Worldmaking (30 page)

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.
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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.
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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?”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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