More than a Historian by Clyde Barrow

Author:Clyde Barrow [Barrow, Clyde]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138512351
Google: cc1_swEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2018-02-05T01:32:28+00:00

5

The Workers’ Republic

It has never been easy to interpret the work of Charles A. Beard using traditional ideological categories from either American or European political thought. Political theorists and intellectual historians have identified Beard as both a Jeffersonian and a Hamiltonian. Others have described him as a Progressive, a liberal, a corporate-liberal, a Tory-radical, and a Marxian socialist.1 Notably, with the exception of those few scholars misguided enough to view Beard as a Jeffersonian, most students of Beard’s political thought have defended their claims by pointing to Beard’s growing enthusiasm for a planned economy during the 1930s. However, as George Soule noted early in the controversies over Beard’s work, the concept of planning was an omnibus word during the 1930s that was given “a different content by any number of its advocates, practitioners, and opponents.” In a political sense, the concept was attractive during the decade because it vaguely denoted one’s opposition to laissez-faire capitalism without “involving the proponent in endless arguments about specific panaceas” for the Great Depression.2 In substance, therefore, discussions of economic planning during this period included everything from Wilsonian liberalism to communism and fascism. Thus, it is no surprise that previous efforts to locate and evaluate Beard’s work on the basis of this concept have never proven wholly satisfactory. Furthermore, Beard made little effort to clarify this ambiguity in most instances, since he frequently referred to his conception of a planned economy as industrial democracy or collectivist democracy.

Thus, in lieu of any clear statement to the contrary, political theorists and intellectual historians have largely accepted Harold Laski’s early assessment of Beard’s political thought. In a collection of essays that provided the first systematic attempt to evaluate Beard’s legacy to American political thought and historiography, Laski claimed that Beard “has never drawn conclusions of a Marxist, or, in any decisive way, even a socialist character….Beard is a collectivist, but not a socialist.”3 Bernard Boming followed this lead in the first and only book devoted entirely to a reconstruction of Beard’s political and social thought, by observing that Beard was inclined only toward “a modified form of ‘capitalist democracy’.”4 More recently, Raymond Seidelman has echoed these earlier claims with his conclusion that Beard merely “wanted to extend the scope and range of collectivist-style reforms” adopted during the New Deal, but Seidelman agrees that Beard’s ideas were “hardly socialist.”5 Indeed, since his death in 1948, most analyses of Beard’s political and historical thought have located his ideas somewhere within the vague progressive spectrum of an emerging New Deal liberalism.6

By contrast, Ellen Nore is perhaps the only contemporary scholar to challenge the dominant interpretation of Beard’s political thinking with her suggestion that Beard’s programmatic proposals for economic and constitutional reform were actually far left of the New Deal. Nore argues that in contrast to the New Deal liberals: “Beard did not want to save capitalism, but rather to go beyond it to a new system” and, in this respect, she insists that “Beard was very sympathetic to socialism.”7 Indeed, when

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