Richard Drake presents a new interpretation of Charles Austin Beard's life and work. The foremost American historian and a leading public intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century, Beard participated actively in the debates about American politics and foreign policy surrounding the two world wars. Drake takes this famous man's life and rewrites his intellectual biography by placing the European dimension of Beard's thought at the center. This radical change of critical focus allows Drake to correct previous biographers' oversights and, in Charles Austin Beard, present a far more nuanced appreciation for Beard's life than we have read before. Drake proposes a restoration of Beard's professional reputation, which he lost in large part because of his extremely unpopular opposition to America's intervention in World War II. Drake analyzes the stages of Beard's development as a historian and critic: his role as an intellectual leader in the Progressive movement, the support that he gave to the cause of American intervention in World War I, and his subsequent revisionist repudiation of Wilsonian ideals and embrace of non-interventionism in the lead-up to World War II. Many of his dire predictions about the inevitable consequences of pre-World War II American foreign policy have come to pass. Drake shows that, as Americans tally the ruinous costs-both financial and moral-of nation-building and informal empire, the life and work of this prophet of history merit a thorough reexamination.
"An estimable study.... Drake's fine book... performs an important service. It invites readers to do what Beard himself strove to do as he kept close watch on events during the 1930s and 1940s: to remain alert to hypocrisy and contradiction contributing to the misuse of American power. In an era awash with fake news, the handiwork not only of policymakers but of the media itself, this task becomes
Andrew Bacevich,The American Conservative
"An incisive view of the power of Beard, and a sense of his intellectual origins.... Drake's worthy volume seeks to take full measure of Charles Beard's contribution to the scholarship of American history."
Paul Buhle,The Progressive
"An unfolding account of [Charles Austin Beard's] ideas and arguments.... The cold, hard face of Charles Austin Beard peers from the front cover of Mr. Drake's biography, as if from the other side of a tinted glass. His is a strong, hard visage, that of a man who long ago had made up his own mind about the world and America's limited place in it."
