolis, 1898), [275]. 47Palladium, March 28, February 28, 1898; November 15, 1897. 48 Fifty-Eighth Year-Book, 41-42; Fifty-Ninth Year-Book of DePauw Uni- versity for the Year 1896-97 (Greencastle, 1897), 40; Palladium, February 28, 1898. For Priest’s influence upon Beard, see Mary R. Beard to Curti, October 23, 1950; February 14, 1952, Curti Papers. 49 Charles Beard to Henry B. Longden, April 14, 1931; January 10, [1937], Beard Collection; Farrell, “Interview,” 2. Charles A. Beard 113

MARYRITER

Courtesy Archives of DePauw University. Greencastle, Indiana 114 Indiana Magazine of History

Pre-eminent among these faculty members was history pro- fessor Andrew Stephenson. A believer in the motto “There is no excellence without great labor,” Stephenson, a DePauw alum- nus who had received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins Univer- sity, was feared-and respected-by his students “for requiring an immense amount of work.” Beard took with him a freshman introductory survey of European history, followed by year-long courses in English constitutional and political history and in American history. Reflecting the dominant intellectual ethos of the time, Stephenson viewed history as an evolutionary process. “Progressive retognition of social needs,” he laid down in his European history syllabus, “induces individual and associated activities, the aim, or at least the tendency, of which is the establishment of new civilizations.” He was a devotee of the Germanic origins theory of Anglo-American political forms, and he listed as the “object” of his English history course “to trace the origin and development of Anglo-Saxon institutions, thus forming a base for a critical knowledge of our own history.” A Gladstonian liberal, he saw as the central theme in western man’s historical development “the problem of devising a civili- zation which shall combine two previously irreconcilable condi- tions, viz.: First, stability of social order; Second, security to the individual of the full measure of his ‘natural’ right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of independen~e.”~~ Stephenson was in many ways an innovator. Viewing his- tory as “the crystallization of the endeavor of man to control his environment,” he dismissed “blank knowledge of facts” as “a mere deposition of rubbish without cohesion.” He accordingly inculcated in his students the view that the historian’s respon- sibility was to go beyond telling what happened to analyze “the true moving forces’’ behind “events.” Stephenson himself in his Ph.D. dissertation, Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic, portrayed how class conflict between “the patrician and plebian, the rich and the poor’’ bore “more or less upon every point in Roman constitutional history.”51 He simi- larly emphasized in his introductory survey of European his- tory the roles played by geographical, economic, social, and intellectual factors in shaping political changes. His readings

Mirage ’99, [39]; Andrew Stephenson, Syllabus of Lectures in European History from the Fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Death of Napoleon (Middletown, Conn., 1893), 100; Fifty-Eighth Year-Book, 41. 51 Andrew Stephenson, Syllabus of Lectures on European History (Terre Haute, 1897), v-vi; Andrew Stephenson, Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic (Baltimore, 1891), 24, [3]. Charles A. Beard 115

for the English history course included the epochal Short His- tory of the English People, by John Richard Green, whose dic- tum that “constitutional progress has been the result of social development” foreshadowed what became popularly known as the New History.52 Befitting his Hopkins training, Stephenson laid down as the guiding principle for his classes that “no historian’s statement shall be accepted as fact unless it can be substantiated by the sources of authority.” Thus, he demanded that his students go to the primary sources-with Beard taking as his special project in the English history course the transla- tion of Bishop Stubbs’s Select Charters.53 Stephenson was a large, rather gruff man--“a roaring lion often,” a student recalled. But he was so impressed with Beard’s abilities that he played a key role in encouraging Charles to go on for graduate work in history.54 Beard in turn found Stephenson’s courses so invaluable for conveying “knowl- edge of the origin, growth and nature of the great political institutions of this country” that he lamented the failure to make history a required subject. He echoed his teacher in eulogizing how “the divine impulse of liberty” was “born in the German forests,” carried by “the Teuton” across the channel, preserved and expanded by the Magna Charta, the Puritan Revolution, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, given “a new birth” on the North American continent, reaching its culmina- tion in the American Revolution and the Constitution, “the greatest document ever wrought from the experience of men.” Hailing the seminar method as “one of the best thought pro- ducers in the educational world,” he extolled as “the true method of study and research, accepting nothing, believing nothing without investigation and verification.” And, pro- phetically, the “Historical Seminary” Charles took his last term was devoted to an investigation of “the origin and adoption of

52 For his assigning Green, see Fifty-Eighth Year-Book, 41; the quote is from John R. Green, A Short History of the English People (2 vols., London, 1960), I, xi. Re the significance of Green’s work, see G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London, 1952), 329-34, and Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, “Frederick York Powell and Charles A. Beard: A Study in Anglo-American Historiography and Social Thought,” American Quar- terly, XI, (Spring, 1959). 30-31. 53 Mirage ’99,[40]; Greencastle Daily Banner Times, January 23, February 8, March 1, 1897; Charles Beard, “Short Account of My Work,” attached to Beard to Frederick Jackson Turner, April 24, 1903, History Department Re- cords (University of Wisconsin Archives, Madison, Wisc.). 54 Newby to Phillips, September 18, 1957; Raymond J. Wade to Phillips, December 10, 1957, Phillips Collection; Stephenson recommendation, Beard Collection. 116 Indiana Magazine of History the Constitution of the United States” through “a careful, com- parative study of the sources.” Although no details survive, the experience appears to have been suficiently idol-shattering for him to report in the editorial columns of the school newspaper that the class had been the scene of “several dangerous explo- sions of ancient theories.”55 Although their fellow students regarded Stephenson as the dominant influence upon Charles Beard during his years at DePau~,~~the Beards themselves gave more weight to the role of Colonel James Riley Weaver. A Union Army veteran, Weaver received his S.T.B. degree from Garrett Biblical Insti- tute in 1867 and his master’s from Alleghany College the fol- lowing year, then taught mat,hematics and military science at West Virginia College. Thanks to the backing of his father-in- law, the politically influential Indiana Methodist Bishop Matthew Simpson, he served from 1869 to 1885 as American counsul in Brindisi, Antwerp, and Vienna. When he lost his position after the Democratic presidential victory, he joined the DePauw faculty, serving from 1893 on as professor of political science. Weaver, Charles Beard recalled five decades later, “had the bearing of the soldier, the courtesy of the diplomat, and the spirit as well as the manner of the gentleman.” Although he “never saw the inside of a graduate school,” he “certainly knew a lot about European languages, politics, economics, law, litera- tures, and customs. . . . It was a joy to work under and with him. . . . Memory of him and his ways is still precious to me.” Weaver, Mary Beard added, “taught him essentials which in- fluenced definitely his interests and what might be described, to no small degree, as his pers~nality.”~~ Weaver defined the field of political science broadly to include not simply “the Science and Philosophy of the State or society politically organized,” but the nature and workings of “organized society in general.” Eschewing textbooks, he re- quired in his courses a “final thesis” demonstrating “original

55Palladi~m,December 20, 1897; April 18, 1898; November 1, 1897; March 7, 1898; Fifty-Ninth Year-Book, 43; Palladium, February 7, 1898. 56Thomas W. Nadal to Phillips, July 29, 1957; Wilbur Helm to Phillips, October 14, 1950; Josephine C. Ives to Phillips, October 8, 1957, Phillips Collection. 57Charles Beard to Jacques Banun, January 12, 1945, Jacques Banun Papers (Columbia University Library); Mary R. Beard to Russell J. Humbert, November 20, 1951, President’s Ofice-Beard Correspondence, Humbert file (DePauw University Archives). For biographical data on Weaver, see Merle Curti, “A Great Teacher’s Teacher,” Social Education, XI11 (October, 1949), 263-66. 274. Charles A. Beard 117

work,” directed his students to the latest scholarship in the Political Science Quarterly, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Johns Hopkins University Studies, and had his classes read the leading past and contemporary thinkers in politics, sociology, economics, and anthropology. He shared the late-nineteenth-century positivist faith in the possibility of discovering a science of society. “Were there no sequence in society,” he postulated, “legislation would be in vain; but as there is manifest causation, the result is the effect of forces. Hence the necessity of discovering these forces, their law of operation and method of co-operation.” But he simultaneously warned that all social thought, indeed all thinking, was influenced by “INDIVIDUAL BIASES: “Educa- tional Bias,” “Bias of Patriotism or Anti-Patriotism,’’ “Class Bias,” “Political Biases,” and “Theological or Religious Bias.” Thus, “all social theory and philosophy must be tested by his- torical data properly interpreted. The Historical-Philosophic method is the only safeguard against Ideology on the one hand and Empiricism on the other.”58 Rather than lectures, Weaver favored what he called “the laboratory method,” by which students were “co-laborers with the instructor in the investigation of specific subjects.” “The very germ of the method,” he explained in his syllabi, “consists in and presupposes an ability of each student to do individu- alized work. . . . Too much help stultifies the intellect; it must be rather awakened to activity and self-dependence.” Nor did Weaver believe that all learning came from books. In line with his program of assigning students “the task of investigating the sociological conditions of the various cities and institutions of the state,”59 he arranged for Beard to do work in “practical sociology” in the slums of Chicago under the direction of the Epworth League Training School during the summer of 1896. Upon his return, Charles reported that free silver had little appeal for the city’s laboring men and that nearly all were for McKinley and protection.60 But the experience was a milestone in his own education: this first-hand exposure to the poverty and degradation found in the nation’s teeming metropolises

58Fifly-Eighth Year-Book, 50; James R. Weaver, Syllabus of Course 11, Dep’t of Political Science, on Sociology and Its Applications (Terre Haute, 1894), 2, 4, 10-12. 59 Fiftu-Eighth Year-Book, 51; Weaver, Sociology and Its Applications, 1-2; James R. Weaver, Syllabus of Course Ill, Dep’t of Political Science, on Socialism and Reform (Terre Haute, 1896), 1-2. 60Greencastle Daily Banner Times, June 19, July 10, 18, August 5, 13, 1896. 118 Indiana Magazine of History made a lasting impression. Living near and visiting Hull House, he came into contact with the ferment of reformist, even radical, ideas that swirled around that pioneer social settle- ment. “The Hull House,” he recalled, “furnished a forum for the free discussion of all the issues then surging up in American civilization but so conveniently neglected in many closed circles and largely manhandled in the press.”s1 The impact of these experiences was reinforced that fall when Beard took Colonel Weaver’s course on “Socialism and Reform.” The course emphasized the role of the industrial revo- lution in stimulating widespread unrest, traced the develop- ment of socialism from the utopians through the First Interna- tional, and explored the rising tide of protest in this country and abroad. At a time when their works remained anathema in most American educational institutions, Weaver had his stu- dents read Marx and Engehs2 As an advocate of a social science based upon ethics the Colonel was no admirer of “Ger- man materialism,” but he acknowledged the “Benefits from Socialistic Agitation” in awakening the comfortable to the plight of the less fortunate. Weaver’s own sympathies lay with what he termed “Social Reform” as the “Golden mean between individualism and socialism.” In his teaching, he confided to Richard T. Ely, whose “Christian sociology” he admired, “I have been putting in my best licks to destroy the pernicious influ- ence of that old Manchester school.” The crux of his message was that an industrial society required “state interference”- such as labor and factory legislation, railroad regulation, and control of monopolies-to promote “welfare of whole.” Ac- cordingly, his reading assignments were heavily weighted to the American exponents of the social gospel, the reformist- minded sociologists, and the new economists: Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden, George D. Herron, John Bascom, Albion Small, Franklin P. Giddings, Frank Lester Ward, Ely, and Simon Patten.63

61 Herring, “Beard,” 642; Goldman, “Origins,” 235. Re the Chicago and Hull House milieu, see Peter A. Soderbergh, “Charles A. Beard in Chicago, 1896,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, LXIII (Summer, 1970), 117-31; Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States (New York, 1942), 477. 62Mary R. Beard to Curti, November 6, 1949; October 13, 1950, Curti Papers. Weaver, Socialism and Reform, 35, 33, 39, 42-43; Weaver to Richard T. Ely, January 1, 1891, Weaver Collection (DePauw University Archives). Beards daughter has a copy, inscribed “C.A. Beard 1895,” of Richard T. Ely’s Socialism: An Examination of Its Nature, Its Strength and Its Weakness, with Suggestions for Social Reform (London, 1894). Charles A. Beard 119

MEMBERSOF THE PHIGAMMA DELTA FRATERNITY, WITH CHARLESA. BEARDSEATED AT THE FARRIGHT

Courtesy Archtves of DePauw University. Greencastle. Indiana

Although a top student, Beard thought that education in- volved more than “merely class-room grinding.” “An ‘A’ on examination is no test of a man’s ability,” he wrote con- temptuously in arguing against basing election to Phi Beta Kappa exclusively on grades. “Any thick-skull who is not too lazy to work can make a high grade.”““ And with his su- perabundance of energy, he played a leading role in extracur- ricular affairs and campus student politics. He was active in the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. His fraternity brothers, Beard recalled, were an “individualistic” and “cantankerous crew,” all “full of steam and conceit.” They did not have a fraternity house, not only because of the expense but because they “thought that the fellows who lived together all the time be- came as much alike as crows.” Instead, they rented a hall on the top of a bank building in town. There they held parties and dances. But social life was relatively muted, partly because of the rather straight-laced rules of decorum enforced by Univer- sity authorities, partly because few of the students had much

644ulladi~rn,November 22, 1897 120 Indiana Magazine of History money. The major activities at their meetings were recitations and speeches by the members. Extracts from the fraternity minutes show Beard’s topics ranging from expounding his theory of God to “Theosophy the New Religion,” from “Myself‘ to the “Organization of Society.”65 The dominant passion among the students and the path- way to campus prominence and leadership was oratory and debate. From his first days on campus, Beard made his mark with his thorough preparation, “excellent style,” and “forcible manner.”66 At a mock Republican convention in the spring of 1896, he stampeded the delegates into nominating Indiana’s favorite son Benjamin Harrison with what one local newspaper called “a flood of pyrotechnics,” another “the most impassioned speech of the evening.”67 While still a freshman, he was selected as DePauw’s representative to the state prohibition oratorical contest and then as Indiana representative to the national competition, where he won second prize of fifty dol- lam6*The following year he was unsuccessful in his bid for the most prized oratorical honor at DePauw, the right to represent the school in the competitions for the annual interstate contest. But he led the DePauw team to victory in the debate with its Indiana archrival, Earlham College, on the question, “Resolved, That Employers should not Recognize Associations of Employ- ees.” Avoiding the rhetorical flourishes and high-blown phraseology so popular among college debaters of the time, he presented a tightly reasoned and thoroughly documented expo- sition drawn largely from official reports and documents in this country and abroad showing how employer recognition of unions promoted “industrial peace.” “He has,” the Earlham hometown newspaper acknowledged, “a fine bearing, is a forci- ble speaker, and very clear headed and

65 Greencastle Daily Banner Times, October 14, 1896; Greencastle Evening Democrat, October 15, 1896; Farrell, “Interview,” 3-4; extracts from the Phi Gamma Delta minutes, folder 1, Phillips Collection. 66 Extracts from Phi Gamma Delta minutes; Helm to Phillips, October 14, 1957; Wade to Phillips, December 10, 1957, Phillips Collection. 67 Greencastle Daily Banner Times, May 20, 1896; Greencastle Democrat, May 23, 1896. Mirage ’97, n.p.; Greencastle Democrat, January 11, February 22, May 30, 1896; Greencastle Daily Banner Times, February 25, 27, April 24, May 13, 22, 26-27, 1896. 68 Greencastle Daily Banner Times, November 14, 1896; DePauw Weekly, November 17, 1896. On the 1897 debate, see DePauw Weekly, March 2, April 6, 13, 1897; Greencastle Daily Banner Times, April 6, 9-10, 12, 1897; the text of the debate is printed in The Earlhumite, April 17, 1897. Charles A. Beard 121

“Beard,” a fellow student recalled, “was quite shy socially, probably didn’t care much for social life.” “College was serious business for us,” he told an interviewer from his old fraternity-and he was more serious than most. “Oh God!” the student annual exclaimed of him his freshman year, “a beast that wants discourse of reason.”70 There were those who re- garded him as too brash and pushy. The student yearbook, the DePauw Mirage, was filled with jibes about Beard as the school’s “Principal Applyer of Nerve,” as looking for “some one to tell people just how great a man I really am,” and as want- ing “to run the college.”71 But his abilities won the respect of most of the students. His freshman year, his classmates voted him class prophet; sophomore year, class president; and his third year, class orator.72 During the 1896-1897 academic year, he served as associate editor of the student newspaper, the De- Pauw Weekly. When that publication was reorganized in the fall under the name DePauw Palladium, Beard, because of his previous newspaper experience at Knightstown, was selected editor-in-chief. Under his management the paper was put on a paying basis.73 More importantly, he succeeded in making the journal-and himself-into a mover and shaker in campus af- fairs. Beard, the Mirage reported, half-sarcastically and half- admiringly, was expert in the “best methods to be employed in handling a conservative faculty, of instigating revolts and of crystallizing and directing public ~entiment.”~~ Upon taking over the helm of the Palladium, Beard set down his editorial credo: “It will be the policy of the present management to ‘hew to the line and let the chips fall where they will.’ . . . It is our purpose to tell the truth, regardless of opinions or consequences.” Beard did not always live up to this credo. There was much in his editorials that was typical of student newspapers past and present: boosterism in behalf of DePauw’s football and baseball teams, exhortations in support of the school’s representative in debate contests, laments over the decline of class spirit, support for students involved in town-and-gown scrapes with the Greencastle authorities, and

70 Ives to Phillips, October 8, 1957, Phillips Collection; Farrell, “Interview,” 4; Mirage ’97, n.p. 71 Helm to Phillips, October 14, 1957, Phillips Collection; Miraze- ’97, n.p.; Mirage ’99, [270,2881. 72 DePauw Weeklv. October 8. 1895: Greencastle Dailv Banner Times. Octo- ber 1, 17, 1895; October 5, 1896; Palladium, October 25, 1897. 73 DePauw Weekly, October 6, 1896; Greencastle Daily Banner Times, Octo- ber 1, 7, 15, 1897; Mirage ’99, [224];Palladium, May 17, 30, 1898. 74 Mirage ’99, [259]. 122 Indiana Magazine of History

appeals for more generous support from the college’s alumni and the state’s Methodists. His editorial columns were studded with what a disgruntled reader dismissed as “glittering gen- eralities” and such “stereotyped imitations of Ram’s Horn prov- erbs and aphorisms” as “Merit and not money wins in De- Pauw,” “The seeker of knowledge is never satisfied,” “Society is full of parasites who take and never give,” and “Those who succeed in life’s contest never haul down their colors.”75 President John had resigned in the spring of 1895 because of the financial crisis facing the institution. Beard gave his successor, Hillary Gobin, generally high marks for his “efforts to advance the interests of the university” in the face of “diffi- cult circumstances,” for his sympathetic attitude toward stu- dents, and for his “liberal yet firm” stance in matters of disci- line.^^ Reflecting his Spiceland upbringing, Beard bewailed the tendency in current fiction to “too much catering to the passions of the low and sensual.” And he blasted Walt Whit- man for “insulting every sense of decency, purity and modesty.” Nor did he feel any sympathy with those who were demanding further liberalization of the campus moral code. “The written rules of DePauw,” he editorialized, “are few and embody such principles as every man who hopes to achieve anything in life can easily adopt. . . . This is a Methodist institution, sup- ported and endorsed by the church, and those students who come here should be willing to abide by the rules and ideals upon which the university was founded. The man who turns his room into a poker den, or spends his time at a saloon has no business in DePauw. We do not need him. The institution was founded for men who want an education, and who want to prepare the way for citizenship in this great nation.”77 Yet Beard was enough of a maverick to win a reputation as a troublemaker and rebel. He was vocal in assailing attempts by “a few men on the faculty” to impose “strait-jacket puritani- cal principles.” He criticized professors who wasted students’ time by their lack of “system about their work.” He was quick to take school authorities to task for what he regarded as “inconsistent and impolitic” enforcement of academic regula- tions. He loudly proclaimed that DePauw must be “a modern

7SPalladium,October 18, 1897; November 8, October 18, 25, November 1, 15, 1897. 76For the problems facing the institution at the time, see Manhart, De- Pauw Through the Years, I, 209-15.Re Beard on Gobin: Palladium, October 25, 1897; February 28, 1898. 77Palladium, November 22, 1897; February 14, 1898. Charles A. Beard 123

university, untainted by any narrowness of sectarianism and untrammeled by religious tenets.” He proclaimed that a new “critical and scientific” spirit was at work that would, with “blasts of iconoclasm,” inaugurate “a thought revolution which will shake the foundations of even rock-founded institution^."^^ In a satirical account of an imaginary class meeting, the Mir- age pictured Beard declaiming: The time has come, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come. The old tradi- tions and fossilized methods of the past must be smashed into smitherines and consigned to chaos. Let there now be ushered in an era of unlimited, unqual- ified and untrammeled freedom! Away with a moss-back faculty, moth-eaten orthodoxy, and give us true democracy! I move you that we declare war upon all things that at present exist!79

As befitting his family heritage, Beard’s revolt against or- thodoxy was most striking in the religious sphere. He appar- ently had entered DePauw with the idea of preparing for the ministry. Classmates remembered how he dressed in minister- ial style when he first arrived on campus. He was elected secretary of the campus Young Men’s Christian Association; he was active in the college’s prohibition association; and he preached in local churches, with one newspaper account even misidentifying him as the “Rev. Chas. A. Beard.”80 At the close of his freshman year, he went as a Y.M.C.A. delegate to the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, summer Bible school, and the follow- ing fall he was a member of a Y.M.C.A. student “prayer band” that held meetings in nearby towns.81 But his religious zeal appears to have faded despite-perhaps in reaction against the strongly evangelical atmosphere at DePauw. In his Palla- dium editorials, he deplored the absence of Robert Ingersoll’s writings in the local libraries, ridiculed those who were so “strongly sectarian that they would not go to heaven in the boat of any other church if they were shipwrecked on the island of despair,” and protested against holding the annual campus revival meeting, an event which he characterized as an exercise

78 Newby to Phillips, September 10, 18, 1957, Phillips Collection; Palla- dium, December 6, 1897; January 10, February 21, 1898; October 25, 1897; March 7, 1898. 7sMirage ’99,[171]. Newby to Phillips, September 10, 1957, Phillips Collection; Mirage ’97, n.p.; DePauw Weekly, November 12, 1895; March 24, 1896; Greencastle Daily Banner Times, October 9, 1895; March 18, April 18, 20, 1896; Greencastle Democrat, April 25, 1896. Greencastle Democrat, June 6, 1896; Greencastle Evening Democrat, Oc- tober 5, 1896; Greencastle Daily Banner Times, December 30, 1896; DePauw Weekly, January 5, 1897. 124 Indiana Magazine of History in “mental pathology” that had “no place in a modern institu- tion of learning.” “Religion that is deep and abiding, that is the expression of man’s inmost spiritual aspirations, religion that will be the predominant note of man’s daily life,” he ad- monished, “comes as the product of long and deliberate thought. It cannot come from a mental delirium of mingled awe, superstition, fear. . . . ”82 In line with the Palladium’s political nonpartisanship, Beard rarely commented directly upon the major public issues of the day. His most extensive remarks were occasioned by the crisis leading up to the Spanish-American War. “If the matter is left for settlement by diplomacy,” he fulminated in the af- termath of the sinking of the Maine, “more red tape and time will be exhausted than the patriotic patience of the people can bear.” When war came, he trumpeted in his column the popular slogans of the day: “Remember the Maine!”; “We have raised our flag and it is never to come down till Cuba is free”; “Cuba Libre!”83 He himself was sufficiently caught up by the war fever that he even offered to organize a volunteer company. But, he recalled, “they wouldn’t take us. They had more men than they had embalmed beef.” Perhaps to salve his own disap- pointment, he began to sound in his editorials a different note. Congratulating the DePauw students upon “the absence of the cheap patriotism and jingoism which have been so prevalent at many other institutions,” he found “beyond comprehension” how “an intelligent, rational man can actually be anxious for war . . . a gory path to glory.” And he took to task students who abandoned their schooling to enlist with the reminder that the “duties of peace are as sacred as those of war.”84 Many students remembered Beard as “radical,” even “so- cialistic,” in his political views.85 Although isolated geographi- cally, DePauw was not insulated from the tumults and strains in American society in the 1890s. “Believe me,” Beard remi- nisced in the late 1930s, “we had then about all the issues that perplex us now.” And there is no question that he had begun shifting away from the Federalist-Whig-Republicantradition of his father. When in the fall of 1896 William Jennings Bryan carried his crusade to Greencastle, Beard was “deeply stirred”

82Palladium, October 18, December 6, 1897; March 14, 28, 1898. 831bid.,March 7, April 25, 1898. %Herring, “Beard,” 642; Palladium, April 25, May 2, 1898. 85 Nadal to Phillips, July 29, 1957; Orin Demotte Walker to Phillips, [August 22, 1957); Newby to Phillips, September 10, 18, 1957; Mary Towne Lockwood to Phillips, October 18, 1957, Phillips Collection. Charles A. Beard 125

by the Great Commoner’s “independent opinions and power.”86 In his own speech at the trials to choose DePauw’s representa- tive to the interstate oratorical contest, he coupled his attacks upon “the evils that were wrought by rum and the rum shop” with a denunciation of “the ill-used power of trust and m~nopoly.”~~He bemoaned how the “old healthiness and heart- ness [sic] of social life is dying out, and a cold, hollow and empty-souled aristocracy is taking their place.” In his 1898 Washington’s Birthday Address he painted a graphic picture of the social ills demanding “reform”: political bossism and cor- ruption, widespread unemployment and poverty, “hell-hole tenements, filled with misery and crime.” He even editorially ridiculed politicians who “bow down before the constitution of the United States as though it were sacred while history tells us that this crowned constitution with its halo has been the bulwark of every great national sin-from slavery to monopoly .”88 Yet too much should not be read into such remarks. Beard’s thinking during these years remained in a state of flux, aggravated by more than a dash of undergraduate bombast. He was hardly a socialist. On the contrary, he blasted a visiting “Christian communist” and “revolutionist” for stirring up “the masses by a vision of an unattainable state of society.” The failure of innumerable utopian experiments had demonstrated, he concluded, “that communistic visions are only the night- mares of disturbed dreamers.”8s Even what he meant by “re- form” remained ill-defined and amorphous. In his 1897 debate with Earlham, he defended labor unionization; in his losing effort the following year he supported an income tax based upon the ability to pay. But a question remains about how far his arguments represented personal convictions rather than the artifices of the skilled debater. The DePauw student newspa- per’s report on the income tax debate noted that Beard was placed in the “difficult position of defending the practicability of the income tax” when “there was evidently considerable doubt in his own mind.” His solution for the ills he so graphi- cally portrayed in his Washington’s Birthday address never went beyond vague generalities about “a resistless moral ap- peal, striking the minds of men with the truth of God,” never

LW Farrell, “Interview,” 4; Mary R. Beard, Making of Charles A. Beard, 15; for Bryan’s speaking there, see Greencastle Democrat, October 24, 1896. 87 DePauw Weekly, November 17, 1896. 88Palladium, December 20, 1897; April 18, May 17, 1898. 891bid.,January 17, 1898. 126 Indiana Magazine of History transcended moralistic calls “to apply the principles of Jesus to all our great social problems.”s0 Perhaps what most clearly emerges from a reading of his youthful editorializing is the tension that existed then in Beard-and would continue throughout his life-between scholarship and activism, between head and heart. On the one hand, he saw himself as a hard-headed realist, an apostle of a “political economy based upon actual facts and not ideals”; on the other, he extolled as the duty of the “true scholar” to “uplift and inspire a burden-stricken humanity. . . . The educational world is not separated from the real world, and the student must stand in the very midst of social conflicts.” Happily for Beard, as he prepared to leave DePauw he found resolution of this tension in the comforting faith that the advance of knowl- edge automatically promoted human welfare. “It is,” Beard wrote in his final Palladium editorial, the truth that makes men free. If the truth tears down every church and government under the sun-let the truth be known. And this truth only will be known when men cease to swallow the capsules of ancient doctors of divinity and politics, and when men begin to seek the truth in the records of history, politicr and religion and science. Let the new school tri~rnph!~’ When Charles Beard graduated from DePauw in 1898, his was still a mind in the making. In the future, he would con- tinue to grow and develop under the influence of new experi- ences, further reading, and fuller reflection. His dedication to the pursuit of what he would call “the Socratic e1enchus”- “new facts . . . constantly challenging old mental patterns and imagery”-remained a lifelong quest. “When I come to the end,” he confessed in a mood of reflection, “my mind will still be beating its wings against the bars of thought’s But these first twenty-four years laid the basis for the achievements that were to come. Already could be discerned that skeptical, inquiring intellect with its delight in deflating pretensions and refuting the conventional wisdom, that restless search for un- derstanding man and society, which would be the hallmark of the mature Beard. And knowledge would remain for the later Beard as for the undergraduate editorialist a weapon in the

The Earlhamite, April 17, 1897; April 15, 1898; Palladium, April 11, 18, May 2, 1898. 91Palladium,January 17, 1898; October 25, November 8, 1897; May 17, 1898. 92 Charles A. Beard, “Political Science,” in Wilson Gee, ed., Research in the Social Sciences: Its Fundamental Methods and Objectives (New York, 1929), 287; Goldman, “Beard: An Impression,” 7. Charles A. Beard 127

struggle for the good. The philosopher Irwin Edman, who took Beard’s course in American government at Columbia Univer- sity, recalled how he conveyed to his students not simply his “passionate concern for an understanding of the realities of goverment,” but his “ideal of government: the liberation of the energies of men.” “We work the whole time,” his wife confided to a friend, ‘‘ . . . because we want to know and say what we think we know . . . to help the human race to realize its highest potentialitie~.”~~ Beard’s dominating passion and the central theme of his career was his search for the fulfillment of “the promise of American life.” In the depths of the Great Depression he pic- tured in rhapsodic terms the America of his dreams: a land “without the degradation of poverty and unemployment on the one side or the degradation of luxury, rivalry, and conspicuous waste on the other.”94 His defense of “continentalism” reflected his conviction that the United States was a new and distinctive civilization, without the feudal past, class bitterness, and an- cient hatreds of the Old World, with its own special genius and destiny.95 Thus, the major thrust of his later years as a histo- rian was to delineate this country’s “unique features in origins, substance and development.” The complex of beliefs and values that Beard apotheosized as the American “idea of civilization” embraced “respect for life, for human worth, for the utmost liberty compatible with the social principle, for equality of rights and opportunities, for the dignity and utility of labor, for the rule of universal participation in the work and benefits of society.”96 Although many influences converged to shape this vision, a major inspiration remained the legacy of his Indiana upbringing. “Life was hard,” Beard wrote in the late 1930s about his boyhood world, “but as I recall it all through the mist of time it seems beautiful against the wars, hatred, and intol- erance of this age; and the best of the old days I should like to recover, for America and for the world.”97

931rwin Edman, Philosopher’s Holiday (New York, 1938), 131; Mary R. Beard to Rosika Schwimmer, July 25, 1936, Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection (New York Public Library, New York). 94 Charles A. Beard, “That Promise of American Life,” New Republic, LXXXI (February 6, 1935). 351; Charles A. Beard, “The World As I Want It,” Forum and Century, XCI (June, 1934). 333. 95 See, for example, Beards speech before the Progressive Education Asso- ciation, New York Tines, October 22, 1939. 9fi Beard and Beard, The American Spirit, 672-73. 97 Souvenir Booklet of the Spiceland Centennial, 15.