BEARD, CHARLES A., AND BEARD, MARY R.

(Charles: 1874-1948; Mary: 1876-1958), historians and social activists. The Beards, passionately independent-minded social critics, were both born and raised in Indiana and met as college students at DePauw University in the 1890s. They married in 1900 and departed for Oxford University in England, where Charles had begun studying the year before and helped found Ruskin Hall, in which evening and correspondence courses were offered to working-class people. Throughout their lives as scholars, both believed that learning was sterile unless it was aimed at progressive social change, an approach that crystallized during their two-year sojourn in England where they absorbed the thinking of cooperative socialists. Mary, influenced by Emmeline Pankhurst (soon to become renowned for suffrage militance), focused her interests on the problems of women workers and on their acquiring the vote as a remedy.

The couple returned to New York City in 1901 and enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University, Mary remaining only briefly. Charles earned a Ph.D. (1904) in political science and was hired as lecturer in history; in 1907 he was appointed to a new chair in politics and government.

Policymaking, constitutional change, and municipal reform absorbed both Beards during the 1910s. Concentrating on votes for women from 1910 to 1917, Mary was a prime mover in the militant Congressional Union, which became the National Woman's party; she also wrote an overview, Women's Work in Municipalities (1915). Charles, a leader at the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, produced an astounding ten books in history and political science between 1904 and 1919, in addition to many shorter pieces. Joining the swell of the "New History" at Columbia and influenced by iconoclastic works in political science and economics by Arthur Bentley, Edwin Seligman, and James Allen Smith, he shattered academic complacency with An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), which analyzed the Founders' motives according to their economic interests rather than their abstract political principles. This and his further works, such as Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), were seen as muckraking attempts to unveil the underlying engines of politics; they became classics of a non-Marxist economic interpretation of history.

A fervent, witty, and magnetic teacher, and a principled defender of free speech, Charles Beard resigned from Columbia in 1917 to protest the university's failure to reappoint several professors who opposed U.S. involvement in World War I. (He himself supported the American war effort.) Thereafter the couple were unaffiliated with any institution of higher education, although Charles remained prominent in academic circles and was president of the American Political Science Association in 1926 and the American Historical Association in 1933.

In 1927 the Beards published their acclaimed two-volume The Rise of American Civilization, a work, said Richard Hofstadter, that "did more than any other ... of the twentieth century to define American history for the reading public." The couple also collaborated on America in Midpassage (1937) and The American Spirit (1942), as well as three textbooks. Amid increasing renown for her work with her husband, Mary Ritter Beard emerged in the 1930s as an insistent spokeswoman for the importance and utility of women's history. She published On Understanding Women (1931), an overview of women's part in Western civilization and edited two collections of documents. Between 1935 and 1940 she headed an (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to found a World Center for Women's Archives. A pioneering thinker "obsessed" with the history of women from her suffragist days, she had an ambivalent relation to the feminists of the 1930s and 1940s. She scorned their view that men had dominated women through history and contended instead for recognition of woman's force in constructing civilization, a view explicated in Woman as Force in History (1946).

During the 1930s Charles Beard turned increasingly to international relations. Distressed with the failure of World War I to achieve world peace or end imperialism, he directed his efforts toward preserving U.S. neutrality and encouraging rational domestic economic planning during the depression crisis. In The Open Door at Home (1934), The Idea of National Interest (1934), and Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels (1939), he expressed these concerns, which culminated in his opposition to U.S. entry into World War II and the writing of his last (harshly criticized) works, American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940 (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of War (1948). Although outspoken noninterventionists, both Beards were vigorous antifascists; nonetheless, Charles was vilified during the war for his views. His advocacy of an engaged practice of history, symbolized in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1933, "Written History as an Act of Faith," came under fire as a result.

After Charles Beard died in 1948, Mary Beard lived for another decade, writing two more books, The Force of Women in Japanese History (1953) and The Making of Charles A. Beard (1955). Both controversial public figures, the Beards are best remembered as distinguished historians whose purposeful readings of the past were intended to change the present and future.

Nancy F. Cott, A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard through Her Letters (1991); Ellen Nore, Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (1983).

Nancy F. Cott

See also Feminist Movement; History and Historians; Progressivism.