Charles A. Beard

Charles A. Beard (born November 27, 1874, near Knightstown, Indiana, U.S.—died September 1, 1948, New Haven, Connecticut) was an American historian, best known for his iconoclastic studies of the development of U.S. political institutions. His emphasis on the dynamics of socioeconomic conflict and change and his analysis of motivational factors in the founding of institutions made him one of the most influential American historians of his time.

Reared in a prosperous family, Beard attended DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana, and, after his graduation in 1898, he studied at the University of Oxford. In 1899 he helped found a workingmen’s school in Oxford. In 1900 he visited the United States briefly, married Mary Ritter, and returned to England. He permanently returned to the United States in 1904 to teach political science at Columbia University, New York City.

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Beard subsequently became one of the intellectual leaders of the Progressive movement and of American liberalism. He was a leader in movements seeking improvements in municipal government and administration and in national planning. He was initially interested in European history, and he collaborated with J.H. Robinson in writing several widely used textbooks on that subject. He then developed a schema of historical explanation that found its most famous expression in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). In this book he claimed that the Constitution had been formulated by interest groups whose motivations were just as much personal financial ones as they were political ones. Although American politicians were generally outraged at the implications of material interests embodied in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, the book was received by academicians as an innovative study on motivational factors among socioeconomic groups. In The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), Beard placed somewhat more emphasis on the philosophical context of political struggles, but he nevertheless reaffirmed his view of the importance of economic interests in governmental action. Beard and his wife, Mary R. Beard, subsequently produced a monumental synthesis of the history of the United States entitled The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vol. (1927). This widely acclaimed work was supplemented by two more volumes, America in Midpassage (1939) and The American Spirit (1942).

In 1917 Beard resigned from Columbia University in protest against the investigation and dismissal of several faculty members on charges of disloyalty and subversion. He was a cofounder of the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1919. His intellectual orientation in the next years began to shift toward the problem of historical knowledge, which occupied him during the early 1930s. Beard pointed out the subjective nature of the historian’s selection and arrangement of facts on the basis of his own relationship to contemporary thought.

In the 1930s and ’40s Beard’s interests turned to the history of U.S. foreign policy. In 1934 he began writing a series of books and articles in which he attacked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s foreign policy. In such books as American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932–1940 (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941 (1948), he charged Roosevelt with virtually maneuvering the United States into war with Japan. Beard was criticized as an isolationist because of these views, and his reputation declined somewhat after the publication of his last works, but he is still considered to be one of the most influential American historians of the 20th century.

Beard’s summation of the lessons of history in four sentences has been widely quoted:

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.

The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.

The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.