Education: Uncle Charlie

At times, he seemed more like a Hoosier schoolmaster than an eminent historian. He was long and lean, baggily dressed, and always in need of a haircut—”a poor professor,” he liked to say, “on his way from obscurity to oblivion.” But when Charles Austin Beard threw back his head, squinted down his long nose, and began to lecture at Columbia University, students jammed in to hear him. And when he perched on the edge of a desk to speak of his own research (“Now I’ll tell you what I found out last night”), historians from all over the U.S. came to attention.

“Examine the Assumptions.” “Uncle Charlie,” as his Columbia students called him, was also a great ruffler of conventional thought. He resigned from Columbia in 1917 over the dismissal of two non-interventionist colleagues, though he himself was in favor of U.S. entry into World War I. The New York Times congratulated the university on its “deliverance” from such a radical. He was forever popping up—at congressional hearings, protest meetings, or with a new book—to attack Hearst, or Wall Street, the “intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism,” or the internationalists and their “giddy minds.” No one ever quite knew what he would say next. “Have you read Charles Beard’s last book?” someone once asked Nicholas Murray Butler. Huffed Columbia’s president: “I hope so.”

Beard insisted that American history was not only a record of great men, of wars and politics—but also of the way ordinary men & women had lived in their land, and of the social and economic forces that had led and pushed them. In An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) he probed into the personal motives of the Founding Fathers themselves, suggested that as men of property they had been privately interested in a charter that would protect their own wealth. To older historians, such an approach was blasphemous. Harvard’s grizzled Albert Bushnell Hart declared the book “little short of indecent.”

But the historians learned much from Uncle Charlie’s rufflings, and from his characteristic “Now, let us examine the assumptions.” And when (in his opinion) too many of his followers began to write as if all U.S. history had been “determined” by economic forces alone, he ruffled them once more. Said Beard: “The economic interpretation is one key to history . . . not the key.” He cautioned that all history-writing had an unavoidable bias, that each historian would approve or disapprove, stress or ignore, according to his time and temperament.

A Generation to School. Beard’s influence spread beyond his colleagues, the historians. During the ’20s, with his wife Mary, he wrote a brilliant and provocative survey history of the U.S., The Rise of American Civilization. The book became a standard work in U.S. schools and colleges. A whole generation of Americans learned their U.S. history in Uncle Charlie’s school.

For Beard, the knowledge of history had one purpose: to guide men in the present. At times, therefore, he was as much a preacher as a historian, reaching into the controversies of the present for his texts. He bitterly opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policies, and his last work (President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941} contained as much propaganda as history.

On a hilltop farm in Connecticut, near New Milford, he and Mary Beard worked and wrote together. There Uncle Charlie grew old and deaf, though his eyes still snapped when he argued (“Of course, sir, I am a poor ignorant boob, but . . .”). There, last week, at 73, Charles Beard died. He was the most influential American historian of his day. What his permanent stature was, it would take some time for the other historians to decide.