More than a hundred years ago, James Madison … prophesied that the supreme test of American statesmanship would come about 1930.… The test is here now—with no divinity hedging our Republic against Caesar.
—Charles A. Beard, 1948
I
THE LAST, and by far the most intense of Beard’s intellectual commitments was to isolationism—or, as he preferred to call it, to American continentalism. His belief that the United States could and should stay clear of the disasters of Europe and Asia eventually drove him back toward an insular American patriotism and impelled him to repudiate much of the radical history of his earlier years. And yet, in his writings on foreign policy, as in his literary vendetta against Franklin D. Roosevelt, Beard displayed much the same style of mind that had characterized his earlier works. In the closing episodes of his career, we still find him given to an excessive preoccupation with the motives and methods of those in power, still disposed to draw a somewhat conspiratorial interpretation of their acts, still trespassing now and then over the border between a sound feeling for economic realism and a crude variety of economic reductionism. As a historian of foreign policy, Beard was an uncertain combination of the disappointed patriot and the village cynic.
War had been a decisive theme in the history of the Beard family. Its comfortable bourgeois position, even the foundations of its Midwestern identity, had originated with his father’s act of self-assertion in turning his back on the Confederacy. Certainly this rebellion left no legacy of pacificism: Beard himself at twenty-four followed quite a different path when he tried to volunteer for the war with Spain, and even the experience of seeing the crusade for Cuba libre turn into a campaign to subjugate the Filipinos did not quite sour his patriotism. During his years at Columbia, for example, he was by no means a consistent or outspoken critic of imperialism. Again, it has been too little remarked that Beard, like so many others of his generation of academic historians, was quite intensely anti-German. A few experiences on the Continent during his Oxford days had left him with an indelible dislike of “Prussianism” which made it hard for him to be “neutral in thought” in 1914. Like many of his colleagues, he was impatient with Wilson’s mild diplomacy, and months before the American declaration of war he believed that “this country should definitely align itself with the Allies and help eliminate Prussianism from the earth.” Even when resigning from Columbia in protest against tyrannies brought about by the war fever, he restated his conviction that “a victory for the German Imperial Government would plunge all of us into the black night of military barbarism,” and reminded President Butler: “I was among the first to urge a declaration of war by the United States.” “I am not and never have been a pacifist,” he declared again in 1919. “I never belonged to Mr. Wilson’s sweet neutrality band. I did not vote for him in 1916 because I believed his pacifist policies wrong.… I was never ‘too proud to fight.’ ”1
Although Beard never threw himself into war propaganda with the enthusiasm shown by many of his fellow historians, he made his sentiments clear in a brief appeal for a 1918 Liberty Loan: “America and her allies are now pitted against the most merciless military despotism the world has ever seen.… Equipped by forty years’ of preparation for armed conquest, fortified by forty years’ conspiracy against the democratic nations of the earth, supported by all the engines of destruction that science can devise, the German military machine threatens all mankind. It has made a religion of brutality.… A German victory means the utter destruction of those ideals of peace and international goodwill which have been America’s great reliance, ideals which make life worth living in America or anywhere else.”2 It is tempting to wonder how much different the end of Beard’s life would have been if he had taken a similar stand in 1941. But by then he had come to feel that he had been gullible in 1917, and in his fierce determination not to be gulled again he conceived the world of 1939–41 as though it were an exact replay of the earlier war.3
During the 1920’s historians were preoccupied with the question of war guilt, a matter charged for many of them with special significance because of their own credulous services to wartime propaganda. Revelations of the secret treaties shook their earlier assumptions about the moral issues of the war, and soon Sidney B. Fay, Harry Elmer Barnes, and other revisionist writers were giving the world a version of war guilt in which the self-seeking aims and schemes of the Allies were emphasized and Germany’s responsibility much diminished. Beard did not rush to join this movement. In a series of lectures at Dartmouth in 1922, he began to apportion the responsibility between both sides, but he still gave Germany the greater share. By 1925 he had come to assigning Russia and France “a Titan’s share” of the war guilt, but was not yet ready to judge American intervention wrong or futile. By now he was disturbed by the guileless ease with which he and his colleagues had taken sides in 1917, and dismayed at the precarious and unsatisfactory character of the peace. He slowly began to withdraw from support for any American involvement in the affairs of Europe—a Continent “encrusted,” as he once wrote, in the “blood-rust of fifty centuries”—and to relapse into the old American attitude that Europe is hopelessly corrupt and beyond saving by any efforts. Those who set out to love one country or hate another, he warned in 1922, are “unfit” for correct thinking about international policies. “Moreover, they are usually found shifting their affections with the current of affairs. They are hot lovers one day and hot haters the next, and in deadly peril of becoming a nuisance all the time. It is the man who gets religion the hardest who backslides the hardest.” War guilt now seemed less important than the question whether American interventionism had served any good purpose, and he still believed it had because it preserved the European balance of power. It was “decidedly the interest of the United States,” he wrote as late as 1926, “to help prevent the rise of any European power to a dominant position.” Decisions about foreign policy should be based not upon foreign sympathies but upon a cool calculation of national interest. The country should return to its original disposition to use the European balance of power to national advantage, and should “regard with cold blood all the quarrels of Europe.” If the victory of the Entente powers had been desirable, this was not because they were more virtuous than the Central powers but because their victory kept a single power from achieving total domination. At this point Beard was not a spokesman for isolationism; he merely hoped to find discreet and realistic self-regarding criteria for intervention. As late as 1930 he asserted: “The theory that the United States can, in its own interest, refuse to take part in world adjustments becomes more doubtful every day.… It can formulate no important policy without affecting the European balance of power.”4
Such statements, founded on classical conceptions of national interest, were much more realistic than a great deal of contemporaneous writing on the subject. But, as always, there was another side to Beard’s mind. At times crass economic interest would re-emerge as the motive power of history. In 1927, Beard opposed foreign investments because they, and not the balance of power, were the source of overseas intervention; he called for heavier income taxes and a program of road, school, and electrical power development that would divert capital from foreign investment to domestic improvement. Such a program, he concluded in his village-cynic manner, “would reduce our chances of becoming mixed up in the next European adventure in Christian ballistics. If the present rate of foreign investments keep [sic] up, every village skinflint from Maine to California will soon have a hundred-dollar foreign bond paying 8 per cent instead of the 6 per cent local rate, and thus inspired will be [sic] by a holy zeal for righteousness, justice, or whatever the next warlike device may be, which means at bottom a lust to get the money back with interest.”5
What is discernible in Beard’s discussions of foreign policy is a pattern rather similar to that revealed in his treatment of the Founding Fathers. In dealing with the Fathers, he might start, as he did in 1912, with an attempt to give a cool account of the hard problems of their statecraft, and then, as he did in 1913, become all too preoccupied with their motives and their investments in public securities. In discussing foreign policy he would often begin with a sound statement about some of the sobering realities—the limitations of American power, the problems of foreign markets and investments, the dangers of overreaching idealistic aims—and then suddenly emerge with a cranky thrust at the big bankers or their countrywide allies among the village skinflints. To follow Beard through the years is an arresting task: a noble and lofty figure is lecturing us circumspectly on the difficult lessons of history; but every now and then there is a sudden turning, spurred perhaps by a moment of irritation; the mask of detachment drops, and we are abruptly confronted by an angry and suspicious mind. Just as we imagine that we are about to be led down a broad avenue toward some chastening wisdom about the limitations of national power, we are abruptly switched onto some unprofitable byway.
II
The crash and the Great Depression seem to have had a more profound effect on Beard’s thinking about foreign policy than any of the revisionist histories of the 1920’s. He had become convinced that the primary cause of American intervention in 1917 had not been (as some were to conclude) the sinister machinations of bankers or munition makers but the more generally shared and more legitimate desire of national leaders to keep the country from the depression that would come if it gave up its war trade. But now such a depression had come anyway. Was it not obviously necessary for the nation, not only for its domestic well-being but also to avoid renewed engulfment in Europe’s wars, to develop an economic program based upon greater self-sufficiency? Must it not prevent a future President, seeking again to avoid or end a domestic depression, from plunging the nation into another war? From 1934 on, almost all Beard’s historical writing became programmatic: it was focused upon the paramount goal of staying out of war, a goal which he pursued with an intensity that dwarfs all the occasional inconsistencies and vacillations of his thought.
Beard took pleasure in the early policies of F.D.R., despite the President’s big-navy sympathies, because he saw in them the promise of a self-sufficing nationalist economic policy, an eventual collectivist democracy that would be able to stay out of war by minimizing foreign commitments. He was particularly pleased when Roosevelt scuttled the London Economic Conference, which confirmed his hope that the New Deal would seek economic recovery not in foreign trade and investment but in the independent development of its domestic program. But he was always suspicious of Roosevelt, and after the President’s “quarantine” speech of 1937, his hostility hardened.
In 1934 Beard published two books, the beginning of an elaborate series of inquiries into foreign policy. The first of these, The Idea of National Interest, an intolerably dull work, showed some of Beard’s characteristic ineptitude with the history of ideas. He was not attempting here to dishonor or debunk the idea of national interest, but rather, by giving examples of its historical uses, to show how it might be made a firm and durable anchorage for national policy. His aim was to show that national interest, realistically and broadly defined, would be a much safer guide to policy than vague notions of national honor, or demanding and treacherous conceptions of moral obligations. But to be safe it must be truly national, and not just geared to the pursuit of private profit for special interests.
Beard tried to make The Idea of National Interest an austerely factual and objective study, reserving to The Open Door at Home the task of presenting his own interpretations and proposals for a national program. In brief, this program called for a system of national autarchy calculated to develop the internal well-being of the country and cut to a minimum its dependence upon external trade. For its defense, the country should rely upon its geographic isolation and an army adequate to its defense in the Western Hemisphere. The naval needs of the country, he believed, would be almost negligible under a circumspect policy of this kind. The navy he saw primarily as an instrument of risk-laden exposure to the problems of the outer world. “The one policy that is possible under a conception which makes the American nation the center of interest and affection is policy based on security of life for the American people in their present geographical home.” To surrender our fortunate insular position, he wrote, “for a mess of pottage in the form of profits on cotton goods, tobacco, petroleum, and automobiles, is to make grand policy subservient to special interests, betray the security of the American nation, and prove that we ‘deserve to be slaves.’ ”6
Beard’s reputation as a student of foreign policy went into such an eclipse after his attacks on Roosevelt that we may easily underestimate such a work as The Open Door at Home. Ringing with pertinent warnings against the global Messianism which has come to be the curse of American foreign policy, the book is by no means either wholly stale or irrelevant in the 1960’s. Beard understood that Americans do not have the duty, the capacity, or the need to patrol or moralize or democratize the rest of the world, and he was trying to state the dangers in their overreaching themselves. Whatever his book’s weaknesses, it aimed at a respectable object: to persuade Americans to think of foreign policy not as subservient to sweeping world-saving ideologies or world-wide commitments to “democracy” or to peace-keeping efforts beyond the power of their arms and outside the range of their moral influence, but rather to think first, in the manner of classical realism, about the requirements of their own security. And security he here defined not as a question of trade or profit, nor of the defense of formally designed principles of international law governing neutral rights, but simply as the long-range pursuit of peace and safety. To achieve these ends, Beard proposed to reverse the familiar priority between domestic and foreign policies: many times in the past, domestic discontents had led to war; he now proposed to put the quest for peace so firmly at the center of American goals as to put forward as the primary argument for domestic planning that it would improve our chances of staying out of war.
However, the difficulty in Beard’s thought, already evident in The Open Door at Home, lay in his findings about the source of danger to American security. Misled by his current disposition to overemphasize economic motives and to read the future in terms of the blasted illusions of 1917, he evaded the central dilemma of international politics: that the quest for security involves hazardous competitive confrontations of power, and is not simply a pursuit of competing interests of trade and empire.7 It was this that led him to think that the primary danger to American peace lay in the sale of cannon and cotton and the advance of credits to belligerents, and persuaded him, even in the age of Hitler and Mussolini, that the possibility of American involvement in war might be eliminated by abstaining from trade and loans. Despite his new-found skepticism about historical generalization, he ventured a “tentative law” governing such matters: “The degree of probability that the United States will become involved in any war arising anywhere in Europe or Asia bears a direct relation to the extent of the economic interests possessed by American nationals in the affected area, and in the fortunes of the respective belligerents.”8 One need think only of the Second World War, or the wars in Korea or Vietnam, not to speak of American experience in 1812 and 1898, to see the limitations of this “law”—a law drawn (and many would say even here incorrectly) from the single experience of 1917.
In February 1935, Beard expressed his recurrent pessimism and his irrepressible suspicions of F.D.R. in a remarkable article on “National Politics and War” which illustrates his disposition to see the threat of war as arising solely from internal, domestic causes. At the outset he addressed himself to the significance of the “Roosevelt upheaval” in American life and the future of the now prostrate Republican party as a viable opposition. Looking to past experience, he found that twice before in American history the “party of wealth and talents” had been overwhelmed at the polls—under Jefferson in 1800 and under Jackson in 1828. (He would not count Wilson’s victory in 1912, since it was a minority victory, a political fluke.) On both occasions the victory of the popular party had finally been reversed by two forces: war, and “the inexorable movement of American business enterprise.” The war of 1812 had in effect liquidated Jeffersonian democracy, undercut its principles, and re-established Federalist policies. Jacksonian democracy too, in the long run, developed a faction which would rather risk civil war than make concessions to the growth of business enterprise. It fell into the hands of the planters, who in the end preferred to take their section out of the Union rather than bow to the demands of business interests. The Civil War, which nearly shattered the Democratic party, returned the country to that whole complex of policies—of banks and tariffs and bonded indebtedness—that the original Jacksonians had opposed. Again when the Democrats, thanks to a Republican split, slipped into power under Wilson and launched upon another episode in reform, they were checkmated by the war of 1917; and once more, as a consequence of the war, “the party of business enterprise emerged more triumphant than ever.”
Now the country was living once again under a third Democratic upheaval. Would this be, at last, the “permanent revolution”? With a bow to the admitted uncertainty of things, Beard hazarded that it would not: none of the basic institutions of capitalism had been unseated, and at the end of the present Depression, “if it ever ends, the concentration of wealth in the United States will doubtless mark a new high point in the evolution of the American economy.” Likewise the Republican party would survive. True, should the Democrats achieve recovery, the Republicans would face a very bleak short-run future. But Beard was plainly more persuaded that the Depression would continue, or even grow worse, and that the Democrats would probably not advance to further radical measures, such as the nationalization of the banks. Instead, tradition and experience suggested that “a wider spread of economic calamity will culminate in a foreign war, rather than in a drastic reorganization of domestic economy.” Roosevelt’s actions, particularly his navy program, confirmed this prospect. “Judging by the past and by his actions, war will be his choice—and it will be a ‘war for Christianity against Paganism’ this time.” It might be objected, Beard said, that nations do not deliberately make war; but what is to the point is that statesmen, who make the effective decisions, do decide for policies that lead to war and often resort to strong foreign policies in preference to strong domestic policies—witness the way the Cleveland and McKinley administrations had used, respectively, the Venezuela crisis and the Spanish war. “This is not saying,” Beard concluded in a memorable passage, “that President Roosevelt will deliberately plunge the country into a Pacific war in his efforts to escape the economic crisis. There will be an ‘incident,’ a ‘provocation.’ Incidents and provocations are of almost daily occurrence. Any government can quickly magnify one of them into a ‘just cause for war.’ Confronted by the difficulties of a deepening domestic crisis and by the comparative ease of a foreign war, what will President Roosevelt do? Judging by the past history of American politicians, he will choose the latter, or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, amid powerful conflicting emotions he will ‘stumble into’ the latter. The Jeffersonian party gave the nation the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and its participation in the World War. The Pacific war awaits.”9
It is a chilling note of prophecy that Beard strikes here, and it is prophetic not only for the world but for himself: in this article he wrote the scenario for the rest of his career, for the unrelenting battle he was to wage against an event which he had forecast as all but inevitable. He had also set down the basic historical assumption upon which his critiques of American foreign policy were to proceed: the United States goes to war not in response, whether right or wrong, to anything other nations do; it goes to war as a part of its own cycle of domestic politics, because statesmen who prefer strong foreign policy to strong domestic policy seek war, or at least seek the conditions under which they can stumble into war. For the dialectic between nation and nation he had substituted a dialectic between internal and external policies.
In assessing Beard’s isolationist views of the mid-1930’s, one must remember that he by no means stood alone; he was in the main stream of liberal and radical opinion at least until the outbreak of war in 1939, and probably right up to the fall of France in 1940. By the mid-1930’s almost all American liberals were convinced that no important principle or value had been served by the military intervention of the United States in 1917, and that private interests, notably bankers with a large stake in Allied loans, were primarily responsible for it. A large body of revisionist historical literature was capped in 1935 by the investigations of the Nye Committee, which again laid the impulse toward American intervention at the door of international bankers and munitions makers, the “merchants of death.” When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in the same year, Congress hastily passed the 1935 Neutrality Act, which authorized the President, where he found that a war existed, to ban the sale or transportation of munitions to any belligerent and to warn American citizens (the Lusitania still haunted the legislators) that they traveled on belligerent ships at their own risk. The Neutrality Act of 1936 also forbade loans to belligerents.
As fascism swept over Spain and Ethiopia, and as the savagery of the Nazis toward the Jews gave stronger intimations of the ultimate horror that lay in wait, some antiwar liberals became troubled about the adequacy of the neutrality laws and were impelled to think about the need for collective action against aggression. But proposals for collective security to halt fascism were dimmed by Anglo-French “neutrality” policies in the Spanish Civil War and then by Munich. It was hard to argue for American initiative when those even more immediately endangered by aggression were not providing it. Above all, most American liberals were convinced by the experiences of the First World War and by the subsequent political conflict of the 1930’s that American democracy could not survive another such effort. The idea that democracy would collapse under the stress of a major war was one of the most pervasive clichés of the 1930’s; it was held by men along a wide spectrum of political opinion from Norman Thomas to such conservative isolationists as Robert A. Taft. Skeptics saw no point in a war to stop fascism abroad if it was all but certain to bring fascism or military dictatorship at home. “Nothing is more likely,” wrote the editors of the New Republic in the fall of 1937, “than that the United States would go fascist through the very process of organizing to defeat the fascist nations.” Beard, writing in the same journal a few months later, voiced his “firm conviction” that the United States could not prevent war in Europe, and that if it took part in another general European war, “no matter what the alleged pretexts or the alignment of powers may be, that participation will mark the end of democratic institutions in the United States. Some forms may survive, as of the Roman Republic, but the spirit and substance will be destroyed.”1
The dilemma facing American liberals on the eve of the war was indeed a difficult and a cruel one. On one side was their fear of another war, with all its horrors, and of the prospect that it would put an end to democracy in America as well as elsewhere; and their now deeply ingrained desire not to lend themselves to a repetition of the follies of 1917–18. On the other was their increasingly acute fear of the triumph of fascism in all Europe, with its own threat to American survival, and their disposition, newly heard but growing stronger, to ask whether, in order to help turn back the threat of fascism, the United States ought not, while it still had potential allies, take the risks connected with a policy of collective security.
What marked Beard off from many of his contemporaries was that he saw no dilemma at all. He took higher ground than most of his fellow liberals: he could see nothing at stake for American security in the impending conflict; and such moral difference as he could find between the contending powers was not big enough to warrant American partisanship. He could see only a battle between the ruthless old imperialisms of Britain and France and the ugly new aggression of the fascist powers. “My trouble,” he wrote in March 1936, “lies in the fact that greed, lust and ambition in Europe and Asia do not seem to be confined to Italy, Germany and Japan; nor does good seem to be monopolized by Great Britain, France and Russia.” He was sure, he wrote the following month, that one could expect Hitler to make “a sudden and devastating attack, East or West,” but he did not see why this should be regarded by Americans as any part of their business. Wisdom dictated a policy of strict neutrality. The neutrality laws were based on a good principle and should be made mandatory; he hoped they would not only bar the sale of munitions and credits to belligerents but would also be extended to impose a restriction on sales to neutrals engaged in reselling to belligerents.2 When war came the country ought to retire to the storm cellars.
The Nye Committee’s revelations and the debate over neutrality legislation touched upon Beard’s sensitivities both as a historian and as an isolationist, and in 1936 wrung from him a strange, tortured little book, The Devil Theory of War. Plainly the Committee’s findings reawakened his penchant for the somewhat conspiratorial view of events that colors his book on the Constitution, his fascination with motives, his passion for the inside story, the “intimate essence” of history. He considered the Nye report in some ways even more revealing than the opening of the European archives in 1917 and after, and in one of his broad sardonic strokes he suggested that in forty or fifty years “even Respectable Citizens” might absorb some of its lessons. With a cautious bow to his own relativist pronouncements, he warned that the Nye revelations did not in any final sense tell what “caused” American intervention in 1917—a matter the human mind could not entirely comprehend. (Beard was clearly troubled by the difficulty of dismissing the idea of cause in history and then, in effect, asserting that the country had gone to war because bankers and politicians took it there.) He warned too—like a man fighting the strongest tendencies of his own mind—against the popular notion that wicked men make war. (He was to say just the opposite about F.D.R. ten years later.) Politicians and bankers, he argued, do not operate in a vacuum: it is the whole society that seeks buyers, jobs, and profits. War comes out of the pursuits of peace. “War is not the work of a demon. It is our own work, for which we prepare, wittingly or not, in the ways of peace. But most of us sit blindfold at the preparation.”3
Beard then launched into a rehearsal of the Nye Committee’s evidence on the importance of the war loans to the Allies, and their central place in America’s wartime prosperity. “The country,” he concluded concerning 1914–17, “faced an economic smash at home or intervention”; but did this decision really “pay” the nation—the nation as a whole, as distinguished from “profit-seeking bankers”? Now again the country was in the midst of still another economic crisis much graver than that of 1914, faced with the prospect of another world war, and with the temptation of more war “prosperity.” Would Americans now prefer to stay out, or to gamble again on wartime profits that would be followed by another, still bigger crash? Rejecting both the militant defense of neutral rights that had failed in 1917 and the collective pursuit of peace conducted arm in arm with corrupt imperialist powers, he urged: “I think we should concentrate our attention on tilling our own garden.” And this was why he favored the most sweeping mandatory neutrality laws. They would be difficult to enforce, he admitted. “But enough of them can be so enforced as to prevent the bankers and politicians from guiding the nation into calamity as in 1914–17.” But here—as indeed in his stress upon war loans, to the exclusion of every other consideration leading America to war—Beard was back with the devil theory of war that he had started out to decry, back indeed with that notion of an arcane and sinister “reality” behind events, in which he had believed in 1913. Manfred Jonas concludes—rightly, I believe—that in this respect Beard’s book “contributed greatly to fixing the onus of guilt on the already suspected parties. It thus had the effect of advertising, rather than refuting, the devil theory.”4
In his peroration to The Devil Theory of War, Beard posed the issue that would occupy Americans for the next five years. If the United States was to go to war, he pleaded, let it not be because of “backstairs dealing and manipulating,” but for some open public object, openly agreed upon. “If we go to war, let us go to war for some grand national and human advantage openly discussed and deliberately arrived at, and not to bail out farmers, bankers and capitalists or to save politicians from the pain of dealing with a domestic crisis.”5 It was what lay behind these words that more and more separated Beard from his generation of liberals in the years to follow. Not only could he see no “grand national and human advantage” in a war against the Axis, but he found it impossible to see how any American of good will and intelligence could on this count disagree with him. In 1939 Beard attributed much of the pressure for collective security to “resident foreigners” who were treating the United States as a boardinghouse, the foreign-born and their offspring. He minimized the danger of German and Italian domination of the Atlantic, asserted that the European powers could themselves easily stop Germany and Italy “within forty-eight hours” if they were truly interested in doing so, and argued: “For the government of the United States to operate on the ostensible fiction that a mere test of despotism and democracy is at hand would be nothing short of childish.” “To entangle ourselves,” he concluded, “in the mazes and passions of European conflicts and tie our hands to British and French manipulators on the remote contingency of a German and Italian domination in the Atlantic seems to me to embrace immediate calamities when the possibility of security and peace in this hemisphere is clearly open to us. If this be immorality, the foreigners now boarding here and the home-grown missionaries can make the most of it.”6
The clearer the lineaments of the Nazi state became, the less Beard seemed to be concerned with what was happening outside the United States. In 1940 he published a brief historical apologia for his proposed policy of “American Continentalism,” under the title A Foreign Policy for America. It was his misfortune that this work, completed by April, was published almost simultaneously with the fall of France. At the very moment when every American was being forced to confront the implications of a possible Nazi victory for the future of his country and the world, Beard, who had always wanted so much to make history relevant to the present, had given his readers a manifesto on foreign policy in which Hitler was barely mentioned,7 in which the problems that would come with an Axis victory were given no consideration at all, and in which the real contemporary villains were American “internationalists” and “imperialists.” Beard had always been convinced, as he now put it, that “foreign policy is a phase of domestic policy, an inseparable phase.” This is an important insight, but if it is exploited to the exclusion of the even more basic truth that foreign policy is also a response to the actions of other states, it can become an instrument of distortion. Most of Beard’s later writings on foreign policy come back repeatedly to a single theme: the United States never goes to war because of anything that is happening outside its borders, but because politicians want to evade a domestic crisis or bankers and munitions makers want outlets for their capital and products. Although in his earlier days he had argued that the quest for national security is in good part a response to happenings in the outer world, he withdrew from this insight from the mid-1930’s onward. During the very years when the future Axis powers were ravaging Ethiopia, Spain, and China, and when Hitler was preparing the ground for his horrendous gamble, Beard became increasingly preoccupied with the search for domestic villainy. In the end his sights were trained, as they had to be, upon F.D.R.
III
Beard’s last two books, American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932–1940 (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948) devoted over nine hundred pages to a detailed historical polemic intended to prove that, from an early date, F.D.R. practiced deceit on the American people, promising them peace while leading them gratuitously into war, and that finally, having failed in his other moves toward war, he provoked the Japanese into the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt’s motives—to save Britain at whatever cost to the American people and to their constitutional forms, and in so doing to aggrandize his own power—had been abominable; his methods had been deceitful; the results of his policies had been disastrous.
George Leighton, in a sympathetic account of Beard’s writings on foreign policy, refers to Beard as “an attorney with a brief and with his country as his client.”8 To assume that this brief was in fact of service to the country would beg the question, but the phrase is otherwise apt: these last two books were indeed a legal brief, a statement of the case for the prosecution, cast in a mold more suitable to an adversary proceeding than to a historical inquiry. As Beard told this story of duplicity in pursuit of Caesarism, the influence of bankers and munitions makers’ loans vanished, and now at last the explanatory pattern based upon the events of 1917 was laid aside.9 Instead of the mischief-makers turned up by the Nye Committee, Beard had discovered a more visible and, in some quarters, a more acceptable villain in the person of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Much has been written about Beard’s use of omission, distortion, and innuendo in these books:1 but absorption in such details may cause us to lose sight of his grand strategy. By concentrating attention largely upon the plans and devices of the President, Beard turned away from the world events to which Roosevelt was responding, from the genuinely trying dilemmas of foreign policy that he had to solve, and from the basic question of how the national interest should have been defended. By writing voluminously about intentions, criticisms, suspicions, stratagems, evasions—in brief, about the clouded moral atmosphere in which power functions—he succeeded in giving the whole story the aspect simply of a study in the immorality of Roosevelt’s statecraft. We are back again, once more, as we were with the Founding Fathers, caught up in an excessive preoccupation with motives. Even in the wake of Hitler, Beard was reverting to the muckraker’s approach to foreign policy, probing once again for the sordid “reality” that must always lie beneath the surface. (Indeed his last book, subtitled “A Study in Appearances and Realities,” was entirely organized around this dualistic conception.) By not setting out the alternatives Roosevelt faced, each with its own costs and dangers, Beard weighted the scales against him in a way that would be fatal to the reputation of almost any political leader faced with a comparable decision. His relatively sketchy treatment of what was going on in Europe and Asia left Roosevelt’s objectionable decisions in high relief, as though they had been made in a vacuum. By posing certain questions and avoiding others of equal and greater importance, he diverted attention from the problem whether American national interests or the interests of mankind were in fact at stake, a stratagem that from the start reduced Roosevelt to the level of a mere meddler in the affairs of an intractable world.
Hardly any of Roosevelt’s advocates have denied that Beard and his other detractors were right in making their grave charges about the uncandid character of his leadership. Roosevelt did not tell the public the truth about what he expected, what he planned, what he was doing. After the fall of France, he surely knew that his repeated promises to avoid war might prove impossible to keep. And though he never took any step in the Atlantic that was far out of line with the current state of public opinion,2 it seems clear too that he was content to work with, and upon, the ambivalence of the American public mind—which was intensely eager for British survival and German defeat but almost as eager to stay out of the war—rather than to put the whole case, as he saw it, frankly before the public. Sometime before the summer of 1941 he plainly decided that the United States must sooner or later—preferably sooner—enter the war, and his whole course of action in the Atlantic, as he moved steadily from neutrality to nonbelligerency to quasi-belligerency to undeclared war, suggests that he was trying, not only to aid Britain, but also to create the circumstances and incidents that would overcome public opposition to the final step. The aggressive character of his policies—the use of American convoys and the beginnings of naval hostilities with Nazi submarines—might have been expected to force a declaration of war by Hitler; but the Fuehrer, mindful of 1917, refused to oblige, and at the time of Pearl Harbor American progress toward full-scale belligerency was still halting and uncertain. In this sense—but I believe in this sense alone—Pearl Harbor came as an end to troublesome uncertainties.
The general course and purport of Roosevelt’s policies in the Atlantic theater were obvious enough, and it can hardly be denied that they had, step by step, the overwhelming endorsement of the public and of national leaders. The pivot of Beard’s book, therefore, was the Pacific theater, where war finally came. There the preliminaries were not followed with the same close general attention as the events in the Atlantic, and there the charge of surreptitious dealings and disastrous failure could be pushed to best advantage. The actual outbreak of the war poses a complex issue for historians, for the policies and performance of the Roosevelt administration are acutely vulnerable. In the then existing state of American military intelligence the disaster at Pearl Harbor should have been avoidable. It is possible to argue also that American diplomacy vis-à-vis Japan was impatient and inept, and that a further postponement of the showdown, which was in fact Roosevelt’s objective, might have been attainable. It is more difficult to argue, as Beard did, that granting the expansionist aims of Japan, the war could have been entirely avoided without jeopardy to long-range American security, and extremely difficult to argue that the situation was a case of flagrant unilateral provocation by the United States.3
What one misses in Beard’s account is a systematic statement of the alternatives facing Roosevelt. The danger on one side was that if Germany and Japan should win, the United States would stand alone, facing two immense and aggressive military empires in the Atlantic and the Pacific. The danger on the other was that to try to stop one or both would mean almost certain ultimate involvement in the war. And the point at which military-strategic realities required that Roosevelt should act, if this eventuality were unavoidable, was not likely to be the point at which congressional leaders or the American public would accept the necessity of war. (It does not seem to have occurred to Beard that F.D.R.’s undeniably devious leadership at certain moments reflected not his Caesaristic aspirations but the difficulties of a democratic politician confronting the force and unhampered initiative of Caesaristic powers.) One would never learn by reading Beard alone that the Japanese had arrived at a determination to gain American acquiescence in their plans or to precipitate war; one might never see that Roosevelt was given the alternative either of becoming, by providing materials, a partner in Japan’s plans for imperial expansion in China and Southeast Asia, or of putting economic pressure upon her to desist, at the almost certain risk of driving her to widen the war. Had Roosevelt, by continuing trade, abetted the gradual conquest by Japan of Dutch, French, and British centers of power in the Southwest Pacific, he would have sapped the Allied cause everywhere, and would have laid himself open to domestic critics for having been a feeble custodian of American security. Had he intervened, however, against Japanese conquests of territories not belonging to the United States, he would have had to enter the war on grounds that many Americans could not accept as legitimate and would have waged war with a divided country behind him. From this dilemma the Japanese, unwisely as events showed, rescued him by striking at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines.
While the war was being waged, Beard, like other isolationists, gave it his support, but when it was over he promptly returned to his original view that it had been futile and unnecessary. And on this view hangs the final meaning and consequence of his books on foreign policy. If we can see a valuable result or historical necessity in America’s participation in the war, Beard’s questions, absolutely central for him, about the motives and details of F.D.R.’s leadership become less vital for us. For his part, Beard was prepared to follow to the end the implications of his argument. “Out of the war,” he wrote in 1948, “came the triumph of another totalitarian regime no less despotic and ruthless than Hitler’s system, namely, Russia, possessing more than twice the population of prewar Germany, endowed with immense natural resources, astride Europe and Asia, employing bands of Quislings as terroristic in methods as any Hitler ever assembled, and insistently effectuating a political and economic ideology equally inimical to the democracy, liberties, and institutions of the United States.… Since, as a consequence of the war called ‘necessary’ to overthrow Hitler’s despotism, another despotism was raised to a higher pitch of power, how can it be argued conclusively with reference to inescapable facts that the ‘end’ justified the means employed to involve the United States in that war?”4
In this passage Beard, as he points up the direction of his own thought, throws down the gauntlet to Roosevelt’s defenders. He asks them to put aside the interests of the rest of humanity, which he believed the United States simply lacked the power to advance or sustain and from which he believed its fate really could be separated, and to address themselves solely to American national interests. And then he poses the ultimate question. After all, if the Russian system and the Nazi system were on an absolute moral par, if the Soviets did in fact represent an even more formidable threat to America than Hitler, if their system had no greater latitude for internal liberalization and democratization than the Nazi system, and if life in the world with them promised no significantly greater chance of peaceful coexistence—then the notion that something had been gained for America from the war was a delusion and the whole Rooseveltian adventure was proved to be the fraud that Beard had anticipated over a decade before when he wrote: “The Pacific war awaits.” The basic political tendency underlying this conclusion was precisely that which had in the intervening years driven a wedge between Beard and his liberal friends. His profound animating hatred of F.D.R., his conspiratorial view of historical events, his idea that this whole episode in human history should be looked at strictly from an American nationalist point of view, and the conviction that the war had accomplished nothing at all, were to become the staple assumptions of the far right wing. These preconceptions had brought Beard to the verge of allegiances that he must himself have thought strange: he would find himself taking pleasure at Chicago Tribune editorials, praising Herbert Hoover, conferring with Henry Luce, supplying memoranda to Republican congressmen.
Though I believe the force and persistence of his early “socialism” has sometimes been exaggerated, Beard had surely always occupied a place on the political spectrum considerably to the left of center. No doubt he would have described himself as a liberal (in the modern American rather than the classic sense of the word), and on occasions he had spoken of his belief in “collectivist” democracy. Now his responses to the war were pulling him steadily toward the right, cutting him loose from his moorings in traditional American liberalism, and setting him adrift on political tides that might have carried him, had he lived beyond 1948, into unfamiliar and uncomfortable waters. Beard was deeply troubled, as many responsible minds have been, by the possible effects of the President’s war-making power on the fate of American constitutionalism. His heightened nationalism and his newly awakened impulse to defend American constitutionalism against the menacing inheritance of Rooseveltian Caesarism, helped to push him toward the mild, acquiescent conservative views of such later works as The Republic, The Enduring Federalist and the Beards’ Basic History of the United States, in which he seemed to be retreating with a certain muffled embarrassment from his earlier writings. But the suspicious and somewhat conspiratorial approach to history that at times had shown itself in his work had now come full circle: a style of thought which gave heart to Progressivism when he was exposing the machinations of the Founding Fathers had become congenial to postwar ultraconservatives and Roosevelt-haters, now that he was exposing the machinations of F.D.R. His penchant for finding the rotten core in the fruits of history finally brought him to turn upon his earlier works, and his intense lifelong devotion to pursuit of the “reality” that underlay appearances at last consumed itself.5
During his fight against Roosevelt’s policies Beard had begun to drift into a new political orbit. Although he had endorsed the isolationist organization, America First, he refused to join it, and he became uncomfortably aware that it was acting as a magnet for “native fascists,” a breed he never ceased to detest. He was spared the painful embarrassment of appearing on the platform with some leaders of the German-American Bund only when friends persuaded him at the last minute to cancel a speech he had engaged to give at an America First meeting in Hartford. His increasing alienation from the main stream of liberal sentiment and from old friends troubled him deeply. “All the people I have always liked,” he once regretfully said, “seem to be on the other side,” but he would not let this dim his independence or his self-confidence. As differences deepened, he found himself spurned or denounced by cherished associates of the past. In 1944 Lewis Mumford, whom he had once helped, wrote a dreadful, wounding attack on him in a letter to The Saturday Review, in which Beard was described as having become “a passive—no, active—abetter of tyranny, sadism, and human defilement,” guilty of a self-betrayal and corruption “comparable to that which placed a novelist of Knut Hamsun’s dimensions on the side of the Nazis.”6 Beard was also deeply hurt to be treated discourteously by a few historians when he appeared at a wartime meeting of the American Historical Association, though the political scientists gave him a cordial reception.7 A sense of persecution finally gripped him, and the closing years of his life found him more than ever in an embattled state of mind. It is a crusty and suspicious note that runs through Beard’s surviving correspondence of the war and postwar years, the note of a man who feels himself surrounded by venality, treachery, timidity, and incompetence, but who in the face of it all maintains his own courage and assurance. Perhaps the worst part of it for him was not the feeling, now quite familiar, of opposing a sinister and scheming officialdom, but the sense of being surrounded by the literary lackeys of power. The country needed, he thought in 1943, “an exposé of the Wilson-F.D. mythology, but most of the people who deal with foreign affairs are subsidized by the Carnegie peace–slush fund and live by keeping up the mythology.” Carnegie’s “peace money,” he said, had done “incalculable damage to minds and morals.” He was convinced that he and other critics of the Pearl Harbor disaster and wartime diplomacy were being shut off from important documentary information that was available to the “official” historians—“the vestal virgins” he called them, “who guard the sacred tradition.” He was so convinced that “no big N.Y. publisher will touch anything that does not laud the Saint” that he denied them the chance to turn him down by taking his books on Roosevelt’s foreign policy directly to the Yale University Press.8
As all other issues shrank in significance when compared with the necessity of telling the public the truth about Pearl Harbor, Beard found himself in a totally alien political environment. He thought Herbert Hoover “courageous” for speaking out on the manner in which the country got into the Pacific war, and in 1944 had two long talks with Henry Luce, preparatory to writing a sharp article on Pearl Harbor for Life, which, to his disappointment, Luce decided not to use. In the election of 1944 he saw himself as forced to choose between “the Peanut of Pawling” and “the Madhatter of Washington,” and felt uncertain, he wrote Oswald Garrison Villard, as to whether he could vote for Norman Thomas, for “he too is a world-saver.” He expected little from Congress on Pearl Harbor: “I hope that Congress demands the truth, but does Congress want the truth?” The State Department, he said in the autumn of 1947, is “now our prize madhouse.” The Truman administration pleased him no more than its predecessor. In early 1947 he thought that he discerned in the Truman policies “a project to invade Russia by way of Turkey, now that the opportunity to fight Russia in China has exploded,” and he saw nothing constructive even in the Marshall Plan. “The Democrats,” he concluded as 1948 began, “are playing the old game of crisis and trying to wring one more victory out of the bloody shirt! Having brought the country to the verge of disaster, they want to complete the job.” Truman, he believed, was looking for another “Pearl Harbor in the Mediterranean or Palestine.”9
What sustained Beard in these years was his arduous labors on his Roosevelt books, and the signs he sometimes saw that Roosevelt’s reputation might yet be destroyed. The rumbles over George Morgenstern’s exposé, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (1947), gave him hope: “The pseudo-intellectuals who have been trying to terrorize everybody who questions the official myths are now getting frantic,” he wrote, “and well they may be, for the whole structure is crumbling and the high-brows are tearing one another’s hair out.” “The myth of the Savior is fading,” he joyfully wrote Harry Elmer Barnes in early 1948, and with his own last book well launched, he had a final moment of keen expectation: “The country seems to be in a mood to consider the question of how we were secretly governed by our great Fuehrer!”1 When he died in the summer of that year it was with the sense of repose that comes to a man who has done his duty under the greatest of difficulties.
IV
Today Beard’s reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography. What was once the grandest house in the province is now a ravaged survival, afflicted, in Beard’s own words, by “the pallor of waning time.” As an admirer of Charles A. Beard approaches the house that Beard built—a pile of formidable proportions and a testament to the vaulting ambitions of its architect—he can hardly fail to feel a twinge of melancholy. True, its lofty central portion, constructed in the days when the economic interpretation of history was flourishing, remains in a state of partial repair, and one suspects that several of the rooms, with a little ingenious improvisation, might still be habitable; but it has become shabby and suggests none of its former solidity and elegance. The east wing, inspired by historical relativism and showing a little sadly the traces of a wholly derivative design, is entirely neglected. The west wing, dedicated to continental isolationism, looks like a late and relatively hasty addition; a jerry-built affair, now a tattered shambles, it is nonetheless occupied from time to time by transient and raucous tenants, of whom, one is sure, the original owner would have disapproved.
As one looks back upon it, Beard’s professional life takes on more and more the aspect of a daring gamble—though, as a critic of speculative enterprise, he might have laughed at such a notion. But Beard did take moral and intellectual risks: he had never been content with the role of the historian or the academic alone; he had always hoped to be politically relevant, had always aspired to become a public force, and even more than the part of the sage he relished the part of the public moralist, the gadfly, the pamphleteer. With his ready pen and wide knowledge, his strong intellectual self-confidence and his tireless energy, he had made himself foremost among the American historians of his or any other generation in the search for a usable past. And yet any man who makes written commitments year after year on difficult public questions will live to find some of his views evanescent and embarrassing and to see his own words quoted with telling effect against himself. Beyond this, the inevitable risk of the publicist, Beard took a further and more gratuitous risk: he finally geared his reputation as a historian so closely to his political interests and passions that the two were bound to share the same fate. This foe of the speculators put everything he had on the line, and though he had a long run at the tables, in the end he lost. As he once wrote about Henry Adams, “He wanted to achieve great things and was oppressed by his own and the general ignorance. What was the poor devil to do in the circumstances?”2
For those of us who came of age in the 1920’s or 1930’s, and for whom An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and The Rise of American Civilization were books of profound and decisive importance, the decline of Beard’s reputation has not been a thing to be witnessed with pleasure, nor indeed can it be by any other historian who has ever shared Beard’s hope that somehow the past might be mobilized to strengthen or enlighten his passion for the public interest. One longs to restore the earlier Beard, who is still remembered as a man of extraordinary kindliness, courage, and honor. And somehow, quite aside from the fate of his works, he does remain appealing—a man so clearly bred out of the native grain, and yet once so cosmopolitan in his interests and experiences; a bearer of something like folk wisdom, and yet a scholar of broad learning; a radical who was also a patriot in the classical and untarnished sense of the word. One prefers to think of him in this way—as a productive scholar who was also an intrepid public spirit, as the patron and guide of younger colleagues, the distinguished and embattled defender of civil and academic liberties, the scourger of Hearst, the spokesman of the native decencies—and one remembers that the life of a man does not end as a series of propositions that can simply be assessed and found true or false, but as a set of lingering resonances that for our own sake we must be attuned to hear. Some scholars choose to live their lives, usefully enough, amid the clutter of professional detail. Beard aimed to achieve a wisdom commensurate with his passion, and to put them both in the public service. No doubt he would rather have failed in this than succeeded in anything less.
1 For Beard’s early views on imperialism, see Gerald Stourzh, “Charles A. Beard’s Interpretations of American Foreign Policy,” World Affairs Quarterly, 38 (1957), 112–15; Beard to Butler, October 8, 1917, Minutes of Trustees, Columbia University, vol. 38, 89–90; for the statements of 1917 and 1919 Warren I. Cohen, The American Revisionists (1966), 5.
2 Cohen, The American Revisionists, 17.
3 This determination not to be fooled twice is a powerful theme in Beard, as in many of the disillusioned enthusiasts of 1917–18. Writing about the war debts in a letter of the late 1920’s, he remarked: “I do not think the money will ever be paid back. Probably [the] Morgans will get the American boobs to lend fifty billions more to the European powers and their nationals to loose [sic] in the next war for liberty, democracy, and Christianity. But I am not going to have any more wool pulled over my eyes if I can help it.” Beard to Harry Elmer Barnes, June 24, 192[7?].
4 Nation, 114 (1922), 289–90; Cohen, The American Revisionists, 86–7; Beard, The American Leviathan (1930), 733.
5 Cohen, The American Revisionists, 99.
6 The Open Door at Home (1934), 261, 267; Beard was quoting John Marshall.
7 Cf. Stourzh, “Charles A. Beard’s Interpretations of American Foreign Policy,” esp. 123–32. Beard, Stourzh observes, “remained under the spell of an economic interpretation in spite of his formal repudiation of economic determinism and his acceptance of a voluntaristic set of ideas.… The outstanding feature of Beard’s brand of economic interpretation of politics, whether in 1913 or in 1934, was its un-Marxian stress, implicit or explicit, on the economic motives of individuals or groups. This insinuation of the acquisitive instinct as the most crucial attribute of human nature lies at the very bottom of Beard’s incapacity to take into account the genuinely political aspects of foreign policy. It was one of the reasons which led him to see in American foreign policy little else but the continuation beyond the water’s edge of the economic quests of individuals and groups making up American society.”
8 The Open Door at Home, 269. In 1935, urging a policy that would develop a more secure economy at home, Beard wrote: “Surely such a policy is as defensible … as, let us say, one that leads to the killing of American boys in a struggle over the bean crop in Manchuria.” Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–1941 (1966), 72. It is sometimes hard to tell whether such passages represent Beard’s idea of the essential problems of foreign policy or whether they are meant only to serve as rhetorical gestures; or indeed whether in his case this distinction can always be made.
9 “National Politics and War,” Scribner’s Magazine, 97 (1935), 65–70. Cf. The Idea of National Interest (1934; ed. 1966), 433–4.
1 For the New Republic, see Jonas, Isolationism, 81; Jonas has many illustrations of the belief that American democracy would end with the next war. For Beard, see his essay “Collective Security,” New Republic, 93 (February 2, 1938), 358. In 1939 he wrote that it was “as certain as death and taxes that civil liberty would perish in the United States as soon as war is declared.” “We’re Blundering Into War,” American Mercury, 46 (1939). 398. But by 1943 Beard had come to the conclusion that the war would not destroy American democracy. The Republic, 253.
2 Jonas, Isolationism, 105–6; Bernard Borning, The Political and Social Thought of Charles A. Beard (1962), 237; on the neutrality laws see Beard, The Devil Theory of War (1936), 122.
3 The Devil Theory of War, 11–13, 29. Although he said that wicked men do not make war, Beard wrote in 1937 that since the American people had not been prepared in 1914 for foreign intervention, “it took time for Woodrow Wilson to manoeuvre the nation into war.” Borning, Political and Social Thought, 233.
4 Ibid., 93, 123; Jonas, Isolationism, 153; cf. Borning, Political and Social Thought, 220.
5 The Devil Theory of War, 123, 124.
6 “We’re Blundering Into War,” 392, 299, and passim.
7 Beard makes one passing reference (p. 9) to Sumner Welles’s recent visit to “the Italian and German dictators,” but they do not otherwise appear. During 1938 and 1939 Beard had consistently minimized the possible threat of the Axis powers to the United States, and dismissed talk about possible fascist penetration of the Western Hemisphere as “the new racket created to herd the American people into President Roosevelt’s quarantine camp.” Borning, Political and Social Thought, 241 and chapter xiv, passim.
8 Leighton, “Beard and Foreign Policy,” in Beale, ed., Charles A. Beard, 161.
9 “I was right,” Beard wrote to Oswald Garrison Villard during the closing year of the war, “in saying that the war was on the way, but I was foolish in laying such emphasis on economic aspects of the business. Man hasn’t sense enough to pursue economic interests consistently.” In fact, he added, the war proved mainly that “man seems bound to have a berserk rage every so often—a senseless berserk rage, and I regard it as a mistake to gloss that fact over. Look at Hitler.” Beard to Villard, July 18, 194[5].
1 Notably by Basil Rauch in Roosevelt: From Munich to Pearl Harbor (1950); see also Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor (1950), and Samuel Eliot Morison, By Land and by Sea (1953), 337–45.
2 Roosevelt was a maker of public opinion, but he was not disposed to defy it, and his actions in this respect were keyed to national sentiment. In March 1941, 70 per cent of the public thought it more important to help England than to keep out of the war; in November 1941, more than 70 per cent were willing to risk war with Japan rather than let her continue her aggressions.
3 Beard did not endorse, though he also did not reject, the view that F.D.R. deliberately exposed the fleet at Pearl Harbor in order to invite a Japanese attack. He said only that while Roosevelt argued that acts of war had been committed against the United States, “in reality the said acts were secretly invited and even initiated by the armed forces of the United States under his secret direction.” President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 583.
4 President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (1948), 577.
5 At least one commentator, George Leighton, has remarked that Beard’s last book had “much of the quality of the book on the Constitution. The two were alike in their method, their attack on the conventional view,” as well as in their indication of the need for further research and their power to evoke wrath. “Beard and Foreign Policy,” 184.
6 Leighton, “Beard and Foreign Policy,” 183, on Beard and the minority report; Josephson, “Charles A. Beard: A Memoir,” 591, 602, and the same writer’s Infidel in the Temple (1967), 413–14; Saturday Review, 27 (December 2, 1944), 27; see also November 11, p. 12, 13, and December 16, p. 15. “The Sat. Lit Rev. performances are shocking,” Beard wrote calmly to Oswald Garrison Villard, January 31, 1945, “but I am used to it now.”
7 Alfred A. Knopf Memoir, Oral History Collection, 147–8.
8 On Carnegie money, Beard to O. G. Villard, November 25, 1943, September 8, 1945; on publishers and vestal virgins, Beard to H. E. Barnes, May 23, 1947, January 14, 1948.
9 Beard to Villard, October 20, 1944; March 9, April 15, September 8, 1947, January 17, 1948; Beard to Barnes, January 6, 1948.
1 Beard to Villard, February 9, 1947; to Barnes, January 6, 1948; to Villard, April 13, 1948.
2 Beard to Carl Becker, May 14, 193[2?].