Historical Family

A HISTORY OF THE BUSINESS MAN-- Miriam Beard--Macmillan ($5).

Charles Austin Beard is a tall, lean, deaf, white-haired, Indiana-born Yankee with a piercing eye, a commanding presence and a gruff voice. For 25 of his 63 years he has been a powerful influence among U. S. historians by virtue of works like Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. His wife Mary, who collaborated with him on The Rise of American Civilization, is a historian in her own right (A Short History of the American Labor Movement), a lecturer, a champion of women's rights. His son William published his first book, Create the Wealth, in 1936. Last month his son-in-law, Dr. Alfred Vagts, published a monumental 510-page History of Militarism (TIME, Dec. 6). And last week his daughter

Miriam gave the Beards clear title to first U. S. historical family when she brought out her 779-page History of the Business Man, tracing the devious path of capitalists from Babylon to Roosevelt II.

In two farmhouses in the hills of Connecticut, the Beards turn out their fat, factual pamphlets on governments, armies, women and businessmen. In a huge, drab, wooden building that was once a boys' school, Charles and Mary Beard, now engaged on a history of the past ten years, live in virtual retirement with no telephone or radio. But each winter they visit Washington, D. C., where Charles Beard sees his good friends Senators Norris and La Follette, Justice Brandeis, Secretary Wallace, and keeps an educated eye open for signs that Congressmen and Senators are doing what his books show they have so often done in the past--talk abstract principles while advocating legislation in the economic interest of their section or class. A few miles from the parental household in Connecticut the younger branch of the Beard historical menage--Daughter Miriam, her husband Dr. Vagts and their precocious eight-year-old son Detlev-- live in even greater retirement in a new brick house that has an electric dishwashing machine, but also no radio, no telephone. When Miriam Beard and Alfred Vagts were married, Vagts, who had been a German officer during the War, was a professor in Berlin, where they lived until shortly before Hitler came into power. A good cook who does her own housework, Miriam Beard spent eight years accumulating the amazing mass of facts for A History of the Business Man, had to be goaded into finishing the book by her energetic mother, almost had a nervous breakdown before she completed it. The result is a volume that businessmen could value as a lucid, informative study of their pioneering ancestors. The dimensions of the book are extraordinary. The 28 chapters are subdivided into 209 sections, covering commercial cities from Carthage to Chicago, war makers from Crassus to Krupp, business failures from John Law to the Van Sweringens. There is a warmly-written, fact-laden essay on medieval Liibeck, centre of the Hanseatic League, sections devoted to business in Venice and Florence, to booms & crashes in Nurnberg, Antwerp, Bremen, the rise and fall of the Fuggers, the spectacular careers of Jacques Coeur, financier of Joan of Arc, and of Gresham, who backed Queen Elizabeth. But all this, with asides about church finances, taxes, makes up only the first half of the story of the businessman's endless race with ruin.

The second half, more heavily documented, is slower going. Here, except for a brilliant account of U. S. town-building, Miriam Beard's contribution is to compare the achievements of Vanderbilt, Gould, Morgan, Rockefeller with those of Fugger, Colbert, or the Bickers of Holland; to measure familiar swindles and honest accomplishments against ancient examples. U. S. millionaires compare well in both respects with their predecessors. Squelched at first by the landed gentry, then by Southern aristocrats, U. S. businessmen wielded their power openly only for a brief period after the Civil War, until their corporations grew so vast that "like kings of Egypt, the later businessmen were buried under their own pyramids."

Like her parents' Rise of American Civilization, like her husband's History of Militarism, Miriam Beard's book ends inconclusively. The composite businessman who emerges from its cluster of facts is a puzzling figure. Not a severe critic, the author points out that in comparison with feudal lords and warriors, businessmen have been humane. They have robbed widows & orphans and sold rotten ships to their governments from the Punic to the Civil War, but they have not burned rival salesmen at the stake. A maniac might get to be a monarch, she says, but he could never run a factory. The gist of her argument is that businessmen's great failure has been their inability to develop a goal that would dignify their ceaseless struggles. Men of calculation, wielding great power, performing gigantic feats of organization and administration, their history should be dramatic, colorful, tragic. And yet it has remained niggardly and dull, its tragedies without elevation, its achievements unsung. Poets have avoided its stories and businessmen themselves have not wanted to hear them. The reason, Miriam Beard believes, is that heroes in other fields have served some ideal larger than themselves, even if they served it badly, have had some goal that business, except in a few unselfish spirits, has always lacked.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.