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Jill Lepore
A staff writer and historian at Harvard
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Lately, I can’t stop thinking about Charles A. Beard, one of my favorite dead American historians. A century ago, when the United States was celebrating its hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, Beard and his wife, the historian Mary Ritter Beard, were just finishing their pioneering history textbook, “The Rise of American Civilization.” A piece of mine about the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s founding—and specifically, the writing of the Declaration of Independence—appeared in the magazine last week. And, this week, I’ve got another story out, reflecting on how difficult I found it to write a new chapter for a new edition of my book, “These Truths: A History of the United States.” The chapter is my attempt to chronicle the age of Trump. I found it devilishly difficult to write.
Illustration by Doug Chayka; Source photographs from Getty
Charles Beard was best-known for “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States,” from 1913, in which he made the controversial argument that the framers had been chiefly interested in consolidating their own wealth. The president of Beard’s own university, Columbia, denounced him. So did very many other people. Warren G. Harding, then publisher of an Ohio newspaper, called Beard’s book “libelous, vicious, and damnable.” In the end, Beard’s interpretation of the Constitution did not prevail—his evidence was not altogether persuasive—but his provocation helped usher in an era of constitutional renewal in the United States. Meanwhile, Beard met the challenge of political repression with integrity. In 1917, after Columbia University fired members of the faculty who were opposed to American entry into the war in Europe, Beard, who supported the war, resigned in protest. From his farm in Connecticut, he went on to write many other books, and to contribute regularly to magazines. Again and again, he spoke out against what he believed to be creeping forms of tyranny in American life. In the nineteen-thirties, when William Randolph Hearst ordered the editors of his newspapers to send reporters to college classrooms to ferret out the Reds, Beard, speaking at a convention of school teachers, described Hearst as “an enemy of everything that is noblest and best in the American tradition,” concluding, as I once reported in the magazine, “No person with intellectual honesty or moral integrity will touch him with a ten-foot pole.”
Like Beard, I’ve just written a new history of the Constitution. I’ve put together a U.S.-history textbook, too. Later historians came to believe that Beard lost his way, and maybe they’re right. In any event, he’s been forgotten. But I have been wondering what Beard would make of our somewhat deranged political moment. What would he write about Donald Trump? How would he assess the state of constitutional argument in the United States? I’ve done my best, beardless.
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