Cold War "revisionism" - how "left" is it?

Historian Walter LaFeber

I've been reading some of The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (1989) by Walter LaFeber. LaFeber was one of the most prominent "Cold War revisionist" historians during the 1960s, which challenged the mainstream consensus on the origins of the Cold War.

The Cold War revisionists were often considered to be taking a "leftist" position. That's in part because their analyses sometimes agreed on particular points with official Soviet versions of events. It was partly because the anti-Vietnam War movement found many of their findings and their approach sympathetic.

Back in July, I posted three times about William Appleman Williams, perhaps the best known of the Cold War revisionist historians: Farm roots of American imperial policy; William A. Williams on the Civil War; and, William Appleman Williams' Empire as a Way of Life - and the tragedy of Williams' life. While he definitely has some useful insights, especially in his work up to 1969 or so. But certainly in his later work, it would be more meaningful to call him a reactionary than a liberal or "leftist".

From other things I've read, LaFeber kept his analyses on more solid ground than Williams did. But I was struck by this passage in The American Age about the Revolution of 1775-83:

That the Americans ended the conflict with their independence and a large landed territory is remarkable. That they did so with so little bloodshed and class conflict is astonishing. Unlike the great revolutions that later struck France, Mexico, China, and Russia, the American Revolution did not become radical and kill off the class that started the revolt. John Adams led the revolutionaries in 1776 and insisted that maintaining order would be "the most difficult and dangerous Part for Americans in "this Mighty Contest." Adams and his colleagues, however,maintained not only order, but, remarkably, their own political power.

In this sense, the American Revolution was not revolutionary at all. Instead. it was the first modern anticolonial war. With rich opportunities for landed settlement and money-making, and having decades of experience in the art of self-government, Americans just wanted the British to get out of the way. The legacy of this experience turned out to be momentous for U.S. foreign policy. Henceforth, Americans smiled on anticolonial wars but frowned on revolution - unless it resembled their own. Given their own unique history, no other revolution could be the same. (my emphasis)

I find this whole argument strange. Whatever its merits, it certainly looks like a conservative version of the American Revolution to me.

To what degree the Revolution involved social conflicts in addition to the war against Britain is in part a matter of judgment, of course. I tend to come down more on the side of recognizing a significant amount of social conflict.

But unless we adopt a fairly eccentric view of what terms like "class conflict" or "radical" would mean in that context, it's hard to see how that view of the American Revolution could be sustained. It looks like he is adopting an eccentric view of what constitutes a revolution, apparently defining it as an event that "become[s] radical and kill[s] off the class that started the revolt."

Whether that definition even fits the situations he cites, which is arguable, by that definition we would have to say the Vietnamese revolution, the Cuban revolution and the peaceful revolutions in the former Warsaw Pact countries in 1989 and afterward also weren't "real" revolutions. Whatever philosophical appeal that might have to some conservatives (and I'm not even quite sure what that would be), it doesn't make much sense in terms of describing historical revolutions.

I suppose in other parts of the book he will elaborate on the observation that since this allegedly non-revolutionary Revolution, "Americans smiled on anticolonial wars but frowned on revolution - unless it resembled their own." Is that really true of the revolutions that followed in the early decades of the nineteenth century all across Latin America? It's hard to picture.

Tags: american revolution, walter lafeber