Worldmaking (25 page)

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.