Howard K. Beale

Howard Kennedy Beale (April 8, 1899 – December 27, 1959) was an American historian. He had several temporary appointments before becoming a professor of history at the University of North Carolina in 1935. His most famous student was C. Vann Woodward, who adopted the Beard-Beale approach to Reconstruction. He went to the University of Wisconsin in 1948, where he directed many dissertations. He specialized in nineteenth and twentieth-century American history, particularly the Reconstruction Era, and the foreign policy of the early 20th century. He was a noted civil libertarian and advocate for academic freedom.

Beale was born in Chicago to Frank A. and Nellie Kennedy Beale. In 1921 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a PhB in English from the University of Chicago. Beale received an M.A. and PhD from Harvard University.

In his PhD dissertation, finished in 1924 under the direction of Edward Channing, Beale developed a complex new interpretation of Reconstruction. The dominant interpretation for the previous two decades was that of the Dunning School, which held that unscrupulous Northern adventurers, known as Carpetbaggers, manipulated the new black vote in the South to take control of state governments for their own advantage in terms of speculation, and corruption. The Freedmen (freed slaves) were merely pawns in the hands of the Carpetbaggers.

Beale argued that the Carpetbaggers themselves were pawns in the hands of northern industrialists, who were the real villains of Reconstruction. These industrialists had taken control of the nation during the Civil War, and set up high tariffs to protect their profits, as well as a lucrative national banking system and a railroad network fueled by government subsidies and secret payoffs. The return to power of the southern whites would seriously threaten all their gains, and so the ex-Confederates had to be kept out of power. The tool used by the industrialists was the combination of the Northern Republican Party and sufficient Southern support using Carpetbaggers and black voters. The rhetoric of civil rights for blacks, and the dream of equality, was rhetoric designed to fool idealistic voters. Beale called it "claptrap." In his chapter, "Claptrap and Issues," Beale argued, "Constitutional discussions of the rights of the negro, the status of Southern states, the legal position of ex-rebels, and the powers of Congress and the president determined nothing. They were pure sham."

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