A William Appleman Williams Reader, edited by Henry W.Berger
Rice-Maximin, Eric & Buhle, Paul
A WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS READER, edited by Henry W. Berger. Ivan R. Dee, 1992. 415 pp. $16.95, paper. William Appleman Williams, the most influential U.S. historian since Charles and Mary...
...Williams's scholarly path was definitely "Madisonian" in this geopolitical sense...
...America Confronts a Revolutionary World (1776-1976) (Selection 16), written for the Bicentennial, argued once more that the United States had subverted its original commitment to selfdetermination...
...During the last years of World War II, Williams served as executive officer on a landing craft, where he sustained injuries painful the rest of his life...
...The historiography of U.S...
...He also spent part of 1948 in England, studying decentralized economic models in Leeds with British Labour party intellectuals...
...historian since Charles and Mary Beard, was also a most curious socialist thinker...
...A "progressive" or "Beardian" tradition there stressed the social and economic factors essential to an understanding of the past...
...Indeed, he was rarely an activist, and never joined any left-wing group...
...He hoped that they might recuperate the original promise of the American Revolution: not a license to Empire but the possibility of universal emancipation from empires of any kind...
...An answer to the Williams riddle can be found partly in the dynamics of changing historical scholarship...
...A handful, such as Martin J. Sklar and Thomas McCormick, build more directly on Williams, identifying through "corporatism" a cluster of elites dominating American policies...
...Meanwhile, Williams himself produced key scholarly essays (Selections 3-5) on isolationism, the frontier thesis, and the legacy of Charles Beard...
...So was the history of the American West, for which Williams had almost unwittingly supplied a new key: expansionism as the pseudosolution to the problems of democracy, and American history as a perpetual frontier of the Open Door with conquest its dominating theme...
...But his impact remained essentially scholarly...
...In the absence of socialism, however, he preferred "enlightened conservatism," a la Herbert Hoover, to the corporate liberalism of Woodrow Wilson or Harry Truman...
...Although Harvard's Oscar Handlin dismissed the book as "an elaborate hoax," Contours caught on quickly with younger scholars, including many outside the field of history...
...Shocked to learn that America behaved like any other empire, they found in Williams's lectures and books a persuasive explanation of how it all came about...
...In The Roots of the Modern American Empire (1969, Selection 13) he argued that farmers and rural businessmen (the majority of Americans) had anticipated by several decades the East Coast industrial and financial elites' quest for overseas markets and even colonial possessions...
...historians supported Norman Thomas for president in 1948, and others speculated on whether the Constitutional Convention of 1783 had been an expression of statist tyranny...
...Williams wisely decided to stay in Madison, but soon found himself harassed by the House Committee on Un-American WINTER • 1994 • 151 Books Activities, which tried unsuccessfully to seize his next manuscript, The Contours of American History (Selections 9-11), published in 1961...
...A widely assigned classroom anthology, The Shaping of American Diplomacy, 1750-1955 (1956) offered a fresh and critical look at the entire diplomatic tradition...
...Increasingly wrenched with physical pain, Williams succumbed to cancer in 1990...
...He entered a military academy on a basketball scholarship, and then went on to the Naval Academy...
...Williams and his students drastically revised the study of foreign relations, examining a broad network of influences—chiefly economic —behind policy decisions...
...Historians of the West such as Patricia Limerick reflect his philosophical outlook in their nuanced regionalism...
...In these days Marx may not be politically fashionable, 150 • DISSENT Books but if (as seems likely) his usefulness is destined to survive as long as capitalism, then Williams's influence will likewise last as long as the American Empire...
...He had finished his major scholarly volumes, and now turned to works of reflection...
...He argued that the historic linking of democracy and prosperity to unlimited economic expansion brought the U.S...
...Discouraged by campus confrontations and exhausted by training dozens of graduate students, Williams abandoned Madison for a safe haven on the Oregon coast...
...Then, and only then, could they live and act within a community, simultaneously citizens of an intimate society and citizens of the world...
...This time, at the high tide of the New Left, traditional historians praised Williams's exhaustive archival research while many radicals were outraged at his conclusions...
...Meanwhile, Williams experienced a rough start at teaching, having fatally flunked an Ohio State football player and faced down McCarthyism at the University of Oregon...
...But the University of Wisconsin, where Williams did his graduate work, had for generations been a center of methodological "revisionism...
...elites to the Russian revolution...
...In an original and far-reaching interpretation, Williams showed how certain leading "worldviews" (the productive "mercantilism" of early days, the destructive "laissez-nous faire" of Jacksonianism, and the manipulative "corporatism" of the late nineteenth century and beyond) had informed and distorted the national experience...
...Born in 1921, Williams grew up amid the kind of prairie liberalism that has nurtured anti-imperial prophets from Robert M. LaFollette to George McGovern...
...A radical campus whose students (many of them veterans) voted in droves against compulsory ROTC while thespians staged Lysistrata, Madison also boasted a multifaceted resistance to impending McCarthyism...
...Until the 1960s, the emerging Williams "school" hardly received an enthusiastic national response...
...Former New Dealer Adolph Berle, however, tried to lure Williams into the Kennedy administration...
...into ever-increasing conflicts with a variety of peoples who wanted to reorder their collective lives in their own fashion...
...Here, Williams's life changed rapidly...
...Some Presidents: Wilson to Nixon (Selection 14), reprinted from a series in the New York Review of Books, revealed his sardonic wit at its best...
...Usually considered an "economic interpretationist," Williams was at bottom more of an intellectual or cultural historian who sought to define the various worldviews that shaped the national experience...
...When Williams began writing during the early 1950s, mainstream historians dismissed the idea of conflict in American history, and held a messianic view of America's role in world affairs...
...Williams next sought to relate his ideas to Marx, as evidenced in his uneven 1963 volume, The Great Evasion: An Essay on the Contemporary Relevance of Karl Marx and on the Wisdom of Admitting the Heretic into the Dialogue about America's Future (Selection 12...
...Empire as a Way of Life, containing the reflections of a lifetime, continues to circulate widely, and William's two most famous works, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and The Contours of American History, have recently returned to print...
...His first major work, American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 (represented in Selection 1), stressed the United States challenge to any restrictions on the Open Door...
...A William Appleman Williams Reader, edited by Henry W. Berger, now adds a concise selection of Williams's major writings...
...This summary barely begins to indicate Williams's paradoxical qualities...
...Much like his fellow (unacknowledged) Christian socialist Michael Harrington, Williams aspired to reach "middle America" with radical ideas...
...By 1957, he was ready to return to Madison...
...Sklar coined the term "corporate liberalism," the explanatory catchphrase of New Left analysis used to explore the background of the Democrats' support for the Vietnam War...
...152 • DISSENT Books More than anything else, Williams wanted Americans to grow up and face their history, with all the responsibilities inherent in it...
...But it caught on with the generation of graduate students shaped by the Vietnam War and the antiwar movements...
...His "Confessions of an Intransigent Revisionist" (Selection 15) and "The Annapolis Crowd" (Selection 18) mark his self—assessment and his final word...
...A plethora of "revisionist" histories followed during the 1960s and 1970s, many of them extensions, popularizations, or (as in the case of David Horowitz's widely read books) vulgarizations of Williams...
...Still others, such as Immanuel Wallerstein, examine "world-systems" to provide a transnational view of world empire, retaining Williams's focus on economic factors...
...He cultivated talented graduate students, including Walter LaFeber, Lloyd Gardner, Thomas McCormick, and Martin Sklar, all destined to become major "revisionists...
...Unlike the radical social historians of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Herbert Gutman, who wrote heavily about the poor, Williams focused on elites...
...The journal's central figure, James Weinstein, still edits In These Times, with a decidedly Williamsesque flavor...
...The Socialist Club, a bastion of young radicals, idolized Williams...
...Yet he remained basically Americocentric, and a moralist...
...Stationed in Corpus Christi, he became involved in local civil rights activities, much to the displeasure of the Navy...
...He wrote his master's and doctoral theses about the response of U.S...
...Some of its U.S...
...Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America's Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative (1980, Selection 17), called upon Americans to confront their past, to limit and improve their empire or dismantle it entirely and create genuine, that is, decentralized, communities...
...He practically launched the great wave of "revisionist" or "New Left" history, yet he broke sharply with student antiwar-militants for being too inclined toward campus confrontations and toward what he viewed as escapist anti-intellectualism...
...Most of today's historians agree with Williams that the United States is an empire and bears heavy responsibility for the cold war—even if they bury such considerations amid a myriad of other issues...
...His most famous book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, published in 1959 (Selections 6-8), seemed to predict the winding down of U.S.-Soviet confrontation as the principal focus of world tension...
...Prestigious liberal and conservative historians naturally considered such ideas anathema...
...Its members went on to found Studies On the Left, very much in his image...
...In their broader view of the United States, they accepted key premises of existing "consensus" history and sought to synthesize American history around themes of consent—a consensus they found anything but benevolent...
...A campus coming back from the cold war was eager to greet him...
...Williams enjoyed his signal professional triumph in 1980, when he was elected president of the Organization of American Historians...
...foreign relations was permanently changed in the process...
...Mustered out in 1947, he entered graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, to study history...
...An epilogue taking on George F. Kennan's "containment" thesis (Selection 2) barely missed publication in Foreign Affairs...
...Berger, himself one of Williams's students, sketches the master's life and briefly analyzes each of his major works in a substantial introduction...
...While keenly interested in Marx, he remained a romantic "socialist of the heart" who favored a decentralized, regionalist cooperativism...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
