Books: Beard’s Last

THE BEARDS’ BASIC HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES— he New Home Library (69¢).

“With this book,” write Charles and Mary Beard, “we bring to a close our many years of cooperative efforts in seeking to interpret the long course of American history.” The collaboration it ends is among the most influential in U.S. history.

The Question. Both Indiana-born, both graduates of what was then sleepy little DePauw University, Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard got their first taste of industrialism together in Chicago, New York and London around the turn of the century. In and near the Beard and Ritter homes at Knightstown and Indianapolis, Ind., there had been no poverty, no slums, no violent strikes; the grapple and grab of business shocked the young couple into questions. In Chicago, with Clarence Darrow and Eugene Debs, they sought answers at the famed forum of Jane Addams’ Hull House. In London they continued the quest, helped set up a workingman’s college (Ruskin) at Oxford. Later, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald said: “If Charles Beard had stayed in England, he would have been a member of my Cabinet.”

But after a year in England the Beards came home, to a lifetime study of why U.S. wealth and wisdom had not fulfilled the American dream of equal opportunity and abundance for all.

At Columbia University, students flocked to savor “Uncle Charlie’s” bottomless knowledge and quinine wit. In 1913, after months of delving in the dust-choked records of the U.S. Treasury Department, he published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, suggesting that the Founding Fathers belonged to a group influenced as much by material self-interest as by love of liberty. Conservatives exploded.

The Ohio Star, in Mrs. Warren G. Harding’s home town of Marion, shrieked: “Every patriotic citizen of the U.S., every lover of liberty in this land, should rise to condemn him and the purveyors of his filthy lies and rotten perversions.”

In 1917, on an issue of academic freedom involving other men, Professor Beard resigned from Columbia with the statement: “I cannot repress my astonishment that America . . . has made the status of the professor lower than that of the manual laborer, who, through his union, has at least some voice in the terms and conditions of his employment.” Next day the New York Times ran an editorial titled: “Columbia’s Deliverance.”

Together. Charles and Mary Beard went off to a spacious old colonial house near New Milford, Conn., settled down to running a dairy farm and remaking the American mind. Each of them turned out individual books. Friendly, tough-minded Mary Beard brought labor into scholarly history (A Short History of the American Labor Movement) at a time (1920) when the subject belonged almost exclusively to pamphleteers. She wrote of women {Woman’s Work in Municipalities, America Through Women’s Eyes, etc.) without feminist ax grinding. Over the years kindly, ruddy-cheeked Charles Beard achieved the stature of a national institution. To hundreds of young pro fessional historians, he became a hero and a prophet, the acknowledged leader of a reformist school which attacked the abstractions of conservatism by an economic reinterpretation of U.S. history.

The most influential works that Charles and Mary Beard wrote, they wrote to gether. In 1923, after the Tokyo earthquake, Mr. Beard was asked to serve Japan as an adviser on municipal reconstruction. Nine thousand miles from home, the Beards saw U.S. history in a new perspective, felt a fresh enthusiasm for writing it. On the ship coming back they sketched the outline on big pieces of foolscap. In the twin studies of their new Milford home, looking out on the rolling Connecticut hills, they wrote The Rise of American Civilization, America in Midpassage, and The American Spirit — four volumes that told and interpreted the whole story in 3,362 lucid pages.

No account of the U.S. past ever interested — or upset — so many U.S. citizens. In the same year as The Rise (1927) Vernon Louis Parrington published his pioneering Main Currents in American Thought (which shows the Beardian in fluence on every page) and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for it. Said Mrs. Parrington: “They had to give the prize to one or the other of them, and I guess Vernon’s book is less disturbing.”

The Drugstore Market. But the bulky, expensive (total cost: $12.25) four volumes had little attraction for the 5 & 10 and drugstore trade. And the Beards know well that if history as a social weapon is to achieve its highest potency, it must reach that market. When, in 1942, Doubleday Doran’s Freeman Lewis began publishing a series of cheap, good, educational books (The New Home Library), the Beards, then in their late 60s, offered to take on the long, gruelling job of writing a new popular U.S. history.

They were totally uninterested in its money-making possibilities.The result is an unprecedented reversal of publishing practice. The 69¢ edition of The Beards’ Basic History which was published last week (150,000 copies in the first printing) was the book’s first appear ance. Next month a more expensive edition will be distributed as a Book-of-the-Month Club dividend. After that Doubleday Doran will publish an illustrated edition at $3.50. For the first time in book history, the drugstore buyers come first.

For their 69¢, they will get no mere rehash of the earlier Beard histories. The Basic History has its own fresh organization (especially noteworthy are chapters on “A Broadening and Deepening Sense of Civilization,” “Centralization of Economy,” and “Gates of Old Opportunities Closing”), its own fresh feats of condensation without loss of striking detail.

Those who read the Beards’ Basic History not for the basic history but for the Beards will find in it the historians’ mature comment on a U.S. liberalism which often claims them as forebears. With a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm they write about a U.S. foreign policy based on “shadowy plans for a world order and for enforcing the four freedoms throughout the world.” With half-concealed asperity they dismiss the notion that the New Deal represented a fundamental attack on poverty. They make a partial defense of Whipping Boy Herbert Hoover. Write the Beards: “President Hoover accepted no defeatist philosophy while this terrible depression harrowed the nation. . . . But Democratic tactics in the House of Representatives were principally confined to obstructing . . . such undertakings as he ventured to sponsor.”

No Answer. On the next-to-the-last page the Beards feel impelled to raise all over again the question which agitated them as soon as they left well-fed Indiana. “Could full employment be provided for all the millions who had to have it for their very livelihood?” And still, to their minds, the answer has not been worked out: “The New Deal has failed to solve the problem of unemployment between 1933 and 1939 . . . and there was nothing in experience to indicate that the New Deal could solve the still greater problem of unemployment looming on the horizon of the coming peace. Nor did the fact that the most devastating panic in the nation’s history had occurred under Republican auspices indicate that a return to the days of freer, if not free, enterprise, still yearned for in nostalgic circles, offered any better prospects.”