Latter-Day Beard

THE REPUBLIC--Charles A. Beard--Viking ($3).

Charles Austin Beard, who looks like the American bald eagle, has made historical scholarship a springboard to a life of heady and exhilarating controversy. The Republic is the latest round of the argument. It will also go a long way to end the notion that, as a historian, Charles A. Beard is an economic determinist and nothing else.

Back in 1913, in his pioneering work, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Beard argued that the Founding Fathers represented four groups of interests: "money, public securities, manufactures, and trade & shipping." "The Constitution," Beard said, "was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities."

All his life that statement has haunted Charlie Beard. Because of it, Marxists have tried to claim him as one of their own, and other men have jumped down his throat. William Howard Taft once attacked Beard as a subverter of the republican (small "r") faith. President Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago has dismissed the Economic Interpretation as a book hardly worth reading. To the Marxists, Beard has replied that he is a Madisonian in his view of the effect of material considerations on history. To those who have attacked him for reducing history to the level of the human belly he has said, in effect: "See here, I called my book an economic interpretation. I have never believed that history is solely a matter of economics, for there can be ecological, juridical, libertarian, moral, religious, philosophical and idealist interpretations. What is the harm in knowing how much real estate George Washington possessed? And why not admit that Robert Morris was an iron manufacturer and a West Indian trader? If we know these facts, and others like them, we can begin to understand the animus of Jacksonian, Populist, Bryanite and Bull Moose debtor classes against many things that have been done in the name of the Constitution. The economic interpretation is one key to history. And mark it well, I say one key, not the key."

The Puritan-Protestant Idea. The fact that Beard was no crude materialist has been apparent for years to those who have read his occasional magazine articles. Beard's vision of America has always been rooted in a moral idea, the Puritan-Protestant idea of "take care of your family and lend a helping hand to those who deserve it."

But having broadened and deepened his knowledge since he was a young rebel against "Federalist" historians, Charlie Beard was bound to do a mature book on his ideas about the Constitution and what it has meant to the U.S. And since his own mind has been a battleground, it is not surprising that the book, published under the Platonic title of The Republic, should also be cast in the form of a series of Platonic (or Socratic) dialogues. To his study high up on a Connecticut hillside overlooking the Housatonic valley, Charlie Beard has invited an imaginary Dr. and Mrs. Smyth and a few imaginary friends for a series of evening seminars on the

Constitution. But let there be no mistake about it: the Smyths are stooges for Charles A. Beard, who is resolved to have his full say about the Constitution.

Energy v. Violence. This time Uncle Charlie makes it plain that he believes that Hamilton, Madison and the rest of the Founders were men first and business men second, that they believed in liberty as well as property, morals as well as interests, rights as well as powers. The Constitution may not have been written, or even ratified, by all the people referred to as "We, the People," in the Preamble. But the men who made it believed in the doc trine that there are many "rights" anterior to government, and that these rights belong to all the people. Even without the Bill of Rights, which was added as an after thought largely at the demand of Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution guaranteed many liberties beyond the "right to property."

Beard's defense of Alexander Hamilton is typical of Beard's shift in emphasis. It is true, says Beard, that Hamilton thought of the "people" as a "great beast." But in The Federalist the "bastard brat of a Scotch peddler" (as John Adams called Hamilton) hailed the Constitution as a "people's document." The privilege of the "writ of habeas corpus," which guarantees individuals and groups against arbitrary imprisonment, covered everybody, not merely the "rich, wellborn and able." At one point in the symposium on "A More Perfect Union and Justice," Dr. Smyth tries to get Beard to admit that Hamilton believed in "Federalist party justice." But the indefatigable Uncle Charles again routs Dr. Smyth since Hamilton vigorous ly attacked the Federalist-inspired Sedition Act of 1798. "Let us not establish a tyranny," said Hamilton. "Energy is a very different thing from violence." All of this is a far cry from the eco nomic interpretation of the Constitution.

But the latter-day Beard goes further still.

The Constitution not only guarantees many rights that are not connected with the right to property, it also lays down a procedure for governing without breaking the heads of any economic class. Washington and Hamilton may have been on the side of the well-heeled, but they believed in "constitutionalism" even when its application worked in favor of the poor and the propertyless. All of the important Founding Fathers were prepared to accept political defeat "if it comes by constitutional methods." That, as Beard is now prepared to argue, is hardly an "economic" aspect of the Founders' character.

Economic Thimblerigging. On the subject Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, Beard has been somewhat equivocal.

Much of the work of the alphabetical agencies has been, to Beard, a species of "economic thimblerigging." But to Dr. Smyth, who was a Liberty Leaguer in 1936, Beard insists that the New Deal has stayed pretty well within the bounds of constitutionalism. The Founding Fathers, says Beard, did not believe in the doctrines of economic laissez faire that are usually attributed to Adam Smith. They were, as a matter of fact, 18th-Century "mercantilists" in their primary economic assumptions. Their "mercantilism" implied a belief in Federal interference with economic matters and they expressly gave Congress the power to "regulate" commerce between the States. Subsidies, tariffs, economic prohibitions, government investment in roads and canals--all of these things have been part of "the American way" ever since 1787. Whether the "mercantilist way" is a good way is not a question that can be settled by reference to the Constitutional debates at Philadelphia.

Blended Powers. If all the people, even including the poorest of the people, are protected against tyranny by the universal rights guaranteed by the Constitution, they are also protected against the tyranny of any single arm of the government. But to Beard, this protection has not been achieved by any hard-&-fast "separation of the powers" into executive, legislative and judiciary. The powers of the various agencies of government, he says, have been "blended" and "interconnected" rather than separated. Congress is not a judiciary body, but it has the judicial power to impeach and try U.S. civil officers. The President nominates Federal judges, but the Senate must approve them. The President can affect or control legislation, partly through his power as a party head with patronage to dispense, and partly by exercise of the veto. In brief, there are checks and balances within the tripartite system of checks and balances. A President can have his way in the conduct of foreign affairs up to a point. But he must always worry about the jealousy of the U.S. Senate, which has the ultimate power in the making of treaties.

Brilliant Catfight. The particular symposium in The Republic that is devoted to foreign affairs turns out to be a brilliant and bitter catfight. As a tiger among lesser cats, Beard claws all his enemies in this particular chapter to death. Beard's opponents have fictitious names, but it is easy to identify them with the beliefs of Dr. James Shotwell, Clarence Streit, Ely Culbertson, Wendell Willkie, Herbert Agar, Pearl Buck and others. The weakness of this foreign-policy symposium derives from its satirical intent, which is not in keeping with The Republic as a whole. Walter Lippmann, for example, could undoubtedly make out a good case for an Anglo-American understanding in support of Beard's "continentalism" (especially as it involves defending the sea approaches to Latin America). But Beard does not let his opponents use the brains which at least one or two of them have.

Nevertheless, every last word of The Republic is stimulating, vibrant, energetic. Beard makes a wonderful prodder, a wonderful Socrates. And in departing from the "economic interpretation of the Constitution," he does much to vindicate the moral disinterestedness of the Founding Fathers. When he is all through he has pretty well succeeded in making his readers believe that human beings have potentialities for fair dealing that transcend any question of their economic or social status.

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