BEARD, CHARLES A. (1874–1948)

Charles Austin Beard, more than any other historian, shaped the way twentieth-century Americans look at the framing of the Constitution. He thus occupied, as he said a historian should, "the position of a statesman dealing with public affairs."

After being graduated at de Pauw and Columbia Universities, Beard continued his studies in Europe. His early writings reflect a theory of strict economic determinism; in The Rise of American Civilization (1927) he argued that the civil war was less a struggle between slavery and freedom than an epiphenomenon of emerging industrialism. Throughout his career as a teacher at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research and as a writer he maintained that historians cannot discover or describe the past as it actually was, but must instead reinterpret the past in order to shape their own times and the future.

Beard's most influential work was his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. First published in 1913, the book was part of the Progressive movement's assault on such "undemocratic" constitutional obstacles to reform as the checks and balances, and federalism. The work was republished, with a new introduction, in 1935, when the forms of constitutionalism again seemed to frustrate attempts at reform legislation. The thesis of the book is that the Constitution was framed by large holders of personal property and capital (especially government securities) in order to further their own economic interests and to frustrate the majority will. The effect of the book at the time of each publication was to undermine the legitimacy of the Constitution in the public mind by ascribing base motives to its authors. Beard's assumptions about the amounts and types of property owned by the Framers have been thoroughly discredited; yet his thesis about the origin of the Constitution became the standard version taught in universities and public schools. Even his opponents have adopted Beard's analytical framework.

Besides the Economic Interpretation, Beard, alone or with his wife, Mary Ritter Beard, was author of some two dozen books on politics and history. He was also president both of the American Historical Association and of the American Political Science Association.

Dennis J. Mahoney
(1986)

Bibliography

Brown, Robert E. 1956 Charles Beard and the Constitution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.