Carleton Beals (November 13, 1893 – April 4, 1979) was an American journalist, writer, historian, and political activist with a special interest in Latin America.^[1] A major journalistic coup for him was his interview with the Nicaraguan rebel Augusto Sandino in February 1928.^[2] In the 1920s he was part of the cosmopolitan group of intellectuals, artists, and journalists in Mexico City. He remained an active, prolific, and politically engaged leftist journalist and is the subject of a scholarly biography.^[3]

Early years

Beals was born in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. His father, Leon Eli Beals (1864–1941), lawyer and journalist, was the stepson^[4] of Carrie Nation,^[5] the temperance movement advocate.^[5] His mother was Elvina Sybilla Blickensderfer (1867–1954).^[6] His brother, Ralph Leon Beals (1901–85), was the first anthropologist at University of California, Los Angeles.^[7]

The family moved from Kansas when Beals was age three, and he attended school in Pasadena, California. After graduating from high school in 1911, he worked a variety of jobs while attending the University of California, Berkeley where he studied engineering and mining. He won the Bonnheim Essay Prize and the Bryce History Essay Prize.^[8] After graduating in 1916,^[9] cum laude,^[8] he attended Columbia University on a graduate scholarship, earning a master's degree in 1917.^[5]

Career

Unable to find work as a writer, Beals took a job with Standard Oil Company, but it did not suit him. In 1918, he spent a brief period of time in jail as a World War I draft evader. Upon release, he decided to go see the world, and with what little money he had, Beals and his wife Lillian drove to Mexico.^[11] There, he founded the English Preparatory Institute in 1919, taught at the American High School during 1919 to 1920, and was on the personal staff of President Carranza (1920).^[9] They left Mexico in 1921 for Europe where Beals studied at the University of Madrid, and then the University of Rome. Back in Mexico, he became a correspondent for The Nation, separated from his wife, and became romantically involved with photographer Tina Modotti's sister, Mercedes.^[11]

In February 1928, Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation, sent Beals to Nicaragua^[12] to write a series of articles. He became notable as the only foreign journalist who interviewed General Augusto Sandino during Nicaragua's 1927–33 war against US military occupation.^[13]

In all, Beals wrote over 200 magazine articles^[14] for publications such as the New Republic^[5] and Harper's Magazine.^[15] Beals also wrote more than 45 books, including on history, geography, and travel. Some of his books are written for a juvenile audience.^[16] His autobiography, Glass Houses, was published by J.B. Lippincott Company in 1938.^[10] In 1931, Beals was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for biographies.^[17] His biography subjects included Porfirio Díaz, Huey P. Long, Roberto de la Selva, Stephen F. Austin, John Eliot, Carrie Nation, and Leon Trotsky.

During his career, Beals witnessed Mexican revolutions, lectured on Shakespeare, and was held incommunicado by a Mexican general.^[10] His travels took him to French Morocco, Tunisia, Algiers, Greece, Turkey, the Soviet Union, Germany, and the Caribbean. He was a Ford Hall Forum speaker in 1936, and a member of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky in 1937. The following year, Time magazine called Beals, "the best informed and the most awkward living writer on Latin America."^[14]

Later years

During the 1960s, he supported the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Beals was a hero to the young people of Cuba.^[18]

In his later years, Beals lived on Fire Tower Road in Killingworth, Connecticut. He is buried in Killingworth's Evergreen Cemetery.^[19]

Partial bibliography