ABSTRACT
In 1916, Charles A. Beard was denouncing Germany as a danger to civilization and calling for American participation in World War I on the side of the Entente Allies.1 Like John Dewey and other socialdemocrats, Beard saw the Great War as an opportunity to advance the interests of the European working class by breaking “the union of the Hohenzollem military caste and the German masses whose radical leaders are Social Democrats.”2 Even after the Versailles Treaty, Beard continued to embrace the Wilsonian theme that the Great War had been fought to make the world safe for democracy.3 However, by the mid-1930s, he was staunchly opposed to war with Germany and Ja pan, had come to embrace the revisionist history of World War I, and even testified before Congress against the Lend-Lease Act. Thus, in tellectual historians agree that somewhere between the end of World War I and the 1930s, Beard shifted from internationalism to isola tionism and, indeed, a few critics have referred to him as a pacifist in his later years. Within the umbrella of this consensus, debates among biographers, intellectual and diplomatic historians, have come to center largely on identifying the timing and the reasons for Beard’s “conversion” to isolationism.4 Not coincidentally, dur ing the 1960s and 1970s, Beard’s writings on foreign policy and diplomatic history enjoyed a resurgence among many on the New Left who were constructing their own revisionist history critical of America’s political and military involvement in various Third World countries.5 Today, Beard’s views are still cited in international rela-
tions and history textbooks as an example of isolationist theory in American foreign policy.6
