ABSTRACT
There is no question that Beard’s final two books on foreign policy damaged his reputation among liberals and ultimately threw his whole life’s work into question only months before his death. Beard’s last two books were based largely on newspaper and magazine articles, press releases, and speeches, because they were the only sources avail able to him at the time. Beard did not have access to the intelligence or inside information that would have allowed him to correctly evalu ate the intentions of Germany and Japan or the motives of President Roosevelt with respect to World War II. Unlike many of his progres sive and liberal colleagues, Beard had spent much of the last twenty years isolated on his dairy farm in Connecticut, insulated from devel opments in academia and excluded from the inner circles of the new liberal regime in Washington, D.C. The dispute between Beard and the New Deal liberals became so vitriolic in the 1940s that Thomas Kennedy identifies his last two books as the fundamental reason for the decline of Beard’s scholarly reputation. Indeed, the two books had a snowball effect on his reputation that continued to gain momentum over the following two decades.
