America in Midpassage was published by Macmillan in 1939, conceived as a third volume in the Beards’ ongoing history of American civilization. Where The Rise of American Civilization had ended in the 1920s on a note of uncertain triumph, America in Midpassage took up the story of the crash, the Depression, and the New Deal, and its tone was markedly more anxious.
The “midpassage” of the title refers to the crossing between two worlds — the Beards saw America in the 1930s as suspended between the collapsing order of industrial capitalism and a new order whose shape was not yet clear. The New Deal, in their analysis, was not a revolution but a holding action — a series of improvisations designed to preserve the essentials of capitalism while modifying its worst features. Roosevelt emerged from the book as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, a man whose genius lay in delay and compromise rather than transformation.
The Beards’ treatment of the cultural life of the 1930s — literature, art, film, radio — was one of the book’s most innovative features. They argued that culture was not a mere reflection of economic conditions but a force in its own right, and their portraits of the decade’s intellectual and artistic ferment were among the most perceptive contemporary accounts.
Collecting America in Midpassage
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1939): Blue cloth.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $10–$25