Charles Beard, properly understood

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

In addition, Beard warned that harnessing military power to internationalist ambitions could undermine constitutional checks intended to prevent the abuse of executive authority. By allowing the president routinely to decide on whether and how to employ the military, Congress effectively forfeited its war making powers. By 1940, Roosevelt's at times disingenuous efforts to aid Great Britain had persuaded Beard that this had effectively occurred. "Our fate," he wrote, "is no longer in the hands of the people or of Congress .... In fact wars are no longer declared. Situations exist or are created. Actions are taken by authorities in a position to act. The people wait for their portion."(18) Thus did Beard foresee what was actually to happen in the cases of the Korean and Vietnam wars.

By attending to its own business, the United States could "command more respect and affection in other countries than by intermeddling with its neighbors' affairs, whether under the formulas of Machtpolitik or those of democracy, beneficence, and world peace"(The Open Door at Home, p. 300). In other words, Beard expressed the belief--the hope, really--that by tending first to its own affairs the United States might come closer to achieving its self-imposed mission than it would by forcing itself on a world less malleable and less accommodating than the heirs of Woodrow Wilson let on.

Realism and Restraint

ACUTELY SENSITIVE to problems at home that had eluded solution, isolationists like Beard also suggested that the ability of the United States to solve intractable problems away from home might not be as great as internationalists fancied. With Americans hard-pressed to deal with their own economic and social ills, asked Beard, "how can we have the effrontery to assume that we can solve the problems of Asia and Europe, encrusted in the blood-rust of fifty centuries?" ("Collective Security," p. 359). Beard pointed to what he called "the hard fact that the United States either alone or in any coalition, did not possess the power to force peace on Europe and Asia, to assure the establishment of democratic and pacific governments there, or to provide the social and economic underwriting necessary to the perdurance of such governments"(A Foreign Policy for America, p. 152). As Beard saw it, internationalists both overestimated American power and underestimated the capabilities of other friendly nations to deal with their own problems.

Viewing America as beset by its own maladies and possessing only a limited capacity to cure those of a nasty, violent world, isolationists like Beard allowed themselves limited room for describing the policies that the United States should follow. Of one thing at least Beard was certain: the American propensity for preaching to the rest of the world was unseemly, ineffective, and wrong-headed. Beard pleaded for American officials "to avoid vain and verbose dissertations on the manners and morals of other countries."(A Foreign Policy for America, p. 153). He detested Franklin Roosevelt's inclination, as evidenced by his loftier flights of oratory, to become "intoxicated by moral exuberance." ("'Going Ahead' With Roosevelt," p. 12). Such moralizing fueled the "theological assertion" that "American law, order, civilization and flag (force) are agencies of God," feeding in turn the notion that "the creed that the United States must do good all around the world."(19)