Beard, Charles A. Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Charles A. Beard (1874–1948), born to a prosperous family in Indiana and educated at DePauw University, was one the most important historians of the twentieth century. He was influential among scholars, a sought-after public speaker, and a writer for the nonacademic world. Beard is probably most famous for his ability to align significant academic research with a progressive concern about politics. His most famous work, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), looked past high-minded political theory or simple hagiography of the Founders to assert that economic interests best explain the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and its ratification. Indeed, throughout his life, Beard was insistent on exploring the economic forces that could explain American history. This often made him controversial among the public audience that he sought. Although many later historians repudiated his ideas, he remains an important historian who influenced generations of readers to think more realistically about American history and the men and women who shaped it.

Beard traveled to England and was a founder in 1899 of the progressive Ruskin House at Oxford, which dealt with labor education. Throughout his life, he remained concerned with public affairs and maintained a progressive desire to end injustice. He eventually became a distinguished and popular professor of history at Columbia University. His resignation from Columbia, in protest over the treatment of antiwar faculty in 1917, added to his fame. Later he was involved in the founding of the New School for Social Research in New York.

Beard, who always had a lively interest in politics, was elected president of the American Political Science Association in 1926 and the American Historical Association in 1933. He continued to write, often with his wife Mary Beard, popular histories of the United States. These include the two-volume The Rise of American Civilization (1927) and its two sequels America in Midpassage (1939) and The American Spirit (1943), as well as the Basic History of the United States (1944). In the late 1940s he developed a strong isolationist streak and wrote highly critical books about Franklin Roosevelt and what he believed were Roosevelt’s authoritarianism and duplicitous efforts to force the United States into World War II (1939–1945). Even though these views are largely rejected, they reveal a man who was always critical in the best sense of that word. Beard never accepted the conventional wisdom and kept a skeptic’s eye on the world.

Although many of Beard’s judgments have been subjected to rigorous subsequent research that, in the end, undermines his conclusion, Beard remains a vital figure in American history and student of politics. His efforts to bring economic questions to the forefront of political thought are now an accepted way of approaching U.S. history. Even his critics recognize the worth of the questions he asked and the answers he sought. Beard will always be remembered as a writer who sought to balance objective historical research with a progressive’s desire for social justice.

Bibliography:

Barrow, Clyde W. More Than a Historian:The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard. New Brunswick, N.J.:Transaction, 2000.
Brown, Robert E. Charles Beard and the Constitution. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1979.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians:Turner, Beard, Parrington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Martin, James J. “Charles A. Beard: A Tribute.” Journal of Historical Review 3 (Fall 1982): 239–258.