What kind of reformist vision did William Appleman Williams have?

William Appleman Williams (1921-1990)

The Nation in July presents a long essay on the late historian William Appleman Williams by historian Greg Grandin, Off Dead Center: William Appleman Williams 07/01/09 (07/20/09 edition).

Andrew Bacevich in The New American Militarism (2005) gives Williams credit, along with Charles Beard, for focusing attention on internal economic and political factors that affected American foreign policy. Because much of conventional commentary and scholarly analysis of US foreign policy fails to do so. Bacevich certainly didn't make any blanket endorsement of either of their outlooks.

Grandin talks about the fact that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., considered Williams an ideological opponent. But he doesn't discuss Schlesinger's actual critique of Williams' historical work, which raise some substantial scholarly objections to Williams' work, arguing that his mis- or over-interpreted some documents and gave unwarrented significance to some events. But Sclesinger's main criticism of Williams' account of the origins of the Cold War, in particular, was directed against a flaw of islolationist work in general, i.e., that it treated American foreign policy as almost exclusively self-generated and ignored or minimized the signficance of other international actors. (That criticism applies even more emphatically to Charles Beard.)

This apparently admiring description of Williams' self-understanding late in life gives good picture, though probably unintentional on Grandin's part, of the hodge-podge of organizing ideas that plagued his historical narratives:

[His own] self-description makes Williams sound more like a Hegelian than a Spinozian or a Marxist. Indeed, despite his searing indictment of empire, he was openly obsessed with the idea of America as the embodiment of a world spirit. "America," he wrote toward the end of his life, "is the kind of culture that wakes you in the night, the kind of nightmare that may [yet] possibly lead us closer to the truth." Williams was a serious, empirical scholar whose prose could be as dense as any academic's, but he often broke out of form to riff in a style as sprawling as his subject matter. "If we start with reform and go on to modernize, prosperity, improve, uplift," he said of the action words of American expansion, "then we come out with purify, put right, purgation, overtake, and never look back. Finally, we find stewards as policemen, which leads us backward and forwards to benevolence, surveillance, reform, paternalism, and systematic discipline in the name of progress." Intoxicated by the "dialectical tension" of "coming apart at the seams at midnight" and "stitching it back together in a sentence or two at 3 a.m.," Williams, a jazz drummer, increasingly expressed himself with bop rhythm and beat imagery. [?!?!] "Assume the worst," he warned in his last great work, chanting its title with a frequency worthy of Howl's Moloch: "empire as a way of life will lead to nuclear death."

I'm sorry, but I have no idea of just what the [Cheney] the dialectical tension of coming apart at midnight might mean. It sounds depressingly like a Maureen Dowd column to me.

Now, there's a lot that can legitimately be said in criticism of Cold War liberalism. But I don't that this counts:

Well before the publication of The Tragedy of American Diplomacy--Williams's best-known book, it has been reissued this year on its fiftieth anniversary--tragedy had become a favored genre of scholars operating within the "vital center" of American intellectual life. "History is not a redeemer, promising to solve all human problems in time," Arthur Schlesinger cautioned in 1949 in a Partisan Review essay nominally about the Civil War but really a brief for containment; it is rather a "tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration." Other "tough-minded" liberal intellectuals, such as Richard Hofstadter and Reinhold Niebuhr, invoked the force of instinct and passion in mass society as something of a deus ex machina to stress history's tragic dimensions. The notion that evil did not "proceed from a cruel system"--that is, a system that could be engineered to produce ever more virtue--but from man's "dark and tangled aspects," as Schlesinger interpreted Niebuhr, helped transform liberalism from a politics of hope to one of fear. The policy implications were clear: the New Deal was the outer limit of reform, beyond which lay the nether lands of totalitarianism, and the Soviets needed to be confronted with the same resolve with which the Union defeated the Confederacy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt beat the Nazis.

When did Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ever say that the New Deal was "the outer limit of reform"? In fact, he was very much a supporter of the Kennedy and Johnson brands of domestic liberalism which did go beyond the New Deal. Surely Grandin has heard of Medicare? And both Schlesinger and Niebuhr became opponents of the Vietnam War. In fact, Niebuhr's Christian conception of the tragic element in human history led him and others who followed his thinking to recognize the limits of US power that the country had encountered in the Vietnam War. Schlesinger lived to see the early part of the Iraq War, which he also opposed forthrightly.

Grandin also seems to find some grand and subtle historical insight in the following:

Williams did not believe, as did many progressives of his day, that liberalism was a way station on the road to social democracy; he thought that whatever transformative force the philosophy once held had mutated either into a corrosive, anti-intellectual individualism or a justification for monopoly capitalism, in both cases kept alive only by a constant "fleeing forward." Thus he was free to find traces of a latent socialism in the unlikeliest places, including in the South's culture of defeat and resentment (a "prism-prison" that distorts some truths, leading to racial supremacy and "hawkish bellicosity," but that clarifies a healthy distrust of the state) and in the writings of aristocrats, conservative politicians and businessmen who, even if they still defended hierarchy, candidly confronted the predicaments of capital. His most famous restoration project was Herbert Hoover; it seemed that every time Schlesinger wrote a book about FDR, Williams would counter by finding some new, underappreciated quality in the man New Dealers loved to ridicule.

He continues immediately to say that Williams greatest inspiration was the American civil rights movement. But he doesn't seem to see the screaming contradiction he spells out in that paragraph just quoted: Williams looked to conservatives more than (American-style) liberals for a hopeful future. How could those ideas lead to some kind of "socialism"? Possibly because his idea of "socialism" seemed to be, as Bacevich describes it, something like his picture of peaceful Midwestern farm communities.

Grandin's essay reminds me how the American political vocablulary complicates ideological discussions. Williams drew on the "progressive" tradition to form a vision of a non-imperialist, "socialist" America based on the ideas of reactionary Republicans like Herbert Hoover and a rejection of the brand of liberalism represented by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Many "progressives" thought that "liberalism" would lead to "social democracy": a statement that would make sense if we knew just what he meant by progressives, liberalism and social democracy.

The problem with untangling this is realted to the fact that in the context of European politics of the same period, the relationships among liberals, social democrats, conservatives and Communists could be more easily described because there were actual parties representing those distinct trends. In Europe, liberalism was the basic ideology of "free market" capitalism, with both conservative and liberal trends within that understanding. Social democracy evolved from a reformist opposition to capitalism to a reformist version of support for capitalism. The Communists and the social democrats were both parties of the Left, sharing a broad criticism of capitalist social relations. But no one had trouble telling the two apart most of the times, though their opponents often found it convenient to claim otherwise.

Whereas in America, reformist and conservative-to-reactionary tendencies were present in both major parties. Reformers in the early part of the 20th century tended to call themselves progressives. When Theodore Roosevelt formed a third party to again for President in 1912, it was called the Progressive Party. The model liberal Woodrow Wilson opposed extending the franchise to women. The Democratic Party of Jefferson and Jackson was home to both union workers and militant farmers and to the Ku Klux Klan and reactionary Southern planters. The "liberal" label more-or-less as we know it today in American politics really emerged after the First World War, when pro-labor activists wanted a way to distinguish themselves from "progressives", who were often affluent middle-class reformers whose reforms were partially aimed at restricted the power of unions.

So we wind up today with American liberals being the pro-labor advocates - though many are not nearly as pro-labor as they should be - and conservatives being the more overt advocates of unrestrained corporate power.

How does this relate to a critique like that of Williams or to Grandin's laudatory essay? Because part of the problem in Williams' approach is that he conflates the "liberalism" of the 19th century with that of the 20th, and the "liberalism" of democracy and human rights with that of coporate greed and military expansionism. He then makes the liberals of the 20th century the villains of American history. And from the perspective of his own pastoral, small-town vision of "socialism" - which seems to be more like the vision of the Amish communities or the Shakers than of European Social Democrats or Communists - he looked hard to find positive examples and trends among conservatives and even reactionaries.

Since the American New Left of the 1960s found itself protesting the Vietnam War and other foreign policies of two liberal Democratic administrations, Williams' arguments resonated with many New Left activists and intellectuals, who presumably missed or weren't too concerned about some of the basically reactionary perspectives underlying his analysis. It's surprising that a historian like Williams for whom conservatives are the heroes of American history is still being claimed by Grandin as a figure of the left. But then, if your ideal society is a "socialism" of Midwestern farm towns, maybe Herbert Hoover counts as a leftist.

The complicated but fascinating ideological tangles in Williams' work and its reception shouldn't obscure the important substantive objections that his critics like Schlesinger advanced on his use of historical material.

Grandin tries to dispute that Williams was repelled by the excesses he perceived in the youth movement of the late 1960s. But there does seem to have been some kind of biographical break in his approach at about that time. Bacevich perceives such a break around 1969. As I've noted in other posts on Williams, his work in the 1970s actually endorsed the neo-Confederate position that the North should have just let the Southern states go in peace, because that's all they really wanted. That position is frankly ludicrous on both factual and interpretative grounds. And any approach to American history that gets you to that point has to be seriously flawed.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, william appleman williams