ABSTRACT
During the last fifty years, American scholars have uncritically accepted and reinforced many of the confusions of Beard’s own gen eration about his viewpoint.1 Beard’s relation to Marx has become especially jumbled with the confusion beginning immediately after he published An Economic Interpretation o f the Constitution in 1913. The notable E. S. Corwin denounced the work in an early review as “bent on demonstrating the truth of the socialistic theory of economic determinism and class struggle.”2 Corwin’s objective was to dismiss the book as partisan ideology. Despite similar denunciations, the Eco nomic Interpretation was soon embraced by American scholars, and by the mid-1930s, Beard’s interpretation was considered so main stream it was frequently reproduced in high school civics textbooks.3 Consequently, in 1935, Theodore Clark Smith, the president of the American Historical Association, considered it necessary to reiterate that Beard’s volume was a partisan use of history “which has its origins, of course, in the Marxian theories.”4
