Charles Beard, properly understood

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)

Moralizing served only to raise impossible expectations about the prospects for peace. Beard mocked what he called "the devil theory of war"--as much a fixture in public discourse of the Thirties as it remains today--according to which, because "the masses of the people are viewed as loving peace," wars and the threats of war are laid at the feet of the dastardly politician, a "strange kind of demon, coming from the nether region and making the people do things they would never think of doing otherwise."(20) Nonsense, said Beard; the people themselves were not to be absolved of responsibility.

Rather than constructing foreign policy around grandiose expectations for peace, isolationists emphasized realism and restraint as the touchstones of sound diplomacy. Those tagged as isolationists, wrote Beard, "do not propose to withdraw from the world, but they propose to deal with the world as it is not as romantic propagandists picture it"("Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels," p. 351).