Word: bearding
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Born 64 years ago on a farm near Knightstown, Ind., wiry, white-haired, amiably skeptical Charles Beard looks like a shrewd Yankee farmer, is really a Hoosier schoolmaster. For the last 20 years he has lived in a big, grey, barnlike house, once a boys' school, on a Connecticut hilltop overlooking the Housatonic River. Part of each winter he usually spends in Washington, D. C., where he visits his good friends, Senator George Norris and Secretary Wallace, keeps a sharp eye on the latest fast moves of legislators. In summer he manages his two dairy farms, calls them...
...Beard's great-grandfather was a Federalist, his grandfather a Whig and rebel Quaker who ran "a one-man church" and speculated in Western lands; his father was a "copper-riveted, rock-ribbed, Mark Hanna, true-blue" Republican who prospered as building contractor, ran a bank, read the classics, raised his family on a farm to develop their backbone. At 18 Charles Beard owned a country weekly, the graduation gift of his father, ran it at a profit for four years. At Methodist DePauw College his extracurricular activities included reporting for a Republican newspaper, electioneering for a Republican Senator...
When his offer to organize a volunteer company in the Spanish-American War was refused, Charles Beard went to Oxford, helped organize its first labor college (Ruskin), chummed with Ramsay MacDonald in British labor circles. From 1904 to 1917 he was one of Columbia University's most popular professors...
...Beard published his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. Probably the dullest book of sensational history ever written, it infuriated conservative historians and editors by documenting the shocking lucidity with which the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution in their own economic interest. Newspapers screamed that Beard was a "hyena." Ex-President Taft (whom Beard calls his heaviest critic-"by tonnage") damned it in a special speech. High schools banned the book; public libraries put it on the restricted shelf. Nicholas Murray Butler sputtered that his derelict professor of politics was aping "the crude, immoral and unhistorical teaching of Karl Marx." Charles...
...Beard resigned from Columbia in protest against the dismissal of two fellow professors for opposing U. S. entry into the War (Beard himself supported the War), later joined John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, James Harvey Robinson in founding The New School for Social Research, for four years headed the New York Bureau of Municipal Research. A belligerent champion of civil liberties and academic freedom, Beard was a scorching critic of post-War red-hunting. When, in 1933, Missouri Pacific Railroad went bankrupt, Beard, a small bondholder, heard that the House of Morgan was withholding interest pending a court order. "Preposterous," Beard...