Charles A. Beard's life constitutes an amazing puzzle for his critics, followers, and biographers. If we take into account Beard's vast writing output, the scarcity of his remaining personal letters, and his penchant for polemics, unscrambling his ideas can be an extremely challenging task. With Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism, historian Richard Drake has joined the cadre of brave scholars trying to make sense of Beard's stormy intellectual life. After studying Robert La Follette's anti-imperialism, Drake decided to reexamine Beard's criticism of American imperialism, which he considers relevant for understanding today's U.S. interventionism as a factor of America's corporate power.Footnote ¹

Drake's study represents an extensive genealogy exploring the influences, friendships, disillusionments, and foes Beard encountered, all of which shaped his ideas about imperialism. Examining Beard's early social activism in England and assessing his unwavering support for America's entry into World War I, his later revaluation of the origins of the war, and his steadfast criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy before and after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Drake not only scrutinizes Beard's ideas but also offers extended analyses of the major figures who, he argues, converted Beard into a fierce critic of American internationalism. Drake's most interesting contribution comes in Chapter Eight, where he details the unlikely partnership between Beard and Herbert Hoover. The chapter includes an extensive examination of the making of Hoover's posthumous book, Freedom Betrayed (2012). Often, however, Drake's analyses of other thinkers’ ideas confuse rather than illustrate their intellectual connection with Beard. Those considerations would be more effective if Drake had fully unpacked Beard's ideas first, but they work instead as complementary material for developing arguments that would be difficult to derive using Beard's writings alone. In fact, the very concept of imperialism remains ambiguous throughout the book. Even the last chapter, which promises insights on imperialism, mainly addresses Beard's relativism. The book turns into a lengthy scrutiny of Brooks Adams's grand theory of historical development, where the nexus between modern capitalism and imperialism, as Drake describes it, emerges in a more overt manner than it had for Beard himself. As such, this comparison does not elucidate but flattens Beard's more nuanced perspective on imperialism. “Loyalty to the facts of historical record,” Beard asserted in 1940, “must ascribe the idea of imperialist expansion mainly to naval officers and politicians rather than to business men.”Footnote ²

Beard's understanding of imperialism was not a straightforward condemnation of political elites searching for new markets for greedy economic groups. As Beard tried to explain to many members of England's labour movement, imperialism, and especially British imperialism, was not inherently wrong but constituted a creative force in human history from which the United States had emerged. Beard explained to his anti-imperialist friends that imperialism could be a positive force, as long as it advanced social development and national markets. He suggested that if imperial wars function as a private enterprise for enriching few industries or manufacturers, then “we are displaying the sublimest bit of self-destructive idiocy in all the annals of human folly.”Footnote ³ Indeed Beard was an imperialist and continued to believe in the right of the United States to conquer peoples and lands by force if the material interests of the country required it. However, following John A. Hobson, Beard opposed the idea of “parasitic imperialism,” predicated on huge state investments in foreign wars without adequate return.Footnote ⁴ While Drake suggests that Beard became averse to foreign quarrels after discovering that World War I was an unjust war triggered by greedy capitalists, in fact, Beard's thinking shifted only after he determined that overseas wars were counterproductive to social reform at home. Evidence of a turning point in Beard's conception of foreign policy can be found in his 1934 publications, The Idea of National Interest and The Open Door at Home. Yet Drake devotes much more attention to the Nye Committee's disclosures and few lines to the latter books. Furthermore, Drake's omission of a discussion of Norman Angell's The Great Illusion (1909) in the extensive catalog of thinkers influential to Beard is surprising. After all, in Angell's writings, Beard found another corroboration that modern wars were not rational from an economic perspective.Footnote ⁵ Based on his conviction that America's destiny was a stake, Beard developed almost a visceral reproach toward Roosevelt's role in “maneuvering” the United States into World War II. Yet few historians have noted the role of Mary Ritter Beard in changing her husband's perception of Roosevelt and framing Beard's public campaign against the war as a crusade for upholding the Constitution.Footnote ⁶

Drake's book plunges Beard into many interesting intellectual debates of the period without delineating the specific differences of Beard's contributions. Thus, at times, Beard's unique message seems diffused, confused, and even silenced by other voices, often making Beard look guilty by association. This is strikingly evident in how Drake approaches isolationism, succeeding in bringing to life the rare cluster of conservative groups who opposed U.S. internationalism without rescuing the humanistic side of Beard's perspective, as historian David Milne has pointed out.Footnote ⁷ Once, Beard defined his life not as “a system but a blundering and delightful adventure.”Footnote ⁸ Drake's biography of Beard has more the flavor of a system and little of the blunders and adventures that marked the rise and fall of one of the most influential American historians.