CHARLES BEARD
The historian and political scientist Charles Beard was unimpressed by Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to avoid involvement in the European conflict from 1914 to 1916. He supported early American entry into the First World War, a stance that appears improbable at first sight. Beard hailed from Quaker origins, opposed the expansionist thrust of the McKinley-Roosevelt years, and the main cause of his celebrity was a book reviled by millions of patriotic Americans. His An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States was a provocative reinterpretation of America’s founding, which sold in large numbers and made him famous.
Published in 1913, the book observed that while most political actors are driven to some degree by economic self-interest, the Founding Fathers had elevated this imperative to a fine art. Fearful of the chaos created by the Articles of Confederation, in which states’ rights trumped those of the federal government, Beard argued, the Founding Fathers had an overarching goal during their deliberations in Philadelphia: to protect men of means from the threat posed by broad-based political activity. The American Constitution was for Beard “essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.”1 It was a radical piece of revisionism that created an almighty stir. President Wilson denounced the book, as did The New York Times in an editorial.2 The Ohio Star presented an evocative (and provocative) banner headline, “Scavengers, Hyena-like, Descecrate the Graves of the Dead Patriots We Revere,” then added that the book was “libelous, vicious, and damnable” and that true Americans “should rise to condemn [Beard] and the purveyors of his filthy lies and rotten aspersions.”3 With admirably dry humor, William Howard Taft wondered why Beard had to depress people by telling the truth.4
In 1912, Beard refused to vote for either Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, viewing their Progressivism as timid affairs driven by the same economic self-interest—albeit cloaked in ameliorative rhetoric—that motivated the Founders. Away from domestic policy, Beard criticized Wilson’s attempts to export democracy to Mexico, dismissing the president’s “loose talk … about restoring order by bayonets,” and observing that if worldwide democratization is inevitable, “it is better to let it alone or to aid in its culmination.”5 Yet there was something about the First World War—and German motives in particular—that roused Beard’s pugnacity. On a trivial level, Charles and his wife, Mary Ritter, a distinguished scholar in her own right, had honeymooned on the European continent in 1900, where Beard was “amused at the pretensions of German professors and fuming at Prussian soldiers who forced him into the gutter rather than share the sidewalk,” according to his later friend and colleague, the historian Eric F. Goldman.6 More substantively, Beard had delivered a speech at the City College of New York in the autumn of 1914 that condemned German militarism so forcefully that the college president banned future talks by Beard on that subject.7 As German U-boat attacks increased, Beard criticized President Wilson for his weak responses, observing “that this country should definitely align itself with the Allies and help eliminate Prussianism from the earth.”8
Beard detected something rotten in Germany’s heart, and his fierce egalitarianism led him to view the nation as a dangerous adversary to be defeated if Progressive causes were to survive at home and abroad. In a speech at Amherst College in 1917, he warned that the “present plight of the world seems to show that mankind is in the grip of inexorable forces which may destroy civilization if not subdued to humane purposes.”9 Like Walter Lippmann, Beard viewed American participation in the war as an opportunity to effect lasting social reform in the United States and beyond. Even the robber barons would be compelled to serve a larger good. Dispensing praise that would likely have stirred disquiet among its recipients, Beard lauded the Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Harrimans as “creative pioneers,” anticipating a time when their “magnificent economic structures” would be used for “public purposes.”10
Irritated by the irresponsibility of the Wilson campaign’s slogan in 1916—“He kept us out of war”—Beard held his nose and voted for Charles Evans Hughes, until recently an associate justice of the Supreme Court, primarily due to his support for military preparedness (it also helped that the Republican candidate offered clear support for national woman suffrage). Deploying Mahanian reasoning, Beard observed that “war has been one of the most tremendous factors in the origin of the State and the progress of mankind,” and that ducking a necessary fight was an abdication of responsibility.11
During the election year, Beard mischievously claimed to understand the tenor of public opinion better than Wilson’s campaign advisers: “Millions of Americans would give their life blood to prevent the establishment of [a Prussian state] on these shores. In this I mean no breach of neutrality. With due scientific calm and without expressing any preference in the matter I think I am stating accurately the opinions of most of my countrymen.”12 Sarcasm aside, Beard’s words revealed his sense of urgency. As Wilson edged slowly toward intervention, Beard condemned the president’s cant. He complained to The New York Times that the “Peace Without Victory” speech was “not much of a basis for negotiation,” and unless Wilson was operating from a script written with the other belligerents, “he was just preaching a sermon.” Wilson’s support for ethnic self-determination, meanwhile, brought to mind Pandora opening her box. “Does it mean an independent Ireland?” Beard wondered. “What about Alsace-Lorraine? What about Bohemia? What about Croatia and the scores of little nations in the Balkans? What about India? What about Haiti and Santo Domingo, where the United States is ruling according to President Wilson’s orders.”13 Beard was relieved when Wilson finally requested a declaration of war. Distancing himself from the president’s grander ambitions, however, he called for “poise, cold-bloodedness, and a Machiavellian disposition to see things as they are … whether we like them or not.”14
The First World War witnessed a remarkable mobilization on the part of America’s universities and intellectuals. When America’s war began, its research universities—inspired by early efforts, such as Robert La Follette Sr.’s “Wisconsin Idea,” to have universities serve a wider political purpose—willingly donated their resources to help realize Wilson’s plans. Hopeful that national planning would elevate the significance of the social sciences, Beard wrote in an article for The New Republic on November 17, 1917, that “political science, economics, social economy, and sociology are now in the crucible of circumstance.”15 Yet it was the natural and physical sciences, not the social sciences, that found it easier to embrace their elevation to circumstance. In February 1918, for example, Columbia University’s mechanical and electrical engineering departments offered all the assistance to the Navy Department that it deemed useful—a windfall for the government. Science and engineering departments followed suit across the nation.
Concerned lest they be left behind, humanities and social science scholars also began to offer their services to wartime America. Alongside distinguished fellow historians such as Carl Becker, Albert Bushnell Hart, and J. Franklin Jameson, Beard propagandized for President Wilson under the aegis of the Committee on Public Information. His scholarly efforts primarily consisted in placing Wilhelmine Germany in its proper historical context: as a ruthless expansionary power that posed a direct threat to the United States.16 In an appeal to support President Wilson’s fourth Liberty Bond Drive, Beard wrote in Harper’s Magazine that America “and her allies are now pitted against the most merciless despotism the world has ever seen … A German victory means the utter destruction of those ideals of peace and international goodwill which have been America’s great reliance.”17 Beard was aware that presenting despotism versus democracy in Manichaean terms obscured as much as it revealed. But he willingly set aside complexity to serve a larger good.
Ultimately, though, regimentation of purpose made Beard queasy. In the spring of 1916, when American participation still seemed a distant prospect, Columbia’s Board of Trustees had warned Beard against any teaching that was “likely to inculcate disrespect for American institutions”—an admonition that Beard cheerfully ignored, as it would have required disavowal of his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. The president of Columbia University, the effervescent and strong-willed Nicholas Murray Butler, then warned the faculty at the onset of hostilities that any professor who failed to support the war would jeopardize his position at the university.18 In March 1917, the university rescinded a speaking invitation that had been issued to the Russian pacifist intellectual Count Ilya Tolstoy (son of Leo). This infuriated Beard, who viewed freedom of speech as inviolable. In a speech on June 6, 1917, President Butler observed that “what had been tolerated before becomes intolerable now … What had been folly was now treason,” before delivering “the last and only warning to any among us … who are not with whole heart and mind and strength committed to fight with us to make the world safe for democracy.”19 A few months later, Columbia’s Board of Trustees dismissed two professors, Henry W. L. Dana (active in the Anti-Militarism League) and James McKeen Cattell (a pacifist), for expressing unpatriotic sentiments. Butler intervened to stall the promotion of a professor who had failed to accord sufficient respect to the Supreme Court.
On October 9, 1917, Beard concluded a lecture to a class of seventy students with the announcement that this would be his last. The university’s efforts to “humiliate or terrorize every man who held progressive, liberal, or controversial views” compelled him to sever his association with the institution.20 The students rose to their feet and applauded for twenty-five minutes, an affirmation that left Beard in tears.21 President Butler was blindsided and dismayed, remarking that Beard’s “resignation was completely unnecessary; I did my best to get him to stay; he had no excuse for going.”22
In a firm letter of resignation, Beard reminded Butler that “I have, from the beginning, believed that a victory for the German Imperial Government would plunge all of us into the black night of military barbarism. I was among the first to urge a declaration of war by the United States, and I believe that we should now press forward with all our might to a just conclusion.” In spite of this prowar stance, however, Beard found something unsettling about the silencing of dissent compelled by the Board of Trustees, whose members he described as “reactionary and visionless in politics, and narrow and mediaeval in religion.” Beard’s letter of resignation was reprinted in The New York Times, as was part of an earlier speech that distilled his position succinctly. “This country was founded on disrespect and the denial of authority,” Beard observed, “and it is no time to stop free discussion.”23 Indeed, Beard’s resignation was newsworthy enough to make the front page of the nation’s paper of record. Its wider significance was further emphasized when The Times printed a mean-spirited editorial titled “Columbia’s Deliverance,” which celebrated Beard’s departure, aimed a few kicks at An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, and offered a philistine précis on the appropriate responsibilities of the intellectual:
Columbia University is better for Beard’s resignation … If [Beard’s] sort of teaching were allowed to go on unchecked by public sentiment and the strong hands of university Trustees, we should presently find educated American youth applying the doctrine of economic determinism to everything from the Lord’s Prayer to the binomial theorem … Trustees may be visionless in politics and mediaeval in religion, but they have the hard, common sense to know … that infallible wisdom does not perch upon the back of every chair occupied by a professor bearing the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and they know that if colleges and universities are not to become breeding grounds of radicalism and socialism, it must be recognized that academic freedom has two sides, that freedom to teach is correlative to the freedom to dispense with poisonous teaching.24
Such abuse was grist to Beard’s mill. Entirely comfortable in the persona of enfant terrible—and dismayed to find himself in such a cowed public sphere—he joined the educationalist philosopher John Dewey and Leonara O’Reilly of the Women’s Trade Union League in protesting the firing of three teachers at DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City who allegedly held “views subversive of good discipline and of undermining good citizenship.” One year later, two of Beard’s coauthored textbooks were banned from Army training camps. In January 1919, Beard castigated President Wilson for failing to release political prisoners, such as Eugene V. Debs, “whose offense was to retain Mr. Wilson’s pacifist views after he abandoned them.”25
Turning his attention to geopolitics, Beard wondered with faux innocence whether Wilson’s promotion of “liberty, self-government, and the undictated development of all peoples” also applied to the British Empire.26 His baiting of the president soon got him in trouble. The following week Beard was cited in the record of a Senate committee charged with investigating German propaganda as one of sixty-two people whose actions had undermined the battle against the Central Powers. Infuriated by this allegation, Beard wrote a strong letter to The New York Times that recounted his support for an early declaration of war against Germany, frustration at President Wilson’s dithering, and the service he provided to the U.S. government in publicizing bond issues and the malevolence of German intentions. Pointedly, he observed that, unlike the president, he had never been “too proud to fight.”27 Beard’s experience of the First World War shaped his strong aversion toward U.S. participation in future conflicts. If independent thinking could not survive war, then it was clear that the conflict was not worth fighting.
The suppression of civil liberties in wartime America was not the only issue that vexed Beard. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin released details of secret diplomatic cables that showed all the Allied Powers in a duplicitous and self-serving light. Their effect on Beard was salutary. Angered that this correspondence revealed Great Britain’s intentions to assume control of Germany’s colonies after the war, and dismayed that Wilson’s moderate peace was being mauled by the French and the British in Paris, Beard lost all hope in the president’s ability to serve a useful diplomatic purpose. He attributed many of the president’s failings to his languid professorial temperament, which explained his refusal to place “before Lloyd George and Clemenceau the vital questions of an independent mind, which he could have done forcefully … [Wilson had] remained just a professor after all.” Equally culpable were the “American professors of his expert loyal guard,” the Inquiry, who had collectively failed to remind the president of his core “mission” to think independently and artfully. In the United States, and indeed in France and Britain, Beard observed that too many intellectuals had been “full of wonder and admiration for W.W.—‘one of our boys made it,’” and had failed to subject his diffidence at the negotiating table to a bracing critique.28
The only intellectual to stand up for “the university” in its truest sense was John Maynard Keynes, who had identified how the reparation and war-guilt provisions critically undermined the Treaty of Versailles. Keynes had remained true to his intellect and had not been swayed by wishful thinking, a trait that Beard came to deplore in himself when revisiting his own response to the war. Beard’s World War I commenced with pugnacity and closed with profound disillusionment. Writing in later years, the radical journalist Max Lerner suggested that Beard must have felt that “after all he had been had. The sense of humiliation [in supporting war] became a rankling resolve to be revenged on his own folly.”29
Much of the remainder of Beard’s life was devoted to ensuring that Americans were never again duped into supporting speciously rationalized foreign-policy crusades. Throughout the 1930s, Beard railed against the notion that the United States had any obligation—moral, economic, or strategic—to the rest of the world. Instead, Beard urged President Franklin Roosevelt to follow a policy of “continental Americanism”: the reallocation of America’s vast resources and energies from resolving the quarrels of others to self-improvement and self-reliance. The formation of a more perfect union could set a powerful example, and that was the sum total of America’s obligation to the world. Beard believed in worldmaking through example.
In essence, Beard wanted to turn the clock back to before Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History had been published and the nation lost its way. Where Mahan believed that the world was becoming smaller, rendering American detachment from European affairs anachronistic, Beard believed that the United States was more or less invulnerable to serious threats—that it benefited from what the historian C. Vann Woodward described as “free security.”30 Right up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Beard argued that fortunate geography and abundant natural resources permitted the United States to ignore whatever convulsions were affecting the Old World at any given time. The United States was a “city upon a hill,” and Beard believed that nothing launched from the foot of the hill could reach the top. He mocked credulous Americans for “imagining German planes from Bolivia dropping bombs on peaceful people in Keokuk or Kankakee.”31
In The Idea of the National Interest, published in 1934, Beard rounded on Mahan’s assertion that greater American participation in global trade ultimately benefited the nation. Through close statistical analysis, Beard proved, to his satisfaction, at least, that the costs of the Spanish-American War far outweighed the economic benefits of acquiring overseas territory and opening up markets for American exports. Beard charged that Mahan’s theory of sea power and American expansion rested on a dangerous fallacy. The nation was more than capable of pursuing a singular path and needed to draw no lessons from any other nation—particularly one as sullied through empire as Great Britain. Beard deployed mild sarcasm in chiding Woodrow Wilson’s naïve internationalism: “In fine, historic wrongs are to be righted, nations put on a permanent footing, and the peace of all guaranteed by all. Never had the dream of universal and final peace seemed so near to realization.”32 But it was Mahan he truly despised for counseling an insidious and unnecessary course of expansion that debased America.
From today’s perspective it is easy to dismiss Beard’s views as the last hurrah of an antediluvian generation that could not perceive that the Mahanian flood of economic interdependence and military expansion had already happened. Yet one must be careful to avoid hindsight, which makes gods of us all. After the disappointments of Wilson’s presidency, and in the midst of the Great Depression, the appeal of Beard’s continentalism—harking back to a simpler and more isolated era—is not difficult to comprehend. As the historian Brooke Blower has noted, antifascist foreign correspondents for American newspapers, such as Dorothy Thompson and Vincent Sheehan, found it hugely challenging to rouse the interest of their fellow Americans in wars and crises afflicting Spain, Poland, and Czechoslovakia—let alone Manchuria and Abyssinia. One journalist observed that as the world edged toward chaos, Americans conceived of themselves as “collectively a nation of Robinson Crusoes.”33 The comfort offered by such a mind-set is easily forgiven, as is the appeal of an individual who characterized America as a bounteous and self-sufficient island. To better understand America’s perspective on world affairs during the 1920s and 1930s, one must attempt to enter a world as yet untouched by the horrors that ensued. Following Charles Beard’s journey through this era provides an erudite perspective on a nation seriously at odds over its world role, its capabilities, its purpose, and what to do about looming threats.
* * *
Charles Austin Beard was born on his father’s sixty-acre farm near Knightstown, Indiana, on November 27, 1874. As F. Scott Fitzgerald, a fellow midwesterner, put it in The Great Gatsby, Beard was raised in “that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” His family was wealthy, stable, and English and Scotch-Irish in lineage. Indeed, it was a source of family pride that the Beards could trace ancestry to two pilgrims. While the Beards had begun their American incarnation in New England and Virginia, financial opportunities had lured the more intrepid of them westward. East-central Indiana was fecund, and Charles’s father, William, had tilled its mineral-rich soil with great success, ensuring that all his family’s needs were met. In 1880, the Beards relocated to a thirty-five-acre farm in Spiceland, to allow their two sons, Charles and Clarence, to attend Spiceland Academy, a Quaker school with a fine academic pedigree. As well as receiving an excellent education, Charles lived an active life that embraced agrarian Jeffersonian virtues, recalling, “By the time I was fifteen I had had enough exercise to last me a lifetime. My muscles and body were hard as steel. I could ride wild horses bare back, and split an oak log with a maul and a wedge.”34
His parents’ farmhouse was lined with books, important local dignitaries were frequent dinner guests, and the Grand Old Party was the Beards’ natural political home. It was a childhood of great material privilege and social entitlement, which continued into Beard’s early adulthood. Following Charles’s graduation from high school in 1891, his father purchased a local paper in Knightstown, The Sun, for his sons to manage. They reveled in their task, offering steady editorial support for the Republican Party, until their joint venture ended in 1894 when Clarence resigned to establish a new organ, The Henry County Republican. This thrilling experience left quite an impression on Charles, who edited the DePauw Palladium during his undergraduate studies and later wrote frequently for the national press. Beard came to believe that truly important ideas should reach the widest possible audience and that journalistic and academic writings were necessarily complementary.
When in 1895 Beard commenced his studies at DePauw University, Indiana’s most prestigious liberal arts college, his political views were conventionally Republican. Asked in later years why his historical scholarship was colored by economic determinism, Beard replied, “People ask me why I emphasize economic questions so much. They should have been present in the family parlor, when my father and his friends gathered to discuss public affairs.”35 It was not until he made his first trip to Chicago, in 1896—an industrial behemoth scarred by slums and sharp ethnic tensions—that he located and embraced the social conscience that would define his subsequent activism and scholarship. In Chicago he joined the vocal and learned discussions held at Hull House, the West Side settlement house founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr that became an influential center for social reform. Discovering his voice in such an august and multiethnic setting—so different in composition from the political parlors of Indiana—instilled in Beard confidence and sophistication.
Having moved steadily leftward during his time at DePauw, his political awakening was fully realized when he departed the United States for Oxford University in 1898, on the good advice of one of his tutors. Oxford was not renowned for awakening social consciences—its libraries and academics were the main attraction. And indeed Beard made good intellectual use of the four years he spent at England’s oldest university, impressing its dons with his acuity and graciousness. The Regius Professor of Modern History, Frederick York Powell, declared him “the nicest American I’ve ever met.”36 But Beard also used Oxford as a base to tour the industrial heartland, meeting giants of the British trade union movement such as James Keir Hardie, Ben Tillett, and James Sexton. Keir Hardie, in particular, was inspirational. He started his working life at age seven, overcame a crushing educational disadvantage, and founded the Independent Labour Party thirty years later, transforming British politics in the process.
Inspired by the commendable pedagogical function served by Hull House—and by the lessons of self-improvement contained in Keir Hardie’s remarkable life story—Beard set himself the task of improving educational opportunities for the “working classes” (to deploy the British idiom) upon his arrival at Oxford. By the start of his second term, Beard had accumulated endorsements from unions representing some three hundred thousand workers, as well as the imprimatur of Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party, to establish an educational institution that met the needs of those who had been previously marginalized. A swell of Britain’s laboring poor had offered their support for this young idealistic American to establish a workingman’s college in Oxford—a remarkable story in itself. Ruskin Hall, named by Beard in honor of the Victorian critic and moralist John Ruskin, was established in 1899 largely thanks to the efforts of Beard and two other visiting American students, the Kansan socialists Walter and Amne L. Vrooman.37 Ruskin College remains an important provider of education to this day, educating, among other politicians, scholars, and unionists, a former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, John Prescott.
Driven by what the historian Richard Hofstadter described as a “demonic intensity,” Beard put his Oxford sojourn to good academic use by completing all of the archival work—in English county record offices—on what would become his Columbia University Ph.D. thesis: The Office of the Justice of the Peace in England: Its Origins and Development.38 Rarely has the aridity of a doctoral dissertation stood in more marked contrast to the color and variety of a subsequent body of work. Yet there was clearly much more to Beard’s Oxford experience than doctoral research. Besides establishing a new college and completing the fieldwork for a Ph.D., Beard wrote extensively on topics of wide resonance. His first book, The Industrial Revolution, was written and published while Beard was in Oxford, and it is still in print after more than a century. The book presents a fast-paced account of industrialization through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with preponderant focus on those who lost out during Britain’s remarkable rise to economic preeminence. The Industrial Revolution was designed to serve a pedagogical function in emphasizing the indignities visited on workers to enrich elites.
These were also tumultuous years in the United States, and Beard took a close interest in the foreign-policy developments anticipated and shaped by Mahan’s books and articles on the primacy of sea power. Beard initially supported President McKinley’s declaration of war on Spain—indeed, he volunteered and was turned down, on grounds of health, for active service—but soon felt great unease over the popular exuberance that accompanied the course of the conflict and at the acquisitive evolution of America’s war aims.39 According to his wife, Beard wondered aloud “how an intelligent rational man can be anxious for war, with all its dire consequences … It is a gory path to glory.”40 Mary Beard added that it was during the Spanish-American War that “[William Jennings] Bryan’s anti-imperialism took roots in Beard’s soul.” In 1948, Beard told the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. that he “left the GOP in imperialism in 1900 and … found no home anywhere since.”41
If the Spanish-American War had driven Beard toward Bryanite anti-imperialism, it didn’t particularly show in an article he wrote for an Oxford student magazine, New Oxford, in November 1901. The essay considered whether imperialism, on the whole, was a good or bad thing. In the case of the United States, Beard believed British imperial endeavor had been vindicated because “the Americans, as bad and half-civilized as they are, are better than the howling, scalping Comanches whose places they have taken.” The British colonial legacy in America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand was beneficial enough to inspire pride, not shame. Yet in surveying America’s recent imperial efforts, Beard recorded some strong words about America’s forlorn adventure in the Philippines. Sending hundreds of “expensively equipped teachers to the Philippines to instruct naked natives while thousands of white children in American cities” were “under-fed and under-educated” suggested that the likes of McKinley and Roosevelt were not “brute imperialists but self-destructive lunatics.”42 Only when the United States and the nations of Europe had attended to their own problems should they attempt to improve the lot of the poorer nations.
Only at this juncture did Beard believe that development could be encouraged under the auspices of an “international bureau” charged with directing irrigation, swamp drainage, land reclamation, and large-scale infrastructure projects. In words that would have repelled Jane Addams and Keir Hardie, Beard suggested that the work would be completed by “mongol and negro” workers “always under white foremen,” suggesting that the hierarchical notions learned through his privileged childhood were still present. And while one should be careful not to set great store in anyone’s scribblings in a student magazine, Beard is more culpable than most, having already published his first book and, thanks to his editorship of a newspaper, being far from naïve when it came to the permanence of the printed word. Beyond the racism contained in some of the language, however, the article’s primary significance lies in Beard’s mixed views on well-meaning global activism. This was the first time that Beard privileged national self-improvement over overseas missionary work, a prioritization that defined his later views on foreign policy.43
After politely rebuffing the attempts of Ramsay MacDonald (who became Labour’s first prime minister in 1924) to convince him to stay in Britain to assist the fledgling Labour Party, Beard returned home to commence his postgraduate study at Columbia University in 1902, gaining his master’s degree a year later, and submitting his Ph.D. dissertation the year after that—all testament to the scholarly benefit derived from his four years traversing England’s many local archives.
It is important to note that Beard’s Ph.D. was in political science, not history. At Oxford, as the historian Mark C. Smith writes, Beard learned from Frederick York Powell that “history’s purpose was not to praise institutions or theories but to understand them; history was a science, rather than theology or ethics.”44 The political science emphasis in Beard’s early years is notable, although it remained present throughout the entirety of his career, particularly as he turned his attention toward foreign policy. Indeed, the political scientist Clyde Barrow categorizes twenty-eight of Beard’s forty-nine books as falling within the field of political science, with topics including political theory, comparative politics, municipal reform, and public administration.45 Columbia appointed Beard as a lecturer in history in 1904, later moving him to an adjunct position in politics and government.
At Columbia—then at the height of its powers as an institution that challenged disciplinary boundaries—Beard was greatly influenced by Professors James Harvey Robinson and E.R.A. Seligman, two giants in the historical field. Robinson was at the vanguard of the so-called New History movement, which expanded beyond narrow political history to emphasize the social, cultural, scientific, and intellectual roots of society formation. The New History was something of an amalgam of history and political science, which explains why it roused Beard’s admiration. Seligman’s major work, The Economic Interpretation of History, was published in 1902 and it came to exert a profound influence on Beard’s scholarship. Seligman taught Beard to follow the money when tracing the taproots of political motivation, an emphasis he pursued subsequently. Columbia was thus a good intellectual home for the young, idealistic advocate of social reform, and he stayed happily there until his resignation fifteen years later. He also embraced New York City and assumed a stake in maintaining its upkeep and development. A true believer in the science of politics, Beard pursued his interest in urban planning by working for the New York Bureau of Municipal Research; his interests were myriad, as were his talents. He was much like certain of the Founding Fathers, who lived and extolled the merits of the generalist intellect. Beard was an engaged public citizen, a much-loved teacher, and a highly regarded scholar.
Beard’s politics were a fascinating amalgam of Jeffersonian idealism, midwestern self-reliance, and urban cosmopolitanism. He was a man of the left, but his journey to that position was atypical. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Beard’s contemporary at graduate school, remembered him as “in no sense a Marxist or single track economic determinist,” but someone who “endowed everything he said with a bracing air of realism” and whose “recurrent theme” was “the role of material self-interest in America’s political and constitutional development.”46 Yet even this recurrent theme conceals complexity in the manner of its formation. When Beard began work on An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, his admiration for the Founders soared, in spite of the fact that the book served mainly to identify and skewer the self-interested way the Constitution was framed and the disingenuous manner of its public presentation. In 1935, Beard declared that Jefferson was the greatest of the Founders because he “combined in his person the best of both the Old World and the New.” Yet he also praised the two main authors of The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, and compared that book favorably to anything written in Europe during the Enlightenment.47
Beard is the most left-wing, but also the most conventionally patriotic, of all the individuals this book surveys. He reveled in his nation’s unique virtues. Every chapter of Charles Beard’s career can be explained, to varying degrees, in reference to his love for the United States. In 1927, Beard wrote that “among the many historic assemblies which have wrought revolutions in the affairs, it seems safe to say that there has never been one that commanded more political talent, practical experience, and sound substance than the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.”48 This was a proudly conventional and patriotic description of the founding generation. Indeed, Beard had something of a proprietary interest in the United States, which is not surprising given his family’s long history in the colonies and the nation. William Appleman Williams, the University of Wisconsin scholar who embraced New History revisionism with fewer interpretive qualms, did not deny that Beard had offered “radical insights into the malfunctioning of the existing system.” Nonetheless, Williams distilled his mixed feelings in describing Beard as a “Tory-Radical,” a man “torn between concern for his fellow men and a personal and philosophic commitment to private property.”49
Beard’s character and raison d’être are similarly complex in origin and evolution. His friend the writer Matthew Josephson wrote that he had “never met anywhere a man who so thoroughly enjoyed his own sense of freedom or who was so jealous of his intellectual and moral independence.”50 This singularity is reflected in his decision to leave Columbia, as well as in the thrust of his scholarship, which is almost willful in its hostility to bland ingratiation. Another constant throughout his career was his belief that “objectivity” in historical scholarship is unattainable—although he did not believe that this should discourage anyone from trying. Beard contested the Germanic ideal of scholarship, as famously expressed by Leopold von Ranke, that the historian’s task was “to describe the past as it actually was,” not to judge it through the lens of preconceived ideology.51 A skeptical Beard believed that this imperative was a “noble dream.”52 “Every historian’s work, that is, his selection of facts, his emphasis, his omissions, his organization, and his methods of presentation—bears a relation to his own personality and the age and circumstances in which he lives.”53 For Beard, history was necessarily a relativist, political activity.
Accompanying Beard’s critique of the self-deluding sanctimony that accompanied the Rankean search for “truth” was his belief that historians must make their work accessible to a general audience and address, so far as possible, the most pressing problems of the contemporary world. Convinced that “specialization in particular, cut off from wider relations, leads to mere thoughtless scholasticism,” Beard’s ambitions as a historian became increasingly divorced from his profession as a whole—and indeed from the discipline of political science, the field in which he earned his doctorate.54 His ability to speak persuasively to two audiences garnered him the unique distinction of being elevated by his peers to the presidency of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association.
Yet Beard believed that political science was as blameworthy as history in its embrace of the margins. In 1918, he complained that too much political science was “concerned with minutiae, not great causes and ideas … The only way we can know the state is through concrete manifestation of power … The only way to find the manifestation is to discover its historical circumstance.”55 Scholars should serve their public not by seeking ever-narrower “truths,” but by engaging accessibly with the wider forces that govern political affairs. In his presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 1926, titled “Time, Technology, and the Creative Spirit in Political Science,” Beard observed that relying solely on mathematical modeling to address narrow phenomena was “myopic” and “barren”—denying the rightful role of creativity and intuition. He called on his fellow political scientists to dare “to be wrong in something important rather than right in some meticulous banality.”56 He chided historians and political scientists alike for parochialism and obscurantism. History needed to draw more from political science and political science needed to attend more to history. Beard believed that the United States was improvable if scholars from both disciplines set their goals higher—if they communicated with the general public rather than with themselves.
Achieving this goal, of course, assumed confidence in the ability of ordinary Americans to react constructively to compelling testimony, and in this respect Beard was unashamedly optimistic. Unlike Walter Lippmann, who viewed the American people as a “phantom public” lacking the ability to distinguish between sophistry and substance—an artless mass that responded more to sound bites and crude stereotypes than to measured analyses—Beard believed that political progress had been driven by “the activities of millions of men and women, most of them unknown to the pages of written history.” The general public yearned for knowledge and possessed an irresistible latent power. It might take only “a word, an article, a pamphlet, a speech, or a book [to] set in train forces of incalculable moment.”57
The reverse was also true: where ignorance reigned, susceptibility to extremism was heightened. Beard held German historical scholarship partly responsible for that nation’s failure to lay strong pluralist foundations, thus permitting strong-willed despots to run amok. Although historians were vested with a grave duty to illuminate the past as widely as possible, German historians had failed to write an accessible, panoptic history of the nation for its people. Brilliant as certain of them were, German research historians sought their “truth” by narrowing horizons and developing jargon: an abdication of responsibility. Beard came to assume his role as a public intellectual with high seriousness, for the stakes were high in interwar America.
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The United States emerged from the First World War as the world’s largest economic power by a considerable margin.58 The conflict had hollowed out the European belligerents, whose populations had been devastated and whose debts—owed to the United States primarily—had assumed gargantuan dimensions. The United States’ gold reserves were vast, and the nation’s economic output was equivalent to its next six competitors combined. As battlefield deaths and disease took a wrecking ball to European demography, America’s population increased by 30 percent between 1900 and 1920, constituting 106 million in total—compared to 44 million in Great Britain, 37 million in France, and 64 million in Germany.59 Major economic shifts were also occurring in the complexion of America’s overseas trade, as the historian Odd Arne Westad has observed. During the 1920s and 1930s, the United States became the hub of the global economy, yet more and more of its trade spokes were connected to the Third World. In Latin America, for example, the United States displaced Britain as the primary provider of capital investment. America’s exports to South Asia tripled between 1920 and 1940. And this increased influence and visibility went beyond the reach of cold cash. As Westad writes, “This influence was far more profound than just American models for production and management. In urban popular culture, in Europe and in the Third World, America established itself as the epitome of modernity, conveying ideas that undermined existing concepts of status, class and identity.”60 The global economy throughout the 1920s was coming to resemble the interconnected trading entity that Alfred Mahan prophesized would benefit the fluid, innovative American economy more than its competitors. For these reasons, the term “isolationism” must be treated with great caution when considering U.S foreign policy between the wars.
The League of Nations was a toxic entity in American political debate in 1920. President Warren Harding’s inaugural address of 1921 had lambasted global multilateralism: “A world super-government is contrary to everything we cherish and can have no sanction by our republic.”61 For a time Harding forbade the State Department from responding to official correspondence from the league’s headquarters in Geneva, an action that in the genteel world of international diplomacy was truly obnoxious, not to say self-defeating. Attacking the nascent league was a bipartisan project, however. Wilson’s Democratic Party was cool toward the league in the 1924 general election, not that it did them much good. The Democratic candidate, John W. Davis, was trounced by Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge, a Vermonter of remarkable stillness and self-possession who was reelected to the presidency—which he had assumed following Harding’s death in 1923—in a landslide. Upon Coolidge’s death in 1933, Dorothy Parker had famously quipped, “How could they tell?” In losing to such an uncharismatic politician, the Democratic Party’s weaknesses were revealed.
While the 1920s were owned by the anti-Wilsonian Republican Party, its internationalist wing was active and influential. Conservative internationalists like Elihu Root, William Howard Taft, and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, all major figures in the GOP, fiercely defended the activist legacy bequeathed by McKinley and Roosevelt, steering Harding’s and Coolidge’s foreign policies away from narrow isolationism. In the early 1920s, American diplomats began to meet unofficially with league representatives and sit in on its meetings. In 1925, the United States sent official observers to the league. Of course, the League of Nations sans America was a low-key affair driven by two exhausted nations, Britain and France, with economic and colonial interests to protect and limited means to do so. Some minor territorial disputes were resolved, but important absences in membership prevented the league from enforcing anything close to “collective security,” Wilson’s original aim.62
Nonetheless, the United States came in time to interact freely with this flawed entity. Secretary of State Hughes wielded genuine foreign-policy influence during the Harding and Coolidge presidencies, carefully weaning America off an instinctive distrust of European involvement that had spiked in 1920 and 1921. Aware of the problems created by President Wilson’s overreach, Hughes’s approach was incremental and low-key, allowing him to present seventy-one treaties sufficiently modest to secure Senate approval. The maxim by which Hughes lived was “a maximum of security with a minimum of commitment,” which offers a neat summary of the tenor of U.S. foreign policy in the first half of the 1920s.63
Beard’s thinking on world affairs throughout the 1920s oscillated between a grudging recognition of the need for international engagement and a growing fear that the nation must avoid the type of economic entanglements, and grandiose diplomatic ambitions, that brought it into the First World War. During a trip to Paris in 1922, Charles and Mary hungrily purchased a “trunk load” of books on the banks of the Seine that documented the secret tsarist diplomatic activity that had been made gleefully public by Vladimir Lenin.64 Making good use of this material, Beard delivered a series of lectures at Dartmouth College, later published as Cross-Currents in Europe Today, which cast preponderant blame on France and Russia—in scheming to destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908—for causing the First World War. Beard was moving away from viewing Prussian militarism as some kind of insatiable geopolitical evil. Further lamenting that the “world is an economic unit and the United States is being woven into the very fabric of that unity,” Beard urged the United States to resist this trend by refusing to facilitate or protect the “foreign trade or investments of American citizens,” granting the Philippines independence so that U.S. interests did not extend beyond Hawaii, and focusing much more on internal development. Such a stance, Beard wrote, would “bend all national genius upon the creation of a civilization which, in power and glory and noble living, would rise above all the achievements of the past.”65 He continued to delineate this theme in The Rise of American Civilization, a two-volume history of the United States, coauthored with his wife, considered among his and their finest works. The Beards observed that America’s vast material abundance—not its ideology, government, or westward-facing development—was its most important defining characteristic. It was thus the duty of government both to spread this natural bounty more equitably and to avoid any overseas adventures that might challenge the primacy of internal development.66 Beard described his prioritization of the domestic sphere as “continentalism” and decried those who sought to characterize his advocacy of selective retrenchment as “little Americanism.” Replying to an appreciative review of The Rise by the historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford, Beard echoed Thomas Paine’s revolutionary intentions: “We have to create the new world, not dig it from the past.”67
Beard was also concerned by the increase in defense spending throughout the 1920s—which harmed domestic progress by failing to correspond with the absence of genuine military threats at this time. (Beard’s concerns here were exaggerated.) At the close of the war, America’s demobilization was rapid, but numbers crept up gradually so that a regular army of fourteen thousand was supplemented by a much more significant reserve of citizen-soldiers. The U.S. Navy had displaced Great Britain’s as the world’s strongest at the time of the armistice, but Harding and Coolidge were content to concede parity with Britain in capital ships. In hindsight, giving up such a military lead appears reckless. But the world was a different place in the 1920s: somber rather than combustible in its international relations. The historian George Herring has observed that “it was quite appropriate for the United States during these years to be economically powerful, and only moderately strong militarily.”68 Beard, however, felt that U.S. defense cuts should be much deeper so that the more pressing domestic problems of inner-city deprivation, inadequate health care, and nationwide poverty could be fully addressed. In August 1928, the signatories of the Kellogg-Briand Pact—a long list that included all the major world powers—renounced war as “an instrument of national policy,” except in clear cases of self-defense. Referencing the fact that world military spending was higher in 1928 than in 1912, Beard noted the irony that “at the very moment when war as an instrument of national policy (with reservations) is solemnly renounced, the civilized world, comparatively speaking, has ready for death and destruction bigger and better armaments than ever in its history.”69
Beard had not given up on assisting the rest of the world in the 1920s, however, and often went out of his way to make clear that his preference for diplomatic modesty was not influenced by a pacific ideology shaped by his family’s Quakerism. On April 4, 1925, for example, Beard wrote to Senator Albert J. Beveridge, informing him that “I am no pacifist.” Nonetheless, Beard wrote, “I hold it to be a crime to waste any of our blood on empire not to be peopled by our stock but by alien races.” The U.S. government had to be much more selective about where it allocated finite resources. “Let us not fight over a whim,” Beard continued, “or a bit of pique or a few dollars worth of trade to enrich more idle plutocrats. Land that has two or three hundred people to the square mile is worthless to us, no matter if a handful of capitalists get ten percent of it.”70 Here Beard was alluding to a growing American concern with China, which was looking increasingly vulnerable to its formidable neighbor Japan. Every nation was of differing importance to the United States, and China was somewhere near the middle. In classic realist fashion, Beard was distinguishing between diplomatic interests in order of their importance to the United States—not suggesting that America raise the drawbridge and disband the State Department. Indeed, as late as 1930, Beard would criticize pure isolationists for sticking blindly to a “dogma” rendered dangerous by lack of understanding of the technological developments that undermined the supposed protection offered by the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. In a book written with his son, William, Beard warned that “the creed of isolationism, which once seemed convincing … may be employed to defeat its own purposes, namely, the maintenance of national security.”71 It took a near-perfect economic storm to convince Beard that his variant on isolationism was the best way to assure America’s safety and prosperity.
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A speculative boom in the 1920s had persuaded increasing numbers of Americans to invest their savings in stocks and shares. In fact, three decades of economic growth, beginning with the boom precipitated by the Spanish-American War, seemed to suggest that cyclical economic slumps had been eradicated. This was an illusion. Economic contractions in 1907–1908, 1914–1915, and 1919–1922 should have cautioned against exuberance. But the broad trend toward growth seemed inexorable. To cash in on such benign circumstances, many Americans borrowed money to invest in the stock market, which in turn created an investment bubble driven by overconfidence and overexposure. As individual portfolios became less diverse, the risks to the wider economy were heightened: more and more of the country’s wealth was tied to the vagaries of Wall Street.
On Tuesday, October 23, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange’s ticker tape—which records fluctuations in share prices—kept running for 104 minutes after the day had officially ended. Relentless “sell” instructions were causing a marked depreciation in stocks on the tape. The next day nearly thirteen million shares were traded, the most ever recorded in a single day. On October 25, President Herbert Hoover sought to calm market sentiment by announcing that “the fundamental business of the country, that is, production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.”72 Investors, however, were not mollified by the president’s reassurance. On October 28 and 29, the market went into free fall. In America, over the course of the crash, $85 billion in share value was wiped out, affecting approximately three million American shareholders, proliferating bankrupticies, which later increased unemployment, repossessions, and homelessness.73 Share ownership was not as widespread as some have contended: the NYSE, inflating its own centrality to the nation, had overestimated in 1929 that twenty-five million Americans owned stocks.74 But the numbers were high enough to cause more than a ripple effect. This was a seismic event that portended yet more tectonic activity.
The Wall Street crash did not directly cause the Great Depression. This also required a clumsy government response, which was not long in coming. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 had imposed significant levies on imports. This was a politically popular course of action, as the purpose of tariffs—if not the outcome—is to protect jobs at home, a lesson heeded by Republicans and Democrats in 1928 when both parties promised support for even higher tariffs. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 followed the logic of its 1922 predecessor in extremis: tariffs were increased to 40 percent, their highest level in American history. It was, in the words of the historian David Kennedy, “an economic and a political catastrophe.” One thousand economists signed a petition urging Hoover to veto this narrow and self-defeating bill, which invited the rest of the world to engage in similarly protectionist practice. The influential J. P. Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, a close adviser to the president, recalled, “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot Tariff. That Act intensified nationalism all over the world.”75 Indeed, the French believed the tariff was akin to a declaration of war and vowed to retaliate in kind. But Hoover signed the bill in June 1930, leading Walter Lippmann, previously a Hoover supporter, to lambast the president for accepting “a wretched and mischievous product of stupidity and greed.”76 Hopeful that America, a land of plenty, was better placed than anywhere else to subsist through its own efforts and resources, Hawley-Smoot’s supporters consigned the rest of the world economy to a dismal fate and scarcely served their homeland any better. The United States was not nearly as self-sufficient as protectionists believed its resources suggested. Over the course of 1930, the gross national product fell by 24 percent and unemployment increased from 8.9 to 11.9 percent. This rate more than doubled over the next two years.
In the final two months of 1930, six hundred banks were forced to close, leaving their depositors empty-handed. Thanks partly to President Andrew Jackson’s assault on Alexander Hamilton’s system of centralized, federally regulated banking, many of America’s banks, according to Carter Glass, the cofounder of the Federal Reserve, were “pawn shops” managed by “little grocery corner-men calling themselves bankers—and all they know is how to shave a note.”77 And while a liquidity crisis afflicting the small banks of the provincial hinterland was one thing, the contagion soon spread to bigger, more esteemed enterprises. New York City’s Bank of United States collapsed on December 11, 1930—the largest commercial bank failure in American history. Panic spread across the nation’s banks and their depositors, clogging the arteries of credit. Viable banks recalled loans as quickly as depositors could close their accounts. As loans became harder to acquire, small and medium-size businesses went to the wall and millions of workers were made redundant. As export markets collapsed, U.S. unemployment rose to 25 percent by the beginning of 1933, the Depression’s trough. Perhaps for the first time, an atmosphere of despondency descended upon a nation known for its optimism. At a micro level, this theme was captured in the suicide note written by a mechanic in Houston: “The depression has got me licked. There is no work to be had. I can’t accept charity and I am too proud to appeal to my kin or friends, and I am too honest to steal. So I see no other course. A land flowing with milk and honey and a first-class mechanic can’t make an honest living. I would rather take my chances with a just God than with unjust humanity.”78
As the historian Anthony J. Badger writes, “So many people in Memphis jumped off the Hanrahan Bridge into the Mississippi that the telephone numbers of local clergymen willing to counsel would-be suicides were listed in the press. The efficacy of this assistance was substantially lessened by the newspaper headline ‘Memphis Preacher Jumps Off.’”79 The Depression was a low point in American self-esteem, memorialized in works of affecting social realism such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
President Herbert Hoover continues to receive a hard rap for his mishandling of the Great Depression’s early years—some of which is warranted and some of which is not. His critics often forget that Hoover was remarkably talented, a victim of circumstance as well as of his orthodox belief that small government worked best, even during a crisis of that magnitude. The Stanford University scholar Thomas Sowell is surely correct to observe, “Had he never become president, Herbert Hoover could have gone down in history as one of the greatest humanitarians of the century.”80 In the aftermath of the First World War, Hoover formed a philanthropic organization, seeded in the first instance by his own personal fortune, to alleviate starvation on the European continent. He was successful—not to say uncommonly proactive and brave—in spearheading this endeavor. John Maynard Keynes observed that Hoover was “the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation.”81 This led some Democrats to approach Hoover about standing for president in 1920, with Franklin Roosevelt as his running mate. Hoover demurred, feeling more at home in the Republican Party, and instead performed distinguished service, during an admittedly economically buoyant decade, as secretary of commerce to Harding and Coolidge.
Hoover’s belief in the superiority of well-meaning voluntarism to government-provided safety nets—and his aversion to running budget deficits—shaped his passivity in the face of irresistible economic forces that served to destroy his reputation. His name remains something of an epithet today. Throughout the 1980s, whenever the Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill wanted to dismiss President Reagan as a doctrinaire conservative of deceptive affability, he would describe him as “Hoover with a smile.”82 Hoover consistently appears on the periodic attempts to rank the presidents as faring better only than Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, and Franklin Pierce. This does a disservice to Hoover. Beard certainly didn’t view Hoover’s response to this grave economic crisis as especially misdirected in the context of the times. Indeed, in 1931 he applauded not just his tariff policy but also the manner in which the president refused to bow to the Navy League’s demands to increase defense spending in what was claimed as a more dangerous world—support that earned Beard an appreciative phone call at home from the president.83
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Much as the cataclysmic events of the First World War guided Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to begin the practice of international relations anew, so the Great Depression—shattering in different ways—informed Charles Beard’s efforts to formulate a similarly bold vision for America’s foreign policy. Wilson and Beard were both political science Ph.D.s responding to calamity with a radical theory, although each had a starkly different point of departure. Whereas Wilson believed the United States had to assume a leadership role to change the world, Beard believed that the nation had to retreat from the world and change itself.
So Beard supported Hawley-Smoot because a 40 percent import tariff was almost guaranteed to compel self-reliance. Beard further envisioned the creation of a barter system in which nations would trade only in essential items not provided by domestic enterprise, removing wasteful competition that leads to needless conflict. He urged tighter controls governing the extension of loans so as to prevent “irresponsible governments” from securing American credit, and sought a substantial contraction in diplomatic activity. Beard believed it was high time the government rejected the rationale that the U.S. military should be strong enough “to protect any American citizen who wants to make ten per cent on the bonds of Weissnichtwo or sell cornflakes, shoehorns and collar buttons to the … world willy nilly.”84
To manage this statist edifice, predicated on much wishful thinking, Beard called for Congress to establish what he named a “National Economic Council,” charged with coordinating all the nation’s economic requirements in the realms of finance, production, and distribution.85 The name he gave to this strategy of foreign-policy retrenchment and domestic statism was “continental Americanism,” elaborating more fully on themes developed in the 1920s. The only problem was that President Hoover steadfastly refused to heed Beard’s advice, or anything even approaching the activism he counseled. It took the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 to raise Beard’s hopes that his views might find a more receptive audience. Indeed, Beard hoped that he would serve as a freelance tutor of sorts to the new president.
Franklin Roosevelt’s public persona is indelibly carved in historical memory: his broad, optimistic smile, half-glasses, finely tailored suits, ever-present cigarette holder, and projection of utter confidence in his and his nation’s destiny. Yet for a man on first-name terms with virtually everyone he encountered, his inner self was safely guarded—FDR was a Fabergé egg in his dazzling, unpenetrable exterior. Born in 1882 in upstate New York to a wealthy patrician family, Roosevelt was educated at Groton and Harvard before embarking on a political career: an occupation often deemed beneath a man of his class. Unlike Wilson, FDR was not an intellectual—he assimilated rather than created useful knowledge. After meeting Roosevelt in 1934, John Maynard Keynes recorded surprise that the president was not more “literate, economically speaking.”86
While Roosevelt brought to domestic and foreign policy no original insights of his own devising, he was adept at delegating the task of policy and strategy innovation to others, and he had a wonderful knack—with some notable exceptions, like the Supreme Court–packing plan—of identifying the ideas and policies that would effect positive, enduring change and pass muster in Congress and the nation at large. His political skills were abundant. He drew important cautionary lessons from his service as assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, recognizing that the White House and public opinion had to be closely aligned for major policy innovations to take root. And it was a fortunate and marvelous thing that Roosevelt was so amply gifted in political matters. For his presidency coincided with the worst economic downturn, and most dangerous war, in American history. His unflappability and charisma—as displayed in his masterly radio Fireside Chats—were indispensable in those perilous circumstances.
FDR was clear in his admiration for Alfred Thayer Mahan, remarking that “as a young man I had the pleasure of knowing Admiral Mahan and I have an almost complete collection of his books and articles.”87 His mother observed that her son “loved history in any form and used to pore over Admiral Mahan’s ‘History of Sea Power’ until he had practically memorized the whole book.”88 Roosevelt believed in the indispensability of a powerful navy, and during the first year of his presidency, in the most challenging economic circumstances, he catalyzed a naval renaissance, allocating a massive $238 billion in June 1933 to improve the fleet and prioritize the development of high-pressure and high-temperature steam propulsion—a farsighted funding decision that allowed the U.S. Navy to launch ships that were up to 25 percent more efficient than those of its peers.89 But FDR’s views on Woodrow Wilson were more qualified in their admiration. In 1928, Roosevelt chided Republicans in Foreign Affairs for positively aiding “the charge that in a time when great constructive aid was needed in the task of solving the grave problems facing the whole earth, we have contributed little or nothing.”90 Throughout the 1920s, Roosevelt recorded strong opposition to America’s continued reluctance to become a full member of the League of Nations.
Political expediency trumped fidelity to Wilson’s league during the nomination tussle in 1932, however, when FDR disavowed his previous support for league membership and the Democratic Party later dropped references to Wilson’s cherished project, eradicating nearly all mention of this pathbreaking two-term president. Repudiating Woodrow Wilson was cruel but perhaps vindicated in the nature of the campaign and its outcome: Roosevelt crushed Hoover on Election Day. FDR took 57.4 percent of the popular vote and left the incumbent president with just 59 electoral college votes from the states of the Northeast, whose long-standing affinity for the GOP would not survive the coming age of Roosevelt. Of course, the overwhelming manner of the Democratic Party’s victory might also suggest that dismissing Wilson’s legacy was unneccesary.
Charles Beard welcomed Roosevelt’s election for the president’s keen attention to the Depression. Both men shared a common optimism about America’s future and its capacity for evolution and improvability. Throughout his thirteen years as president, FDR led a step change in the purpose and reach of the federal government, implementing some of the statist policies Beard had advocated and whose implementation he celebrated. What was not to like in a presidency devoted to job creation, social security, large-scale public works programs, the promotion of labor union rights, and federal subsidy of the arts? Of course, the president rejected Beard’s counsel in refusing to centralize economic planning in a single source that would have brought the nation closer in affinity to the corporatism of fascist Italy than the ameliorative, paternalist state capitalism in, say, France or even Great Britain. But Beard forgave him that, recognizing that a change of that magnitude was out of reach for the present time—even for so gifted a politician as Roosevelt.
What worried Beard was the president’s affinity for the Navy. In this regard, and in this alone, he much preferred Hoover, who shared his aversion to Mahanian naval theory. FDR’s support for naval expansion seemed to portend an outward-facing foreign policy. And Beard worried that this foolish emphasis might result in the president proving susceptible to “a grand diversion—a diversion that might not be unwelcome, should the domestic recovery program fall far short of its aims”—a remarkably farsighted observation for Beard to have registered in 1933.91 At this juncture, Beard blamed some of Roosevelt’s hawkish advisers rather than the man himself. He identified a split in the administration between Jeffersonians who favored political and economic self-sufficiency, such as the president and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and dangerous Wilsonian internationalists like Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who believed that the United States must promote order, spread democratic values, and continue to facilitate greater economic interdependence. Hoping to tilt the administration in a continentalist direction, Beard embarked on the task of convincing Roosevelt of his indispensability as an adviser.
In October 1933, Beard dined with Roosevelt at the White House. Like countless others, Beard had been thoroughly charmed by his presidential host and returned home in an optimistic frame of mind, hopeful that FDR might again prove receptive to his views on how to deal with the economic crisis and assure America a more modest place in world affairs.92 In 1932, the Social Science Research Council had awarded Beard a $25,000 grant to formulate a precise definition of that vexing term, “the national interest.” The result of this research program was two books published in 1934, “with the collaboration of” the lawyer and Yale academic George H. E. Smith. Put together, The Idea of the National Interest and The Open Door at Home represent Beard’s only attempts to emulate Alfred Mahan in formulating a foreign-policy vision that stood a realistic chance of being actioned. Realizing that time was not on his side, Beard was more forward than Mahan in identifying his intended audience. The core chapter in The Open Door at Home, titled “The Ethical Roots of Policy,” was addressed directly to President Roosevelt: “the statesman … the socially-minded, public personality engrossed in the public interest.” Beard described himself as a “scholar conscious of his role … a statesman, without portfolio, to be sure, but with a kindred sense of public responsibility.”93 In 1934, the stars were never better aligned for Beard to assume a position of policy influence.
Though published simultaneously, the two books are quite different in style and purpose. The Idea of the National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy is the most ostensibly Rankean book Beard ever wrote. His intention was to be “coldly factual throughout,” and the result is a dry reading experience so challenging to the reader’s forbearance as to make it positively un-Beardian.94 The yin and yang of the book are Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, whose conceptions of the national interest were starkly different. For Jefferson, the national interest was primarily agrarian in economic form. The United States should pursue a policy of expansion, but only within the continent, to create a self-sufficient population truly independent from the Old World. For Hamilton, America’s national interest was primarily urban and commercial. As the U.S. economy grew, through exploitation of its vast natural resources and technological innovation, a point would come when its political leaders would have to unshackle the nation from the continental sphere.
To Beard’s mind, the logical outcome of Hamilton’s elevation of overseas trade as the central driver of progress was reckless adventurism in the Caribbean and the Pacific, culminating in the Spanish-American War and its land-grabbing outcome. While Jeffersonianism was not without its flaws, Beard believed fidelity to Hamiltonianism was a greater danger for the United States, since implict in its rationale is a perpetual expansion of international commitments and a massive navy to protect them. It was in the nature of big business to urge a restless, expansive foreign policy, which was anathema to America’s true national interest. Where commerce went, so the military would be compelled to follow. This resulted in “outward thrusts of power” that damaged the United States, in neglecting its domestic sphere, nearly as much as the nation on the receiving end of the thrust.95
The Open Door at Home was more philosophically wide-reaching and friendlier to the reader. Beard argued that the Great Depression was the logical outcome of the type of economic interdependence extolled by the likes of Hamilton and Mahan. Following the analytical thread developed in The Rise of American Civilization, Beard celebrated America’s natural abundance, which permitted the nation to avoid the cataclysmic class struggles predicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He recommended that the federal government assume absolute control of imports and exports, that peripheral territorial possessions be handed back to their rightful owners, that U.S. diplomatic contact be limited to the minimum necessary to avoid counterproductive rudeness, and that a radical “standard of life” budget be created so as to redistribute the nation’s vast wealth more equitably and to eliminate the cancer of unemployment that blighted the American body politic. Beard promised that this program would produce marvelous outcomes for the United States, and conceivably for the rest of the world too:
By domestic control over all foreign trade, by the relaxation of the capitalistic pressure of the United States on world markets in standardized manufactures and commercial investments, by concentrating national energies on the development of national resources and the efficient distribution of wealth at home, by deliberately withdrawing from the rivalries of imperialistic nations, the United States would take its official nose out of a thousand affairs of no vital concern to the people of the United States, would draw back its defense lines upon zones that can be defended with the greatest probability of victory in case of war, and would thus have a minimum dependence on the “strategic products” indispensable to war. And by multiplying many fold its outlays for scientific research in analytic and synthetic chemistry, it could steadily decrease its dependence on world markets for the essentials indispensable to our material civilization in time of peace …
In short, by cultivating its own garden, by setting an example of national self-restraint (which is certainly easier than restraining fifty other nations in an international conference, or beating them in war), by making no commitments that cannot be readily enforced by arms, by adopting toward other nations a policy of fair and open commodity exchange, by refraining from giving them any moral advice on any subject, and by providing a military and naval machine as adequate as possible to the defense of this policy, the United States may realize maximum security, attain minimum dependence upon governments and conditions beyond its control, and develop its own resources to the utmost.96
This was a vision every bit as radical as Woodrow Wilson’s. Yet its premise was antithetical to nearly everything presented in the Fourteen Points. It was also unremittingly hostile to Mahan’s vision of the United States as a maritime trading empire ennobled and hardened, from time to time, by participation in necessary wars. Where Wilson and Mahan wanted America to make peace with the interlinked nature of world affairs, Beard instead believed that the nation should retreat and “cultivate its own garden.” Where Wilson believed America owed the world its leadership, Beard believed it owed it nothing—although other nations were welcome to test America’s developmental path if they so wished. In Darwinian terms, Beard believed that the United States was similar to places like Australia and the Galápagos Islands, remote enough from outside predators to support a unique and remarkable ecosystem. “Enthroned between two oceans,” Beard wrote, “with no historic enemies on the north or south, the Republic can be defended against any foes which such a policy may raise up against it.”97
Certain signs had suggested to Beard that the president might be sympathetic to this radical reimagning of America’s future. In July 1933, Roosevelt had withdrawn from the London Economic Conference, designed to hammer out a common global response to the economic depression—which by now affected every nation. To protect the trading benefits that accompanied a weak dollar, however, Roosevelt had refused to join a shared policy of currency stabilization. Beard applauded FDR’s actions, which he believed followed the Jeffersonian tradition, for imparting the lesson that foreign trade was not necessary for domestic recovery.98 In January 1934, the journalist Ernest K. Lindley, known to be close to FDR, reported that Beard was “one of the intellectual parents of the New Deal,” a welcome validation. In a generally warm review of The Open Door at Home in The American Historical Review, the historian Samuel Flagg Bemis observed that the book held the potential to become “a classic of American political thought” and that well-placed sources had informed him that President Roosevelt had read the book and jotted comments in the margins.99
Bemis was right about Roosevelt scribbling in his book, and indeed that the president “kept it in his desk for callers to see for three weeks!” But Beard also learned in time that one of FDR’s handwritten comments described the book as “a bad dish.” His feeling of disappointment was compounded when Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace penned an evenhanded but critical review of The Open Door at Home in The New Republic. Wallace observed that Beard “dreams a great dream of a beautiful and peaceful future of our great land,” to which “the heart thrills … [but] even Beard has not seen the whole problem. He is not so good an economic technician as he is a historian.” Rather than securing the United States a blissful future, Wallace believed it was impossible, and potentially very damaging, for the United States to abandon world trade in favor of domestic development alone. In another review, the historian Herbert Feis, then working as an economic adviser to the State Department, detected chauvinism in Beard’s recommendations and worried his model might invite the kind of reciprocal belligerency he deplored. If France viewed Hawley-Smoot as a declaration of war, what might Paris make of America’s move to autarky? Feis further worried that technological innovation would soon rob the United States of the protection offered by two great oceans.100 The United States might just about achieve self-sufficiency, but nations with formidable militaries and vast potential for further growth—Germany and Japan in particular—lacked the natural resources to follow a similar path. What would stop them from seeking redress from the bountiful United States when military technology permitted? Wallace and Feis detected significant shortcomings in Beard’s thesis. Put together, alongside FDR’s “bad dish” comment, their critiques might be described as the official administration response to Beard’s continentalist vision for his beloved United States. His hopes for policy relevance were crushed in 1934. Beard’s views on Roosevelt continued their trajectory from hope to concern to strident opposition.
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Like Germany and Italy, Japan felt it had been given a raw deal at the Paris Peace Conference. For fighting valiantly on the side of the Entente, winning important battles against the German fleet in the Pacific, Tokyo believed that the acquisition of the League of Nations’ South Sea Mandate—constituting what we know today as Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands—was inadequate recompense, particularly when compared to the mandate booty engineered and acquired by France and Great Britain. A nation for which Beardian autarky was a hopeless dream, lacking vital natural resources such as rubber and oil, Japan was a first-rank power implacably opposed to the territorially restrictive interwar status quo. And so Japan fell under the spell of militarists during the 1920s and 1930s, ambitious and ruthless men who believed the only way to secure Japan a more glorious future was to annex the rich northern regions of China and as much of Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies as its formidable military could conquer. This plan for expanding the Japanese empire at its neighbors’ expense was given an Orwellian title in 1940: “The Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
The first stage in creating this arc of prosperity was the Japanese annexation of Manchuria, in northern China. This was achieved in 1931 when the territory was invaded, declared independent from China, and renamed Manchukuo. Half a million Japanese men and women subsequently emigrated to settle and till the resource-rich land, with a view to alleviating some of the economic woes afflicting the homeland. In response, the Hoover administration promulgated what became known as the Stimson Doctrine—named after Secretary of State Henry Stimson—which held that the United States would not recognize Manchukuo as an independent nation, or indeed any other Chinese territory that Japan decided to hack off and subsume in its pursuit of self-sufficiency. The Stimson Doctrine was directly challenged in 1937 with Japan’s full-scale invasion of China, unleashing a brutal conflict in which Japanese war crimes were legion. Following the Japanese capture of Nanjing (Nanking), for example, its troops murdered some two hundred thousand Chinese civilians and soldiers, and raped tens of thousands of women.101 The “Rape of Nanjing” was a dark episode in Japan’s quest for regional dominance, and more were to come. Roosevelt’s response was critical but muted, influenced to some degree by the coldly realist advice he received from his adviser William C. Bullitt: “We have large emotional interests in China, small economic interests, and no vital interests.”102
Berlin and Rome were plotting a similarly destructive and expansionist path. Italy was the lesser of those irredentist powers—though a pioneer in embracing fascism first—and it invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935 with ambitions of rekindling the glories of the Roman Empire. More plausibly, it hoped to exact revenge for the humiliating defeat that the Abyssinians had dealt the Italian army during the Battle of Adowa in 1896. This time the Italian military prevailed against the hopelessly outgunned Abyssinians—who nonetheless managed to deal some embarrassing blows to Benito Mussolini’s invading forces. In a shameful diplomatic episode, Britain and France combined in an attempt to placate Mussolini in the hope that he might ally Italy against Adolf Hitler’s Germany. The two nations refused to close the Suez Canal, which would have stranded the Italian army in the Horn of Africa, and proposed a plan devised by their foreign secretaries, Sir Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval, which ceded much of Abyssinia to Italy. When the details of this supine plan were made public, Hoare-Laval was torpedoed and the two men were forced to resign. A halfhearted League of Nations embargo was imposed in its place, which, fatally, did not include oil. But the damage to the reputations of both Britain and France was profound. Observing diplomatic adversaries that were irresolute at their core, an emboldened Hitler recognized that the time was opportune to attack the reviled Versailles Treaty.
Hitler’s challenge to the European status quo proceeded cautiously. First the führer ordered the remilitarization of the Rhineland—which the victors at Versailles had shorn of military capabilities—in March 1936. Britain and France did nothing in response. During the summer, Hitler dispatched German troops, and state-of-the-art military hardware, to assist the efforts of fellow fascist General Francisco Franco to overthrow the democratically elected Popular Front government in Spain. Direct participation in the Spanish Civil War allowed Hitler to test new battlefield strategems, the blitzkrieg and indiscriminate aerial bombardment, which were deployed to devastating effect in all theaters during the Second World War. German support was also decisive in allowing Franco to prevail, leading to the establishment of another fascist nation on the European continent. A German “Axis” with Mussolini’s Italy was declared later that year—displaying the futility of Anglo-French efforts to lure Il Duce to their side. In February 1938, Germany gave up its hopes of reacquiring its Pacific territories and agreed to a formal alliance with Japan. In that same month, German troops entered Austria and a pan-German Anschluss was declared, later ratified by a plebiscite that registered Austrian approval at a suspiciously high level of 99 percent.
Confident that continued Anglo-French acquiescence to his assault on Versailles proved that those nations were irredeemably effete, Hitler turned next to Czechoslovakia, whose Sudetenland was peopled by a large proportion of ethnic Germans. While caving to German aggression had not worked well to that point, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain gave it one final go at the Munich conference in late September 1938. With Chamberlain as master of ceremonies, he, French prime minister Édouard Daladier, and Hitler hashed out an agreeement, signed on September 30, which gifted the Sudetenland—the industrial heart of Czechoslovakia—to Germany. With dubious grounds for self-congratulation, and infused with a large dose of Polyannaish optimism, Chamberlain hailed the Munich agreement for assuring “peace in our time.” This peace lasted until March 1939, when Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia and became a pro-Nazi satellite, and the remainder of the now impotent nation was incorporated into the Third Reich at the point of the German bayonet.
On March 31, France and Britain, finally conceding the failure of their appeasement of Hitler, pledged their full support for an independent Poland, which by now was hemmed in by Nazi Germany to the west and Stalin’s Soviet Union to the east. Britain further solidified its commitments when it signed an Anglo-Polish military alliance in August, which Chamberlain promised to honor. A few years too late, a line had finally been drawn in the sand, not that its permanence much convinced Hitler, who had reason to doubt that Britain would risk war over Poland. A million and a half battle-ready German troops flooded across the Polish border on September 1, exactly one week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This pact of convenience between two of the twentieth century’s worst mass murderers promised nonaggression between Germany and the Soviet Union as their armies feasted on Polish territory, visiting hellish destruction as they went. Holding true to their word this time, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. Conditioned to Anglo-French pliability, Hitler was genuinely surprised when he received the news.
With such audacity and brutality did Adolf Hitler destroy almost all that had been drawn up by Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau in Paris. In fact, Hitler could even claim to be following the logic of ethnic self-determination—he was gathering all German peoples under the benign control of the Third Reich. Totalitarian governments in Japan, Germany, and Italy were taking what they believed was rightfully theirs, and the rest of the world—with Britain and France sharing most of the blame—seemed to lack the will and ability to stop them. A strong, unified Anglo-French response to these Versailles transgressions might have halted his momentum, shattering the cult of personality he and his propagandists so capably developed, and encouraging his opponents to launch a coup of the type that Hitler had tried in Munich in 1923 and Berlin in 1933.
* * *
The parameters of President Roosevelt’s response to these harrowing geopolitical events were circumscribed by the isolationist tenor of the times, which Beard, through his voluminous writings in national newspapers and magazines, helped in small part to create. In 1934, however, it was H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen’s sensational Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armaments Industry that truly captured the public’s imagination. A national bestseller, widely circulated by the influential Book-of-the-Month Club, Merchants of Death argued that the armaments industry played a major role in bringing the world to war in 1914 and provoking American participation three years later. Responding to the apparent plausibility of some of the claims, and the furor they created, Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota led a congressional investigation charged with establishing the true origins of the First World War. Nye offered dramatic and incendiary conclusions, laying blame at the feet of reckless, internationalist American banks—whose interests were dangerously intertwined with those of the arms industry—that extended credits to Britain and France that could be redeemed only if Germany and its allies were defeated. The Nye Committee’s findings were published at the beginning of 1935 and soon began to exert significant influence on congressional and public opinion. A 1936 straw poll revealed that 95 percent of Americans opposed participation in any future war with Hitler’s Germany. Roosevelt understood that he confronted “a public psychology of long standing—a psychology which comes very close to saying ‘peace at any price.’”103
Congress passed three major neutrality acts with sweeping majorities. The first, passed in 1935—as Mussolini prepared to attack Abyssinia—required that during a state of war the U.S. should impose an arms embargo on all belligerents and warned Americans against traveling on belligerent-owned ships. The second neutrality act was passed in February 1936. Taking its direct cue from the Nye Committee, it prohibited war loans and credits for belligerents. The third act, passed in May 1937, renewed the earlier restrictions and made American travel on belligerent ships unlawful, rather than simply cautioning Americans against it. The rationale behind all these acts was clear: an isolationist congressional majority wanted to foreclose to Roosevelt all the maneuvers that Wilson allegedly deployed in bringing the United States into war in 1917. On a visit to the United States, the sister of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain described her host nation as “hardly a people to go tiger shooting with.”104
It was Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, and fear that a resurgent Congress, if not contained, could derail Roosevelt’s broad political agenda, that convinced the president to reassert authority and lead public opinion with a major speech on international affairs. As the New Deal faltered in the face of renewed recession, and FDR’s efforts to pack the Supreme Court with sympathetic justices ran into an almighty political/judicial roadblock, Secretary of State Cordell Hull recalled that in this context of political crisis he “was becoming increasingly worried over the growth of isolationist sentiment in the United States.” He urged the president to challenge his tormentors in Congress and in the media by delivering a major speech on the efficacy of “international cooperation in the course of his journey.” Roosevelt agreed to Hull’s request and delivered an address in Chicago on October 5, 1937—the famous “Quarantine Speech.”105
Hundreds of thousands of people thronged the sidewalks, framing the president’s leisurely route through Chicago, desperate to catch a glimpse of a leader still viewed as a potential savior. In a powerful speech, FDR referred directly to the wars raging in China and Spain, observing that world civilization was threatened by the terror that authoritarian regimes were visiting upon the earth. He attacked those well-intentioned but dangerous idealists who argued that America’s comfortable perch in the western hemisphere was distant enough from the world’s travails to avoid involvement and attack. It was a remarkable speech that exerted a profound influence on the future course of world affairs:
The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy, instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality … When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease … We are adopting such measures as will minimize our risk of involvement, but we cannot have complete protection in a world of disorder in which confidence and security have broken down.106
The crowd’s response was ecstatic. On the train back to Washington, the president, seeking further affirmation, asked his secretary, “How did it go, Grace?” When she nodded appreciatively, Roosevelt mused, “Well, it’s done now. It was something that needed saying.”107 While it might have needed saying, it also provoked a backlash. As news of Roosevelt’s speech reached Washington, D.C., Congressmen Hamilton Fish and George Tinkham called for the president’s impeachment. Cordell Hull recalled that the “reaction against the quarantine idea was quick and violent. As I saw it, this had the effect of setting back for at least six months our constant educational campaign intended to create and strengthen public opinion toward international cooperation.”108 FDR’s line in the sand had been drawn as quickly as his political survival permitted.
In January 1938, Congressman Louis A. Ludlow sponsored a constitutional amendment that would have required a national referendum on the declaration of war, except in the event of a direct military attack on American territory. This proposal was defeated in the House by 209 votes to 188. Sensing that momentum was now on his side, Roosevelt requested a substantial increase in military preparedness expenditure, which was duly authorized. Through 1939, FDR grew bold enough to challenge the neutrality laws. After Germany’s invasion of Poland, a fourth neutrality act was passed, which repealed the blunt-instrument nature of the three that preceded it. Passed in November 1939, the fourth act allowed belligerent nations (meaning all those that opposed Hitler) to purchase American arms on a cash-and-carry basis—a lifeline that Britain and France grasped as long as financial reserves permitted. On May 10—a day that was auspicious only in the sense that Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister—Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The defensive Maginot Line, in which French hopes were mainly vested, was outflanked, and one by one, in rapid succession, each nation fell to the German blitzkrieg within five weeks. Paris fell to the Germans on June 14. The British Empire was the only force that remained to thwart Hitler’s ambitions, and it desperately needed American supplies. But how could America supply a nation that couldn’t afford its wares?
* * *
Beard was relaxed about Japan’s acquisitive ambitions in its Pacific backyard. In a speech delivered at the University of Southern California, one week after the establishment of Manchukuo in 1931, Beard observed that Japanese expansionism was the natural outgrowth of a system in which the navy and army operate outside the reach of civilian authority and are accorded too much institutional respect. He further cautioned that what Japan did to China was of no real concern to the United States, occupied as it was with defending its “continental heritage” in arduous economic circumstances.109 He despaired of the internationalist rationale presented by Walter Lippmann in 1933, who argued that “this damnable crisis is international whether we like it or not … It is international in spite of all prejudices, preferences, and wishes to the contrary, and the man who tries to act as if it weren’t is trying to put out a great fire with one bucket of water.”110 Beard believed that Lippmann was wrong, and the public opinion he so disparaged would present the strongest bulwark against internationalist-led expansionism: “With much twisting and turning the American people are renewing the [George] Washington tradition and repudiating both the Kiplingesque imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt and the universal philanthropy of Woodrow Wilson.”111 But the public still had to be on their guard. Beard strongly suspected that President Roosevelt was seeking participation in a foreign war to deflect attention from continued depression at home. “The Jeffersonian party gave the nation the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and its participation in the World War,” Beard wrote in February 1935. “The Pacific War awaits.”112
Following Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, Beard turned fire on those observers sanctimonious enough to pin the label of “good” or “bad” on Italian actions, and who recklessly “employ the risk of war to prevent war” in fidelity to such distinctions.113 In an asymmetric war that pitted the narcissistic, bellicose Benito Mussolini against the noble, diminutive Haile Selassie, Beard’s denigration of the good-bad dichotomy seems difficult to fathom, let alone agree with. But his broad motivation—to avoid American entanglement in a larger war precipitated by Italy’s interest in a godforsaken part of a godforsaken continent—is clear enough. Following this line of reasoning, in September 1937 Beard observed that Roosevelt, ill-advisedly emulating Woodrow Wilson, was still following “the creed that the United States must do good all around the world.”114
Beard nonetheless was plotting a difficult path between his obvious distaste for Japan, Italy, and Germany, and his desire to undermine America’s stake in forestalling their advance. His sense of comradeship with progressives and socialists elsewhere was still clearly present. Beard supported, for example, supplying the “Loyalist” Popular Front in Spain with American weaponry and munitions—it was clearly a moral good that Franco’s insurrection be defeated. Following Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, Beard penned a perceptive, morally informed critique of what Japan, Italy, and Germany had wrought, and what this portended:
By their faith in force … Hitler and Mussolini are more or less beyond the reach of the old-fashioned calculations. Japanese militarists belong in the same emotional category. Having a philosophy of history in which “anything may happen,” the directors of these three groups may fling prudence to the winds and make the experiment [of aggressive war], or without any deliberate intention or open declarations, the great powers may find themselves at war in the midst of a dissolving civilization.115
But then in February 1938, fearing that the brutality of Japanese actions in China might permit FDR to convince Americans of a phantom stake in East Asia, Beard presented a stark choice between privileging the fates of exotic peoples thousands of miles away and privileging American development itself:
It is easy to get into a great moral passion over the distant Chinese. It costs nothing much now, though it may cost the blood of countless American boys. It involves no conflict with greedy interests in our own midst. It sounds well on Sunday … [But] anybody who feels hot with morals and is affected with delicate sensibilities can find enough to do at home, considering the misery of the 10,000,000 unemployed, the tramps, the beggars, the sharecroppers, tenants and field hands right here at our door.116
While it was difficult for Beard to reconcile his contempt for Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo with his belief that America was best advised to tend to its own Edenic garden, the latter strain in his thinking became dominant with FDR’s Quarantine Speech, which he believed portended disaster. Responding to the self-serving support extended to the president by Earl Browder, general secretary of the American Communist Party, Beard wondered of the speech: “How can we have the effrontery to assume that we can solve the problems of Asia and Europe, encrusted in the blood-rust of fifty centuries? Really, little boys and girls, how can we?”117 Called to testify before the House of Representatives on February 9, 1938, Beard decried FDR’s “policy of quarantine” as necessarily requiring “big battleships to be used in aggressive warfare in the Far Pacific or the Far Atlantic.” He also cast scorn on those sensationalists who entertained the possibility of the “fascist goblins of Europe … marching across the Atlantic to Brazil … [This was] the kind of nightmare which a holder of shipbuilding stocks had when ordinary business is bad … the new racket created to herd the American people into Roosevelt’s quarantine camp.”118
A convenient way to dance around any residual discomfort about Japanese, German, and Italian transgressions was to blame Britain and France for inviting this mess with their irresolution—which Beard did relentlessly. Having seen the nation close-up during his time at Oxford, Beard had mixed feelings toward Britain. He admired its orderly society and myriad political and cultural achievements, but he despised its class system and its empire. Reviewing an anti-British polemic penned by Quincy Howe, titled England Expects Every American to Do His Duty, Beard agreed wholeheartedly with the author’s central contention that America should let its elderly colonial parent fight its own battles, which were invariably waged in defense of its own interests. But clear commonalities in language, economics, and cultural traditions assured “that even blind isolationists must recognize this fact in all their thought about practice.”119 For all that, Beard believed that Britain should face down Hitler and Mussolini alone—or with any help that France could muster. In early 1939, Beard advised that Paris and London should “call [Hitler’s] bluff and stop the peril within forty-eight hours. They can establish solidarity, if that is their real and secret wish. They have the men, the materials, the money, and the power.”120 Here, Beard was overestimating Anglo-French capabilities and underestimating those of the German Wehrmacht. But he was far from alone in misdiagnosing the European military balance in the late 1930s.
Where Beard was prescient was in comprehending the horrific threat posed by Hitler’s warped sensibilities. In Foreign Affairs in 1936, he wrote that Mein Kampf should be taken at face value, that “no other book approaches in authority this sacred text.” He also formed some general sense of what Hitler’s accession meant for Germany’s Jewish population—“Jews are condemned in language unprintable. They are to be driven to the Ghetto or out of Germany”—and nailed with unerring accuracy Hitler’s expansionist design: “Turned in upon themselves, nourishing deep resentments, and lashed to fury by a militant system of education, the German people are conditioned for that day when Hitler, his technicians and his army, are ready and are reasonably sure of the prospects of success in a sudden and devastating attack, East or West.”121
One thing that Beard could not be accused of was underestimating Hitler. Yet in 1939, in contrast to his earlier advocacy of Britain stiffening its resolve, he weclomed continued equivocation. On May 20, the radical journalist H. L. Mencken wrote to Beard that “if the danger of war passes it certainly won’t be Roosevelt’s fault. He had done his best to encourage an unyielding spirit in England.” Beard replied, “I fear that you are right as to our being served up for the next crusade … Let us hope that the wild men in Europe manage to bluff one another cold … and thus grant us a little respite.” To Beard’s credit, a year later—as Britain’s fate as an independent nation was contested in the skies above—he chastised Mencken for suggesting in an article that “there is not the slightest evidence that the Totalitarian Powers … have been planning any attack on this country.” Beard responded that “the statement is right—there is not the slightest evidence—in the sense that we do not know what they are doing in this respect, if anything. But there are grounds for suspicion … I am for staying out of this mess in Europe, but experience and prudence, coupled with the pains of an oft-singed tail, suggest to me that we keep our powder dry and our neck well in.” Backing down only slightly, Mencken wrote unvaliantly that “the blame for whatever happens rests with Roosevelt, it seems to me, far more than on Hitler.”122
Beard made some questionable and contradictory calls on the darkening situation in Europe. But as this exchange suggests, his intellect remained supple enough to recoil from unsubstantiated assertions such as Mencken’s. Throughout the late 1930s, however, Beard’s continentalism placed him in unpleasant company. The isolationist camp was a broad church, but many of its members were regrettably on the side of the devil. The priest and radio demagogue Charles Coughlin was virulently anti-Semitic and didn’t expend much effort shielding his fascist sympathies. The chief spokesman of the isolationist America First Committee, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, held ugly views on eugenics and the influence exerted by Jews. Lindbergh’s admiration for the Third Reich—and what he viewed as its irresistible Luftwaffe—led him to advise FDR to accommodate Hitler in America’s best interests. Isolationists drew their strength from a smorgasbord of sectional interests: draft resisters, anti-Semites, Irish Americans, pro-fascist German and Italian Americans, William Randolph Hearst and his credulous readers, midwestern xenophobes, pacifists, Quakers, and Bryanite Democrats. The sociologist Talcott Parsons observed that isolationists were consumed by something akin to social pathology, a variant on what Émile Durkheim labeled anomie: “the unbearable loss of normative regulation that signaled the breakdown of social structure and the disorientation of isolated individuals.”123 Beard operated in the midst of that cacophony of strident, chauvinistic, disoriented voices.
Compared to these unpleasant rationales for American noninvolvement, Beard’s continentalism was a paragon of humanity, driven by benign social-reformist statism. There is something laudable about his injunction to perfect the United States before attempting to export an unrealized model elsewhere. He wasn’t the only isolationist from the academic community. John Bassett Moore (Columbia), Edwin M. Borchard (Yale), Philips Bradley (Dartmouth), Harry Elmer Barnes (Smith), Robert M. Hutchins (Chicago), and Henry Noble MacCracken (Vassar) were all firmly opposed to American participation in a second world war. But Beard provided the most humane and intellectually compelling rationale for global noninvolvement. Although he defended Lindbergh against his detractors in 1940—refusing to attribute base, racist motives to such a hero—Beard also declined to offer public support for America First, writing to Matthew Josephson that “I wanted to speak out for peace. But I found that the wrong kind of people were in that camp, while those I like seem to be on the other side.”124
Beard’s final plea for geopolitical sanity was published as France fell to the force of German arms. In A Foreign Policy for America, Beard identifies two villains who combined to create a momentum for wrongheaded overseas entanglement that might eventually destroy the republic: Alfred Thayer Mahan and Woodrow Wilson—and the success of one led inexorably to the overstretch of the other. Beard describes Mahan as “the most successful propagandist ever produced in the United States,” lamenting that Theodore Roosevelt “made Mahan’s work his bible of politics for the United States.” In condemning Mahan with a full repertoire of vitriol, Beard displays almost virtuosic ability:
Perhaps in the whole history of the country there had never been a more cold-blooded resolve to “put over on the people” such a “grand” policy, in spite of their recalcitrance, “ignorance,” and “provincialism” … [Mahan] was a veritable ignoramus. He took such old works as suited his preconceived purposes, tore passages and fragments out of their context … In sum and substance, Mahan’s foreign policy for the United States was based on the pure materialism of biological greed, although it was more or less clouded by rhetorical confusion, religious sentiments, and a clumsy style … Much which passed for argument in the Mahan system was little more than the rationalized war passion of a frustrated swivel-chair officer who had no stomach for the hard work of navigation and fighting.125
Having put Mahan and Roosevelt to the sword, Beard turned to Wilson. For Beard, the segue was seamless: “From their participation in collective world politics, from the imperialistic theory of ‘doing good to backwards people,’ it was but a step to President Wilson’s scheme for permanent and open participation in European and Asiatic affairs in the alleged interest of universal peace and general welfare.”126 Beard clearly despised Mahan, but he had more sympathy for Wilson and his Fourteen Points:
It went beyond the fondest dreams of many pacificators. It raised some dubious issues. But it was a program for world peace, put forward by the highest authority in the country … In fine, historic wrongs are to be righted, nations put on a permanent footing, and the peace of all guaranteed by all. Never had the dream of universal and final peace seemed so near to realization … By President Wilson’s program the old foreign policies of the United States—continentalism and imperialism—were to be resolutely discarded and a new policy of internationalism was to be substituted. Active and continuous participation in the affairs of Europe was to take the place of non-intervention.127
Yet this fine-sounding plan was critically undermined by its insidious economic foundations. Wilson’s internationalism “placed its main reliance on laissez faire in international commerce as the chief economic support of the new order. Thus in every respect it was in flat and irreconcilable contradiction to continentalism for the United States, the program of peace for America in this hemisphere, and pacific relations elsewhere.”128 Mahan was driven by brute materialism, Wilson by self-deluding altruism, and both were operating against the Jeffersonian spirit of American continentalism:
Twice in American history the governing elite had turned the American nation away from its continental center of gravity into world adventures, ostensibly in a search for relations with the other countries or regions that would yield prosperity for American industry and a flowering of American prestige. First in 1898; second in 1917. But each time the main body of the people had resisted the propulsion, had found delusions in the false promises, and had returned to the continental orbit.129
It was in the American people that Beard found his greatest cause for optimism. He still hoped that a swell of public opinion would embrace his vision, making it impossible for FDR to realize the war plans that Beard believed he clearly now possessed.
On the inside cover of his personal copy of Beard’s A Foreign Policy for America, President Roosevelt wrote: “40 years’ hard and continuous study has brought forth an inbred mouse.”130 The book’s critical reception was scarcely more restrained. The Protestant theologian and noted foreign-policy realist Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that Beard did not hide his “moral indifferentism.”131 At a time in which Nazi Germany had overrun the European continent and was setting itself for an invasion attempt against Great Britain, Niebuhr found Beard’s neglect of these events unconscionable. Allan Nevins echoed Niebuhr in decrying Beard’s “frigid indifference to moral considerations … The democratic world is slipping into dissolution and despair. Men are dying under bombs and machine guns to save part of it. They speak the language we speak, they hold our faith. But Mr. Beard turns away.”132 Once a firm admirer of Beard, Lewis Mumford believed that a serious threat to Western civilization rendered the author of continentalism “like a sundial [that] cannot tell the time on a stormy day.” “The isolationism of a Charles Beard,” Mumford wrote with utter comtempt, “is indeed almost as much a sign of barbarism as the doctrines of a[n Alfred] Rosenberg or a Gottfried Feder.”133 Attacked from all sides, with American public opinion falling in line with the administration, Beard was cutting an increasingly beleaguered figure. A July 1940 poll in Fortune magazine had found that two-thirds of respondents supported the president furnishing aid to any nation that opposed Germany and Japan.134
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It was in such inauspicious circumstances that Beard testified, on February 4, 1941, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against President Roosevelt’s main strategy to defend Britain short of a formal military alliance: Lend-Lease. David Lilienthal, a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the New Deal’s crowning achievements, wrote admiringly of the distinguished figure that Beard cut in Congress. He was “a grand-looking man with a mobile face that at times is gentle even to the point of seeming ‘harmless,’ an impression that is heightened by his deafness and age. His eyes will darken and sharpen, his brows tighten, and a lowering hawklike expression takes over, and then he can lay on the whip in a way that is a joy to see.”135
Beard made good use of the whip in his testimony. Under the provisions of the Lend-Lease Bill, the United States promised to lend Britain significant military matériel without any need for up-front payment. The bill stipulated that after the war, the matériel would be returned to the United States or else “bought” at a 90 percent discount. FDR explained the rationale by observing that in the event of a fire at a neighbor’s house, the appropriate response was not to say, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it,” but to say, “I don’t want $15—I want my fire hose back after the fire is over.”136 Beard disputed the wisdom of the president’s logic and contended that the program would bring America inexorably into the conflict; it would take more than a well-aimed garden hose to prevent the fire from spreading.
Before criticizing Lend-Lease, Beard extended an apology for previously overestimating the ability of France and Britain to repulse Hitler’s Germany unaided, adding by way of self-excuplation that he was not alone in making this mistake. “Who among us in September 1939,” Beard asked the committee, “could foresee that the French nation, which had stood like a wall for four cruel years, would collapse like a house of cards in four cruel months?”137 His basic position was that Lend-Lease was unconstitutional. Given his views on the economic foundations of the Constitution, lending matériel without obvious recompense did indeed jar with the Founders’ intentions. Beard urged Congress to vote against the bill “with such force that no president of the United States will ever dare, in all our history, to ask it to suspend the Constitution and the laws of this land and to confer upon him limitless dictatorial powers over life and death.” For Beard, Lend-Lease was “a bill for waging undeclared war. We should entertain no delusions on this point.”138 Looking forward to the possible defeat of Germany, Japan, and Italy, Beard wondered what America would do next: “After Europe has been turned into flaming shambles, with revolutions exploding left and right, will this Congress be able to supply the men, money, and talents necessary to reestablish and maintain order and security there?”139 It fell to later politicians and thinkers to mull the practical implications of Beard’s final point. Roosevelt secured the bill and Beard lost the argument, further sullying his name in the process. His Senate testimony was the last time that Beard recorded a significant observation on U.S. foreign policy prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
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It was Beard’s unfortunate fate to deploy relativism in opposing one of the few Manichaean conflicts in world history. Japan attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—sinking 4 battleships and 2 destroyers, destroying 188 aircraft, and killing 2,400 service personnel—and Germany and Italy declared war on the United States four days later. Pearl Harbor dealt the rationale for isolationism a mortal blow. Gardening was no longer an option. Privately, Beard felt vindicated that his mid-1930s prophesy about FDR inciting Japan to precipitate war had been borne out. In imposing an embargo on oil exports to Japan in July 1941, Roosevelt had more or less forced Tokyo’s hand. Due to a paucity of oil reserves, Japan was immediately confronted with two options: either step back from the brink, or secure its own independent supply of oil through territorial acquisition. Tokyo opted for the latter option, deduced that the U.S. Navy was the only force that could frustrate its ambitions, and acted accordingly in attacking Pearl Harbor. Indeed, Japan could claim to be following a Beardian path to development. America had colonized a continent in creating conditions for self-sufficiency. Japan would attempt to colonize Southeast Asia and some of the Pacific islands to realize that very same aim. In awakening the United States, a slumbering giant, Imperial Japan had signed its own death warrant. As Admiral Hara Tadaichi observed in 1945, “We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war.”140
Advances in military technology rendered the world a much smaller place in the years that followed. During a war in which huge mobile fleets—including aircraft carriers, the dimensions of which Mahan could scarcely have conceived—operated with crushing lethality far from home shores, Beard’s call for insularity was shown up as a failure of imagination. Instead of adjusting to a new reality, recanting some of the ideas that patently hadn’t stood the test of time, Beard chose to revisit the history of the Roosevelt administration, identifying deception and executive skullduggery at every turn. Beard followed the logic contained in Dylan Thomas’s villanelle that “old age should burn and rave at close of day,” although he directed his fury at Franklin Roosevelt, not his own mortality. From 1941 to his death in 1948, Beard raged at FDR’s duplicity—and the dying of the isolationist light—shredding friendships as he strode proudly toward pariah status, hopeful, like Wilson, that vindication might come later. It was a sad end to the career of a pathbreaking scholar who possessed admirable traits in personality and who offered a well-intentioned rationale for geopolitical retrenchment as self-improvement. Yet these priorities have not entirely disappeared from view. From President Barack Obama’s dedication to “nation building here at home” to Senator Rand Paul’s valorization of geopolitical “modesty,” aspects of Beard’s “continental Americanism” are returning to view.