Charles Austin Beard (redirected from Charles A. Beard)

Beard, Charles Austin 

Born Nov. 27, 1874, in Knightstown, Ind.; died Sept. 1,1948, in New Haven, Conn. American historian, one of the founders of the economic school in US historiography.

From 1904 to 1917, Beard taught at Columbia University. In 1933 he was president of the American Historical Association. At the beginning of his career Beard upheld the necessity for bourgeois reforms. In the 1930’s he became a supporter of President F. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In the works An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), and The Rise of American Civilization (1927), Beard attempted to give an economic analysis of the most important problems in US history. He was the first bourgeois historian to characterize the Civil War of 1861—65 in the USA as “the second American Revolution.” However, Beard replaced a class division of society with a classification of the national economy by branches. His concept of the history of the USA in the 18th and 19th centuries was based on the contraposition of agriculture and industry. Beard obscured the class contradictions between the farmers and the plantation slaveholders at the time of the creation of the Constitution of 1787. Beard’s incipient transition to a position of vulgar materialism led him to the conclusion that the downfall of slavery in the USA was fatally predetermined by the development of capitalist relations in the North. In the America of his time, Beard also placed greatest emphasis not on class contradictions but on conflicts between individual groups of the bourgeoisie, individual strata of farmers, and so forth. Beard also attempted to prove the possibility of elevating the state to the role of a supraclass arbiter.

Beard’s bourgeois economism was one of the main forms of the struggle against Marxism in American historiography. Under conditions of an intensified class struggle in the USA in the 1930’s, Beard renounced bourgeois economism and adhered to the idea that it is impossible to discover the laws of historical development. In The Republic (1943) and A Basic History of the United States (1944), Beard revised his views on the most important historical events of the 18th and 19th centuries, including the constitution and the Civil War. In the works American Foreign Policy in the Making,. 1932–1940 (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948), Beard criticized F. Roosevelt’s foreign policy from an isolationist position and attacked the Soviet Union. However, in the very last years of his life Beard condemned the aggressive foreign policy of the USA after World War II. After Beard’s death his early historical views became a target of criticism for reactionary historians.

WORKS

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New York, 1960.
The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. New York, 1949.
The Rise of American Civilization, vols. 1–2. New York, 1942. (Jointly with M. R. Beard.)
The Republic. New York, 1946.
A Basic History of the United States. New York, 1945. (Jointly with M. R. Beard.)
American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932–1940. New York, 1947.
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941. London, 1948.

REFERENCES

Dement’ev, I. P. “Ob istoricheskikh vzgliadakh Charlza Birda.” Voprosy istorii, 1957, no. 6.
Charles A. Beard. Edited by H. K. Beale. [Lexington, Ky.,] 1954.

I. P. DEMENT’EV