William Appleman Williams

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[In the latest issue of Against the Current, Alan Wald has a very
perceptive review of Daniel Schwartz's new biography of Betty Friedan,
which highlights her early years in the CPUSA, and Ellen Schrecker's "Many
are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America." Both books stress the important
positive legacy of the party in the labor movement and the social
movements. While sympathetic to the need for ending the demonization of the
CPUSA, Alan points out that recent "revisionist" scholarship on the party
tends to go overboard. He writes, "Missing from 'Many are the Crimes' are
the voices of the 1950s Marxist left that were independent of pro-Sovietism
or liberal reformism. In the period under discussion, such trends, while
dwarfed by the Communist movement, were certainly active and vocal, even if
assaulted by the Communist Left (as crypto-fascist) and the right (as
crypto-Communist). By and large they are associated with figures such as
A.J. Muste, Sidney Lens, David Dellinger, and several remarkably
well-edited publications variously identified with the Trotskyist movement."

One of the key elements of this emerging non-Communist left was the
American Socialist, which collaborated closely with Lens, Muste and
Dellinger in the "regroupment" process. While this process did not lead
unfortunately to a permanent formation, it did provide an opening for
radical intellectuals who not only were critical of the CP, but who were to
play a key role in the formation of the New Left.

Among them was William Appleman Williams who contributed an article to the
July 1957 American Socialist titled "The Choice Before Us". The article
stakes out a position which breaks definitively with the FDR as friend of
peace and democracy paradigm promoted by Earl Browder during the war years.
Although Browder was thrown out of the CP for going overboard, his
successors never quite broke with the New Deal mentality, as evidenced by
their critical support for LBJ in 1964.

Williams, who had no use for the "democracy expansion" rhetoric of the
Democratic Party, would have--I'm sure--been sympathetic to the movement
against Nato's war against Yugoslavia. His hostility toward liberal
democracy's "civilizing" wars was a throwback to earlier traditions, such
as the progressivism of Charles Beard, a 1920s and 30s figure who was one
of the few on the left, besides the Trotskyist SWP, to oppose WWII.

Williams became the founder of the "Wisconsin" school of revisionist
historians, who figured prominently in the Vietnam-era teach-ins. Their
hostility to the Democratic Party's war in its early stages was critical in
turning a generation of youth, including me, into radicals. Among them are
Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperovitz and younger scholars grouped around the
journal Radical America. By providing a platform for Williams, the American
Socialist provided a "revolutionary continuity" that was much more
meaningful than that claimed by small, sectarian "vanguard" parties
claiming to be the avatar of Marx and Lenin.

An excerpt from Williams' article is followed by an entry on him from the
Encyclopedia of the American Left.]

===

The American Socialist, July 1957
The Choice Before Us by William Appleman Williams

(Mr. Williams has been assistant professor of history at the University of
Oregon, and is moving to the University of Wisconsin this September. His
books on American diplomacy attracted wide attention, and his articles have
appeared in The Nation and other periodicals. This is his first article for
the American Socialist.)

VIEWED from any perspective other than orthodox nationalism, it can be seen
that the central characteristic of this period of American history was a
labor imperialism based upon the conquest and colonization, in the style of
seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European imperialism, of the
trans-Mississippi West. This fact has been neglected for the same reason
that the policy worked so well: Neither the natives (the American Indians
and the Mexicans) nor the competitors (England, France, and Russia) were
capable of offering significant opposition. Hence we treat our wars of
conquest as benevolent police actions undertaken in the cause of democratic
civilization. It was their grasp of this pattern which enabled Marx and
Engels to understand the lack of a truly radical movement in the United
States: "America after all was the ideal of all bourgeois; a country rich,
vast, expanding."

Secretary of State Seward also saw this relationship, and undertook, in
line with the switch from agrarianism to industrialism, to shift the nature
of the expansion from territorial acquisition to overseas economic and
strategic penetration. Markets, raw materials, and bases became his
objectives?as witness his forays into the Caribbean, the Pacific Basin, and
(in Korea) on the mainland of Asia itself. In many respects, indeed, Seward
is the real Jefferson of America?s contemporary industrial liberalism;
combining as he does the rhetoric and ideals of freedom with the pragmatic
ability to accept the Existing Establishment on the basis of reform through
further expansion. Harrison and Blame lacked his comprehension of this
process of democracy by expansion, but their frenetic diplomacy was
predicated on the same assumption.

Not until the crisis of the 1890s did Americans face even the possibility
of a choice between radicalism and a damaging war. Even then, however, the
ease with which Spain was defeated served temporarily to strengthen the
assumption, so recently and so precisely formulated by Turner and Adams,
that democracy was the sprightly handmaiden of expansion. But a bit later,
between 1900 and 1917, events did structure the circumstances for the rise
of an American radicalism. At home, it became apparent that the limits of
political and economic democracy were closing in on every citizen. Abroad,
meanwhile, expansion slowed down in the face of vigorous opposition from
Japan, England, France, Russia, and Germany.

The threat of a serious war against Japan over China took the edge off
America's crusading fervor. Theodore Roosevelt was forced to give up the
struggle for Manchuria and take up the rhetoric of domestic radicalism.
Woodrow Wilson?s success was based on doing the same thing more
convincingly, though not necessarily more thoroughly. More revealing was
the effect of developments on the movement led by Debs. It strength
steadily until Wilson?s New Freedom, a failure at home, expanded into a
crusade to save the world for late Victorian democracy. That meant war:
abroad the Germans and the Bolsheviks, and at home the radicals.

DEFEATED in that engagement, domestic radicalism did not revive until
midway through Franklin Roosevelt?s first term, at which time it became
even more apparent that continued expansion (for whatever purpose) meant
war. Instead of following the policy of British Labor, which offered
long-range benefits, despite short-term disadvantages, this American
radicalism of the mid-thirties chose to follow the course laid out by
Wilson. It abandoned radicalism for a crusade to save the status quo. But
by whatever other name?and Doctor Win-the-War and the Fair Deal are in fact
rather feeble diversionary rallying cries?the status quo is still the
status quo. The end result of all this was the political mutation known as
the Vital Center, which combined Theodore Roosevelt's bellicose
nationalistic expansion with Wilson?s Victorian liberalism. It should not
really surprise that the Truman Doctrine reads like the Roosevelt Corollary
to the Monroe Doctrine, or that John Foster Dulles is an evangelical
preacher in the same tradition as Woodrow Wilson. The thesis that expansion
is democracy, and democracy expansion, is America?s Orwell?s Doublethink.

It was not until the early 1950s, when the full significance of Russian
possession of the A-bomb undercut this expansionist philosophy of history,
that Americans slowly realized that democracy by expansion was apt to turn
into repression for and by war. The first product of this awareness was the
Geneva Conference, where the policy of containment-liberation?so clearly
the classical expression of the expansionist philosophy of history?was
tacitly (albeit not formally or rhetorically) abandoned, at least for the
moment. Since that time the American scene has been characterized by a
general formlessness and meaninglessness. Outmoded policies are sustained
by nothing more than the habit and the inertia of expansion. Existing
political leaders unsuccessfully rummage through their rhetoric for a
relevant idea. And the morale and mores of the society disintegrate into
the pulpy pap of an indiscriminate togetherness.

These developments have already sparked a flickering in the ashes of the
American Left, as well as a much stronger and more vigorous reaction in
British socialism. The key question is not whether such a new radicalism
will arise in America, for it is already in existence, but whether or not
it will mature intellectually and politically in time to forestall a
nuclear war. Given the general, though unfocused, dissatisfaction
throughout American the crucial problem is intellectual. A rigorous
analysis and a positive program would appear to have more than a fighting
chance to win widespread support.

THE theoretical problem is threefold: 1) to formulate and specify a
domestic radicalism that will infuse with a purpose beyond its
self-perpetuation and the continued mass production of the banal, the
vulgar, and the irrelevant; 2) to define and adopt, for the immediate and
vital purpose of disengaging from the Cold War before it devolves into
nuclear war, a foreign policy of radical isolationism; and 3) to outline
and develop, as an ultimate foreign policy, a radical internationalism
which will strengthen political and cultural independence within a
framework of economic integration and planning.

In the circumstances of the inter-continental ballistics missile, this
appears to be the most promising program for replacing corporate capitalism
with democratic socialism, and for transforming an empire into a
commonwealth. Lacking this alternative, the existing American Empire will
ultimately find itself isolated in a socialist and communist world. And, as
with most empires of the status quo ante, it will very probably prefer to
risk nuclear war instead of accepting its decline and fall with dignity.
For it was, after all, only the militance of British Labor that gave
Winston Churchill the opening for a graceful retreat from imperialism. He
could withdraw abroad because he was challenged at home as well as
checkmated overseas. Had he been secure at home, he would have had to fight
abroad, even in the face of certain defeat. Anthony Eden was not so
fortunate, for he was challenged by Nasser at a time when the Labor Party
was immobilized by the conservatism of its own leadership. But Eden?s
tragedy does have the value of dramatizing the central point.

The same considerations make it imperative for American radicalism to
accept its opportunity and its responsibility to perform a similar service
for American society (and, indirectly, for existing American leadership).
For the obvious is never obvious, nor the inevitable ever inevitable, until
someone points it out or makes it so. The only other source of such action
is the Russians, and the only teaching aids they have at their disposal are
very apt to destroy the student with the lesson. Anyway, it is long past
time for American radicals to abandon the Freudian sublimation of their
frustrations in romantic illusions, self-righteous crusades to save someone
else, or adjustment to the status quo, and turn instead to the Marxian
challenge of changing their own world.

====

WILLIAMS, WILLIAM APPLEMAN (1922-1990)
An atypical radical with distinctly conservative traits, not unlike Eugene
Debs or various mid-western "Progressives," William Appleman Williams grew
up in the farming community of Atlantic, Iowa, and later registered as a
Republican who preferred Nixon to Kennedy in 1960; but always dreaming of
old-fashioned egalitarian communities, Williams developed into something of
a "Christian socialist" or "socialist of the heart." A graduate of the U.S.
Naval Academy and injured World War II veteran, Williams first became
radicalized by his involvement following the war in civil rights activities
in Corpus Christi, a harrowing experience that henceforth left him shy
about engaging in direct-action politics. Nevertheless determined "to make
sense" out of everything that was going on in America and the world at that
time, Williams decided to become a historian at the University of
Wisconsin, where a high-powered and heavily Beardian history department
favored economics and points of conflict in the study of American history,
in sharp contrast to the prevailing "consensus" history of the "Cold War
liberals," particularly those at Ivy League schools. Williams also spent
several months in England working with Labour scholars. Always fascinated
by the instructive experiences of the Soviet Union, his first book surveyed
American-Russian relations, particularly during the Russian Revolution.

For most of the fifties Williams was a lone voice, writing frequently in
left-wing journals such as the Nation, Science and Society and Monthly
Review. Although denounced by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as "a pro-Communist
scholar" and later hauled before to the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, Williams eventually produced his celebrated Tragedy of American
Diplomacy (1959) and The Contours of American History (1961). In these
classic works he insisted that the United States had always been an
imperialist nation (Vietnam was no aberration) and that American policy
leaders, particularly "liberals" in the tradition of Jefferson, Jackson,
Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, consistently believed that American
civilization could not survive without an ever-expanding frontier or by
maintaining an "open door" for American trade and political ideology
throughout the world. The tragic result was involvement in two world wars
(and a cold one) and staunch opposition to social revolutions almost
everywhere, while at home the American elite had developed a "corporate
liberal capitalist state" that negated any sense of genuine community or
responsible citizenship. Lacking any viable socialist alternative, Williams
sought inspiration in such "enlightened conservatives" as John Quincy Adams
and Herbert Hoover. Radicals not only could but must learn from
conservatives. Only forty years old, Williams had shaken historical studies
as no one else had since Charles Beard.

Meanwhile, back at Madison since 1957, Williams was developing the
"Wisconsin School of Diplomatic History," which produced a number of
scholars who substantially rendered the study of American foreign relations
more complex and much more rooted in economics. They particularly
challenged the "Cold Warriors" by arguing that the United States had been a
much more aggressive power than the Soviet Union. This revisionist
scholarship inspired and contributed greatly to a wave of "New Left"
history that swept across the nation in the next two decades. Williams,
himself, greatly sympathized with the Cuban Revolution (The United States,
Cuba, and Castro), applied (rather feebly) a Marxist analysis to American
society (The Great Evasion), massively documented the imperialist role of
agricultural businessmen (The Roots of the Modern American Empire), and
sponsored a radical student publication, Studies on the Left, for which he
contributed superb essays on American responses to the Russian Revolution.
At the same time Williams became increasingly alienated from what he saw as
"infantile leftists" on the campus. Student activists needed to reach out
and communicate with "middle America" wherein, he naively believed, lay the
germs of decentralized, communitarian, indigenous socialism.

Exasperated, Williams left Madison in 1968 for the simpler life of Oregon,
thus removing himself from the cutting edge of radical history. Although he
popularized his ideas in Empire as a Way of Life and was honored as
president of the Organization of American Historians, he never again
produced a path-breaking work. A second marriage ended badly, his children
had serious problems, and he began drinking more heavily. He died of cancer
in March 1990. His social and political involvement had been limited, his
solutions vague and even naive, but Williams had left a whole generation of
students, leftist scholars, and other concerned citizens with an
irreversibly and radically different understanding of the course of
American history

?EDWARD RICE-MAXIMIN



Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/