His Noble Dreams

Abstract

The subtitle of Richard Drake’s new book on the historian Charles Beard certainly draws the eye. “The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism” expresses Drake’s wish to restore his subject’s reputation to where it was before Beard opposed U.S. participation in the Second World War and lambasted Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a great deceiver. So the book does not chronicle Beard’s actual return to prominence—its purpose, rather, is to help catalyze it. Beard’s steep ascent and vertiginous fall bears some similarity to Daedalus and Icarus as aeronautical innovators. “No American historian before Beard could match his sales record,” writes Drake, “his dozens of textbooks and monographs sold in the millions of copies” (1). His breakthrough work was An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, published in 1913, which proposed that the Founding Fathers’ constitutional designs were driven principally by economic self-interest. The book was denounced by President Woodrow Wilson and the New York Times—in a front-page editorial—which predictably worked wonders for its sales. Charmingly, former president William Howard Taft wondered why Beard had to depress so many good people by telling the truth.