Arts and Letters

Until 1917 the rise of Charles Austin Beard was typically that of the able teacher who wins his doctorate at an age of maturity. He was in his thirtieth year when he completed his dissertation and passed his final examinations for his Ph.D., but he had accumulated so much sound experience that with a few long strides he caught up with scholars who had started earlier in life. Within three years after graduation at Columbia he was named Adjunct Professor and in 1915 he was promoted to be Professor of Politics. He had held that position two years only when the familiar controversy over American foreign policy led to his resignation. From 1917 to 1922, he was Director of the Training School for Public Service, and, briefly, adviser to Baron Goto, then Mayor of Tokyo, in the Institute of Municipal Research in the Japanese capital. These interruptions of the service he had rendered at Columbia might have been fatal to the productive career of the average scholar; but Marcus Antoninus' maxim applied: "Ill fortune, nobly borne, [was] good fortune." When Charles A. Beard ceased to put teaching first and historical research second in his work, he concentrated on writing and quickly achieved high distinction. Before leaving Columbia, he had written among other books An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy and in them had fashioned the lantern he was to carry with him in dark, unexplored fields of American history. With the publication in 1922 of his Economic Basis of Politics, he formulated his thesis of an economic interpretation of history, a thesis destined to have as marked an influence on historical thought in America as F. J. Turner's theory of the frontier had. Within five years after the publication of that work, Dr. Beard, with his wife's assistance, had completed his Rise of American Civilization, which fixed his place among American historians and won for him an audience that followed almost to the end of his career. Any study of historiography in America during the twentieth century would have to list this book among the dozen that did most to shape historical thinking. Sharp division developed over Beard's last works, but for those of his middle period there was almost universal respect and wide admiration.

Beard the teacher was the peer of Beard the historian. Although his formal instruction of advanced students was within the bracket of fifteen years (1907-1922) it was given to some exceptional men with extraordinary results. His was always a challenge of the difficult. When a student came into what appeared to be a blind alley of inquiry, Beard always had both a suggestion of a new approach and a confident assurance that the young man would find it. Beard inspired even more than he created: there is no nobler end than that for a scholar.