Charles A. Beard

Childhood

Charles Austin Beard was born on November 27, 1874, in Knightstown, Indiana, in the Corn Belt. His father, William Henry Harrison Beard, was a farmer, contractor, part-time banker, and real-estate speculator. In his youth, Charles worked on the family farm and attended a local Quaker school, Spiceland Academy. He was expelled from the school for unclear reasons but graduated from the public Knightstown High School in 1891. For the next few years, Charles and his brother, Clarence, managed a local newspaper. Their editorial position, like their father's, was conservative. They supported the Republican Party and favored prohibition, a cause for which Charles lectured in later years. Beard attended DePauw University, a nearby Methodist college, and graduated in 1898. He edited the college newspaper and was active in debate.

Education

Beard went to England in 1899 for graduate studies at Oxford University under Frederick York Powell. He collaborated with Walter Vrooman in founding Ruskin Hall, a school meant to be accessible to the working man. In exchange for reduced tuition, students worked in the school's various businesses. Beard taught for the first time at Ruskin Hall and lectured to workers in industrial towns to promote Ruskin Hall and encourage enrollment in correspondence courses. He returned to the United States in 1902, where Charles pursued graduate work in history at Columbia University. He received his doctorate in 1904 and immediately joined the faculty as a lecturer. Beard married his classmate Mary Ritter in 1900. As a historian, her research interests lay in feminism and the labor union movement (Woman as a Force in History, 1946). They collaborated on many textbooks.

Columbia University

After receiving his doctorate from Columbia University, he joined the faculty as a lecturer. There, he provided his students with a number of reading materials that were hard to acquire. He compiled a large collection of essays and excerpts in a single volume: An Introduction to the English Historians (1906), a compendium which was an innovation at the time. An extraordinarily active author of scholarly books, textbooks, and articles for political magazines, Beard saw his career flourish. He moved from the history department to the department of public law and then to a new chair in politics and government. He also regularly taught a course in American history at Barnard College. In addition to teaching, he coached the debate team and wrote about public affairs, especially municipal reform.

Among the many works that he published during his years at Columbia, the most controversial was An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), an interpretation of how the economic interests of the members of the Constitutional Convention affected their votes. He emphasized the polarity between agrarians and business interests. Academics and politicians denounced the book, but it was well respected by scholars until it was challenged in the 1950s.

World War I

Beard strongly supported American participation in the First World War. He resigned from Columbia University on October 8, 1917, charging that "the University is really under the control of a small and active group of trustees who have no standing in the world of education, who are reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion. I am convinced that while I remain in the pay of the Trustees of Columbia University I cannot do effectively my part in sustaining public opinion in support of the just war on the German Empire." After a series of faculty departures from Columbia in disputes about academic freedom, his friend James Harvey Robinson also resigned from Columbia in May 1919 to become one of the founders of the New School for Social Research and serve as its first director.

Independent scholar

Following his departure from Columbia University, Beard never again sought a permanent academic appointment. His financial independence was secured by lucrative royalties he had received from his textbooks and other bestsellers, including The Rise of American Civilization (1927), and its two sequels, America in Midpassage (1939), and The American Spirit (1943). The pair also operated a dairy farm in rural Connecticut that attracted many academic visitors. Beard was active in helping to found the New School for Social Research in the Greenwich Village district of Manhattan, where the faculty would control its own membership. Enlarging upon his interest in urban affairs, he toured Japan and produced a volume of recommendations for the reconstruction of Tokyo after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake.

Beard had parallel careers as an historian and political scientist. He was active in the American Political Science Association and was elected as its president in 1926. He was also a member of the American Historical Association and served as its president in 1933. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1936. In political science, he was best known for his textbooks, his studies of the Constitution, his creation of bureaus of municipal research, and his studies of public administration in cities. Beard also taught history at the Brookwood Labor College.

Beard was a leading liberal supporter of the New Deal and an intellectual leader in the Progressive movement. However, Beard was very critical of the majoritarian vision of democracy that most Progressive leaders endorsed. In fact, "Beard refrained from endorsing direct democracy measures as a blueprint for reform, focusing instead on streamlining the American system of government to incorporate in a transparent fashion, both political parties and interest groups."