evidence of Beard’s odd-man-out status within the “progressive school”). Beard also stands alone among the progressive historians inasmuch as he wrote a consensus-style book in collaboration with his wife. It was entitled “The Beards Basic History of the United States,” and was published in 1944. In it, he (is “they” perhaps better?) seconded many of Jameson’s notions of the end of primogeniture, disestablishment of the Anglican Church, and so on. (Beard 1944, 119) But it is the chapter on the Constitution that stands out. The view of the Constitution that was offered by Beard was a much mellower view than the one offered by him a bit more than thirty years earlier. He discussed the various features of the document and extolled its virtues. In short, he seemed more tolerant of “men of property” (Beard 1944, 120-137). Was it because two world wars had changed his world-view? Had he been cauterized by the barbarism of twentieth-century global war? On the other hand, had he merely begun to be more tolerant, as so often happens as people reach the ends of their lives? Probably all of these forces were in effect to one degree or another. Beard himself is quoted by Richard Hofstadter as saying in 1934 that “are indeed is the savant who does not appear to be at war with himself in his own breast” and in 1940 that “Olympian certitude has exploded” (Hofstadter, 285). In any event, whether for wartime propaganda reasons, or for the reasons wrought by intellectual evolution, Charles Beard near the end of his life had softened his once-adversarial stance. The only important criticism of Beard is that economic interpretations of history that exclude all others, of the kind that Beard wrote in his earliest years, are at best one-dimensional. At worst they are narrow-minded, adversarial, sometimes even hate-filled, polemics. Taking a similar approach to Beard’s i...
