Worldmaking (26 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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But the numbers were high enough to cause more than a ripple effect. This was a seismic event that portended yet more tectonic activity.