The Open Door at Home was published by Macmillan in 1934, co-authored with G. H. E. Smith, and it marked Beard’s turn toward the foreign policy positions that would dominate the last fifteen years of his life. The book’s argument was that American prosperity did not depend on foreign markets — the “open door” policy of expanding American trade throughout the world — but on the development of the domestic economy. The “open door at home” was a metaphor for internal economic reorganization: redistribution, public investment, and the creation of a self-sustaining national economy that would not need imperial expansion to survive.
Beard’s position was rooted in his economic determinism: he believed that the pursuit of foreign markets led inevitably to military entanglements, imperial overreach, and war. The Spanish-American War, the Open Door notes to China, and American involvement in World War I were, in his analysis, consequences of the capitalist need for markets, not of genuine security interests. The solution was to break the link between economic growth and foreign expansion — to build an economy that served its own citizens rather than its exporters.
The book was influential among isolationists in the 1930s and was used by opponents of intervention in the European war to argue that American security did not require engagement with the conflicts of other continents. After Pearl Harbor, the book’s premises seemed to many observers to have been refuted by events, and Beard’s reputation never fully recovered from his association with the anti-interventionist cause.
Collecting The Open Door at Home
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1934): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Without jacket: $8–$15