CHAPTER 1

Discovering the Economic Taproot of Imperialism

To the question of where Charles Beard discovered the economic interpretation of history, his wife, Mary Ritter Beard, offered some authoritative answers in her book about him, The Making of Charles A. Beard. Born in 1874 into a solidly Republican family, he started out in life with conservative views about politics. Following a rural boyhood near Knightstown, Indiana, and a turn at local journalism, he left in 1894 for nearby DePauw University. A teacher at the school, Colonel James Riley Weaver, sparked his interest in social critics. Beard began reading Henry George and other authors irreverent in their attitudes toward Republican orthodoxies. A veteran of the Civil War and a man of substantial international background with postings in the American consulates in Brindisi, Antwerp, and Vienna, Weaver introduced the young student to the world of European culture and thought.1 Mary emphasized the importance in Beard’s political formation of a Weaver course he took on practical sociology, which required him to spend time at Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago. Ravaged by the depression of the 1890s, the city shocked him with its extremes of poverty and luxury. The contrast between the rich and the poor, she observed, “made a deep and lasting imprint on his mind and influenced his future activities.”2
Only after going to Oxford as a graduate student in 1898, however, did Beard acquire a historical understanding of the economic forces that shaped politics and culture. His father, a wealthy farmer and businessman, provided financial support for his son’s education in England. Although the young man would not sit for a single examination at Oxford, the approximately three years that he spent in England proved to be decisive in his intellectual formation. With high enthusiasm Beard arrived in Oxford late in the summer of 1898. About his preparation for graduate work he declared: “My ignorance was, as American movie magnates might say, ‘colossal,’ but my enthusiasm was high.”3 He had resolved to make his way as a scholar of English constitutional and political history.
Although Beard met many outstanding scholars at Oxford, the author who influenced him the most was the art historian and social critic John Ruskin, formerly an Oxford professor but by then retired and in his dotage. According to Mary, Ruskin gave her husband his first real understanding of how the world worked and in whose interests. She wrote, “Beard regarded Ruskin’s philosophy as set forth in his small book, Unto This Last, as the acme of wisdom and usually had it in his hand or pocket as a bracer.”4 He had read the book while still in college, but his life experiences in England fully brought home its lessons to him. As Beardianism begins in Ruskinism, it becomes necessary here to examine this singularly influential book in his young life.
Originally published in 1862, Unto This Last took its place in a long line of anti-modernist British preachments dating back to Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village,” including William Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present, and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. To this imposing body of work, Ruskin brought distinctive rhetorical gifts and the acclaimed insights of the most erudite and influential art historian of the age. He thought that a disastrous confusion afflicted the modern world, where genuine art and even basic decency could lead only a fugitive existence. In a prefatory essay to the book, titled “Political Economy of Art,” he considered the questions of how artists are produced and maintained for the lasting advantage of society and civilization. Ruskin lamented that modern men had forgotten what their medieval forebears had understood fully in providing for the education, training, and advancement of creative talent, with the result that Gothic civilization could boast the spires of a hundred magnificent cathedrals throughout Europe, whereas “I am sorry to say, the great tendency of this age is to expend its genius in perishable art.” Ruskin thought, as Wordsworth had before him, that modern literature also proclaimed the vulgarity and stupidity of contemporary man. The books of the present day showed that “the world is, generally speaking, in calamitous disorder.”5
Unto This Last proper consists of four essays that Ruskin originally published as articles in William Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine in 1860. He recalled how they “were reprobated in a violent manner.” In these essays he had undertaken to give, “as I believe for the first time in plain English … a logical definition of WEALTH.” In the first of the essays, “The Roots of Honour,” he criticized modern political economy for its neglect of moral criteria in determining the wealth of society. All that modern economists concerned themselves with was the creation and sale of goods and services, as if justice and the well-being of society had nothing to do with the economy. Ruskin called such an approach to economics “this negation of a soul.”6
In “The Veins of Wealth,” Ruskin ruled out socialism as a solution for the problems of industrial society. He saw nothing wrong with wealth in and of itself: “Any given accumulation of commercial wealth may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive energies, and productive ingenuities; or, on the other, it may be indicative of mortal luxury, merciless tyranny, ruinous chicane.” Wealth could not be separated from the moral character of the ways in which it had been acquired. Commercial dealings had to be just and faithful. Indeed, every economic question “merged itself ultimately in the great question of justice.” The actual wealth of society had to do fundamentally with the number of “full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures” in it. Ruskin thought that contemporary ideas about wealth excluded human values, with disastrous results for society. Surveying the scene around him, he found the English population generally to be sunk in “a dim-eyed and narrow-chested state of being.”7
The third essay, “Qui Judicatis Terram,” concerned the relationship between the rich and the poor. They had a perpetual bond in history, and in a good society both sides would act from a sense of charity, love, and justice. The Latin aphorism inspiring the title of this essay read “Diligite Justiam Qui Judicatis Terram,” which he translated as “Ye who judge the earth give (not, observe, merely love, but) diligent love to justice.” This passion for justice defined righteousness. Ruskin stands at an infinite remove from Marx, who claimed that class conflict drove the historical process. Ruskin, however, preached a message of class harmony, with the workers and the owners striving together to bring society ever closer toward “the sun of justice.” He wanted nothing to do with the socialists. As he would write in the final essay of the book, not socialism but Christianity offers man safe passage out of the quagmire in which he now finds himself, bereft and friendless: “until the time come, and the kingdom, when Christ’s gift of bread and bequest of peace shall be Unto this last as unto thee.” The central meaning of his writings, “if there be any one point insisted on throughout my works more frequently than another, that one point is the impossibility of Equality.” He took the eternal superiority of some individuals to be a given in history. They are the leaders and should lead, “on occasion even to compel and subdue their inferiors, according to their own better knowledge and wiser will.”8 Anarchy, the greatest evil imaginable to Ruskin, loomed as the only alternative to the time-honored hierarchical arrangement in human affairs.
In the last essay, “Ad Valorem,” he attacked the leading economists of the day, especially John Stuart Mill and David Ricardo, for their intellectual justifications of the economic practices and institutions that had laid waste to the earth and most of its inhabitants. On the principle that the economy should have as its only aim the creation of meaningful work for every able-bodied member of society, he condemned economic liberalism as a monstrous system of exploitation from which only the investors stood to gain. Economics should be the science of life enhancement for humanity, or “that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life; and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction.” A true political economy should be instructive about the differences between vanity and substance “and how the service of Death, the Lord of Waste, and of eternal emptiness, differs from the service of Wisdom, the Lady of Saving, and of eternal fullness.” Wealth, in short, is “the possession of the valuable by the valiant,” and not at all a row of dividend numbers on the stock-and-bond statements of financial elites whose valor, Ruskin thought, could not be guaranteed, given the greed and obscene consumption habits that generally marked them as a class. Things not only should be consumed, but consumed nobly and serviceably, in a way that made the welfare of all “the end and aim of consumption.” The distilled essence of Ruskinism, “There is no wealth but life,” became the mantra of young Beard and his circle of friends at Oxford.9
Beard found in Ruskin’s book not only a compelling interpretation of modern social problems, but also a call to action. With another American who also admired Ruskin, Walter Vrooman, he founded Ruskin Hall as a college of the people, a workmen’s university. In so doing, they followed the example of Ruskin himself, who had taught in the Working Men’s College founded by Christian Socialists in 1854 and had worked assiduously to establish schools that would promote his educational principles. Vrooman had come to study philosophy at Oxford, but, like Beard, became distracted by the Ruskin Hall project and did not get very far with his formal studies. Vrooman’s wife Amne, a Baltimore heiress, provided funding for the college.10 The historian Harold Pollen wrote: “The idea was to educate workingmen in order to achieve social change.”11 The incorporation agreement stated that Ruskin Hall would provide for instruction in science, history, modern languages, “and generally in the duties of a citizen, and in practical industrial work, and for the delivery of lectures to them and others upon such subjects,” but not “for the purpose of teaching the Latin, Greek, or Hebrew languages, metaphysics, theology, or party politics.”12 A memorandum from the Executive Committee read, “Ruskin College is required to be absolutely neutral in all matters of theology and party politics.”13 The insistence on political neutrality would have no practical effect at the historically left-wing school.14
In an article that Beard wrote in 1936 for the New Republic, he explained how Ruskin Hall, which in 1907 formally would become Ruskin College, acquired its name. The organizational meeting had taken place in a little room in Beard’s lodgings at 11 Grove Street. Referring to himself, Beard wrote, “An American ‘from the wilds of Indiana’ who had read Ruskin in the library of ‘a freshwater college’ proposed that the new institution be called ‘Ruskin Hall.’ ”15 The debate that ensued among the founders involved a discussion of Unto This Last: “That was the book that furnished a frame of reference for the students who started Ruskin College.”16 Other books also had influenced them, most notably by John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Marshall, and Karl Marx, “but ‘Unto This Last’ served to give unity and purpose to their enterprise. Despite all the wrangling battles and deviations, Ruskin’s teachings furnished a kind of anchor against storms, in the early days of the labor college.”17
After the formal opening of Ruskin College on February 22, 1899, Beard continued to be engaged actively with the school, serving as its secretary, recruiting students as well as full-time and part-time teachers for the faculty, and winning the support of prominent union leaders. He also created Ruskin Hall correspondence courses for students. Beard had not yet made a definite career choice between university scholarship and social activism. He sought to do both. Amidst a whirl of Ruskin Hall–related activities, by the end of his first year at Oxford he managed to write a 50,000-word draft on the evolution of the office of the justice of the peace in England. Returning then to America with a hazy plan to spread the Ruskin Hall idea there, he continued to follow a dual career path. He spent a term doing graduate work at Cornell University with Moses Coit Tyler, the eminent historian of American literature, while still being deeply committed to the cause of worker education.18 In a vain effort to keep Beard, Tyler offered him a fellowship and then lamented, “It is with extreme regret that I now yield him up to the superior claims and attractions of the mission which calls him to educational work in the United Kingdom.”19
Beard decided at the end of 1899 to resume his life in England, but not before making Mary his wife. Following their wedding, Charles and Mary settled in Manchester, which as the center of England’s textile boom had become the greatest industrial city in the world. There he headed the extension department of Ruskin Hall. He also taught various courses of his own and gave many public lectures. Their daughter, Miriam, was born in that city two years later. Beard continued to study the British trade union movement and explored the Black Country—the industrial districts around Birmingham, which were named for the soot of the heavy industries that covered the area.20 He felt revolted by the squalor and the waste of these places. His wife recalled this period of their lives as an endless round of political and educational activity, with Beard addressing workers’ assemblies and rallies of the English wholesale cooperative movement. The young couple moved in a wide circle of radical intellectuals and activists that included Prince Peter Kropotkin, Keir Hardie, and Emmeline Pankhurst, whose feminist ideas appealed to them both.
Beard’s continued affiliation with Ruskin Hall included the writing that he did for Young Oxford: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Ruskin Hall Movement, which published its first issue in October 1899. When Ruskin died the following year, the magazine celebrated his legacy. Above all, he had striven “to implant in men’s minds a love for the beautiful—so conspicuously wanting in our towns and cities.” No one more eloquently than Ruskin had exposed the blighting effects of the modern industrial order and its terrible failure to produce a civilized society. The Young Oxford tribute to Ruskin quoted from his critique of modern industrial cities as “mere crowded masses of store, warehouse, and counter … in which the object of man is not life but labour … and the streets not the avenues for the passing and procession of a happy people but the drains for the discharge of a tormented mob, in which the only object in reaching any spot is to be transferred to another.” Ruskin Hall had been founded to perpetuate this great man’s “There is no wealth but life” legacy.21
From its beginnings in October 1899, Young Oxford published many Beard articles, signed and unsigned. Writing in the 1970s, his daugh...