Charles Austin Beard, the historian who would inspire and mentor Luther Gulick, was born in 1874 in Knightstown, Indiana. Beard attended DePauw, Oxford, and Columbia Universities,soon joining the faculty at Columbia where he had received a graduate degree in 1904. Over the next decade he would author a number of books that would make him a familiar name in the scholarly community, the most famous of which was “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution.” Beard’s scholarly pursuits coincided with the birth of the Bureau of Municipal Research and soon the two became very close.

After the Training School of Public Service was founded in 1911, Beard visited the institution and made a case that the training received there should be transferable to college credit. As a result Columbia, NYU, and the University of Pennsylvania passed resolutions crediting Training School field work toward graduate degrees at their institutions. In 1915 Beard began teaching courses at the school and was quickly offered the position of head of the school, which he readily accepted.

At the same time at Oberlin College in Ohio, a young Luther Gulick, was able to convince the administration to invite Beard to be a commencement speaker and the two men met for the first time. Gulick was greatly impressed by the New York professor later noting: “Beard, with his flashing eyes and realistic analysis of human political behavior, was a truly revolutionary teacher. With his economic analysis of American history, this Hoosier from the West had debunked the Sunday School interpretation of politics and administration.”

Gulick soon followed Beard to New York, becoming his protege and enrolling at Columbia University. After his first year of graduate school and upon Beard’s recommendation, he enrolled in the Training School of Public Service. In 1918 Beard became the director of the Bureau of Municipal Research, handing the directorship of the Training School to his protege in 1919.

Under Beard, the Bureau began making its first international forays, helping establish the Tokyo Institute for Municipal Research. Beard himself traveled around Japan, presenting a series of lectures on American local government in several cities. According to some accounts, the first telegram sent out of Tokyo after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 was from its mayor, Count Shinpei Goto, who was a close friend of Beard, asking that Beard return to Japan as an expert to help plan the reconstruction of Tokyo.

In 1921, with the reorganization of the Bureau and the Training School into the National Institute of Public Administration (later the IPA), Beard decided to step down, once again leaving his post to Gulick who would remain there for many decades.

The two men remained good friends and stayed in touch until Beard’s death in 1948 in New Haven, Connecticut. Gulick lived another 45 years.