Worldmaking (24 page)

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.