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Charles Beard, properly understood

National Interest, The, Spring, 1994 by A.J. Bacevich

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That the rich and powerful nations standing at the forefront of modernization should profess great interest in maintaining "peace and the possession of all they have gathered up in the way of empire" did not surprise Beard. Yet was it not true, he asked, that the nations possessing wealth and power had achieved their position "by methods not entirely different" from those being employed by the predators of the 1930s? Beard thought it unrealistic to expect that disadvantaged nations would respect calls that they accept the status quo out of sheer regard for the higher claims of world peace. On the contrary, the have-nots would insist upon their fair share. "In the future as in the past," wrote Beard, these demands would raise the prospect of "profound changes in the distribution of populations, resources and imperial possessions...." With this prospect in mind, "the question for the United States" was "whether it wants to be involved in every conflict that arises in this historical movement."(11)

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Beard conceded that overriding moral issues could impel the United States to involve itself in situations that it would otherwise avoid. Yet he was not persuaded that the right and wrong of any specific dispute was as straightforward as it was typically portrayed. However obscure or ancient the dispute, competing propagandists bombarded Americans with competing versions of the truth, each one as self-serving and over-simplified as the next. Playing a leading part in this ritual of distortion were those for whom "advocacy of American interventionism and adventurism has become a huge vested interest": the professoriate specializing in the new discipline of international relations, the private groups and associations devoted to fostering interest in foreign affairs, and, above all, "the daily press and radio, thriving on hourly sensations" while proving abysmally deficient in both attention span and historical perspective.(12)

Beard did not believe that among the various parties contending for advantage in the 1930s any one nation had a lock on either wickedness or virtue. Beard was not an apologist for Germany or Japan. Yet he hesitated to characterize the successive European and Asian crises of the 1930s strictly in black-and-white terms. As he observed in 1936, "greed, lust and ambition in Europe and Asia do not seem to be confined to Italy, Germany and Japan; nor does good seem to be monopolized by Great Britain, France and Russia."(13) History seemed to teach that the high ideals for which nations professed to fight had all too often been a facade covering greed and duplicity. The diplomacy of World War I, exposed during the Twenties and Thirties in all its unseemly detail, persuaded Beard and many others that the moral issues of 1917-1918 had been simply a gloss contrived to induce American intervention.

"Tilling Our Own Garden"

CONDITIONING Beard's assessment of how the United States should respond to a world that was complex, conflictive, and morally ambiguous were his very considered views of his own country. They retain considerable resonance today.

Charles Beard, properly understood

National Interest, The, Spring, 1994 by A.J. Bacevich

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