When Williams Appleman Williams's The contours of American history was voted one of the 100 best non-fiction books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library, the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr could only gasp. ‘Why William Appleman Williams for God's sake?’Footnote 1 Schlesinger's rather negative association with Williams and his work had been a long one. In 1959, the New York Times made Schlesinger's The coming of the New Deal share the limelight with Williams's very own The tragedy of American diplomacy as the year's best books. Years later, historians could be found saying that the book was ‘probably the most important book ever to appear in the history of U.S. foreign policy’.Footnote 2
Williams's seminal text of revisionist history, now a wise (some might argue unwise) fifty, has survived the attacks from those who would have preferred that age had well and truly wearied it. His work, far from gathering dust on the shelves of historical conflict, still sparks excited debate. At the 2009 panel of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations discussing the typologies of American ‘empire’, one academic from the floor argued in a huff that the revisionist historian had been nothing short of an ‘idiot’, a crude and cobbled version of Charles A. Beard. It would seem that revisionism, as the erratic historian H. Elmer Barnes once claimed, might arouse the ire of fanatics intent on committing bodily harm to you.Footnote 3 To her credit, Marilyn B. Young, whose work remains touched by Williams, added some perspective to the proceedings: Williams may have been mistaken about his conclusions, but he was far from idiotic in erring.Footnote 4 As Goethe notes in Faust: Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt.Footnote 5
Williams's legacy has been dealt with in various ways. His central work was debated as part of a vigorous, often bitter battle. Measured dialogue has often had little to do with it. Rutgers University celebrated his contributions to scholarship with a conference organized by Williams's first doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, Lloyd Gardner. Some attending it felt it was like being present at a séance, commanding the spirit of Williams uncritically through modern lenses. For one of the participants, James Livingston, the ironic element of American history, as picked up in the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, had been ignored in the preoccupation with the tragic. Perhaps Williams would have approved of a more comedic element, something of a Comedy of American Diplomacy.Footnote 6
That said, the impact of this work has been durable, despite an assortment of seemingly withering attacks over the years. Williams still has an impressive bevy of historians who have assimilated his ideas with considerable effect.Footnote 7 This has made critics of his work wary of discarding him. ‘It would be a very brave soul, indeed, who would pass on William Appleman Williams.’Footnote 8 Despite being considered a secondary phenomenon by some scholars, his overall impact has been far from epiphenomenal. In 1973, the alarmed syndicated journalist Joseph Alsop would write that American history departments had been ‘captured’ by Cold War revisionism, a coup d'état that had monumental implications for the teaching of American history.Footnote 9 While such influence was deeply exaggerated, the sheer note of worry struck by Alsop is worth noting. The New Left, that formidable movement of progressive scholars who challenged the noble, benign premises of American power in the shadow of the Cold War, was here to stay.Footnote 10 Williams was very much their helmsman, making Madison the epicentre of that questioning radicalism. As historian and former Williams pupil Paul Buhle noted, the University of Wisconsin became the meeting point for refugees of Old Left families and those who had supported Henry Wallace's failed presidential campaign for the Progressive party in 1948. ‘They took their models … from their quasi-isolationist, anti-military tradition of Progressive historians and from the new mass student culture.’Footnote 11
I
Revisionist diplomatic history has long vigorous roots in American scholarship, taking shape in the writings of Howard Beale, Beard and Fred Harvey Harrington. Williams added his own distinct contribution to the school, employing models of economic determinism in his analysis of American foreign policy while relating it back to a certain, previously unexamined psychological dimension, the Weltanschauung of the American people. In many ways, his brand of history reflected a typical American Midwestern suspicion of centralized and expansive power. He spent his childhood years in Atlantic, Iowa, an experience which vested him with a certain ‘prairie cosmopolitanism’.Footnote 12 He had stints at the Kemper Military Academy in Missouri, and served in the Pacific during the Second World War. He joined the University of Wisconsin's progressive graduate school in 1947 three years after graduating from the US Naval Academy. In so doing, he was attending an institution renown for its ‘anti-monopolist, anti-imperialist thought’, an attitude developed in the days when the progressive Senator Robert La Follette stood firm against corporate interests and America's entry into the First World War.Footnote 13
His work challenged the realist-idealist binary typical in approaches to American foreign policy that still govern writing on the subject. The realist school, dominated by such formidable figures as Norman A. Graebner, was critical of US foreign policy because of its wearing over-commitments and undue emphasis on the threats posed by Soviet power. They proved unimpressed by the psychological dimensions of any Weltanschauung.Footnote 14
For Williams, the impulses of American power were due less to the chessboard moves of the White House and plots in the State Department than an overarching, social process involving the pacification of internal conflict (capital and labour) over income, and the externalization of evil.Footnote 15 That is not to say that Williams or those associated with the Wisconsin School were averse to realist assumptions.
The Wisconsin School in time became a powerhouse of radical and revisionist historiography, taking the torch to the standard assessments on the origins of American empire and that of the Cold War. History narratives are themselves monuments to history, artifacts that signal the relevance of an age. Tragedy told Americans a superb, if unpleasant story, even if some thought Williams had slanted his figures and doctored the record of national achievement.
II
Williams's work holds relevance today because such terms as empire, especially when described in the same breath as American power, have returned with a vengeance. Empire-speak, trumpeted by aggressive think-tank operatives in the American Enterprise Institute and various writers eager to see the term either accepted as a reality or implemented, is well and truly present.Footnote 16 While the imperial project may have a time of hibernation under the Obama administration, its hues remain in such notions as America's ‘redeeming’ role as a democratizing force in the world.Footnote 17
In truth, the notion of empire in American life has never been entirely absent, whatever lexical or conceptual difficulties its citizens might have had with the term. The founding fathers may well have jettisoned the British crown, but notions of empire, whether seen in terms of enlightenment or a gift of civilization, regularly cropped up in deliberations.
The notoriety and appeal of Tragedy lay in the way that it dovetailed into the protest movement against the Vietnam War, providing historians and activists alike with an apocalyptic narrative.Footnote 18 Such conflict was the outcome of imperialist schemes hatched by elites in order to conserve wealth and democracy at home. In these views, thinkers such as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, as introduced to the American left through Paul Sweezy in the early 1950s, become relevant. This is notably so in his analysis of the atavistic impulses and careerist tendencies of colonial elites.Footnote 19 ‘Men like McKinley and other national leaders thought about America's problems and welfare in an inclusive, systematized way that emphasized economics.’Footnote 20
From a rugged frontier existence, a continental empire was constructed at the expense of the Indian nations and the Mexican Republic. The United States then moved beyond its continental limits via the Open Door, which had been reached with the ‘closure’ of the frontier in 1892. The Open Door, articulated by President McKinley in the autumn of 1898, was designed to facilitate unfettered access by trading powers to the Chinese market while preserving that country's precarious borders. Secretary of State John Hay formalized the arrangements with his ‘Open Door Notes’ to the relevant major powers the following year.Footnote 21 The move secured American economic interests in halting, at least temporarily, the partition of the country between rival powers. ‘When combined with the ideology of an industrial Manifest Destiny the history of the Open Door Notes became the history of American foreign relations.’Footnote 22 An informal empire was thereby created. In pursuing this effort zealously, Americans embraced a political model which came into deep conflict with the ideals of state sovereignty that such individuals as Woodrow Wilson otherwise held dear.
It was already obvious, even by the time Williams was engaged in his work on American expansionism, that diplomatic historians were content with using the term ‘empire’ in their analysis, showing more than just a passing interest in its implications in the trajectory of US history. Historical assessments of the importance of imperial power became particularly pressing as the United States acquired its own formal empire from the early 1890s to 1902.Footnote 23 The onset of gradual decolonization of Europe's territories after the First World War made professional historians take note of precedents and comparisons. For that reason, despite stages of American amnesia on the subject, Williams was far from being alone in examining the various incarnations of American imperialism.Footnote 24 His work took root in a milieu of questioning that has ebbed and flowed as dramatically as the historiography.Footnote 25 The sagacious and persistently realistic Graebner used the term in the context of American power in the Pacific as early as 1955. Richard Van Alstyne's examination of US imperial thrusts in the Caribbean and Pacific suggested that empire was certainly not as shunned as people might think.Footnote 26 That same decade, the pantheon grew even more pronounced, with notable additions from Walter LaFeber and Thomas McCormick.Footnote 27
Even his critics would be happy to have a stab at the lexical play of ‘American empire’ while attacking him. In this plan of attack, as Bruce Cumings has noted, historians acted like contortionists, seeking to twist their opponents into seemingly untenable, often unrecognizable positions. John Lewis Gaddis, founder of a now heavily revised post-revisionist doctrine on the origins of the Cold War, was one such scholar, who tended to be ‘malevolent’ in placing Williams into a bracket of those historians using ‘the classical [sic] Leninist model of imperialism’.Footnote 28 While in itself a problematic, crude conflation, it also ignored the interest shown by Williams in the ‘sense of equipoise’ he found in such Tory radicals as Lord Shaftesbury or the warning pessimism of John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover.Footnote 29 To this might be added the influence of Georg W. F. Hegel, members of the Frankfurt School, and the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, himself the great interrogator and expounder of a threefold typology of Weltanschauung. This had largely been the result of Williams's exposure to the teachings and encouragement of the melancholic sociologist Hans Gerth.Footnote 30
Beyond the pen of the diplomatic historian come the stern warnings of American publicists and statesmen who warned, at various stages, about the problems an American empire might cause. John Quincy Adams was astute enough in 1821 to speak of the dangers of undertaking that mission of destroying monsters in the name of freedom. ‘She might became dictatress of the world, but she would no longer be mistress of her own spirit.’Footnote 31
What was, however, discomforting about Williams's work was his critique of American life seen through a historical narrative of ideas. The diplomatic tradition was itself a mirror to domestic conflicts between capital and labour. The Open Door was suddenly privileged as the driving force of American corporatism. Elites motivated by market interests and distinct worldviews were also pulling the strings of power, a far from remarkable suggestion when one considers the works in other fields of political economy and sociology that were questioning democracies as being run by managerial, oligarchic castes.Footnote 32
For Williams, the making of American diplomacy rested on three premises: the humanitarian urgings to assist; the principle of self-determination; and the primacy of the American formula in achieving those aims. Such a tendency towards exceptionalism could only cause grief, enlisting the use of force to promote American ‘values’ in, first, the Western Hemisphere, then the globe. The ‘traditional effort to sustain democracy by expansion’, Williams cautioned, ‘will lead to the destruction of democracy’.Footnote 33
It is fitting to see Williams's work in the tradition of Western tragedy and the way it has been appraised by other historians and writers. Perhaps a consideration of Georg W. F. Hegel's views on tragedy in his study of ethics might be useful:
The original essence of tragedy consists then in the fact that within such a conflict each of the opposed sides, if taken by itself, has justification, while on the other hand each can establish the true and positive content of its own aim and character only by negating and damaging the equally justified power of the other. Consequently, in its moral life, and because of it, each is just as much involved in guilt.Footnote 34
In the Hegelian sense then, history is the progressive realization of the absolute, where conflicts emerge which are then dialectically resolved in the demise of the particular. This condition, even if historically determined and necessary, has its own inherently tragic nature. It is difficult to fault Williams for a condition he diagnosed with such precision, though much easier to take issue with his explanation of how that condition was generated. There is little doubt that the inconsistency between American ideals and its at times brutal projection, that very tragedy that manifests as a flaw within the character of America, is something that still gnaws at the reader.
Writings from all sides of the political spectrum have ventured to say that America has moved in that direction. The relevance of Williams has itself assumed such force with the talk of empire as not merely a past, historical phenomenon but a viable system of power. Current students of American power such as Charles Maier prefer to avoid the question about whether America is, in fact, an empire, while proceeding to employ the lexicon of imperial terms in identifying an ‘Empire of Production’ and the succeeding ‘Empire of Consumption’.Footnote 35 Niall Ferguson has become not merely a historian of empires, both British and American, but a political pundit, advising John McCain in the 2008 presidential elections and making the case that the US confront the brutish realities of empire.Footnote 36 Liberals such as Paul Berman and Michael Ignatieff have argued for some form of empire ‘lite’, while the neoconservative writings of Robert Kaplan, Richard Cheney, and Max Boot suggest the necessity of a durable Pax Americana:
For a limited period, the United States has the power to write the terms for international society, in hopes that when the country's imperial hour has passed new international institutions and stable regional powers will have begun to flourish, creating a kind of civil society of the world.Footnote 37
Williams himself shares a certain strain that he disavows. His writing is caught, at least potentially, in the trap of causal determinism. As Robert W. Tucker perceptively noted in his critique of the radical left, Williams was vague on whether ‘American institutions necessitated expansion or whether America has been expansionist out of the mistaken conviction that the well-being … of these institutions required constant expansion.’Footnote 38 That is not to suggest that Tucker was any clearer on the matter. Staughton Lynd would note somewhat dismissively that Tucker could only use Aristotelian logic in escaping the conundrum identified by Williams: as the American radical critique saw US foreign policy as guided by the ‘structural needs of American capitalism’ it followed that it had to be the essential thing about it.Footnote 39
The final gloss of his critique refuses to abandon the pretensions of American power globally. On the one hand, he was intent on reconstructing American power on the notion of charitable help, a kind of superpower benevolence that eschewed notions of hegemony. US resources should be used to assist rather than hamper nations. International co-operation would be facilitated rather than hindered. It would be hard to imagine such a power, of any sort, and certainly one intent on allowing other nations to ‘come to terms with themselves’. On the other hand, it seems markedly close to notions of ‘hegemony’ in which the presence of a supreme power in a league or alliance is seen as beneficial rather than destructive; useful in development, rather than retarding in the imperialistic sense.
Would this have squared with the issue of humanitarian intervention, seen by its critics as Western-driven jurisprudence and values enforced by the use of arms? In this sense, Williams was not entirely free of those symptoms identified by Geir Lundestad in the writing of much American history, that overwhelming presence of ‘moralism, presentism, exceptionalism and provincialism’.Footnote 40 Williams continued to believe in America's messianic mission. He was certainly not intent on identifying villains for the dock and stockade. ‘The sad result was not the result of malice, indifference, or ruthless predatory exploitation. American leaders were not evil men.’ Tragedy provided a chance for cathartic transformation, ‘a new opportunity for great achievement’.Footnote 41
By 1961, Williams had moved, in his Contours, far beyond diplomacy, a category he never fitted with ease. He peered into the annals of British history, seeing the nexus between empire and liberalism as a compromise, an exercise of domestic stabilization against internal factionalism. Empire was the only means of honouring ‘avarice and morality. The only way to be good and wealthy.’Footnote 42
Revisions were soon made to Tragedy. A version came out in 1962, followed by another in 1972. The work became lengthier. More detail and chronologies were added. Arguments were expanded, including the extension of the analysis of Hay's Open Door Notes from a ‘policy … for America's overseas expansion’ to seeing them as the means by which ‘America's preponderant strength would enter and dominate all under-developed areas of the world’.Footnote 43 Each version, each revision, spelled greater urgency, giving it the air of a manifesto rather than a monograph.Footnote 44 Later editions made note of the ‘tragedy’ of US diplomacy in its torrid relations with Castro's Cuba, while the reformist voice of the 1962 and 1972 editions is more urgent that that of 1959.Footnote 45 That said, there are instances where it seems Williams steps back, refusing to stay firm to the old position that the United States had been responsible for the Cold War. Again, sounding rather realist in note, he claimed it was American inflexibility in its foreign policy goals that ‘hardened the natural tensions’.Footnote 46
III
In a debate in the electronic medium for diplomatic historians a few years ago, the very relevance of the New Left, and specifically Williams's work, to the modern education syllabus was questioned. Academics, as they tend to do with relish, revealed the wonders of how far gone notions of an ‘objective’ historical profession are. One respondent decided that Williams was simply inaccurate, completely mistaken on his analysis of European politics and vastly ignorant of great power politics. Instead, it was Winston Churchill, a ‘historical’ hero, who had to be given to students to digest on the origins of the Cold War.Footnote 47 Evidently, we were being entertained to a series of debates as to which one's inaccuracies, not to mention pieties, would win out. Another committed the usual mistake in reviewing Williams, assuming that the historian had taken poison from the chalice of Marxist determinism in evaluating the economic processes of history.Footnote 48 Williams was determinist, but he was never firmly grounded in Marxist theory, despite finding Marx's capacity to discern ‘in one piece of evidence a set of relationships that reveal an economic truth, a truth about an idea, a social verity, and a political truth’ revelatory. He hoped to fashion, as one of his teaching assistants and scholar of US labour history Herbert Gutman noted, a ‘radical’ alternative to ‘sterile Stalinism’.Footnote 49
Some of the remarks in that online debate resonated with the academic grievances of the 1970s, when Robert J. Maddox decided to attack the New Left's footnotes with some enthusiasm. Omissions were uncovered; misstatements exposed, and evidence found wanting, notably over the claims by Williams that American policy-makers had seen ‘an Open Door in Eastern Europe as the critical factor, rather than as one of many subsidiary goals, in relations with Russia’.Footnote 50 Williams, in peddling ‘solemn nonsense’ had also been sloppy on, for instance, the American position on reparations at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. He had pasted ‘snippets’ of chronologically skewed conversations between officials, giving the reader a mistakenly uniform picture, a ‘composite photo’, argued Whittle Johnson, ‘in yellow journalism’.Footnote 51 A relieved Alsop, in reviewing the book, would cheer the fact that American history could finally be cleansed of negative preachers and return to good chest-thumping narratives. While such activity does bear fruit, big pictures and encompassing narratives are trashed and scattered in the relentless pursuit of minutiae. This might explain why Williams rarely engaged his opponents in the battle of the misquotation or the mistaken footnote. ‘That's a no-win situation.’Footnote 52 Histories of the broad canvas and brushstrokes tend to resist such trundling efforts, however important they may be to the everyday grind of the historian. Big picture histories and the labours within the musty archive undertaken by many historians are sometimes hard to reconcile.
Curiously enough, it was left to one of Williams's early critics, Joseph Siracusa, to resurrect him from what seemed to be an imminent demise. Those in the Williams lineage remained as silent as the tomb as their captain's reputation was being shredded. ‘One would think that in the aftermath of Vietnam, the inequities of globalization, and now the mess in Iraq, it would make more sense to call on a reappraisal of Williams's canon than to banish his work to the outer.’Footnote 53 Doctoral students also added their voice to the debate, claiming how they had drawn considerable value from the nature of Williams's work. ‘Not exposing future graduate students to Williams would be a true tragedy.’Footnote 54
An even more forceful resurrection came from the neoconservative quarter, long blamed for its associations with the philosophical pretensions of Leo Strauss and the revolutionary ardour of lapsed Bolshevism. Again, what were those liberals, who had flocked to parade under the Wisconsin banner, doing in picking the wrong targets? As Robert Kagan wrote inquiringly, ‘Can a generation raised on the teachings of William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber believe that the alleged sins of neoconservatism – excessive idealism, blinding righteousness, utopianism, hubris, militarism, and overweening ambition, and throw in if you want selfishness and greed – are somehow new sins?’Footnote 55 Even at the height of America's bloody wars in the Middle East, an eye could be cast back to Tragedy, for it was here that sins, truths, and even a message of redemption were to be found.
What has manifested itself now with the problems of American foreign policy is how the tragic has merged with the comic. Livingston may be right in that sense: the modern vision of American interventions, notably under the Bush administration, had a sense of the tragicomic air. The audience, through millions of protesting voices, somehow knew that the imperium was embarking on a mission it could not fulfil, with costs it could not foresee. Washington was attempting to build empire on the cheap.
The heavy reliance on domestic sources, the appraisal of American power as an engine room insular and unfed by the world, was a mistake historians had made. Williams tended to downplay the interactive dimension of diplomacy, a facet that does to a certain extent mar his work. The American world at the expense of the rest of it did distort, if not impoverish, much of the record of history. But Williams, at the forefront of the movement he helped create, removed the paternal, friendly beard associated with the American power that world war had supposedly cleansed. His technique has left a lasting legacy in the fine works of such scholars as Marilyn B. Young, who has married considerations of cultural and political capital with notions of economics.Footnote 56 But it also left such individuals as the late critic Edward Said impressed in the way Williams had demonstrated how empire had proven to be a key and enduring organizing principle of modern thought.Footnote 57
His errors were those of previous historians who seek broad, universal narratives that prove formidable as capturing motifs, but limited in netting smaller details. Then came those memories which overlay and supplemented the personal past – in the case of Williams, it was clear that he was working with a ‘screened’ memory tinted with a touch of nativism and a solid dose of nostalgia. The aims of the revisionist do tend to be more modest than what is initially assumed, ‘one who sees basic facts in a different way and as interconnected in new relationships.’Footnote 58 As Bradford Perkins pointed out a quarter century after Tragedy made its momentous entry onto the scene of history writing, ‘Historians today – and not merely historians of American diplomacy – often rather self-consciously seek for some system into which all eras and events may be fitted.’Footnote 59 The United States was, indeed, no Santa Claus. Williams's mission was, towards that end, a rather simple yet edifying one, a record of ethical absolutism he rarely strayed from. ‘I prefer to die as a free man struggling to create a human community than as a pawn of Empire’, he wrote in 1976. A letter penned in 1970 is even more poignant. The most important thing in life was something his grandmother disclosed to him when growing up: ‘Billy, give the flowers to the living. It's too late after they are gone.’Footnote 60
