Case 4:22-cv-00324-MW-MAF Document 44 Filed 11/17/22 Page 133 of 139
another tumultuous era, one “that roiled the country during and after the First World War.”[1] A prescient example of this fraught time comes to mind—namely, the resignation of Columbia University Professor Charles Beard.
Given the pressing issues of the day, “we stand on the threshold of an era which will call for all the emancipated thinking that America can command.”[2] Such was the conviction of Professor Beard, in October 1917, when he wrote those words in his resignation letter to the President of Columbia University. At the time, Professor Beard resigned in protest of the firing of two anti-war professors. Notwithstanding his own view that the United States should declare war with Germany, Professor Beard recognized that “thousands of [his] countrymen do not share this view” and that “[t]heir opinions cannot be changed by curses or bludgeons.” Instead, he asserted that “[a]rguments addressed to their reason and understanding are our best hope.”
In decrying the Board of Trustees’s decision to fire his anti-war colleagues, Professor Beard urged that “[s]uch arguments … must come from men whose
- ↑ See, e.g., Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (2022) (noting that the “tensions that roiled the country during and after the First World War still linger today,” and arguing that “a vigilant respect for civil rights and constitutional safeguards” is necessary “to save ourselves from ever slipping back into the darkness again”).
- ↑ Quits Columbia; Assails Trustees, N.Y. Times, Oct. 9, 1917, at 1 (quoting resignation letter of Professor Charles A. Beard to President of Columbia University), available at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1917/10/09/96274988.html?pageNumber=1.
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