CHARLES AUSTIN BEARD AND ROBINSON JEFFERS: A HISTORIAN AND A POET AGAINST THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

Jeffers and Beard both published books in 1948 that denounced the foreign policy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for what they believed to be its warmongering character. Appearing at the high tide of American triumphalism after the Second World War, both books received savage treatment from critics, and essentially for the same reason: they questioned the morality of Americas involvement in the Good War. For Jeffers's part, his library included at least one of Beard's books, the 1923 edition of The History of the American People (originally published in 1918), a textbook written with William C. Bagley.1 Intended for use in the high school classroom, this is a very minor work by Beard and entirely lacking the passionate revisionism that would characterize his later studies of American foreign policy. A decade later, in The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy (1934), he put forward his view that the country's dealings with the world had amounted to little more than a hypocritical promotion and defense of elite economic interests.