Charles A. Beard: The English Experience

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Abstract
During his life, as after his death, Charles A. Beard was a controversial figure. An unsympathetic Allan Nevins dismissed him as the exponent of “a smart, hard materialism.” His former student and long-time friend Raymond Moley regarded him as the exemplar of a “hard-bitten realism,” a realism heavily laced with skepticism toward “orthodoxy — even his own earlier orthodoxies.” His “real spirit,” the “essential ‘style’ of the man,” his friend and neighbor Matthew Josephson found, “was realistic, skeptical, pragmatic.” Yet there was another side to Beard. He had, an admirer wrote, “a deep concern about human beings, a profound respect for human dignity.” The philosopher Irwin Edman, who took his course in American government when an undergraduate at Columbia, recalled how he conveyed to his students not simply his “passionate concern for an understanding of the realities of government,” but his “ideal of government: the liberation of the energies of men.” The problem, his wife perceptively recognized, was that Beard was such “a highly complicated person” that he “cannot be classified into any mere category of man, thinker, historian. He was not mentally static enough for that simplification.”Beard's multifarious accomplishments and activities were more than sufficient to fill the lifetimes of several men.

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