Charles Austin Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the American Century through His Journalistic Writings

Richard Drake, “Charles Austin Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the American Century through His Journalistic Writings,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, April 2023, volume 34, issue 1, 1-29.

NOTE: Diplomacy and Statecraft does not permit its articles to be posted on personal websites. The article posted here is the typed copy of it preceding publication.

“I begin by confessing a prejudice for the land of my birth and for the ideals that were professed before we began, under the thoughtful patronage of our mother England, to acquire dependencies, protectorates, moral obligations, and mandates in the interest of humanity, to administer water-cures and Krag-rifle medicines, to shoot, bayonet, gas, bomb, and eviscerate backward peoples in the name of the higher good and profitable investments….”¹

For criticisms regarding United States foreign policy during the Second World War and the aborning Cold War, the historian Charles Austin Beard became a figure of lasting controversy. This critical fate was in principle nothing new for him. Beginning in 1913 with An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, he had made his reputation as a historian by writing books about the power of money over politics and policy. To detractors, Beard’s economic interpretation of the country’s history seemed insulting in its programmatic dereliction of American idealism. By 1939, he had grown accustomed to such demurrals. His stance on the Second World War, however, ignited a critical reaction of unprecedented severity. American historians generally held that this was the “good war” for freedom against fascism. More than an irritant, Beard’s objections to the conventional view rose to the level of a capital offense, professionally speaking. His reputation, long at the peak of the profession, plummeted to the base level of a Second World War conspiracy monger. Taking the same acerbic view of American foreign policy at the start of the Cold War further removed him from the scholarly consensus.

Confusion about the actual content of Beard’s criticisms of American foreign policy during the Second World War compounded the controversies swirling around his name. The most famous books that he wrote about the war, American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940: A Study in Responsibilities (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (1948), hardly dealt with economics at all. They primarily concerned what Beard saw as the Machiavellian motives for Roosevelt’s policy decisions and constituted a critique of the President’s failure to provide truthful democratic leadership in the crisis. Such a sharp methodological about-face led Richard Hofstadter to conclude in 1968 that during the 1930s and 1940s Beard had become increasingly skeptical about the economic interpretation of history and “to some considerable degree he had quietly recanted.” The mature Beard appeared to have developed a reverence for the Constitution that sharply differed from the iconoclastic analysis of his earlier years. By the time of the two Roosevelt books, which issued, in Hofstadter’s image, from a literary vendetta and deflected Beard into conspiracy thinking about machinations in the White House, he no longer showed the same interest in economic elites. Beard in these books focused on “the immorality of Roosevelt’s statecraft.²

Hofstadter was not the first historian to detect a change in Beard’s writing. Nearly a quarter-of-a-century earlier, Eric Goldman wrote about “a conspicuous shift of emphasis” in Beard’s way of discussing the Constitution. He had begun “stating emphatically things which the earlier books had assumed” about the genius of that document.³ Goldman, who as a young professor at Johns Hopkins had known Beard personally and admired him, though disagreeing with his interpretation of the Second World War, rejected the image entertained by many readers of a transformed and chastened Beard suddenly at peace with the founders of the American political tradition. The many excellences of these men did nothing to alter Beard’s fundamental point about them as representatives of certain economic interests. Beard also had added to his stock of ideas about causation in history, but economics continued to be the core of his thinking. Hofstadter’s reading of Beard’s major books about the Second World War nevertheless is right to the extent that the corporations, the bankers, the tycoons—the “interests”—are conspicuous by their absence.

It was as if a break had occurred between Beard’s last books and what he had produced earlier in his career. His crowning work on the economic interpretation of American imperialism appeared in 1934, The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy. In his celebration of Beard as one of America’s greatest historians, Eugene Genovese singled out this book for the flood of light it shed on his “tenacious theses and insights.” ⁴ It is Beard’s seminal book of the period and informs everything else that he wrote, including his journalism. Beard sought to identify the terms of what he called “the Formula” of using foreign policy as a means of protecting and advancing elite interests. He thought that there could be no debate over the question, “For whose benefit is diplomacy carried on and whose will is to determine the policy and exercise the greatest control.” ⁵

Beard then recounted how American history abundantly illustrated the connections between economics and international relations. He chiefly had in mind the acquisition of America’s overseas empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific following the Spanish-American War, as well as the country’s involvements in the Mexican Revolution and the Great War. The national interest in foreign policy always primarily concerned at its core America’s economic stake abroad. With comprehensively similar pro-capitalist ideological views, government officials and the leaders of existing economic institutions worked together toward extending the sphere of American power and influence.

The year after the publication of The Idea of National Interest, Beard in an article for Scribner’s Magazine distilled the essence of the book’s thesis about the economic factors in the history of American warfare. None of the country’s wars could be understood without careful attention to the critical influence of business interests in shaping American foreign policy and, in the case of the Civil War, domestic policy. Beard found operating throughout American history a pattern that he described as “the movement of business enterprise and war.” From each of the nation’s conflicts, the power of business grew. Contemplating the New Deal, he could see no fundamental change in the American arrangements for wealth and power distribution. Moreover, he feared that the conjunction of business enterprise and war would persist under Roosevelt, should the New Deal prove ineffective against the Depression. American leaders always preferred strong foreign policies over strong domestic policies. With “the biggest navy program in the history of the country in peacetime,” Roosevelt most likely would not be the first exception to the iron rule of American statecraft. “The Pacific War awaits,” he feared. ⁶

That Beard’s economic interpretation of history carried over into his analysis ofAmerican foreign policy during the Second World War can be seen most clearly in his journalism of the 1930s and 1940s. A public intellectual of great renown for much of his career, he wrote numerous magazine articles about the motives behind America’s foreign policy, to a striking degree following the path in his journalism that he had blazed in making “Beardianism” a byword in American historiography for the economic interpretation of history. As a magazine writer, he followed the standard professional practice in cultural journalism by trying “to understand connections—between news events and context, present and past….” ⁷ A study of these articles in their historical context will enhance our understanding of the process that by the end of his life would estrange Beard, a former president of both the American Political Science Association and the American Historical Association, from the general view of the Second World War. Though his revisionist ideas about the war and the resulting Cold War invited widespread condemnation at the time of their formulation, they deserve reexamination in the understudied format of his journalistic writing. The magazine articles are the best places to look for the way his economic interpretation of the defining historical events in our time took root.

The politically progressive New Republic served as Beard’s primary magazine outlet for the twenty years beginning with the First World War. Beard had concurred unreservedly with founding editor Herbert Croly’s call for American intervention in the war. Both men then had shared the postwar disillusionment that followed the Treaty of Versailles. Beard’s New Republic articles and reviews of the 1920s and 1930s reflected his revisionist interpretation of American intervention in the war as a catastrophic mistake. As he would write in support of neutrality legislation in the mid-1930s, trying to make the world safe for democracy, “we nearly burnt our house down…; so, it seems not wholly irrational to try another line.”⁸

A trilogy of 1936 “Peace for America” articles contains the standard foreign policy views that Beard advocated in The New Republic. Beard claimed that it would be an oversimplification to argue, “all can be reduced to economic motives.”⁹ It would be worse than an oversimplification, however, to ignore economics. Ideas, personalities, and passions mattered, too. Nevertheless, history could not be understood at all without accounting for the manifold ways the rich and well-connected groups in society habitually gained the political ends that mattered most to them. He wrote these three articles as the national debate raged over neutrality legislation designed to prevent the United States from stumbling into war, as in 1917. They would form the core of a book published later that year, The Devil Theory of War: An Inquiry into the Nature of History and the Possibility of Keeping out of War, but the articles more vividly reflect the immediacy of the world situation at that time.

The findings of the 1934-1936 Nye Committee investigation into the munitions industry and America’s intervention in the Great War inspired Beard to write his “Peace for America” articles. Testimony before this committee convinced Beard that, among the many factors influencing the Wilson administration to take the course it did in 1917, the war loans given to the Allies beginning in 1915 had been decisive. From that point on, “[e]conomic leaders as well as political leaders… [had become] entangled in the same fateful web.”¹⁰ The Allies had needed the money to fight the war. To meet this need, the Americans had set up a profitable system of lending money for the purchase here of food and the materials of war. Thus, did the doldrum-plagued American economy of 1914 perk right up with a tonic of the revitalizing war orders. The bankers and the politicians did not work as “devils” in a vacuum. They had a most compliant population to govern, one only too willing in the interest of the national prosperity made possible by the war loans to overlook the dangers in plain sight of a neutrality characterized by gross favoritism to one side. The economic interpretation of history still dominated his thinking, not simply in the form of machinations by international bankers and munitions makers. The corporate capitalist system permeating the entire society and ever generating expansionist momentum had pulled the country into the vortex of the Great War.

Beard’s book reviews during this period reveal the same fascination with the lessons of the Great War. He hailed Merle Curti’s The American Struggle, 1636-1936, a history of the peace movement in America. Curti recognized that “foreign policy is an expression of domestic ideals and interests.¹¹ ”America’s intervention in the Great War stemmed mainly from the exigencies of an exploitative status quo at home. Changing the domestic economy would be the most important requirement for ending a culture of imperialism and war. “What price peace,” Beard asked. For an answer, Curti’s research suggested to him that nothing less than a reconfiguration of the American economy, far beyond the timid experimentation of the New Deal, would be required for the United States to become a genuine social democracy.

Study the skein of events that brought the United States into the Great War, Beard recommended to New Republic readers in March 1937. Regarding the coming conflict, “If we want to stay out of it, we can find some assistance in all the truth we can get about how we became involved in the last war.”¹² No simple explanation could account for such a vast and multifarious occurrence in history, but Beard could be depended upon to bring “indisputable economic facts into consideration.” The ideas, ideals, and passions that played an important part in the ways Americans thought about the war could not be shown to have been conditioned directly by the absentee-owner class. Yet, “into this context were thrown the widespread and growing economic interests, whose transactions were facilitated by bankers who induced the Wilson administration to lift its ban on credits and loans.” The economic ties thus forged between the United States and the Allies sharply increased the probability of our intervention in the critical year of 1917 when the fortunes of war had turned in favor of the Germans. It was improbable by then that we would let our best customers go under. Historians had established many certainties about the economic forces contributing toward intervention. Those same forces remained in place at the sub-structural level of current events, making it likely that our intervention in the next war would follow the pattern of 1914 to 1917.

Commenting in October of that year on a Foreign Affairs article by Newton D. Baker, Beard returned to the theme of how financial and banking interests had been catalysts for American intervention in the Great War. He faulted Baker, who had served as Wilson’s Secretary of War from 1916 to 1921 for his exoneration of the financiers and bankers. He averred again that the 1934-1936 Nye Committee had established irrefutably the crucial role played by Wall Street in getting the United States into the war. Yet economic determinism did not explain everything in the case of American intervention. Beard irritated many on the left for his refusal to declare flatly that the United States had entered the war, at bottom, for economic motives. He reasoned from his own experience as an ardent interventionist from the opening shots of the war that economics alone could not account for all the emotional, psychological, and intellectual variables of the situation. The Baker thesis, however, “is as much a perversion of history as the oversimplified communist and economic determinist thesis.”¹³ Beard in the 1930s would be attacked even by liberals for pointing out that under Lenin and Stalin the Soviet Union stood for state capitalism “despite their proletarian pretensions.”¹⁵ At this time, liberal publications like The New Republic and The Nation fawned over the Soviet Union, as if it were the hope of the Depression-era world.¹⁶ These two magazines reveled in their reporting on the genius of Soviet planning. Beard opposed Earl Browder, the General Secretary of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), in a New Republic debate in 1938 about the requirements of national security for the United States. Browder agreed with President Roosevelt, that the democracies—Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union—collectively should resist Germany, Italy, and Japan: “Peace is being destroyed by Hitler, Mussolini, and the Mikado,” he cried.¹⁷

Beard thought that the part of the Roosevelt-Browder argument concerning democracy came from “the lofty clouds of sentimentality.”¹⁸ The real issue in the Pacific in no way dealt with democracy. What mattered primarily was Standard Oil business and other American investments in China. Maintaining democracy in that part of the world really meant preserving existing business arrangements there. The same could be said about “all the Arabs, the teeming millions of Africa toiling under European yokes.” He very much doubted that the British and the French had any serious thought about bestowing the blessings of democracy on their colonial peoples. Beard also charged that the current distribution of the world’s wealth and resources probably could not meet the test of democratic principles. For the world’s dissatisfied nations then challenging the status quo, had the democracies done everything possible or anything at all to be certain “that there are no grounds for unrest”? All this righteous war preparation planning and presidential pleas for collective security he found completely insincere, based as they were on a primary concern about the preservation of never-to-be-mentioned existing imperialist arrangements.

In making points against Browder, Beard rehearsed the main theoretical arguments from The Idea of National Interest. He mocked the idea that “there is such a thing as politics apart from economics.” Just as the last war had been shown to have originated in imperialist competition, so the coming conflict already could be seen to be following precisely the same historical pattern. The great democratic powers want peace, but only on the condition of their remaining “loaded with the spoils of empire.”¹⁹ Here Beard derided the moral protests of Britain and France against Italy’s conquests in the Ethiopian War of 1935-1936. What had the Italians done that the British and the French—to say nothing about the Americans in fulfilling their manifest destiny at home and abroad—had not done a hundred times over throughout the world?²⁰ The wonder about Ethiopia was that the sticky-fingered British had not stolen it long ago.²¹ To be politically effective, the moral posturing of the democracies depended entirely on an attitude of insouciant disregard for history. These nations were empires with long records of imperialist exploitation. For Beard, the corporate capitalist system, from which Roosevelt never distanced himself, showed neither evidence nor promise of transcending oligarchical domination on a global scale.

Beard’s journalism of the late 1930s found its main outlet in Common Sense, a progressive magazine established in 1932 by radicals far to the left of the New Deal. On foreign policy, they promoted the ideas of retired Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, who after a colorful thirty-three-year Marine Corps career published in 1935 an anti-war book prized by Beard, War Is a Racket.²² That same year, Common Sense began to publish a five-part series by Butler, “America’s Armed Forces.” He synthesized his experience in the military as the record of “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”²³ He had known Roosevelt since their 1917 meeting in Haiti where the then Assistant Secretary of the Navy was on an inspection tour of the Caribbean. He remembered Roosevelt from that period as a Big Navy enthusiast and thus was not surprised by his defense policy as president. The projected all-time high naval expenditures for 1936 meant preparation for offensive war, the only kind the Navy intended to fight: “It does not possess a single plan that does not contemplate an attack on another country.”²⁴ On military matters, Beard and the editors at Common Sense took guidance from Butler, who spoke from vast experience about the American way of war.

One of the magazine’s editors, Alfred M. Bingham, hailed Beard as “America’s greatest historian.”²⁵ His books received uniformly adulatory notices in Common Sense, and he regularly contributed reviews, articles, and letters to the editor in the run-up to the Second World War. His name prominently appeared on book lists that the editors recommended to the magazine’s readers. They published a summary of the Collective Security debate between Beard and Browder that had taken place in the pages of The New Republic, concluding, “We are biased, of course—who isn’t—but professor Beard’s reply to Earl Browder strikes us as not only the outstanding magazine article of the month, but the brightest ray of light that has yet struck the current foreign policy muddle.”²⁶ The editors airily dismissed Browder’s “preposterous argument” in support of the President’s internationalist foreign policy, which they portrayed as “the latest piece of high-powered jingoism.”

Beginning with its October 1938 issue, Common Sense listed Beard on the magazine’s masthead as one of its contributing editors. His affiliation with the magazine became magnified just as the crisis in Czechoslovakia reached its climax at the Munich conference. On September 30, Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy reached an agreement allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. For the editors at Common Sense, the outcome at Munich appeared to be reason incarnate. In their October editorial, “The Liberal and Anti-Fascism,” they warned against the dangers of anti-Fascist fanaticism: “Hatred and fear of Fascism is today as much a menace as Fascism itself.”²⁷ Why, they wondered, did liberals feel such an exaggerated concern about the dangers of fascism when communism posed a comparable totalitarian threat to peace and to Western values. By this time, following the well-publicized purge trials in Moscow and the epic slaughter of peasants during Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, Common Sense had overcome its initial attraction to the Soviet model. Instead, the magazine complained about the liberals who “are swift to defend and excuse the Soviet dictatorship,” not noticing that country’s horrendous record of human rights abuses.²⁸ Only German crimes seemed deserving of moral outrage to those liberals content to live by double standards. Hitler did not seem to the magazine’s editors as “a blood-dripping monster,” at least not by comparison with Stalin, as of 1938 the real mass-murderer in Europe.

On the specific issue of the Sudetenland, Common Sense sided whole-heartedly with Hitler. The Versailles Treaty, not Hitler, was the problem. This disastrous peace had led to all the crises now facing Europe.²⁹ The people screaming about appeasement at Munich while invoking the sanctity of the existing status quo had not taken into consideration the complete moral bankruptcy of Versailles, which had put in place the conditions for a second world war. The question of the moral basis for world security and order had been raised by Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, but the president’s concerns immediately lost out to the real business at hand: harvesting the spoils of war by the victors.³⁰ In so acting, they had piled high the grievances to which Germany now appealed for rightful redress in the name of a principle once held to be sacred by Americans, self-determination. The case of the three million Sudetenland Germans could not be bettered as an example of what self-determination meant. The numerous other such cases would have to be dealt with in “a new peace conference, to undo the mistakes of Versailles.”³¹ A reformed world order was needed “in which there is neither British Empire nor French Empire nor Fascist lust for empire, neither haves nor have nots; where national sovereignty is an anachronism; where the world’s resources are planned for the world’s use.”

The editors at Common Sense sent Beard an advance copy of “The Liberal and Anti-Fascism” editorial for his comment. They published his reply in the next issue, November 1938. He began, “Your editorial is powerful and has my hearty approval.”³² Beard always had detested the Nazi regime. He implacably had condemned the Nazis for their anti-Semitism. In the earlyand mid-1930s when many in Europe and America had cheered Hitler as a bulwark against Soviet communism, he had denounced “the customary Nazi savagery in dealing with the Jews.”³³ He had protested lectures by Nazi spokesmen trying to influence Americans “for the benefit of Hitler’s propaganda game.”³⁴ In an address delivered at the New School for Social Research on 10 April 1934, Beard had portrayed Nazism as “a low diabolical philosophy” responsible for a reign of terror in the heart of Europe.³⁵ Participating in a “Will Fascism Come to America?” symposium in September of that year, Beard had said that “fascism is a dictatorship, and a dictatorship is an authority possessing irresponsible power for an indefinite period—an authority that cannot be ousted by any electoral or head-counting process, but only by violence.”³⁶ The next month, he criticized Roscoe Pound, Dean of the Harvard Law School, for accepting an honorary degree from the University of Berlin.³⁷ An honor from the Nazis counted against the recipient, in Beard’s moral economy. In 1936, he castigated the Nazi system of education for its obsession with racial hygiene and program of crushing “all liberty of instruction and all independent search for truth.”³⁸

Yet, Beard enthusiastically endorsed the Common Sense editorial favoring the Munich settlement. He complained that government-concocted over-simplifications and outright distortions, dutifully transmitted by compliant media, had created in the minds of the American people an unreal view of the world. They had been taught to ignore the complex historical background of current world affairs and to reduce them to simple moralistic slogans, such as democratic freedom versus fascist tyranny. Such a heedless approach to foreign affairs had inspired the absurd idea that Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union seriously felt an attachment to democracy. These countries were empires operating fundamentally from imperialist considerations. The Soviet Union as a totalitarian dictatorship obviously had no interest at all in democracy. Could anyone studying the history of Britain and France honestly conclude that their leaders ever had given a moment’s thought to the democratic well-being of the subject peoples they dominated and exploited throughout the world?

In his letter, Beard denounced the propaganda transmission system in the United States responsible for inflaming “the American people with clotted nonsense” about world affairs.³⁹ Rather than trying to reform the world, it would be much better for our leaders to deal with the problems at home in depression-wracked America. To be sure, grave international problems threatened Europe and Asia. For America to busy itself as the world’s problem-solver, however, carried the risk that “wrongs right here as deep and dangerous as death and night will be forgotten and Roosevelt will be overcome by the messianic urge to entangle the country in quarrels leading to commitments and wars.” Beard concluded, “America can do more good to Europe by setting her own house in order than by working up a Walpurgis night of international wrath.”

Common Sense continued to stand by Beard even during the storm of abuse that engulfed him following publication of “Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels,” a fierce manifesto against intervention that he published in the September 1939 issue of Harper’s Magazine. George R. Leighton, a Harper’s editor from 1932 to 1944, supervised the publication of this issue and years later recalled the frenzy provoked by the article: “The vituperation poured upon Beard was intense.”⁴⁰ The interventionist press castigated him as a traitor to democracy in its life-and-death struggle against fascism. This episode foreshadowed the severe downturn in Beard’s professional standing.

For his part, Beard reminded readers how clear the Democratic platform of 1936 had been on the question of American neutrality: “‘We shall continue to observe a true neutrality in the disputes of others; to be prepared resolutely to resist aggression against ourselves; to work for peace and to take the profits out of war; to guard against being drawn, by political commitments, international banking, or private trading, into any war which may develop anywhere.’”⁴¹ Beard wondered what had caused such an eminently sensible foreign policy declaration to lose favor. He thought that the economic downturn of 1937 and 1938 had been the turning point when Roosevelt realized that the New Deal had failed to bring the country out of the Depression. Unwilling to consider fundamental changes in the capitalist economic system, he had turned to foreign affairs as a distraction from problems at home, a venerable political stratagem given immortal literary expression by Shakespeare in Henry IV, Part Two. In that play, the king counsels his son to “busy giddy minds/With foreign quarrels,” as a diversionary tactic.

Criticizing the pundits in Roosevelt’s orbit, Beard singled out journalist Walter Lippmann, who seemed to him the most imperialist-minded of the group. In the summer of 1939, Lippmann had taken a brief trip to Europe, where Winston Churchill had told him that for the stability of the world Americans must learn to “think imperially.”⁴² An old-time Wilsonian, Lippmann spoke with suave fluency in the language of democracy and human rights about imperialist stability and order. To Beard, however, “Mr. Lippmann’s new brew of Roman grandeur and British philanthropy is of the same vat now used by British propagandists.”⁴³ The Americans would be recruited again, as in the Great War, to provide a backstop for the British Empire “in another war for democracy.”

Beard’s article for Harper’s Magazine focused on the danger of intervention. He thought it obvious that from the beginning Roosevelt desperately wanted to take the country into the war and busily worked to create a fog surrounding his motives. Once again, official American declarations about ideals clouded the real issues in the war. Beard found instructive the silence in Washington about economics. FDR’s foreign policy did not look far beyond current economic arrangements: “It does not propose any fundamental adjustment in the economies of nations which would provide any guarantee of peace after the temporary pacification.”⁴⁴ There was no for what would follow the war, except the good old plan, which had brought on the present crisis and the ones before that. Did we want to be the new Rome or the new British Empire? He warned, any nation that raises its sights above the requirements of its own people and gets into the business of solving world problems goes by the name of empire.

In October 1939, Common Sense published a lengthy summary of Beard’s “Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels” arguments, calling the article a brilliant polemic by “one of America’s first minds.”⁴⁵ The editors stood by him without reservation. Continuing to write for the magazine in 1940, he grew increasingly afraid that Roosevelt would resort to war as a means of extricating his administration from the New Deal’s failure to end the Depression. In a book review, he mocked “the latest quirks of New Deal meanderings.”⁴⁶ Clearly, the corporate capitalist system had been unable to produce an economic recovery. He continued to hold to his trademark anti-interventionist line, on the grounds that Britain and France had gone to war not for any of the noble motives attributed to them in FDR’s speeches or in the pro-British Hollywood films of the period, but to retain their ill-gotten gains from the First World War. Nazi Germany he continued to condemn as a totalitarian abomination, though it was no worse than the terror-ridden dystopia of Stalinist Russia. The government’s rhetoric about framing the war as a fight for freedom against tyranny he deemed to be a distraction from the historical truth about the underlying economic war aims of the Allies. Defeating the egregious Nazis would be incidental to the main objective of erecting an impregnable defense of the corporate capitalist system.

Yet Common Sense began to shift its foreign policy position in 1940. When Beard’s anti-interventionist A Foreign Policy for America appeared that year, Alfred Bingham reviewed it, along with Raymond Leslie Buell’s Isolated America. Bingham summarized Beard’s familiar arguments without the overwhelming enthusiasm usually reserved in Common Sense for the “dean” of American historians. It was different with Buell, who in his book took direct aim at Beard’s anti-interventionist thesis and continentalist ideas for investing in the domestic economyas an alternative to an overemphasis on global trade.⁴⁷ Bingham praised this former director of the Foreign Policy Association, an organization originally conceived as a vehicle for Wilsonian idealism and United States participation in global affairs. He judged Buell to be an articulate spokesman “for active American leadership in the world.”⁴⁸ Whereas Beard’s book was “hardly more than a pamphlet,” Buell’s 457-page tome commanded respect as “a potent argument for an activist policy.”

Beard never would become a member of the America First Committee, which had been founded on 4 September 1940. Yet his sympathy for this isolationist organization was another reason why the editors of Common Sense distanced themselves from him. As they developed an appreciative view of the Roosevelt administration, Beard’s byline suddenly disappeared. He had condemned the president’s naval buildup as a long step toward the militarization of American foreign policy, ineluctably tending toward “a kind of world dictatorship through sea power.”⁴⁹ Moreover, he had been a leading opponent of the Lend-Lease measure to aid Britain, calling it a bill to wage undeclared war. For his erstwhile admirers at the magazine, Pearl Harbor put an end to all ambivalence about the war. In January of 1942, they dropped Beard from their masthead list of contributing writers and never again published an article by him.⁵⁰ His unrelenting opposition to interventionism had made him a poor fit for that suddenly but fully pro-Roosevelt publication.

For the rest of the war, Beard followed its economic developments primarily in the pages of The Progressive magazine, which had been founded by Senator Robert M. La Follette in 1909 and continued to promote the Wisconsin progressive Republican’s anti-imperialist and anti-militarist views. Beard avidly read this publication and became one of its featured writers, as inhis earlier relationships with The New Republic and Common Sense. To fellow revisionist historian and Progressive columnist Harry Elmer Barnes he would write: “We are regular subscribers to The Progressive and agree with you that it is about the only civilized sheet in the country.”⁵¹ By “civilized sheet” he meant journalism curious about peering behind the gauze of wartime propaganda for a look at the real mainsprings of government policy and action.

The Progressive presented and copiously illustrated a Beardian argument, that the conflict had arisen primarily over economic rivalries among the great imperialist powers. It seemed likely that the same economic motives of empire protection and expansion would persist throughout the war and its aftermath. To Beard’s complete and frequently expressed satisfaction, the magazine’s main editorial line derided the idealistic Atlantic Charter of August 1941 as a feint from more abiding concerns about the continued prosperity of Allied cartel arrangements and control over subject peoples. The Progressive magazine seemed to Beard the only publication in America alert to the economic dimensions of the war and able to penetrate the administration’s excessively restrictive narrative about a clash of moral absolutes.

Beard had begun this new phase of his journalistic career with an article attacking the Roosevelt administration’s Lend-Lease program to facilitate Britain’s purchase in America of war supplies. He called it “a bill for waging an undeclared war.”⁵² Lend-Lease placed too much unaccountable power in the hands of the President, Beard admonished. Under the bill’s terms, any country deemed vital to the security of the United States could be eligible on Roosevelt’s say-so alone to receive war materiel. The costs of such an arrangement could not be foretold, and there might be other unknowns as well.⁵³ Recognizing the evil in Nazism and the undesirability of a German triumph in Europe, Beard did not oppose aid to Britain. He nevertheless thought that any assistance from the United States should be controlled by Congress, the proper constitutional war-making authority. He feared most the abrogation of all constitutional restraints on the presidency and the prosecution of a hidden foreign policy by leaders indifferent to the norms of democratic forthrightness about their motives.

Beard followed and cheered The Progressive for its coverage of the economic issues in the war. The magazine’s reporting illustrated for him the wisdom of a book written in 1895 by Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay. Beard wrote a lengthy introduction for the 1943 edition. He praised Adams for understanding contemporary American history in the comparative context of world empires from Roman times to the present. The big wars in history concerned one thing ultimately: where would the headquarters for economic mastery over mankind be located? The outcome of the Napoleonic Wars had made London the financial center of the world. As Adams had foreseen, it would be New York City’s turn next. Beard drew the conclusion from Adams’s work that the wars in the Pacific and in Europe concerned ultimately for control of the world’s trade and resources.⁵⁴

Beard and The Progressive became paramount symbols of the forces in American life loath to embrace the war. Bruce Bliven, editor of The New Republic since 1930, condemned them for “‘sitting out’ this war.”⁵⁵ Beard had pedaled the isolationist nostrum, “America could successfully close the gate and cultivate her own garden,” all the while ignoring the menace to the world posed by Hitler. The offending magazine, representing “the moribund Progressive movement in Wisconsin,” also failed to understand the mortal international dangers confronting the country. In the decisive struggle between democracy and fascism, Beard, The Progressive, and smaller like-minded fry looked on with indifference, nit-picking the Roosevelt administration and the Allies in the manifestly just war against criminal regimes bent on enslaving the world. Bliven here repeated the central charges made four years earlier by Archibald MacLeish. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, faithful supporter of President Roosevelt and Librarian of Congress, had written in “The Irresponsibles,” a blistering article for The Nation, “Nothing is more characteristic of the intellectuals of our generation than their failure to understand what it is that is happening to their world.”⁵⁶ MacLeish did not mention Beard by name as the chief culprit for this deplorable neglect. He did not have to mention him. Everyone reading that article would have known where the prime fault for isolationism lay.

A denouement of wartime American foreign policy would occur in July 1944 at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, where 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations met for three weeks to regulate the international monetary and financial systems.⁵⁷ Ostensibly, the Americans and the British were joining other peace-loving nations to prevent the kind of economic crisis that had produced Fascism and Nazism. Newspapers reported daily on discussions at Bretton Woods, but Beard derived his understanding of this conference mainly from the analysis in The Progressive magazine, whose editor, Morris H. Rubin, correctly understood the decisive importance of the developments taking place in New Hampshire. Only twenty-eight upon becoming editor in 1940, Rubin revered the Beards’ Rise of American Civilization as the true story of the country’s history.⁵⁸ For the rest of his life, Beard would have a zealous advocate in the editor’s office at The Progressive.

Coverage in The Progressive of the Bretton Woods conference began with queries about what such a gathering would mean for the world. An article by Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, a redoubtable advocate of Beard’s foreign policy views and one of Roosevelt’s most severe critics, posed the question, are we fighting “to establish an economic hegemony?”⁵⁹ It certainly seemed so to him, and he wondered if the United States had become “a coldly designing imperialistic state which makes deals with decadent political satraps.” Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had announced that the conference would stabilize world currencies and promote international trade, but The Progressive agreed with Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, a relentless critic of the planning at Bretton Woods. He could not understand how the government’s international funding schemes would redound to the benefit of the American people. The new system looked to him like a sleight-of-hand by government bureaucrats and their fast-talking financial experts.⁶⁰ The Progressive also noted that labor organizations had not been invited to the luxurious Bretton Woods retreat. It would be a meeting of international bankers who expected to control the world’s financial institutions after the war.

The magazine gave Walter A. Morton the assignment of analyzing the Bretton Woods conference proceedings. A professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin and the author of British Finance, 1930-1940 (1943), Morton studied international banking. The main point of the conference, he wrote, concerned the proposed creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), respectively to stabilize world currencies and to make loans for reconstruction and development. The IBRD would become the World Bank. No one could fault in principle such laudable aims, Morton began, but he worried greatly about how the International Bank would be managed. If management proceeded under democratic auspices, then the reconstruction and development goals set for the International Bank could well be achieved, “but under bad management it might be an instrument of oppression, used to exploit weaker peoples, to promote inflation by wild credit expansion, and in the end breed international hatred and ill will.”⁶¹ How this desired democratic control could be implemented and made to further the public interest did not appear to be a matter of urgency at Bretton Woods where the overwhelming power of the United States as the International Bank’s chief funder betokened that country’s likely preponderance after the war.⁶² The other countries might be reduced to satellite status in varying degrees of subsidiarity to American power. American self-interest could be merchandized as the good of the international community and rule the day.⁶³

Beard grew increasingly alarmed about the role that America would play in the postwar world. He had observed in a 6 March 1944, front-page article for The Progressive that “an air of irresponsibility seems to hang thickly over the Capitol Hill as well as the White House.” Grave issues concerning the ultimate purposes of the war continued to be undefined. For example, United States policies in Latin America could not be explained simply in the abstract terms of the Four Freedoms. Reporting from Latin America in The Nation and Harper’s had raised disturbing questions about the sincerity of FDR’s vaunted Good Neighbor Policy. I. F. Stone, the Washington editor of The Nation, charged that for the purpose of maintaining full production of vital war materials, especially tin, the American ambassador to Bolivia had sought to prevent the enactment of a new labor code for the miserably exploited miners. Stone wondered, “If we cannot keep our diplomats in this hemisphere from serving the forces of reaction and exploitation now, how can we hope to defeat the same combination of big business and bureaucracy and build a better world when the war is over?”

An even more shocking story about Bolivia had appeared in August 1943. Carleton Beals, whose work as a regular contributor to The Progressive Beard would have known very well, followed up Stone’s reporting with news about the violent suppression of striking Bolivian miners. On 21 December 1942, Bolivian soldiers killed some 400 men, women, and children at the mines where a strike had been in progress. Called the “Catavi massacre,” this event generated a wave of negative publicity, not only for Bolivia, but also for the United States. A New York banker, Joseph C. Rovensky, served as a director and vice-president of the mining company involved in the dispute. Even before the war, American commissions had helped to structure the Bolivian tin industry with loans. Working seamlessly with the mine owners and the Bolivian government, the United States had meddled in that country’s politics in support of the tin cartel’s monopoly, “a procedure certainly not in line with the Roosevelt proposal for free access to prime materials by all countries.”⁶⁶ Based on what had happened in Bolivia, Beals professed skepticism about the likelihood of any real improvement in the postwar treatment of poor countries.

Despite persistent questioning of government officials, Beard could not obtain a convincing explanation about United States economic activities in Latin America. He condemned the malfeasance “in a legislature and in an executive department which cannot tell the public what is being spent and why.”⁶⁷ Bolivia stood out as an extreme case, but in Latin America generally Washington more than ever had extended its sway. The Good Neighbor Policy had revealed itself to be a mere marketing refinement of previous imperialist economic initiatives. His convictions reinforced by The Progressive, Beard continued to think that the war entailed at its deepest level of meaning a vast economic restructuring around the globe.

Uruguayan journalist and man of letters, Eduardo Galeano, would explicate in The Open Veins of Latin America (1973) Beard’s intimations about the World War II era phase of Latin America’s economic subjugation by the United States. Galeano called this period of Latin American history a continuation “in a long story of infamies,” though with rhetorical innovations about democracy and freedom unique to Yankeedom. He showed the British ingloriously retiring from their one-time fields of economic mastery in Latin America, reduced by American competitors after the war to second-tier status as imperialist exploiters. Galeano described the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as essential institutions in the contemporary structure of plunder integrated around U.S. corporations. These two institutions emerged “together to deny to underdeveloped countries the right of protecting their national industries, and to discourage state action in those countries.”⁶⁸

In Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (2014), Eric Helleiner has attempted to rehabilitate the honor and integrity of the United States delegation. Based on a comprehensive survey of the scholarly literature on Bretton Woods and his own archival research on the subject, he contends that the American representatives, led by Harry Dexter White, honestly intended to promote the economic development of Latin American countries. Still inspired by the Four Freedoms idealism of FDR, they sought to modernize Latin America and the other developing regions of the world. Their plan miscarried, however, when “U.S. foreign economic policy changed quite suddenly with Truman’s ascent to the presidency” and Cold War priorities subverted the idealism of an earlier halcyon time.⁶⁹

Beard expressed skepticism about the importance of idealism in the formulation of United States foreign policy in Latin America even during the reputedly high-minded years preceding the Truman administration. Again, we must turn to The Idea of National Interest, to find the origins of Beardian realism regarding the foreign policy initiatives of the FDR administration. Though Beard had voted for FDR in 1932 and continued to support him politically at the time he was writing The Idea of National Interest in 1934, one of his biggest concerns in the book had to do with the very practices Helleiner lauds as economic development in the Southern countries. Beard noted that the United States Constitution made no mention of developing other countries. The Founding Fathers had rested content with the sole ambition of developing the Republic of the United States.

As Helleiner shows in his meticulously detailed book, the Bretton Woods agreements had been preceded by a series of conferences and proposals dating back to the 1930s between the United States and Latin America calling for investment in economic development. Beard professed to be confused about such initiatives. Constructing with American capital industries in underdeveloped countries to compete with the industries of the United States seemed to him like a counterproductive business strategy for the American people. Indeed, testimony at Senate hearings about foreign loans increased his suspicion about such financial assistance. Conceivably, industrialization abroad in time might come to mean de-industrialization at home. As an abstract proposal, international development sounded philanthropic and noble, but in the Senate documents “the bankers involved and the government officials concerned stood revealed in stark reality.”⁷⁰ On close examination, the process of capital export appeared to be an enrichment scheme for economic elites at the expense of American workers and farmers.

To the United States leaders in business and government calling for foreign investment, Beard posed a simple question. How would ordinary American people benefit from such investments? He thought it reasonable to guess that the benefits would flow in one direction only, to Wall Street, with appropriate shares distributed to the foreign elites participating in the development transactions. Foreign workers might benefit incidentally, but their well-being stood in a drastically subaltern relationship to the profits of the investing classes. As a child of the depression of the 1890s, Beard had no faith even in the competence of the economic elites, let alone their ethical probity. The Great Depression of the 1930s deepened his radical temperament as a social critic of the American power structure. The Idea of National Interest contains some of Beard’s most caustically ironic commentary.

Beard surmised from what he had learned in The Progressive that the Bretton Woods conference would eventuate in a new and improved system of economic imperialism over the economically backward peoples of the earth, through the machinery of control exercised by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.⁷¹ He viewed the Bretton Woods conference very much the way Helleiner does, as the outcome of longstanding trends in American economic policy, only as a tragedy from the start, not as an exercise in idealism later ruined by the Truman administration. Beard could not free himself from the suspicion that with its unrivaled power the American government had been “playing a straight imperialist game under other names.”⁷² Internationalist-minded America, it seemed to him, had entered fully into the argument among the rich about how to control the poor, completing an initiative begun with the Spanish-American War.⁷³ With its military and economic power vastly increased by the outcome of World War II, the United States would have a post-democratic relationship with the rest of the world. Euphemisms about American allies would continue in solemn usage on both sides of the Atlantic, but Beard had the idea from his study of history that empires did not permit practices of genuine equality. The empire that America had won would conform to the laws of hegemony governing all its imperial predecessors.

The dramatic expansion of government might during World War II alarmed Beard. His postwar correspondence reveals a sense of dread about what proliferating power in Washington would mean for the country. Even before the war, beginning with The Idea of National Interest, he had argued that the government, with its ever-accumulating bureaucratic machinery, had become a new kind of problem for American democracy. The outbreak of a second global conflict and then America’s involvement in it created a situation of even greater change in the controlling way the government worked.

Robert A. Brady’s 1943 book, Business as a System of Power, made a strong impression on Beard. Inspired by the theories of radical economist Thorstein Veblen, Brady presented a comparative study of business organization in six countries: Germany, Italy, Japan, France, the United States, and Britain. Beard lauded the book for the way Brady had showed how business concentrations in totalitarian and liberal-capitalist countries followed parallel paths leading to societal outcomes inimical to democracy.⁷⁴ Brady analyzed fascist trends in the American economic system. In a chapter titled “The American Way: ‘Business Self-Regimentation,’” he could find no structural differences between capitalist policies in the United States and in fascist societies. Later in the book, Brady concluded, “there is a basic sameness in purpose, general uniformity of direction-impulse,” essentially in an anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian direction.⁷⁵

Beard’s two closest friends on The Progressive, Harry Elmer Barnes and Oswald Garrison Villard, sounded the alarm about the wartime emergence of what they called an American variety of fascism. Barnes warned about “the alarming Fascist tendencies in the whole current of our wartime civilization and policies.”⁷⁶ Villard concurred and specified in a review of John Flynn’s As We Go Marching what fascism meant in an American context: greater and greater concentration of power in a militaristic and imperialistic government at the service of monopolies, cartels, and armaments manufacturers. He agreed in 1944 with Flynn: “the present fiscal policies of our Government are taking us over exactly the same road traversed by Italy and Germany.”⁷⁷ The Second World War dramatically had accelerated this trend. In Beard’s correspondence with Barnes and Villard, he echoed their convictions about the practical eclipse of American democracy during the war

Beard had the metastasizing power of Washington, D.C., in mind when he published the 1945 edition of The Economic Basis of Politics. Originally published in 1922 as a collection of lectures delivered several years earlier at Amherst College, the second edition contained a long new chapter in which Beard dealt with “the bearings of recent historical events on the economic basis of politics.”⁷⁸ The waging of two world wars had revolutionized American statecraft. Therefore, he felt the need to restate the theory of the economic basis of politics. Washington’s large-scale taxing, spending, and borrowing policies to wage war had made manufacturing, commercial, financial, and agricultural interests increasingly dependent on the government. State intervention in the economy had assumed a systematic form unparalleled in American history. The classic populist/progressive view of politics as an arena controlled by economic interests, always an oversimplification, failed to explain the current status quo, which consisted of businessmen, the military, and policy makers all competing within a capitalist system of unquestioned legitimacy and virtue “for power over the state and its fortunes.” From this intramural fray, government bureaucracy and militarism would be gaining the most. All the same, “Politics, including military aspects, must have an economic basis or perish.”⁷⁹ In other words, the economic interpretation of history remained valid and indispensable for understanding the politics of war.

The critique put forward in Beard’s 1945 essay prophetically addressed the issue of the American national security state as a top-down organization of war managers. In like manner, C. Wright Mills would observe, “During World War II, the merger of the corporate economy and the military bureaucracy came into its present significance.”⁸⁰ Richard J. Barnet would call the World War II expansion of the United States government a “bureaucratic revolution” that had made the national security state the dominant force in the American power structure. He would explain, “the concentration of independent power within the national security bureaucracy” eclipsed in decision-making importance for American foreign policy even the notorious lobbying efforts of the corporations, although there would be a revolving door between the two blocs and generally they would work harmoniously to promote global capitalism.⁸¹ For understanding the rank growth of bureaucracy in Washington, Franz Schurmann would attach special importance to the years 1945 to 1947: “In no comparable period of American history did the state undergo such an accretion of power as in those early postwar years.”⁸² Afterwards it sleeplessly enlarged itself as the catalyst and overseer of a military-industrial complex, the better to supervise, maintain, and defend its own power and allied economic interests.

The creation of the United Nations in 1944 and 1945 as an organization completely dominated by the wartime victors confirmed Beard in his skepticism about the promises of equality made in the Atlantic Charter, the document that had been presented as the declaration of Allied democratic war aims. He shared the view of Villard who reported in The Progressive that the aborning UN replicated all the defects of the old League of Nations: “It is the same old thing,” down to the exclusion of conquered enemies, “…precisely as was the case in 1919.” Villard had been an eyewitness at the Paris Peace Conference. He now saw history repeating itself with a modified cast of protagonists. The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union would dominate the United Nations in the interests of their power elites. To do their part, the Americans would have bases all over the world reinforced with “all the appurtenances of a great imperialist power.”⁸³

Beard continued to follow the reporting of Carleton Beals in The Progressive as a means of decoding administration propaganda about what it was doing in the Middle East. Beals observed, “Just as in and after World War I, control of the oil resources of the world has become one of the principal stakes in the present conflict.”⁸⁴ American rulers had shown no interest in learning about Arab aspirations for independence or putting an end to Western imperialism in the region. They did express a concern about procedures for oil exploitation. Beals scathingly denounced the ensuing Anglo-American oil treaty “as an imperialistic document, using lofty platitudes to cloak monopoly and governmental protection of oil imperialism.” Writing later that summer about his concern over the failure of the government to produce a credible explanation for its responsibility in the Pearl Harbor catastrophe, Beard predicted, “the problems of peace will try the abilities and powers of the Americans to the uttermost.”⁸⁵ Constitutional government in the conduct of foreign affairs no longer mattered in Washington. Like Beals, he feared that the massive deceptions by the government and the media about the causes and consequences of the war would habituate the American people to imperialism and militarism as a normal and even virtuous way to conduct themselves in the world.

Two postwar developments rendered palpable for Beard the fundamentally economic character of the war.⁸⁶ To him, the Truman Doctrine speech that the President gave before Congress in March 1947 and the promulgation of the Marshall Plan later that year unfolded as necessary consequences of the Bretton Woods agreements. The new international order came from the economic substructure of global capitalism, as the war itself had. In his address, Truman called for the United States to provide support for free peoples resisting attempted subjugation by revolutionary forces. The Progressive, which continued to boast of its association with Beard, denounced the Truman Doctrine as a flagrant repudiation of America’s traditional foreign policy of no permanent entanglements and as a program serenely unconcerned about the subjugation of free peoples by reactionary governments so long as they professed to be anti-communist and were prepared to take economic instruction from Washington.⁸⁷

Age and, especially after 1945, worsening health problems slowed Beard. Nevertheless, he remained strongly attached to the magazine. His two final Roosevelt books would receive their best reviews in The Progressive. Moreover, throughout 1946 and 1947 editor Rubin continued to make prolific use of a Beard testimonial: “The Progressive is indispensable for all Americans who are aware that some portion of the United States lies west of the Hudson River.”⁸⁸ It was a vintage Beard sarcasm about the all-too-real suzerainty of economic and political power structures in New York City and Washington, D.C., the country’s democratic lore notwithstanding.

About the Marshall Plan, Beard and Rubin differed. The Progressive endorsed the program as a positive step in the rehabilitation of Western Europe.⁸⁹ Beard denounced it as a transparent maneuver of economic imperialism by the United States. To Villard he wrote about the Marshall Plan, “If it isn’t a fog, I don’t know one when I see it.”⁹⁰ He meant that American economic assistance to client states, decorously denominated as allies, had an ulterior managerial motive, which Marshall Plan rhetoric about freedom and opportunity had been manufactured to conceal. To preserve the fruits of its wartime victory, the United States would be obliged to nurture and guide world capitalism, in much the same way it had transformed Latin America fully into an economic colony. To Villard and a few other intimates, he wrote in his last letters that inevitably the economic premises of the new world order would require the United States to wage permanent war for permanent peace.⁹¹ It would be a role of Sisyphean futility with shattering moral and economic consequences. The permanent war economy Beard pronounced yet another tragedy for the American people to emerge from the Second World War.⁹² His study of classic historiography persuaded him that we were on the road to ancient Rome’s decline and fall, only in our case it would not require five hundred years for the poison of empire to take fatal effect.

The Progressive, meanwhile, faced an economic crisis. On 6 October 1947, editor Morris Rubin announced, “This is the last issue of the present Progressive.”⁹³ The magazine would resume publication as a monthly in January 1948 and continue to publish articles critical of American foreign policy in the postwar period. By this time, Beard’s worsening medical condition had sidelined him almost completely. After a prolonged illness, he died on 1 September 1948. He did not live to see the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of the following year or to learn of National Security Council Document No. 68 the year after that.⁹⁴ Beard saw enough of America’s postwar foreign policy to know that it constituted a decidedly new phase in the country’s course of empire.

American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940 and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 only comprise Beard’s partial reckoning with the factors responsible for the Second World War. Both books, which critics like Hofstadter interpreted as Beard’s surrender of the economic interpretation of history, did in fact focus on FDR’s personal role in shaping America’s foreign policy.⁹⁵ The corporations, cartels, and banks—along with their lobbies, pressure groups, and hidden persuaders—went missing from these two accounts. It does not follow from the absence of the standard Beardian concerns, however, that he had abandoned the convictions of a lifetime in studying the eternal war between wealth and commonwealth.⁹⁶ As he told Barnes on 2 September 1945, dwindling energy would impose physical limitations on his capacity to recount the full history of the war. Other historians would have to tell the rest of the story for which he no longer had the opportunity or the stamina to study. It can be safely presumed that the economic history of the war would have been uppermost in his mind regarding the work these other historians should be doing.

The story that Beard wanted to tell, he informed Barnes, concerned “how the peace psychology was built up while other things were being done by the administration.”⁹⁷ The “other things” had to do with FDR’s actual, non-public foreign policy. In public, he professed to be working conscientiously to keep America out of the war. Beard, however, presented a clear record of misrepresentation by the government. While building up “the peace psychology,” plans for intervention in the war went forward without interruption. Beard sought to expose the contradiction between the president’s professed foreign policy and his real intentions. The way that he had concealed his hidden agenda posed a threat to the integrity of a democratically controlled foreign policy.⁹⁸ Where would subsequent administrations take the country by following the foreign policy path of deception charted by Roosevelt from September 1, 1939, to December 8, 1941? That path clearly would lead to more wars dressed up to look like sequential versions of a morality play whose subtext of imperial control always would be the same. Though falling well short of providing a full historical explanation for why America entered the Second World War, Beard’s anti-Roosevelt books of 1946 and 1948 raised an important question about how the country’s foreign policy should be conducted: in the open or in the dark? The latter would be more suitable for an empire; the former the indispensable precondition for a democracy.

Beard’s continuing concerns about elite control of the country’s power structure appear in his correspondence and in the 1945 revision of The Economic Basis of Politics, but most prominently of all in his interwar and wartime journalistic writing. These three sources substantiate the argument that he viewed the Second World War as another of the ceaselessly recurrent great state clashes over imperial primacy in the world. He never lost sight of the deeper economic currents that propelled American foreign policy. He retained his inveterate suspicion of corporate capitalism’s hegemonic end game for the world, a viewpoint in principle carried forward from his fervent attachment in youth to conservative social critic John Ruskin and supplemented with the social democratic critique of John A. Hobson. The magazine writings in particular document his revisionist ideas about how the war arose in the wide-ranging context of the day’s current events as news reports came over the wire about empires in dubious battle not on the plains of heavenly abstraction, but on a different plane where territories, markets, and resources are in play. Beard’s journalistic first draft of history crucially supplements the later historical writing that he published and shows him to have conserved in full the view that there is no politics without economics. The American Century, beginning in practice with the revolutionary economic formulations of Bretton Woods, was not an adventitious by product of the war. From Washington, it was fought for that precise outcome, as Beard knew it would have to be owing to the requirements of the corporate capitalist worldview guiding the leaders.

Notes:

1
Charles A. Beard, “Agriculture in the Nation’s Economy,” The Nation, 17 August 1927, 150.
2
Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968), 222, 336. For an earlier version of this argument, see his “Charles Beard and the Constitution,” in Howard K. Beale, ed., Charles A. Beard: Am Appraisal (Lexington, Kentucky, 1954), 89-91.
3
Eric Goldman. “A Historian at Seventy,” The New Republic, 27 November 1944, 697.
4
Eugene D. Genovese, “Beard’s Economic Interpretation of History,” in Charles Beard: An Observance of the Centennial of His Birth, ed. Marvin C. Swanson (Greencastle, Indiana, 1974), 43.
5
Charles A. Beard, The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy, with the collaboration of G. H. E. Smith (New York, 1934), 14.
6
Beard, “National Politics and War,” Scribner’s Magazine, February 1935, 70.
7
Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York University, “Cultural Reporting & Criticism,” https://journalism.nyu.edu/
8
Beard, “Heat and Light on Neutrality,” The New Republic, 12 February 1936, 9.
9
Beard, “In Time of Peace Prepare for Peace,” The New Republic, 18 March 1936, 157.
10
Beard, “Solving Domestic Crises by War,” The New Republic,11 March 1936, 129. To Beard’s delight, Walter Millis had argued in The Road to War: America 1914-1917 (Boston, 1935), “The two economies were for the purposes of the war made one; each was now entangled irrevocably in the fate of the other,” 221.
11
Beard, “What Price We Must Pay for Peace,” The New Republic, 15 April 1936, 289.
12
Beard, “Why Did We Go to War?” The New Republic, 10 March 1937, 128.
14
13
Beard, “Five Pages from Newton D. Baker,” The New Republic, 7 October 1936, 248.

Beard, though a man of the left, criticized communism and its interwar avatar, the Soviet Union. Defending communism, literary critic Edmund Wilson had said of him, “he hardly ever writes an article nowadays without expressly repudiating Marxism.”¹⁴ Edmund Wilson, “Marxist History,” The New Republic, 12 October 1932, 228.
15
Beard, “Lenin and Economic Evolution,” The New Republic, 17 May 1933, 24.
16
As a typical example of pro-Soviet bias, James J. Martin quotes New Republic editor Bruce Bliven’s praise for the Soviet Union as “an island of well-being in a world of bleak misery and want,” in American Liberalism and World Politics,1931-1941: Liberalism’s Press and Spokesmen on the Road Back to War Between Mukden and Pearl Harbor (New York, 1964), vol. I, 125.
17
Earl Browder, “For Collective Security,” in “Collective Security: A Debate,” The New Republic, 2 February 1938, 354.
18
Beard, “A Reply to Mr. Browder,” Ibid., 357.
19
Ibid.
20
Anders Stephanson illuminates the economic, racist, and genocidal components of American domestic and foreign policy in Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: 1995).
21
Patrick J. Hearden describes British attempts during the Second World War to circumscribe Ethiopian sovereignty. The State Department “took steps to keep Great Britain from reducing Ethiopia to a puppet state where doors would be closed to American enterprise,” in Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order during World War II (Fayetteville, Arkansas, 2002), 131.
22
For Butler, see Hans Schmidt, Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History (Lexington, Kentucky, 1987) and Jonathan Katz,” Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of the American Empire (New York, 2021).
23
Smedley D. Butler, “America’s Armed Forces,” Part 2, ‘In Time of Peace: The Army,’ Common Sense, November 1935, 8.
24
Butler, “America’s Armed Forces,” ‘Part 3, ‘Happy Days Are Here Again: The Navy,’ Common Sense, December 1935, 11.
25
Alfred M. Bingham, review of The Open Door at Home by Charles A. Beard, Common Sense, February 1935, 27.
26
Under “What’s Left,” a monthly column featuring summaries of articles in other magazines, “Collective Security: A Debate” by Earl Browder and Charles A. Beard, New Republic, 2 February 1938, Common Sense, March 1938, 27.
27
“The Liberal and Anti-Fascism,” Common Sense, October 1938, 3.
28
Ibid., 4.
29
Edward Hallett Carr identified “the fiasco” at Versailles as the ignition point for the Second World War, in his classic work of foreign policy realism, The Twenty Years’ Crisis,1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York, 1946, second edition), ix. The book was originally published in 1939.
30
See David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York, 1989), especially Ch. 41, “Betrayal,” 389-402 and Ch. 42, “The Unreal World of the Peace Conference,” 403-411 and the more general study by David A. Andelman, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Hoboken, New Jersey, 2008). For Andelman, “…the peace imposed at Versailles…determined much of what went wrong for the balance of the century and beyond,” 2-3.
31
“The Liberal and Anti-Fascism,” Common Sense, October 1938, 5.
32
Charles A. Beard, “Letter to the Editor,” Common Sense, November 1938, 2.
33
Beard, “Spooks Made in Germany,” The New Republic, 6 December 1933, 98.
34
Beard, “Invitation to a Bronx Cheer,” The New Republic, 3 January 1934, 227.
35
Beard, “Hitlerism and Our Liberties,” document found in Charles Austin Beard Letters, 1929-1939, Charles Austin Beard Collection, Correspondence between Charles A. Beard and George S. Counts, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
36
Beard, “Will Fascism Come to America?” in Stuart Chase, “A Symposium: Will Fascism Come to America?” The Modern Monthly, September 1934, 458.
37
Beard, “Germany Up to Her Old Tricks,” The New Republic, 24 October 1934, 299-300.
38
Beard, “Education Under the Nazis,” Foreign Affairs, April 1936, 439.
39
Beard, “Letter to the Editor,” Common Sense, November 1938, 2.
40
George R. Leighton, “Beard and Foreign Policy,” in Beale, ed., Charles A. Beard, 181.
41
Beard, “Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels: An Estimate of American Foreign Policy,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1939, 344.
42
Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston-Toronto, 1980), 376. In Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (New York, 2008), Nicholson Baker debunks the Winston Churchill myth by repeatedly quoting the British leader’s own lustrous language to reveal his tireless pursuit of empire as the driving force in a career bulging with war crimes including the World War I starvation blockade of Germany, the post-World War I poison-gas attacks in Iraq. and the World War II terror-bombing attacks against German cities and their civilian populations, 220 and passim.
43
Beard, “Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels,” Harper’s Magazine, 350.
44
Beard, “Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels,” Harper’s Magazine, 346.
45
“‘Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels’ by Charles. A. Beard, Harper’s, September 1939,” “Periodicals,” Common Sense, October 1939, 28.
46
Beard, “The State Limited,” a review of The American Stakes by John Chamberlain, Common Sense, May 1940, 18.
47
Beard biographer Ellen Nore credits “the sharpness of many of his comments” in arguing for less attention to involvements abroad and more to the problems of poverty and inequality at home, in Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1983), 186. See the “Epilogue” for her tribute to the prophetic character of his career as a historian, 226.
48
Alfred M. Bingham, “America’s Decision,” Common Sense, June 1940, 24-25.
49
Beard, “A Navy Second to None,” The New Republic, 26 February 1940, 283.
50
The ex-Marxist literary critic, Granville Hicks, did write for Common Sense a favorable review of Beard’s 1943 book, The Republic. About Beard, he allowed, “his vast knowledge, his critical spirit, and fine feeling for American life fill the book with brilliant insights.” “The American,” Common Sense, November 1943, 417.
51
Beard to Harry Elmer Barnes, 2 September 1943. Harry Elmer Barnes papers, Box 29, Folder 2, 2 August-30 September 1943, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
52
Beard, “Counting the Consequences,” The Progressive, 1 March 1941, 2.
53
For the economic consequences of Lend-Lease, see Lloyd C. Gardner, Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison, Wisconsin, 1964), especially regarding the penetration by American businessmen of the British Empire, 280, and on the same point, Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (London-Sterling, Virginia, 2003, second edition), 127. This book appeared originally in 1972 as Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of the American Empire.
54
For an analysis of the impact of Brooks Adams on Beard’s thinking about the Second World War, see Richard Drake, Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism (Ithaca and London, 2018), 244-252.
55
Bruce Bliven, “The Hang-Back-Boys,” The New Republic, 6 March 1944, 305.
56
Archibald MacLeish, “The Irresponsibles,” The Nation, 18 May 1940, 619.
57
Alan S. Milward observes, “by summer 1944 the economic nature of the peace had become the main preoccupation,” in War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945 (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1977), 52. In the Beardian manner, Milward views the Second World War as “an economic event” determining, at its deepest level of significance, the way the productive forces of the world would be organized under American supervision, xii. Perry Anderson in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers (London-New York, 2015) sees this same pattern of American economic aspiration as “the strategic background to the global struggle” beginning with Pearl Harbor and even earlier in the war, not only in 1944, 17. Christopher Layne, in The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca & London, 2006), writes that the American plan for hegemonic control of the world economy “was under way before the U.S. entry into the war as an active belligerent,” 42.
58
Patrick J. Maney, “Morris H. Rubin, The Progressive, and Cold War Liberalism,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1984, 186.
59
Burton K. Wheeler, “The Road to Enduring Peace,” The Progressive, 24 July 1944, 1. For his dim view of Roosevelt, see Marc C. Johnson, Political Hell-Raiser: The Life and Times of Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, (Norman, Oklahoma, 2019).
60
“The Week in Review,” The Progressive, 24 July 1944, 3. James T. Patterson recounts Senator Taft’s criticisms of America’s wartime aims, in Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 286-291.
61
Walter A. Morton, “What They Did at Bretton Woods,” The Progressive, 7 August 1944, 5.
62
Regarding American foreign policy from 1943 to 1945, Gabriel Kolko concluded that the United States had been striving to achieve “an allegedly new internationalism which scarcely concealed the imperial intent behind it,” in The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (New York, 1968), 626.
63
Michael Hudson wrote in 2003 that the enormous financial crises of recent years “may be traced back to the malstructuring of the World Bank and IMF at the insistence of United States economic diplomats at the inception of these two Bretton Woods institutions,” in Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance, xi. He says of this book, “it was the first to criticize the World Bank and IMF for imposing destructive policies on the world’s debtor economies and to trace these policies to United States diplomatic pressure.”
66
Carleton Beals, “Inside the Good Neighbor Policy: The Strange Story of Bolivian Tin,” Harper’s Magazine, August 1943, 216.
67
Beard, “Our Irresponsible Government,” The Progressive, 6 March 1944, 1.
68
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973, 1997), 159, 204.
69
Eric Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Ithaca-London, 2014), 260. For an analysis of Bretton Woods as essentially an exercise in American realpolitik, see Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton and Oxford, 2013). He writes, “the United States held virtually all the cards at Bretton Woods,” and under White’s skillful direction determined the conference outcome in every significant detail, 209.
70
Beard, The Idea of National Interest, 513.
71
Alan S. Milward concludes his comparative economic history of the Second World War by noting, “the International Bank and the I.M.F. became subordinated to United States control and operated no longer in the universal interest but as instruments of United States policy,” in War, Economy, and Society, 1939-1945, 364.
72
Beard to Merle Curti, 29 August 1946, Merle Curti Papers, Charles Beard material microfilm, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.
73
Beardian historian William Appleman Williams noted that with the Spanish-American War, “America was entering into the argument among the rich about how to control the poor,” in Empire as a Way of Life (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 119.
74
Beard, “Business as a System of Power by Robert A. Brady,” American Political Science Review, April 1943, vol. 37, no. 2, 329.
75
Robert A. Brady, Business as a System of Power (New York,1943), 226.
76
Harry Elmer Barnes, “America Today: Warning and Challenge,” The Progressive, 3 January 1944, 2. See also Barnes’s “The Coming Showdown against Fascism,” The Progressive, 12 June 1944.
77
Oswald Garrison Villard, “The American Road to Fascism,” The Progressive, 21 February 1944, 10.
78
Beard, The Economic Basis of Politics (New York, 1945), “Preface to the Second Edition.”
79
Ibid., Ch. V, “Economics and Politics in Our Revolutionary Age,” 75, 107.
80
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1959), 212.
81
Richard J. Barnet, Roots of War: The Men and Institutions Behind U.S. Foreign Policy (Baltimore, 1971), 137-138.
82
Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York, 1974), 147.
83
Oswald Garrison Villard, “Old League, Old Faults,” The Progressive, 18 September 1944, 12.
84
Carleton Beals, “Oil Imperialism Imperils the Peace,” The Progressive, 21 May 1945, 36. Beals soon would be lamenting the rapidly expanding role of Zionism as the paramount threat to the peace and stability of the Middle East, in “Rabbi Berger’s Fresh Air on Zionism,” The Progressive, 21 January 1946, 10. In The Jewish Dilemma, Rabbi Elmer Berger rejected the idea of a separate race, nationality, and state for the Jews. For the next two years, Beals regularly wrote for The Progressive about oil imperialism and Zionism as driving forces in America’s Middle East policy.
85
Beard, “Pearl Harbor: Challenge to the Republic,” The Progressive, 2 September 1945, 1.
86
In a generally pro-Beard book, Clyde W. Barrow faults him for making the “egregious mistake” of thinking that the Second World War, like the first one, aimed “to make the world safe for capitalism,” More Than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard (New Brunswick and London, 2000), 227.
87
Harry Paxton Howard, “Come Clean, Mr. President!” The Progressive, 14 April 1947, 8. The author of America’s Role in Asia (1943), Howard was a foreign affairs expert and a frequent contributor to the magazine
88
“Testimonial from Charles A. Beard, Dean, U.S. Historians,” The Progressive, 11 February 1946, 5 and used repeatedly thereafter.
89
Maney notes that Rubin wanted the Marshall Plan to be the cornerstone of United States foreign policy, in “Morris H. Rubin, The Progressive, and Cold War Liberalism,” 193
90
Beard to Oswald Garrison Villard, 17 January 1948, Oswald Garrison Villard Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Key scholarly works confirming Beard’s insights regarding the American promotion of corporate capitalism during and immediately after the war are Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (1968), Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy, 1941-1949 (1970); and Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949 (1996).
91
Drake, Charles Austin Beard, Ch. 10, “Defending Beard after the Fall,” 210-233.
92
Seymour Melman lamented in The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline (New York, 1974), “The consensus ideas on war economy … have held sway as defining ideas in our time,” 153. He deplored this consensus for having produced economic instability and for benefiting only the military-industrial complex.
93
Morris H. Rubin, “The End of the Progressive,” The Progressive, 6 October 1947, 1.
94
For an analysis of how NATO and NSC-68 accelerated the militarization of American foreign policy, see David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (New York: 2015), Ch. 5 “The Artist: George Kennan,” 217-267 and Ch. 6 “The Scientist: Paul Nitze,” 268-325.
95
Bernard C. Borning echoes Hofstadter that Beard’s economic interpretation “had become vaguer, less certain…in his mind property ownership in particular had virtually ceased to have any correlation with the possession of political power,” in The Political and Social Thought of Charles A. Beard (Seattle, 1962), 105. Still immensely valuable is Borning’s bibliography of Beard’s articles, books and contributions to books, congressional statements, letters to the editor, pamphlets, reviews and writings about Beard and his intellectual world, 257-295.
96
For Beard’s longstanding interest in the impact of giant capitalism on society, see his review of Robert Liefmann’s Cartels, Concerns and Trusts, in “German Big Business,” The Nation, 31 May 1933, 618-619.
97
Beard to Harry Elmer Barnes, 2 September 1945, Harry Elmer Barnes Papers, Box 31, Folder 1 July-26 September 1945, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
98
Against Beard, Thomas C. Kennedy strongly supports the foreign policy decisions of FDR in the run-up to American involvement in the Second World War while acknowledging that “particulars of his indictment have been conceded,” in Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy (Gainesville, 1975), 165. Kennedy grants Beard’s charge of the President’s dissembling, as well as the legitimacy of the concerns he expressed about the overweening power of the presidency in foreign affairs and the dangers of American militarism. Regarding Beard’s claim in 1947 that he had been denied access to State Department documents available to pro-FDR historians, Kennedy finds no justification, concluding he “wittingly or unjustly, conveyed the impression that he had been denied such access,” in “Charles A. Beard and the ‘Court Historians,’” The Historian, August 1963, vol. 25, no.4, 448.

Charles Austin Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the American Century through His Journalistic Writings

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