Boom to Gloom

AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE--Charles A. Beard & Mary R. Beard--Macmillan ($3.50).

Seldom have Americans been so beset by history as in the decade from 1928 to 1938. In those ten years, history rushed at them like an attack of modern high-speed tanks. Business stagnation, unemployment, hunger, despair, menaced millions hourly. Kept on the run, bewildered people had no time to take stock of the very events they were running from.

For such fugitives from history, learned, liberal Historians Charles and Mary Beard this week provided America in Midpassage (the third volume of their Rise of American Civilization), a condensed but still bulky survey of the last ten years. Into its 977 pages the Beards with evident relish have packed the joltiest jars of the great skid from the boom of 1928 to the gloom of 1939, suggest some new rules for safer driving if the car of state ever climbs back on the road.

Still plugging their once-sensational theory that economics makes history what it is, the Beards explore the underground economic forces that brought about Coolidge prosperity. With the aloof amusement of two moralists who stayed sober while the rest of the world got tight, they investigate the causes of the crash, the closing of the banks, the New Deal and government by Brain Trust.

Burning question for many readers may well be: what do the Beards think of the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt? Adept at juggling hot coals, the cagey Beards are much too light-fingered to hold one of them a minute too long, on the whole admire most New Deal intentions, are politely skeptical of most New Deal results.

Franklin Roosevelt, the Beards find, combines "in his thinking the severe economic analysis of the Hamilton-Webster tradition with the humanistic democracy of the parallel tradition. Whatever his merits or demerits as statesman or administrator, he eventually gave expression to the two most powerful tendencies in American history."

Impartial historians are as rare as "impartial" politicians. The Beard style, with its heavy clattering of cliches, lightened by an occasional urbane understatement or neatly turned irony, gives a skilful impression of impartiality. The impartial Beards' smartest trick is ventriloquizing moot points through historical Charlie McCarthies: James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster.

The Authors. Declining to reveal which is which in their literary partnership, Charles Austin Beard claims that the secret of his congenial collaboration with his charming wife, Mary, is "division of argument." But Charles Beard is the solid head historian of the history-writing Beard family (Daughter Miriam: A History of the Business Man; Son William: Government and Technology; Son-in-Law Alfred Vagts: The History of Militarism).

Born 64 years ago on a farm near Knightstown, Ind., wiry, white-haired, amiably skeptical Charles Beard looks like a shrewd Yankee farmer, is really a Hoosier schoolmaster. For the last 20 years he has lived in a big, grey, barnlike house, once a boys' school, on a Connecticut hilltop overlooking the Housatonic River. Part of each winter he usually spends in Washington, D. C., where he visits his good friends, Senator George Norris and Secretary Wallace, keeps a sharp eye on the latest fast moves of legislators. In summer he manages his two dairy farms, calls them "a sheet anchor against inflation."

Beard's great-grandfather was a Federalist, his grandfather a Whig and rebel Quaker who ran "a one-man church" and speculated in Western lands; his father was a "copper-riveted, rock-ribbed, Mark Hanna, true-blue" Republican who prospered as building contractor, ran a bank, read the classics, raised his family on a farm to develop their backbone. At 18 Charles Beard owned a country weekly, the graduation gift of his father, ran it at a profit for four years. At Methodist DePauw College his extracurricular activities included reporting for a Republican newspaper, electioneering for a Republican Senator, first exposure to the rising Progressive movement.

When his offer to organize a volunteer company in the Spanish-American War was refused, Charles Beard went to Oxford, helped organize its first labor college (Ruskin), chummed with Ramsay MacDonald in British labor circles. From 1904 to 1917 he was one of Columbia University's most popular professors.

In 1913 Beard published his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. Probably the dullest book of sensational history ever written, it infuriated conservative historians and editors by documenting the shocking lucidity with which the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution in their own economic interest. Newspapers screamed that Beard was a "hyena." Ex-President Taft (whom Beard calls his heaviest critic--"by tonnage") damned it in a special speech. High schools banned the book; public libraries put it on the restricted shelf. Nicholas Murray Butler sputtered that his derelict professor of politics was aping "the crude, immoral and unhistorical teaching of Karl Marx." Charles Beard urged them to read Federal Paper No. 10, by Founding Father James Madison.

In 1917 Beard resigned from Columbia in protest against the dismissal of two fellow professors for opposing U. S. entry into the War (Beard himself supported the War), later joined John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, James Harvey Robinson in founding The New School for Social Research, for four years headed the New York Bureau of Municipal Research. A belligerent champion of civil liberties and academic freedom, Beard was a scorching critic of post-War red-hunting. When, in 1933, Missouri Pacific Railroad went bankrupt, Beard, a small bondholder, heard that the House of Morgan was withholding interest pending a court order. "Preposterous," Beard wrote, "you have my money. Send it to me." When they refused, Beard forced a Congressional investigation, collected his interest.

An isolationist in foreign affairs, Beard had personal experience of idealistic dabbling in European matters when he served as adviser to the Yugoslavian Government in 1927-28. Serbs appreciated his advice, but continued to oppress Croats, Macedonians, Hungarians. "That cured me," Beard says. He thinks Europe is just a big Balkans, that Americans can never solve Europe's problems. A long-term optimist, Beard believes that Fascism cannot come to the U. S. "Democracy," says he, "is a cause that is never won, but I believe it will never be lost."

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