Thesis and Message
Neumann, William L.
Thesis and Message THE CONTOURS OF AMERICAN HISTORY, by William Appleman Williams. World. 5 1 3 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by William L. Neumann HISTORY, Charles Beard once said, is philosophy open...
...Roosevelt is described as "the last and certainly one of the most conservative representatives of the American feudal gentry to hold the Presidency...
...The first, titled the "Age of Mercantilism," is dated 1740-1828...
...He discovers his "contours" in three stages of economic thought and institutions...
...In a manner which will delight some readers and appall others, Williams manages to align Christ, Marx, and Freud in a front against new frontiers...
...In each of these periods he analyzes the conflict between the existing order and the movement towards the new age...
...today, in Moscow, Laos, and Berlin...
...from 1819 to 1896, and finally the "Age of Corporation Capitalism," which began in 1882 and persists to the present...
...Williams suggests instead that the source may be at home and that the cure can be found in recreating a sense of community, a democratic, socialist commonwealth...
...The Contours of American History is one of the best of the relatively few attempts to interpret the American past...
...If Khrushchev calls Kennedy's bluff over Berlin— and it turns out to be only a bluff—this product of the University of Wisconsin may win the White House consideration previously given to the work of Harvard scholars like Kissinger, Rostow, and Schlesinger...
...the second is the "Age of Laissez Nous Faire" (sic...
...Most American historical writing is limited to seeing development in the clash of "good" and "bad" men or, in modern terms, between "liberals" and "conservatives...
...The period in between offers ample scope for philosophizing...
...Few historians like to admit it, but this is basically what the best interpretive writers have done—developing "concepts," "trends," or "processes" which seem to give some meaning to man's collective behavior...
...But the long overdue "agonizing reappraisal" may still come as an alternative to thermonuclear disaster...
...New Dealers are found to share in what has been a blight on the whole era, the quest for Utopia through the conquest of new frontiers of overseas commercial expansion...
...Reviewed by William L. Neumann HISTORY, Charles Beard once said, is philosophy open at both ends...
...To many readers this solution will seem only a resurgence of Beard's continentalism, or pre-World War II liberal isolationism, a point of view which disregards America's "responsibilities" for a world-wide defense of peace, parliamentary democracy, and the remnants of capitalism...
...thesis, but also a strong message...
...Williams, a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin who acknowledges his indebtedness to Beard, has ranged beyond these conventional limitations...
...Pragmatism, faith in national "destiny," and the desiccating influences of graduate school training have combined to discourage American scholars from thinking "big" about their national experience as Arnold Toynbee has tried to do about many nations...
...Beginning with the use of Spain in 1898, Americans have found the source of their troubles outside their borders...
...By taking individuals like Mark Hanna, conventionally damned by liberal historians as "reactionaries," and finding that they were proponents of the Rising rather than the Passing Order, he produces some interesting fresh interpretations...
...The New Deal is dismissed from its conventional ranking as a new approach to economic problems and seen as a convergence and consolidation of elements to be found in the older Progressive movement...
...No scholar can say much about the beginning of human existence nor be well-informed about the Day of Judgment...
Vol. 25 • September 1961 • No. 9
