Our Empire's Roots

...Also, despite the impressive research in agricultural papers and related sources, Williams seems sometimes to be reconstructing the thought of farm leaders, not farmers...

...Clearly Williams favors a radical reconstruction of the economy into what he loosely describes as "interacting regional political economies that will function as communities," but he never addresses the painful questions now troubling the Left: Will the corporate elite yield power...

...What could make an important difference, however, is the resolution of issues on which he has seemed unclear or perhaps ambivalent: Is the "Open Door" policy dysfunctional...

...It is a testimonial to the influence of William Appleman Williams that his work has compelled radicals and liberals, both in the universities and in the streets, to confront these problems which America shunned in the Forties and Fifties...

...Stated more fully, can the American economy of large-scale corporate capitalism endure if left-wing revolutions succeed and close off foreign markets and sources of raw materials...

...Yet, whether the "ideology" has agrarian origins, as he now believes, or industrial origins, as he previously believed, the knowledge will not make any difference in the understanding of the contemporary American empire, nor in the ending of that empire...

...His new book, "Reporter in a Soft State," will be published by Harper & Row this fall...

...As in the Tragedy, William Mc-Kinley, the master of his own Administration, appears as a strong President who seeks to extend American power and markets abroad...

...According to Williams, the themes of humanitar-ianism, realism, and self-determination were integrally linked, for this "ideology" associated domestic prosperity and liberty with free markets, economic expansion, and the spread of freedom abroad...

...The nation, emerging slowly from a depression and searching for expanded markets, was unsettled by the revolution in Cuba...

...If we can understand how we became an imperial metropolis in the name of freedom and prosperity . . . then perhaps we can free our minds and wills to achieve freedom and prosperity without being an imperial society," explains Williams in expressing the "relevance" of this volume...

...The solution was "Open Door" expansion (free marketplace competition without annexation of territory), which would allow the American economy to prosper and American liberty to flourish while extending similar benefits to foreign peoples...

...Opposing the foreign policy of his own time, Williams, in The Tragedy, searched for the origins of the American empire and located its sources in the thought and actions of the 1890s...

...Not surprisingly, these objections appear at the very time when, for related reasons, some historians are critically re-examining the American past...

...Instead, Williams concluded that the newly industrialized society, recognizing the closing of the frontier and the need for overseas markets, came to believe that its own prosperity, as well as democracy, depended upon continued expansion— not for territory but for foreign markets...

...His conclusion, stated bluntly, is that what went wrong —the ideas leading to the American empire—flows from the ideas originally generated by agriculturalists and then taken up by the industrial society...

...It keeps up a continuous irritation within our own borders, injuriously affects the normal functions of business, and tends to delay the condition of prosperity to which this country is entitled...

...For how else can historians plausibly explain the apparently irrational but widely-held fear that the Cuban situation was injuring or threatening America...

...Or must the American economy be reorganized to reduce dependence on foreign markets, and would that mean the end of large-scale corporate capitalism...

...The chronic condition of trouble and violent derangement in [Cuba]," warned Secretary of State John Sherman, "constantly causes disturbance in the social and political condition of our own people...

...Given this analysis, as well as the Administration's desire to seize the Philippine Islands in order to secure a stepping-stone (including a coaling station) to the China markets, McKinley was ready to go to war when Spain refused to yield to America's demands...

...Imperialism, then, for Williams, was not imposed in 1898 by an industrial elite on a reluctant majority...

...Partly concerned about investments and markets in Cuba, U.S...

...These are challenging, difficult, and not always historical problems whose resolution may guide social action...

...Without foreign outlets for the growing glut of industrial goods, the economy would collapse and democracy would crumble...

...Perhaps, then, the movement to war must be explained in terms of William's theory of "ideology," as supplemented by some theory of aberrant mass behavior—perhaps a theory of a "psychic crisis...

...It is not clear, for example, that ideas (or actions) for expanding exports to Europe could, in the minds of some writers in the 1870s or 1880s, have justified such actions as intervention in Cuba or seizure of the Philippines...

...He rejected the popular notion that imperialism in 1898 was a "great ab-berration," as Samuel F. Bemis contended in a leading text, or that it was the result of a "psychic crisis" in American society, as Richard Hof-stadter argued...

...Put simply, the farmers of the West and South, who were in a colonial relationship with the East, understood that economic expansion was necessary to prosperity, democracy, and domestic well-being...

...The Roots of the Modern American Empire raises other problems of conception, method, and use of evidence...

...His decision, spurred by the agriculturalists, was also endorsed by powerful sectors of the business community who shifted in the late winter from opposition to support for war...

...This policy first formulated by the agriculturalists and shared by the majority of Americans, was slowly adopted and adapted by the industrial elite...

...They were not, as some historians have argued, naive, nostalgic, often backward-looking men who chanted the rhetoric of subsistence farming while competing for international markets...

...His analysis of the movement into the Spanish-American War, modifying his earlier Tragedy of American Diplomacy primarily by placing greater emphasis on the agriculturalists, merits a brief summary, despite limitations of space...

...BARTON J. BERNSTEIN, associate professor of history at Stanford, edited "Politics & Policies of the Truman Administration" and "Towards A New Past...

...At root, much of the difficulty is that Williams has not dealt clearly and effectively with the nature of "ideology"-—both in theory as a way of interpreting social experience, and in practice in late Nineteenth Century America as a means of understanding a disordered, anxious society in which some citizens foresaw cataclysm...

...The results of the war were annexation of the Philippines and the extension of America's informal empire: economic expansion (without colonialism) into weaker nations...

...Even within the historical profession, some of the more eminent and esteemed practitioners have serious reservations and fears: that history is inherently a conservative enterprise...

...that it has become trivial...

...Because he is the "father" of Cold War revisionism and justifiably commands respect for his courage and intellect, a growing number of scholars and students await his future analyses of American society and his consideration of these important questions...

...policy makers concluded that the American economy could not fully recover until the Cuban situation was resolved...

...If not, then what is to be done...

...There is at least one serious problem: Some of the rhetoric of the late 1890s, including the previously quoted analysis by Secretary Sherman, suggests that members of the McKinley Administration perceived a "psychic crisis" in other sectors of the policy...

...As part of their marketplace ideology, they believed that expansion extended and protected their own freedom while also conferring similar benefits on others...

...they are seeking to understand the marketplace of academia so successfully suppressed, discouraged, and penalized radicals...

...They were not ambivalent or confused about their conditions, activities, or needs in the international economy, which they understood...

...This analysis of particular events, though rejected by many historians, seems powerful and persuasive, but incomplete...

...His concern, as explained by the subtitle, is "a study of the growth and shaping of social consciousness in a marketplace society...

...THE REVIEWERS DAVID SHANNON is professor of history and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia...

...Reviewed by Barton J. Bernstein In the universities, and in the -*• streets, the study of history is a subject of suspicion and doubt, occasionally of derision or contempt...

...STUART H. tOORY is a Washington correspondent for The Los Angeles Times...

...BERNARD NOSSITER is a member of The Washington Post's national bureau whose reporting of military procurement has been widely acclaimed...

...In addition, his conception of "social consciousness" as "attitudes, ideas, and patterns of behavior" is distressingly loose and sometimes means ripping ideas out of context...

...Returning to these themes in The Roots of the Modern American Empire, a ponderous new volume years in the making, Williams has sought to provide "relevant" history: to explain the origin of the "ideology" which he now traces back beyond industrial society to the earlier agricultural society...

...Perhaps the most minor is Williams' tendency to over-emphasize considerations of foreign policy and markets as the major issues in domestic politics— thereby, for example, casting the election of 1896 within this constricted framework and minimizing important dimensions of the urban-rural conflict...

...He has specialized in the history of leftwing politics and is the author of "The Socialist Party of America...

...rather, imperialism represented the consensus of the society...

...Also, his analysis of "social consciousness" generally avoids establishing a hierarchy of values, and therefore does not adequately explain why advocates of the "Open Door," when confronted with a conflict between the conditions for freedom and for economic expansion, usually chose the latter...

...that it can never yield enough to guide intelligent social action...