History to understand, or to entertain?

Andrew Bacevich recently made this observation (Still Chasing the Wrong Rainbows The American Conservative 05/04/2017):

In our own day, the purpose of history is less to illuminate than to entertain or reassure. More or less like poetry, history serves at best an ornamental function. Today the only American historians enjoying a significant public profile are those like Michael Beschloss or Doris Kearns Goodwin who specialize in repackaging colorful stories. Innovative, critical, probing history does not lack for practitioners; yet beyond the confines of the professoriate, it commands minimal attention.

I recently read several essays be the Argentine philosopher Ricardo Forster in which he draws on the concepts of Guy Debord elaborated in his Society of the Spectacle (English translation 1970). And I'm tempted to say that Bacevich is referring to something like that phenomenon here.

But I've never been able to apply much more than the title phrase of Debord's book because I've never been able to grasp a consistent thread in his argument there. Because he says things like this:

Ideology is the basis of the thought of a class society within the conflictual course of history. Ideological facts have never been simple chimaeras, but deformed consciousness of realities, and as such they have been real factors in turn exerting real deforming action. All the more reason why the materialization of ideology brought about by the concrete success of autonomized economic production, in the form of the spectacle, is in practice confused with the social reality of an ideology which was able to reduce everything real to its own model.

This sounds like a particularly convulted way of describing Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, which refers not to sexual practices but to the mystification of material realities caused by the production relations in society.

Apart from the formidable task of untangling the various threads of Debord's arguments, I'm not sure that what Bacevich is describing fits the Debord "society of the spectacle" model. He's talking about how the dominant corporate media provides history packaged as entertainment with "an ornamental function" and the viewers and listeners tend to receive it as such. This is a different way of processing history than the more critical, substantive way which academic history seeks to achieve.

Ricardo Forster uses the society-of-the-spectacle concept to talk about how the present media-drenched environment makes images into substantive objects in themselves which themselves become matters of political contention and thus gives enormous social and political power to media conglomerates. That line of thinking is something I can work with. But I'm not sure that's actually what Guy Debord had in mind.

For instance, he also writes, "The contemplative side of the old materialism which conceives the world as representation and not as activity - and which ultimately idealizes matter - is completed in the spectacle, where concrete things are automatically the masters of social life." In formulations like that, he seems to be emphasizing the insubstantiality of the hegemonic images rather than their potency. Debord calls the spectacle the space "where concrete things are automatically the masters of social life." But he also says things about the spectacle that seem to contradict that notion.

The focus of Bacevich's essay, though, is not on the philosophy of imagery but on the cautions against militarism and arrogance made by the historian William Appleman Williams (1921-1990). Bacevich ranks him among several other of his contemporaries who had an outlook that could be insightful across ideological divides:

Williams was an unapologetic radical. Yet he was by no means unsympathetic to conservatives. Nor did he lack for patriotism. Indeed, viewed in retrospect, he was one of those American intellectuals who bridge the divide between left and right, thereby representing some distinctive amalgam drawing from both camps. (Among Americans, Randolph Bourne, Charles Beard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Christopher Lasch offer other twentieth-century examples).

Taking up his own challenge of drawing meaning analytical understanding from history. Referring to how the politics of the Vietnam War undermined Lyndon Johnson's Great Society project, he writes:

Meanwhile, to judge by Trump’s one-and-done missile attack on Syria and the fatuous deployment of the “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan, our president’s approach to statecraft makes Lyndon Johnson look circumspect by comparison. Trump assured his supporters that he was going to break the hold of the foreign-policy establishment. In fact, he has embraced the establishment’s penchant for “using our power for whatever we happen at the moment to want, or against whatever at the moment we do not like.” [W.A. Williams] U.S. national-security policy has become monumentally incoherent, with the man in charge apparently doing whatever his gut or his latest visitor at Mar-a-Lago tells him to do.

Frankfurt School, 1935 (2): Charles Beard on the social sciences in the US

Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)

The 1/1935 number of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung features a short article by the Progressive historian Charles Beard, who was soon to become a bitter isolationist critic of Franklin Roosevelt and his pro-British, anti-German foreign policy.

But his article doesn't deal with foreign policy, but rather with "The Social Sciences in the United States" (the article was published in English). Beard refers to the controversy over to what extent social sciences can qualify as empirical disciplines of an equal scientific validity to the physical sciences. And he writes:

Whatever may be the merits of the controversy, it is certainly true that every student of the social sciences brings to his choice of areas for research, his
detailed investigations, his selection of data, and his organization of materials some more or less clearly developed assumptions and scheme of valuation. If anything is known about the human animal this is known. As Croce says, if some large, generous, and reasoned philosophy does not control the thinker, then some petty, narrow, class, and provincial philosophy will.

And what schemes of organization and valuation have generally prevailed among American scholars in the social sciences ? In the main the system of British Manchesterism has prevailed, with modifications in detail and with acquiescence in certain stubborn contradictions in American practice. For confirmation of this large generalization, the reader is referred to that excellent contribution to the history of social thought in the United States, Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America [1934; italics added]. The systems of Hegel, Marx, and the German socialists of the chair [academia] have had little or no observable influence on American studies in history, politics, economics, or sociology. Veblen may be cited as an exception that illustrates the rule. Even so-called institutional economists bent on „seeing things as they are" have not escaped the constricting influence of British Manchesterism. Nor have American Catholic writers in this field kept pure and undefiled the scheme of Thomas Aquinas.

Presumably by “the scheme of Thomas Aquinas,” Beard was referring to medieval Catholic social teachings which criticized practices like usury (lending at interest) which were a normal and even vital part of capitalist economies.

Manchester economics refers to the laissez-faire, anti-regulation, free trade policies of the classical economists favored by the classical liberal tradition of the 19th century. In America in Midpassage (1939), Beard and his wife and co-author Mary Beard described the prevailing conservative business wisdom in the years leading up to the Great Depression as follows:

Indeed thought in every age had seemed to flow in a kind of cycle, out of
current proverbs into erudite coverage and back again into common sayings. The process was illustrated in 1931 when Albert H. Wiggin, head of the Chase National Bank, engaged in instructing a Senate Committee at Washington, based his philosophy of finance on the maxim of "let us alone," therewith merely repeating a "truism" of the marketplace that had formerly got into the heavy pages of Adam Smith and David Ricardo and out again into the marts of trade.

In the effulgence of the golden glow, the most general system of American thought, upon which professors and nearly everybody else drew for inspiration, was that of smooth and ready acceptance of the prevailing order, from which Satan and nearly all evil had been effectively banished. Its central conception was that the United States of America was a pretty good place, just as constituted. Its special interests were comfort, convenience, pecuniary advancement, emulatory display, salesmanship, unbroken progress in the straight utilitarian direction, and efficiency, with education as a preparation for the realization and enjoyment of such interests. Its philosophy was on the whole "matter-of-fact" and pragmatic. Our world will go on very much this way forever; and if disturbances should arise, we can "recover" the past again by doing more of the same thing we had been doing. There will be no more devastating jars to the American social order, no more wars, revolutions, cataclysms, and national tragedies. [my emphasis]

The onset of the Depression, although it “spread desolation all around” For some of the plutocrats of the day, it didn't shake their basic dogmas much. Still, "economic and political practitioners began to search feverishly for explanations of the plight into which they had fallen and to wonder how they could get out of it."

Beard was a strange and puzzling character. The historian William Appleman Williams, to whom that description could also be applied, wrote an essay about Beard called “Charles Austin Beard: The Intellectual as Tory-Radical” (in Harvey Goldberg, ed., American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities (1957). If the general outlook of the Frankfurt School in 1935 were described as radical-social-democratic, Beard perspective shared much of their criticism of existing economic conditions but didn't embrace their broader ideas for an ultimate solution. Thus, the “Tory-Radical” label. Williams wrote of Beard’s understanding during the Depression years:

But the depression brought Beard up short. Here was deep and general crisis. And there is little doubt that his intellectual and personal outlook responded immediately. ...

Beard did not, however, launch any frontal attack on private property. His proposal [in 1931] was no more, in essence, than an intelligent and rather extensive development of the idea of a corporate society, previously advanced in America by such men as Herbert Croly and Herbert Hoover. This concept of a corporate society is based on the proposition that every individual holds membership in two of the three basic units of all industrialized societies. All people are citizens, hence are part of the government. And, in addition, they belong either to capital or labor. Thus the
state, in theory at least, is at once the common ground where both parties adjust their differences, and an independent power capable of enforcing judgments on both groups.

But corporatism is not a radical concept, for it is tied intimately to the principle of private property. And this weakens both its theoretical and its practical value. For unless the power to control investments, so vital to balanced economic growth, is exercised on the basis of a public choice between alternate programs and policies, one half of the economic life of society remains in the hands of a tiny minority.

Thus Beard's radical insights into the malfunctioning of the existing system were never matched by an equally fundamental program for its renovation.

I posted a sketch of Williams' own outlook here in 2009 What kind of reformist vision did William Appleman Williams have? 09/01/2009. I commented on his later neo-Confederate version of the American Civil War in 2007 William A. Williams on the Civil War 07/17/2007.

Tags: charles beard, frankfurt school, william appleman williams

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

William Appleman Williams' Empire as a Way of Life - and the tragedy of Williams' life

Herbert Hoover, progressive politician and anti-imperialist hero?

I've been on a bit of a roll reading William Appleman Williams, who was famous in the 1960s and thereafter as a "revisionist" historian of the Cold War, who argued that the US had a very large share of blame for the Cold War, if not the primary share. The official version, of course, is that the innocent God-fearing Americans were forced into it by the evil atheistic Commies. (Warning: this is a long post. But it does have pictures.)

And, as I mentioned in an earlier post, Andrew Bacevich in American Empire (2002) mentioned Williams as a significant historian who challenged his readers to take a more realistic and honest look at the actual costs and results of imperial foreign policies.

Bacevich wrote an introduction to a 2006 edition of Williams' 1980 book, Empire As A Way of Life. I just read the original edition and I'm now curious as to what Bacevich has to say about it. Because comparing this book, which is really a long essay, to The Roots of Modern American Empire (1969), also brings very much to mind Bacevich's comment on Williams in American Empire that at some point after 1968, "Although he continued to write, he had little to offer except self-parody."

I'm guessing that if anything actually impressed Bacevich about the 1980 book, it would be Williams' emphasis on how the habits and assumptions of an imperial foreign policy are deeply rooted in many of our assumptions about our political and economic system and are reflected in the broader culture in many ways. In particular, the powerful effect of the Second World War gave new strength to those assumption, one of the stronger elements in Williams' 1980 book. The subtitle of Bacevich's 2002 book is "The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy", and he does emphasize that Williams urged the American public "to contemplate the implications of their imperium".

Life in the peaceful, progressive idyll of Herbert Hoover's Presidency

If I were to try to list additional elements that I found positive about Empire As A Way of Life in addition to the elements already mentioned, it would be the following:

Territorial expansion was a major theme in American political life from the first years of the Republic.

The assumed need for territorial expansion became deeply entwined with American assumptions about democracy and prosperity.

The identification of expansionism with democracy continues to influence American foreign policy until today (technically, 1980, for this particular book).

This identification also makes it exceptionally challenging for Americans to re-examine those assumptions in the public debates on foreign policy.

Williams' view of American history in 1980

But those positive elements are embedded in an historical narrative that I would summarize as follows (in my words):

The battle over the adoption of the Constitution was a battle between the imperialist-minded (Washington, Franklin, Madison, Jefferson, etc.) and those who saw that empire would raise dangers to basic American freedoms. The reform-minded types in American politics - Jefferson, Madison, Monroe - were committed to imperialist expansionism. Andrew Jackson took that to a new level. The two Adamses, John and John Quincy, were more focused on the fact that empire was a threat to freedom.

But the Original Sin of American imperialism was not committed by the most passionate democratic advocates of the early 19th century. No, the fatal Faustian bargain that caused all the evils of US imperialism was struck by Abraham Lincoln. When he decided to lead the Union to fight the Confederacy in the Civil War.

I have to pause here to say, I'm not making this up. I talk about this more down below.

The expansion-mindedness of American farmers and later industrialists led to the formal period of imperialism more-or-less corresponding to the Spanish-American War. McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were enthusiastic imperialists. Especially Roosevelt, because reformers tended to be much more aggressive and ruthless expansionists than conservatives.

Then there was Woodrow Wilson, who schemed his way into the First World War out of expansionist aims, though those were made even worse by the extent to which he attached pro-democracy idealism to it. Fortunately for the country, his League of Nations proposal was defeated and the US stayed out of it.

After the nightmare of Wilsionianism, there came a decade or so of wise statesmen: William Harding, Silent Cal Coolidge and, best of all, Herbert Hoover. Hoover was probably the most far-sighted and sensible of all 20th-century Presidents. Those three statesmen had the sense to keep the United States out of dangerous international organizations and concentrated on promoting imperialism through trade, though they also spiffed up the Navy quite a bit.

Then came the imperialist years of Franklin Roosevelt. Sure, some reforms at home were needed. But, as we know from that villainous Abraham Lincoln, reformers are aggressive, ruthless imperialists. Plus, unlike the great Hoover, FDR raised taxes on working people more than any conservative ever had. Presumably the far-sighted Hoover wouldn't have wasted the taxpayers money on imperialist frills like Social Security or jobs programs. (We don't have to presume; the great statesman Hoover opposed that stuff and called the New Deal "fascist". Apparently he was a great political scientist, too.)

Then, of course, FDR provoked Germany and Japan into going to war. That scheming old Roosevelt had planned to go to war against Japan anyway, but they gave him some help with that little Pearl Harbor business. But the Second World War was no big deal for Americans. Sure, a few soldiers died, but what the heck?

I pause again to say that no, I'm not making this up.

FDR didn't expect anyone to sacrifice much during the Second World War. Roosevelt pursued a massively destructive war policy and that's mostly Lincoln's fault. And his delay in opening the Second Front, a delay due to FDR's own imperialist scheming, was what caused the Cold War.

At least to start with. But then another reformer Harry Truman took over foreign policy and was an even more militant expansionist, using the Soviet Union as an excuse for a kind of Manichean dualism that dominated his foreign policy and led to the Korean War.

Then came the wise statesman Dwight Eisenhower who brought calm, pragmatism and restraint to foreign policy after the wild moralism of the Truman years. But after that came John Kennedy with that old Truman-style moralism which carried over into the Lyndon Johnson years and the Vietnam War. (Lincoln, by the way, was also responsible for the Vietnam War.) Kennedy caused the Cuban missile crisis. Nixon and Kissinger carried on the imperialist overreach and, of course, so did Carter.

Herbert Hoover was good, FDR and Truman were rock-ribbed imperialists, "Wilsonianism" the dirtiest of cuss words. John Foster Dulles and John Kennedy were pretty much the same as Reinhold Neibuhr and Henry Luce (publisher of Time and Life).

That is obviously an unsympathetic summary. But it's a fair one. And it's hard to see how a sympathetic summary would be much different without twisting his arguments to make them sound more sensible than they are.

What to make of this?

This view of American history can accurately be described as neo-Confederate and Old Right isolationist. It's pretty much a "high-brow" version. But neo-Confederate and Old Right isolationist is what it is.

Williams in this book uses a couple of tricks that you see elsewhere in this kind of writing. One is unrealistically isolate particular elements of an action or situation and ignore or minimize other critical elements. To describe FDR's rearmament program as he does in this book, for instance, as though it were primarily a domestic economic project without putting it into the context of the international situation with Germany and Japan inevitably produces a distorted picture.

I won't try to cover all the strange interpretations of American history that I summarized above. But I will mention a few things.

Nothing about the expansion of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the early decades of the Republic can be understood without recognizing that other powerful nations had ambitions in North America: Britain, Spain, France, even Russia. In Jefferson's time, for instance, having a guaranteed access to the Mississippi River for trade was not simply a concern for markets, though it certainly was that. Both during the time of the Louisiana Purchase and during the Civil War, having a hostile power control the port of New Orleans would have been a constant threat to the independence of the United States.

There are lots of things to say about various policies along the way. But to present continental North American expansion as simply a matter of an expansionist ideology and economic forces internal to the American economy that could have been forgone by a more reflective country and leaders without recognizing those real security concerns makes such an incomplete story that it inevitably badly distorts what happened.

Lincoln: the worstest, awfullest imperialist of all?

The Lost Cause claims that the Southern states simply wanted to secede from the Union and leave the Union in peace are also absurd on other grounds. The slaveowners had been in a continuous rage for years over Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law that coerced Northern citizens and states into returning the slaveowners' human property to them when they escaped to freedom. Were they really going to sit back while slaves escaped across an international border from the Confederacy to the United States, which would no longer be bound to return escaped slaves to a foreign country (the Confederacy)? Please.

There was simply no way the Confederacy would have let the Union states remain free and in peace. They would have sought to seize Western US territories and states, as well.

And there was a Constitution and democratic form of government to preserve. Like other neo-Confederates, Williams in this book seeks to denigrate the Union leaders motives without taking account of the fact that, however impure their motives may have been by whatever strange standard he was applying in 1980, there were substantial and extremely important issues at stake for Southern and Northern whites and blacks. His treatment of the Civil War in this book is so flimsy it's frivolous.

Williams also embraces a Lost Cause characterization of the Union goal in the Civil War by saying "it became a ruthless war of annihilation - which inevitably led on to a period of occupation and colonial rule." The "occupation" part is the only thing in that sentence that is a remotely reasonable generalization about the American war against the Confederacy. He says that Union generals like Pope, Grant and Sherman "ravaged a people and their culture". The war they led certainly destroyed the slave system of holding (black) human beings as property of other (white) people.

Woodrow Wilson: for the Old Right isolationists, "Wilsonianism" is the worst cuss word in foreign policy

One solid point in this book, as I mentioned earlier, is the fact the American public generally experienced the period of the Second World War as a period of rapidly rising economic prosperity that coincided with victory abroad, both of which were widely taken to validate American principles of government. But he steps on that point by badly exaggerating it.

For instance, he writes, of the US in the Second World War, "We did win the war cheaply." But he goes on in the same paragraph to denigrate the Americans deaths in the war, which he gives reasonably at 405,399, in comparison to the USSR and the Chinese. But that comparison hardly justifies a simplistic, blanket statement like, "We did win the war cheaply."

Williams also promotes the stock Old Right notion of Roosevelt the Dictator. During the war, he argues, "The citizenry was sent off to Limbo, that marvelous country of the powerless. Domestic breakdown [the Great Depression] followed by international crises left them at the mercy of their ostensible leaders." This is not some carefully thought-out criticism of some of the Roosevelt administration's excesses, such as the inexcusable internment of Japanese-American citizens. It's just stock Old Right Roosevelt-hater rhetoric.

Some of his constructions are so forced they seem like a joke. To present the Truman administration as rabid, Manichean moralists and aggressive imperialists and then to describe the Eisenhower administration as pragmatic and reasonable by comparison is bizarre. Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had a rigid moralism of an intensity that was not seen in the national government until the Reagan administration. He also has to "bleep" over some major elements of Eisenhower's policy, like the threat to use nuclear weapons in Korea, to paint his fake picture of a dogmatic Truman administration versus the pragmatic and peaceful Eisenhower government. In fact, the nuclear policy of the Eisenhower administration was known as "tripwire/massive retaliation", relying overwhelmingly on the general threat of nuclear war. Not exactly a pacifist's dream.

Sloppiness

And some parts of Empire As A Way Of Life look downright sloppy.

For instance, what can we make of a statement like, "After all, Stalin and his advisers were subtle enough to understand the imperial nature of the Open Door," i.e., the US free trade policy. (p. 184) Say what? Stalin and his advisers, all of whom spoke and presumably to a large extent thought in the categories of Marxist-Leninism were "subtle enough" to recognize imperialism? Since imperialism was how they conceived the Western capitalist powers in the most basic sense, what does a sentence like that mean? It hardly took any subtlety during the Stalinist years for a Soviet Marxist to detect imperialist tendencies. On the contrary, detecting departures from imperialist behavior would more likely be a sign of subtlety.

For a bit of a digression, this reminds me of something that Lenin said in the early days of the Soviet Union, quoted by George Kennan (yet another bogeyman for Williams) in his book Russia Leaves the War: Soviet-American Relations 1917-1920, Vol 1 (1958). At one point, the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee was discussing a particular French offer of aid. Some of the members argued that a workers' state shouldn't accept aid from imperialist powers. Lenin wasn't there, but he put his own position into writing: "I request that my vote be added in favor of the acceptance of potatoes and arms from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism." Now, that qualifies as subtlety.

On a more substantive point, he argues in one place that there was a moment in 1949 when the US had secured Iran as part of the Western sphere of influence and the Soviets had asserted control in Czechoslovakia that presented a good opportunity for a stabilizing accommodation between the US and the Soviets. He writes, "A thoughtful and responsible imperial elite [in the US] would not have been particularly upset by the overall meaning of various events that occurred during the autumn."

But then in the following chapter, he says that the Truman administration's intervention in Iran at the end of the Second World War "played a significant part in the intensification of the Cold War." Now, there may be a bridge between the notion that US actions in Iran acted as a stabilizing factor that presented a missed opportunity to improving relations between the US and the USSR, and the view that US actions in Iran intensified the Cold War. But it's not a bridge he makes in this book. And this sort of thing makes the book muddled as well as reactionary.

Especially from the standpoint of 2007, his argument that FDR tried to win the Second World War "without upsetting the American people" sounds particularly strange. If Williams had heard George W. Bush and his faithful followers tell us that the needed to fight the Global War On Terrorism Against The Unbelievably Deadly And Threatening Islamunists, the Epic Battle of Good vs. Evil, by going shopping, taking vacations and - most important of all - paying less taxes, he might have rethought that particular formulation about FDR and that earlier war.

Even more disturbing

Given his embrace of an isolationist/Old Right view of American history, in which the reformers were the worst and most imperialistic leaders of all, some of his other points take on a nasty edge.

In writing briefly about Israel, he refers to "the distortion of religion known as Zionism"; surely he was aware than Zionism was primarily a secular movement with the early pioneers being secular minded social-democrats. And that in 1980, Zionists included both a variety of Jewish religious tendencies as well as more secular ones, and that some of the most hardline Orthodox Jews considered themselves anti-Zionist.

In two pages on which he focuses on Israel in the context of US interests in Middle Eastern oil, I count five references to Zionists or Zionism, and no use of the word Israel or references to Jews or Judaism; he does manage two mentions of "Israel" on the following page. He also makes references to the unnamed Israel as "a geographical area populated exclusively by self-proclaimed pure Zionists", although whether actually or potentially is not entirely clear. (And whatever a "pure Zionist" may be; I don't recall encountering that term before.) He says that American confusion over the difference between the alleged Israeli goal (or reality in his mind?) of an area for "pure Zionists", on the one hand, and self-determination for Palestinians, on the other, "has already told us all that we should need to know about any people confusing themselves with the Lord."

I'll be generous about this and say his formulations that would be unlikely to find disfavor with Old Right anti-Semites who would also share much of the vision of American history he describes in this book.

This is also probably the appropriate place to comment that Williams' puts the deaths from the Dresden bombing in 1945 at 118,000 (rounding down). The actual figure was 35,000 or less. Certainly a stunning loss of life in itself. This is worth mentioning, though, because exaggerating the number of deaths from the Dresden bombing plays a particular role in the Holocaust-denier pseudohistory. This is described very well and at length in Chapter 11 of the judgment against David Irving by British Judge Charles Gray April 4, 2000.

The attitude toward African-Americans expressed in this book is not particularly impressive, either. Let's start with his view of the Union cause, which includes the notion that even though slavery was wrong (it has always been part of the Lost Cause ideology to admit in the abstract that slavery was wrong while defending it in many historical particulars), so was any war to fight slavery. "The irreducible issue is whether or not one uses one evil, empire, to destroy another evil, slavery." By doing so, he says that the villainous Abraham Lincoln made a "bargain ... with the Devil", a characterization of the Union cause he repeats several times. It's not at all clear that he means it purely symbolically or metaphorically.

In describing one of his main villains, Franklin Roosevelt, he basically sneers at the landmark efforts by the African-American civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph's pressure to reduce racial discrimination in the war effort, which led to FDR issuing an Executive Order forbidding discrimination against blacks in war industries and the federal government. That measure was a long way from the civil rights achievements of the 1950s and 1960s, but they were important.

For Williams, though, this just showed how passive and submissive African-Americans were. Noting that enforcement was less than thorough, he writes, "No matter, the blacks backed off. The master had won again." The "master". I suppose this is meant to be cute.

FDR: so many imperialistic villains, so many ways for Old Right isolationists to criticize them

He then makes the far-fetched argument that Roosevelt made wartime misjudgments about his Soviet allies because he expected them to be as easy to please as American blacks supposedly were. "The Russians were not American blacks", he says by way of saying the Russians were much more self-assetive in pursuing their interests. (p. 175) This whole strange argument can be fairly summarized as saying that much of FDR wartime issues in dealing with the Soviets can be blamed on ... African-Americans. For being such wimps. "Unlike American blacks," he writes, "the Russians were going to make sure that they secured what they considered their minimum rights and benefits". (p. 179)

Later on, he blames the alleged passivity of black American citizens for being a large part of the reason post-Second World War leaders so often misunderstood revolutionary movements in the less-developed world:

Once again one thinks of the way American leaders failed to comprehend the willingness of black citizens to settle for promises of future equality and freedom at home. They had first misread and misapplied that episode in their dealings with the Russians; then with the Chinese; and finally, with increasing frequency, in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The mistaken assumption that other poor and demeaned peoples would display similar forbearance appeared as the cosmic cost of such prejudice and racism.

The Roosevelts, the Trumans and the Achesons, and most of their successors, fundamentally misconceived the deeply patriotic - even loving - commitment of American blacks to what Martin Luther King called The Dream of America. And because they could not acknowledge the existence of an American Empire, they could not comprehend - let alone understand - that other so-called inferiors felt the same love for their cultures; and that, viewing America as an empire which threatened the integrity and existence of their cultures, they would ultimately fight rather than accept indirect destruction. (p. 196)

This is the kind of "highbrow" sneer at African-Americans that you can easily find in respectable Republican magazines and books today. Nominally, it recognizes racism and praises Martin Luther King - in very abstract terms.

But Old Right segregationists or respectable Republican neosegregationists in either 1980 or 2007 would read this as a nudge-nudge, wink-wink way of saying "the blacks were to blame for all kinds of problems for being so lazy and passive", with convoluted and quirky argument serving as ersatz sophistication. And, in the context of the rest of his neo-Confederate version of history, it would take a lot of generosity and comma-dancing for pretty much anyone to read it any other way. And even then, it's still muddled and weird.

When African-Americans finally live up to Williams standards for them in the civil right movement, he writes, "And we, the happy citizens of the empire, respected American blacks only after they committed their imaginative pacific terroristic acts." Pacifist Ghandian protests are "terroristic acts"? Bull Conner or Ross Barnett would surely concur, because that's standard segregationist talk.

Useful observations obscured

With all this, the few valuable and reasonable observations he makes are so buried they are difficult to find. He mentions that after the Civil War, "The old equation that defined the British, the First Americans [Indians, or Native Americans], the Spaniards, and the Mexicans as undemocratic threats to American t4erritorial security and welfare was thus projected onto the global scene." That's a defensible and useful observation. In particular, the post-1865 Indian Wars were particularly influenced by the experience of Union generals in the Civil War who were assigned to the Western Plains to fight Indians.

Yet, as the The Roots of the Modern American Empire, he surprisingly minimizes the effect of that conflict on American attitudes toward expansion in that period. Of the post-1865 Indian Wars, he writes that they were "pretty much a horror sideshow." Horrible they often were. But they were also more than a "sideshow", for both the Indian tribes and the majority Americans.

Conclusion

I could go on. And on. Because the book is full of strange, quirky and off-base judgments and arguments. But this quotation gives a good summary of his basic argument about what he sees as the "imperial outlook" in the United States:

Irving Kristol, a distinguished member of the Board of Contributors to the Wall Street Journal, reveals the essence of that outlook with typical flair and style. "There is far too much easy and glib talk these days about the need for Americans to tighten their belts, accept a reduction in their living standards, even resign themselves to an economic philosophy of no growth. It is dangerous and irresponsible talk. .. What few seem to realize is that a prospect of economic growth is a crucial precondition for the survival of any modern democracy, the American included." The American sense of progress hinges on the lineal projection of the imperial idea: from the British mercantilists of the i6th and iyth centuries through Franklin, Madison, and Jackson and on down to the present through Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Truman.

It's clear that Williams is criticizing this imperial outlook, even if he's doing it from a neo-Confederate and Old Right isolationist perspective in which the greatest villains are also the greatest democratic leaders.

But with his shallow and dogmatic formulations, most people would read such a view as saying that expansionism and imperialism are as American as apple pie. So what's so bad about it?

The daily headlines from Iraq provide part of the answer to that question. But Williams Old Right isolationist approach to understanding the "imperial" phenomenon in American history has very limited utility.

And it's so jarringly different from his earlier work that it really makes me wonder whether some personal trauma may have thrown his off the tracks somehow. This is not like David Horowitz who has made a career out of being a former left-winger. Bacevich suggests in American Empire that there may have been something like a drastic change at some point in Williams understanding of the world around him:

Though an avowed man of the left, by the mid-1960s Williams found himself increasingly out of sympathy with the political views of the Vietnam-era student radicals, among whom he had achieved the status of icon. He considered the antics of the counterculture to be childish and self-indulgent. He found the sexual revolution to be repugnant. In 1968, exhausted and with his personal life careening out of control, he fled Madison for the Pacific coast, where he remained until his death. Although he continued to write, he had little to offer except self-parody. Aside from a one-year term as president of the Organization of American Historians in 1980, his final years were largely reclusive.

Bacevich argues that that Williams' basic outlook had a fundamentally conservative orientation. And he advocated a vague, neo-Confederate solution to the problems of American imperialism:

Williams yearned to recover the remembered - or idealized - life of a small boy growing up in the American heartland, watched over by hardworking plain folk, who were neither corrupted by great wealth nor afflicted with extreme poverty. To revive that world, he believed, required an experiment in radical decentralization. The radical historian's alternative to empire was to dismantle the Union of fifty states, "breaking the Leviathan into community-sized elements."

Williams' advocacy of national dismemberment generated no discernible interest.

It strikes me as quite a sad evolution for a talented historian who contributed a great deal to the intellectual ferment of the 1960s around foreign policy and Cold War assumptions.

Tags: andrew bacevich, empire as a way of life, william appleman williams

William A. Williams on the Civil War

I'm on kind of a roll with this William Appleman Williams thing. Something I needed to get out of my system, I guess.

The other day I posted a review of his The Roots of the Modern American Empire (1969). I just finished reading his 1980 book Empire As A Way of Life. And the deterioration in quality of judgment between that 1969 book and the 1980 are disturbing. I'm going to post on the 1980 one later.

But I wanted to mention his brief treatment of the Civil War in 1969. On pp. 99-100 of that book, he writes:

The tension between Eastern and Western farmers was pushed into the background, though not permanently resolved, by the rising opposition to Southern demands to extend the slave labor system into the trans-Mississippi territory. That increasingly bitter confrontation over the Western empire was the single most important immediate cause of the Civil War. Western and Southern agricultural businessmen rapidly came to view control of that land as a necessary condition of their present and future welfare. They considered it the crucial determinant of political power (and hence freedom), as well as of economic prosperity. That estimate of the role of territorial expansion created the hothouse psychological environment that became so congenital after 1844 to the groups that decreed immediate and final solutions. The Northerners who demanded abolition—NOW!, and their Southern counterparts who insisted on secession—NOW!, unquestionably intensified the conflict. But the war came over the extension of slavery, not over the abolition of slavery, and that issue was defined and joined by market-minded agriculturalists rather than by moral crusaders.

The marketplace political economy of the Northern farmers did integrate political and social freedom with economic liberty in a tight causal relationship. That was, indeed, the image and explanation of the world that defined control of the trans-Mississippi West as the decisive determinant of their well-being and security. But the overwhelming majority of them applied that philosophy to themselves first and primarily, and only secondarily and incidentally - if at all - to the black men of the country. They opposed the extension of the slave labor political economy not because they were concerned to free the slave, but because they were resolved to maintain their own freedom and improve their own welfare.

They reacted negatively, therefore, to the strategy of compromise offered after 1853 by Senator Douglas. His popular sovereignty plan, in reality a proposal to fight the issue in each territory, rapidly lost whatever initial backing it gained as the violent struggle in - and for - Kansas revealed the determined willfulness of both protagonists. Northern farm opposition to Southern projects to expand into Cuba, Mexico, or Central America further intensified the anger and militance of both sides. Whatever their differences with each other, Northeastern and Northwestern agriculturalists moved rapidly after 1854 toward an agreement on the sentiments shortly expressed by the Nebraska City People's Press. Paraphrasing what they called the typical Southern attitude, the editors charged that region with ruthless, single-minded selfishness: "'we care nothing about you or your rights, all we desire is to extend the area of slave Territory.'" (my emphasis)

Those three paragraphs as written are accurate. And I wouldn't really object to the formulation there. I've written at some length in my annual April sets of posts that I do as a counter-celebration to Confederate "Heritage" Month about how the conflict over the extension of slavery into the territories led up to the Civil War.

It's also true that most whites in the free states objected to slavery primarily because they rightly understood it as a threat to their own economic well-being and to white men's democracy, as well.

But free whites were also genuinely disgusted by the treatment of slaves, which was widely reported in the rest of the country. While they may have looked at abolitionists as very annoying fanatics, and while very few Northern or Western whites exhibited the late-20th-century style sense of democratic equality that John Brown and his immediate followers did, they also understood that slavery was a disgusting system.

That is also a trick that the neo-Confederates use, to act as though the Union cause was presented as something like the realization of the principles of post-Second World War, post-Voting Rights Act America. And then to point out in "ah-ha!" style that most Northern whites didn't have that point of view, then making the leap to the favorite Lost Cause dogma that slavery had nothing to do with causing the Civil War.

So it's true that "war came over the extension of slavery", which was the program of the Republican Party when it won the Presidency under Lincoln in 1860. The Republicans did not propose to impose abolition of slavery on the South.

But it's also unhistorical to make some bright red line of division between the program of opposing the extension of slavery and supporting the abolition of slavery in the South. Williams does not do that in his description I just quoted. Given the situation in 1860, it was clear to many and probably most people in the North that democracy for whites could not survive indefinitely in a country "half slave and half free", in Lincoln's famous phrase. And the slaveowners understood that, for more reasons than one, if their Peculiar Institution were confined to the slave states of 1860, it would eventually expire - or, more precisely, would be rejected by the people of the various states and the country. William Freehling in The Road to Disunion, Vol 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007) describes how that process was visibly under way in the Border South at the time of secession.

The slaveowners were undoubtedly paranoid. But behind the paranoia was also a realization that unless the Peculiar Institution could be imposed on all or most of the rest of the country, it couldn't endure permanently. And they also knew that Lincoln's election would allow the Republican Party, which was an anti-slavery party in 1860 though not officially abolitionist, to use federal patronage to establish their party in the South and start to roll back the political repression that had largely prevented any open debate of slavery in the (soon-to-be) Confederate states since the early 1830s. Although as Freehling also points out, those debates were going on in the Border South states, and they were one of the things that showed the slaveowners that time - time in the American Constitutional democracy - was not on their side.

Having said all that, I thought as I was reading that passage of Williams' book about how the neo-Confederates seize on statements ripped out of context and put at the service of arguments that people who have never encountered them before may find bewildering.

For instance, a neo-Confederate reading of the above passage from Williams might go something like this:

Even William Appleman Williams, one of the most famous leftwing historians of the 1960s, said clearly that the Yankee cause in the Civil War was "not over the abolition of slavery". He said that the main cause of the conflict was competition between Northern and Southern agricultural interests over control of the Western territories. He wrote, "They considered it the crucial determinant of political power (and hence freedom), as well as of economic prosperity."

As I said, I wouldn't challenge Williams' formulation quoted above. Even the most carefully qualified arguments can be nitpicked by pseudohistorians to say something different than the plain meaning of the author's text. (Williams' version of the Civil War in Empire As A Way of Life is a whole 'nother story, and one for a separate post.)

But the following mention of the crucial 1876 election, which effectively ended Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South and allowed the disenfrancisement of the freed slaves, is formulated in a way that makes it too easy for someone to take out of context to support a Lost Cause narrative of American history. And the truth is, I'm not quite sure just how Williams meant it in context.

After talking so much about "context", I'll quote the whole paragraph in which it appears (p. 202 of Roots of the American Empire):

The resin-filled tinder had been assembled, the atmosphere was crackling hot and dry, and sparks were being struck throughout the country. Small wonder that men oscillated between violence and caution. The Republicans nominated the staidly respectable Rutherford Birchard Hayes of Ohio and prepared to use force to control the vote in the South just as they had used it against strikers in the metropolis. The Democrats selected Samuel J. Tilden, a conservative New York lawyer, and prepared to use force to prevent the black man from electing another Republican. Had it not been for the great boom in agricultural exports that developed even as the embattled rulers of the nation compromised the victory of Tilden into the inauguration of Hayes, it seems very possible that their political arrangement would have proved incapable of containing the explosive forces of social change. But the export bonanza turned the agricultural majority away from its embittered confrontation with the metropolitan minority, and at the same time turned it and a metropolitan plurality toward a policy of active overseas economic expansion. The exports that prevented domestic upheaval became the exports that required an imperial foreign policy. (my emphasis)

The bolded portion suggests a false and very misleading equivalence between the federal troops that were kept in the South to preserve the democratically-elected Reconstruction governments (a policy the Republicans supported), and the Ku Klux Klan violence that was directed and overthrowing them by force and violence and depriving the black citizens of the South of the vote and other basic rights. (The Ku Klux Klan and the Democratic Party were pretty much synonomous terms in the South of that time, especially if we understand the Klan to refer to a range of white-supremacist terrorists groups that were violently active at the time.)

The two sides may have used the same kind of guns. In fact, some of the white terrorist antidemocracy groups seized federal shipments of arms on the way to the US Army in the South and used them against the elected and legally constituted governments.

That formulation of Williams' I can't say I support. In context or out, it suggests an equivalence of purpose and function between the American troops and the white-supremacist terrorist groups that is just not accurate. Certainly not from a pro-democracy point of view.

Tags: reconstruction, us civil war, william appleman williams

Farm roots of American imperial policy

William Appleman Williams (Photo: Ira Gabriel)

William Appleman Williams' book The Roots of the Modern American Empire (1969) is subtitled A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society. Back in 1969, the word "Empire" itself pretty much marked a book as outside the Establishment consensus. During the Cold War, "imperialism" was a favorite cuss word used by Communist countries, and so of course Our Side considered it tainted. These days, the neconservatives - for whom Trotskyism was an important influence - have succeeded in making "empire" and "imperialism" perfectly ordinary and respectable concepts used to refer to the US and its foreign policy. (Although that may be a reason to try to ban the terms back to the fringes of respectability!)

And Williams was outside the consensus, though the quality of his work was such that conventional historians found it hard to ignore entirely. He was considered a "revisionist" historian of the Cold War, which meant that he questioned the Cold War American conventional wisdom on the beginnings of the Cold War in particular, especially in what was probably his most famous work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.

Andrew Bacevich in American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (2002) gives Williams credit for a number of important insights, including showing how "the American empire emerged out of a particular worldview". Bacevich also argued that Williams' challenge to Americans to think realistically about the costs and consequences of imperial behavior remains an important one.

19th century America

Roots of the Modern American Empire (just "Roots" hereafter) focuses in particular on the latter half of the 19th century, which led up to the period when even more conventional historians would be willing to describe American policy as imperialist, particularly with regard to the bloody conquest of the Phillipines.

This is not the book for someone to get their first dose of 19th American political history. Without some basic grasp of the major issues, the parties and events of the time, especially the post-Civil War period, it would be read pretty much as a near-unintelligible blur of economic history. To put it another way, if you don't recognize Chester Arthur and Benjamin Harrison as having been Presidents, if you've never heard of the Grange or the Populists, if all you remember about the railroads from that time is that Jesse James robbed them, this book is not the place to start.

William McKinley, President of the United States, 1897-1901

But if you know roughly when Reconstruction ended and know that the US had a war with Spain in the late 19th century, then Roots does an good job of putting the reader into an earlier American where the hot issues of the day included tariffs, specie payments, monometallism vs. bimetallism, absentee ownership, the appointment of Easterners to be Governors of Western territories, demonetization and remonetization of silver, and ranchers erecting fences on federal land. A world in which the end of the frontier was assumed (rightly or wrongly) to be a fundamental fact shaping the future of American society. Where European countries would block American exports of pork products on health grounds, and where farm spokespeople could say in response, presumably with a straight face, that Europeans "have maligned the American hog". A world of Granges and Farmers Alliances and Populists, where admission of new states was an urgent issue, a world where the famous lobby groups of the day were not arms merchants or Indian casinos but growers and meat packers and food processors, wheat farmers and cattle ranchers and tobacco farmers.

This was the same world of which the more familiar parts to me are the stories of Reconstruction, the Indian Wars, the cowboys of the Wild West and the robber barons of the Gilded Age. But Williams keeps an admirable focus on his topic, which is how the role of what we would now call the "agricultural sector" shaped a consciousness which convinced most Americans that an expansionist, imperialist foreign policy was necessary for the economic well-being and even political freedom of the United States. Williams refers to farmers by the less familiar terms of "farm businessmen" and "agricultural businessmen", to emphasize their intense awareness and concern for markets, of which foreign markets were a vital part.

Farmers the majority

A key point that Roots makes is that because in the 19th century more people worked in agriculture than in industry. Williams' argument that farmers had a decisive influence on attitudes about foreign policy even in the late 19th century may initially seem surprising to present-day readers. But it's not surprising if we remember their majority position in the 1800s.

Cartoon: the niño ("boy"; the Spanish King Alfonso XIII) teases the American "cerdo" (pig), the latter of whom grows larger very quickly (Don't you insult the honor of American pork!)

Abraham Lincoln addressed the fact of the farmers' majority in a humorous vein in an address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society on 09/30/1859:

I presume I am not expected to employ the time assigned me, in the mere flattery of the farmers, as a class. My opinion of them is that, in proportion to numbers, they are neither better nor worse than other people. In the nature of things they are more numerous than any other class; and I believe there really are more attempts at flattering them than any other; the reason of which I cannot perceive, unless it be that they can cast more votes than any other. On reflection, I am not quite sure that there is not cause of suspicion against you, in selecting me, in some sort a politician, and in no sort a farmer, to address you.

But farmers, being the most numerous class, it follows that their interest is the largest interest. It also follows that that interest is most worthy of all to be cherished and cultivated— that if there be inevitable conflict between that interest and any other, that other should yield.

A later Republican President, Rutherford Hayes, later assured the readers of the Rural New Yorker that there was no doubt about "the preponderance of the agricultural over any other interest in the United States".

Farm exports predominant

Another key point is that because farm products were a far higher percentage of exports than manufactured products or other raw materials, the farm interests took the lead in focusing on the importance of external markets. It also meant that the rural population was widely receptive to notions of foreign expansionism of the sort represented by the Spanish-American and Phillipine Wars. Farm businessmen defined the world market as the proper sphere for US domination.

Williams illustrates the importance of farm exports by these figures from late in the century, as agricultural exports were declining as a share of exports: "With the exception of 1892, those dropped steadily from 76.4 percent in 1887 to 61.6 percent in 1900." So even at the time when the agricultural share was having a long-term decline, in 1900 it was still over 60% of exports. The rising industrial share of export led industrial and financial representatives to put a greater emphasis on the importance of foreign markets and the imperial policy to support them. It was the increasing convergence of the major business interests on the importance of external market expansion through the exercise of military power that eventually produced the imperial policies which became full-blown in the Phillipine War.

It was taken for granted among "farm businessmen" as well as industrialists and financiers - Roots often uses the shorthand term "the metropolis" to refer to the two latter groups collectively, and even to include labor unions - that the American economy periodically suffered from overproduction and that expanding foreign markets were necessary to dispose of that overproduction. This statement could serve as a rough summary for that process he describes, referring here to the last quarter of the 19th century and the efforts of the Republican Party to win support from Western farmers:

[Secretary of State and Republican leader James G.] Blaine had been trying to alert other metropolitan leaders of the party to the same truth for almost a decade. The agricultural interest of the country, he reiterated in 1878, was by far the largest in the nation. That meant simply that "the farmers of the Republican will control its destiny." Blaine proved an accurate prophet about American foreign policy. For the agricultural pressure for expanding the marketplace, and the growing acceptance of that outlook by metropolitan leaders, turned the United States into an imperial course between 1877 and 1897.

What did "American imperialism" mean in the late 19th century?

Williams also summarizes several events which even the more conventional historians of 1969 would have been willing to recognize as "imperialism" or something close to it:

Even if one dates American imperialism by the taking of the Philippines and the enunciation of the Open Door Notes (1898-1901), the period under discussion is only twenty years. For half that period, 1880-1890, the United States was engaged in a series of wars to contain and defeat the Indians of the trans-Missouri West. Yet, even granting the effect of that distraction [!], American leaders can hardly be termed indifferent or inefficient expansionists. They moved firmly and irrevocably into Samoa in 1878, helped Europeans control Morocco in 1880, opened Korea by themselves in 1882, maneuvered for open access to a free marketplace in the Congo in 1883-1884, claimed rights to Pearl Harbor in 1887, finished the job in Hawaii in 1893, intervened in Venezuela and Brazil between 1893 and 1896, established effective control of Cuba and the Philippines by 1899, and dispatched more than 5,000 troops to China in 1900 as part of claiming fair shares throughout that vast nation. Surely that performance qualifies for passing marks as an imperial achievement over twenty years.

I would add briefly that the Indian Wars actually had a greater significance for American foreign policy than simply being a "distraction". But Williams' focus is on the specific political struggles that bore most directly on foreign policy during that period.

Chester Arthur, President of the United States, 1881-1885

The late 19th century was the age of the robber barons and their influence was enormous. Roots carefully explains that the US imperialism which became full-blown and obvious with the Spanish-American War (Guerra Hispano-estadounidense) developed in an intellectual and political framework that primarily grew from the consciousness of farmers. But as as the famous "trusts" consolidated and manufacturing exports became a growing proportion of total exports, the "metropolitan" interests came to accept a similar framework for foreign policy. And, as represented by the McKinley administration that apparently came to office in 1897 heavily inclined to go to war with Spain over Cuba, the metropolitan interests took the lead in implementing the expansionist foreign policy for which "farm businessmen" had agitated for decades.

When he describes more closely the political decisions leading up to McKinley's launching war with Spain in 1898 - he did it with a Congressional declaration of war, a custom from the old days that our current Presidential administration no doubt would find "quaint" - Williams gives another summary description of how that process translated itself into the imperial foreign policy:

The primary force producing the war against Spain was the marketplace-expansionist outlook generated by the agricultural majority of the country during the generation after the firing on Fort Sumter. That social consciousness involved an image of the world as a free capitalist marketplace in which personal and social freedoms were causally integrated wilh economic liberty and welfare, in which ideas and experience were merged as beliefs, and which promised ideal results from necessary actions.

The agricultural businessmen played a smaller, but by no means insignificant, part in the crucial definition of the war as an instrument of American expansion in Asia. But it was the metropolitans, rather than the agriculturalists, who explicitly formulated the war against Spain over Cuba as a war for the free marketplace in the Far East. The acceptance of that conception marked the shift in policy-making initiative away from the farm businessmen to metropolitan leaders. It was a decision of principle implemented with plans to fight a two-front war, and to hold some portion of Spain's Pacific empire as a springboard to the Asian marketplace. (my emphasis)

The Cross of Gold

Anyone who went through an American high school probably has vague but painful recollections of the most boring section of American history class, which was devoted to tariffs and the gold standard and related issues that were virtually impossible to imagine how anyone ever cared about them.

But what Williams explains at length in Roots is that these now-obscure issues contributed decisively to the notion that expanding foreign markets were critical to the economic and even political healthy of America and provided powerful impetuses to what became an imperial foreign policy. He quotes Populist Congressman Jeremiah Simpson of Kansas saying, "We have some very serious problems to face. Our country is filled up. There is no west to go to. We are full, and we will have to acquire Canada, British American, and Mexico, or overflow." It was a widespread sentiment, although Simpson himself didn't advocate that expansion should be achieved by military conquest. He thought that the expansion of trade would attract the Canadians and the Mexicans to want to become part of the United States. Because everyone wants to be like America, right?

William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, not being crucified on a cross of gold, 1896 (New York World 08/13/0896)

The gold-standard controversy pitted "metropolitan" financiers and industrialist against agricultural interests, with the "Eastern" and big-business preference being a single gold standard for the currency and the agricultural position being for having currency based on both gold and silver. These positions were known respectively as monometallism and bimetallism. There was a domestic factor involved, with the farm businessmen viewing bimetallism as more inflationary and therefore beneficial to the debtors, and to the farmers who had to rely heavily on borrowing.

But the more powerful concern, according to Williams' analysis, was the farmers' belief that bimetallism would allow American agricultural exports to compete more broadly in world markets. A closely related factor was that Britain largely set the terms of world agricultural trade by its powerful influence in the market, and Britain used the gold standard. Anti-British sentiment was strong among the farm businessmen and bitmetallism was seen as a way to weaken British economic power and influence relative to America.

That legendary Populist William Jennings Bryan is now mostly remembered for his role in his last years as a defender of creationism against evolution. And also for his famous declaration for bimetallism at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, "You shall not press down on the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold." Williams provides a couple of Bryan quotes from his days as a Congressman from Nebraska that give a good look at how farmers tended to see the silver issue in relation to foreign policy:

A silver standard, too, would make us the trading center of all the silver-using countries of the world, and these countries contain far more than one-half of the world's population. What an impetus would be given to our Western and Southern seaports.

China and Mexico, both markets toward which American farm exporters looked eagerly, used the silver standard.

Why not reverse the [goldbug] proposition and say that Europe must resume the use of silver in order to trade with us? But why adopt either gold or silver alone? Why not adopt both and trade with both gold-using and silver-using countries?

The farmers' push for bimetallism was based on a strong understanding that winning maximum access to world markets was vital for their well-being.

Yes, the tariff issues were huge for decades

The tariff's connection to foreign policy is more obviously apparent. Tariffs imposed on imports affected different sectors of the economy differently. As a general rule, agricultural interests preferred low tariffs and industrialists preferred high tariffs. The high tariffs protected the industrialists from lower-cost imports and allowed them to charge higher prices in the home market.

José Julián Martí (1853-1895), Cuban poet and revolutionary leader against Spain

Farmers didn't like having to pay the higher prices on manufactured goods like farm machinery that the tariff enabled. And tariffs also brought the danger of retaliatory measures by other countries against American imports, including farm products. There was also a balance-of-payments effect of high tariffs that disadvantaged the farmers.

Even the high-tariffs/industry, low-tariffs/farmers is an oversimplication. Farmers were open to high tariffs of raw materials, which included farm products like cotton, because those provided protection to farmers. Industrialists tended to not support those because it raised their materials prices.

The point the Williams emphasizes in Roots is that the importance of tariffs for farmers was focused primarily on their effect on farm exports. The necessity for an increasing foreign market was widely accepted among the agricultural businessmen. And that appreciation of the importance of foreign markets led them also to support proposals for a larger navy.

Farmers, the railroads and Adam Smith

Williams makes another important point in connection with the "Smithian" outlook of the farm businessmen. Their famous battles for better regulation and the railroads, and even for publicly-owned railroads, was based on a particular understanding of how a capitalist economy should work:

[Adam] Smith likewise provided a solid critique of monopolies, and of the misuse of the government by special coteries of metropolitan interests. The farm businessmen were also aware that Smith offered careful and even sophisticated justification for government actions, such as those concerned with improving transportation or checking monopolies, that were designed to strengthen the structure and guarantee the freedom of the marketplace itself. And their own experience, particularly after the 1840s, steadily reinforced their understanding and acceptance of Smith's great stress on the necessity of the sustained expansion of the market as the dynamic engine of continued progress and freedom. (my emphasis)

This concern for regulating ralroads' rates and practices was also heavily related to farmers' concern for accesss to the export market. "The farmer's concern with transportation costs, which arose directly out of his routine involvement with the foreign market, was the primary cause of his increasingly vigorous attack on the railroads" (my emphasis). So, the railroad fight themselves played an important role in shaping the agricultural majority's concern for public policies on the export markets.

The role of Britain

The farm interests often cast their complaints about both tariffs and the gold standard in terms of competition with Britain. This aspect was important, because of Britain's predominant role in the world economy.

American political rhetoric in the late 19th century was full of reference to the need for a new independence from Britain and about the alleged effects of British money on one's political opponents.

The Party puzzle

Williams wasn't trying to present a history of the political parties here. That would require much more attention to issues like Reconstruction, "Redemption" and urban politics, and would have taken him far afield from his steady focus on foreign policy and the public views and interests that gave rise to it.

President McKinley, ready for war

But he does provide enough discussion of partisan politics and specific administration's approach to policies to give the reader a political framework to match with the economic considerations he discusses at length. For instance, he judges that the James Garfield/Chester Arthur Republican administration that marks the turning point when a broad consensus became solidified on military expansionism to support US access to foreign markets. (Garfield became President in 1881 but was assassinated the same year. Vice President Arthur then became President until 1885.)

The Party constellations in the late 19th century are tangled. Republicans and Democcrats jockeyed for farm votes by staking out various and evolving positions on tariffs, "reciprocity" trade agreements, silver and an aggressive foreign policy, including anti-British posturing.

The reciprocity treaty issue was especially helpful to the Republicans behind William McKinley's leadership in 1896 when they were running against William Jennings Bryan, who was the nominee of both the Democratic and Populist Parties. The Republicans were generally cool to bimetallism. The business and banking interests forced McKinley to distance himself from pro-silver positions. But they were fine with reciprocity, while Bryan emphasized sliver a cure-all and downplayed reciprocity. This enabled the Republicans to pull a considerable number of farm votes away from the Great Commoner.

Expansionism, commerce and American freedom

Williams makes a persuasive case for the leading role that agriculture, the "farm businessmen", played in the developing expansionist mentality that led to the adoption of overt imperial policies, such as acquiring "protectorates" like the Phillipines and blithely intervening in civil conflicts in Latin America.

Roots is not so persuasive in the argument that the notion of spreading American-style democracy abroad was already an integral part of the expansionist outlook. The missionary faith was there, for sure. But the examples he cites of people making that identification seem to have more to do with the idea that free trade would lead to democracy, not so much with the idea that the US should shoot and shell other countries into adopting American-style political institutions. Something along those lines was one of the consequences of the imperial policy that was in place by 1900. But it wasn't necessarily an integral part of the agricultural view of the vital necessity of expanding world markets for America imports.

What's more obvious is that American farmers believed that American political institutions at home required an expanding foreign markets and the continued prosperity those were expected to ensure. This was an outgrowth of the "Manifest Destiny" drive to occupy the North Americans continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

I noticed as I was reading Roots how strongly suspicious I've become of claims about American foreign policy being aimed at liberating other countries, especially in the sense of bringing them American-style "liberty" by military force. Dick Cheney, George Bush and their neoconservative fellow travelers (and instigators) have so cynically misued the whole idea, that I found myself looking with particular skepticism at Williams' claims in that regard.

So I'll put it this way. It seems to me that some of the formulations in Roots may overstate the degree to which advocates of overseas expansionism at that time emphasized the need to bring democratic freedom to the countries or territories they wanted the US to impose itself on by force. Certainly, some of that idealistic-sounding rhetoric was there, along with the kind of language that European imperialists used to justify taking over areas in Africa and Asia, the alleged need to bring civilization to the benighted races.

But Williams also explains that the "agricultural businessmen" were operating with an understanding of the world based on Adam Smith's classical economic theories. Smith stressed the importance of foreign trade. And he emphasized the need for free trade without the kind of restrictions that the British mercantilist system of his time imposed. Smith's American admirers also held the conviction that the spread of free trade would convince those who benefitted from it of the virtues of a capitalist free market economy. And that along with spread of capitalism would come democratic and liberal institutions. Their notion was "a fair field with no favor" in the global marketplace, as Williams puts it. And they believed democracy would follow.

(This claim is still made today, especially by the neocons, even though abundant past and current experience shows that capitalism can exist and flourish under non-democratic regimes, such as Bismarck's Germany, France under Napoleon III or Spain under Francisco Franco, to take some of the less extreme examples. On the other hand, the course of the Cold War suggests that trade relations between the West and the Soviet bloc were a major factor in managing the nuclear standoff successfully. The case for trade contributing to international peace is stronger than the case for capitalism producing democracy.)

Manifest Destiny had been a continuous project, though one vastly complicated by the fight over the expansion of slavery. The notion was widely accepted that American prosperity, security and democratic government all depended in an important way on this expansion. Those convictions provided the historical background for the different sort of expansionist ambitions that became the focus by the 1890s, when
Americans were concerned over the effect of the famous "closing of the frontier."

And Americans' high opinion of their own system of government combined with their practical and theoretical assumptions about the connections of capitalist markets with democratic freedoms and liberal institutions. This produced a broad expansionist outlook "in which ideas and experience were merged as beliefs, and which promised ideal results from necessary actions", to repeat Williams' words quoted above. But it didn't mean that people were making a simple equation of market expansion with military expansionism, although it certainly worked out that way in practice in a number of cases, including the Spanish-American and Phillipine Wars.

Williams calls special attention to an 1873 report of a Senate Committee headed by William Windom of Minnesota, the Select Committee on Transportation Routes to the Seaboard, better known as the Windom Committee. Williams calls it "one of the key documents of late-nineteenth-century American history". It showed the "deep commitment by the agricultural majority", he said, "to the proposition that American welfare depended on overseas markets". In addition, "Perhaps even more significantly, the Windom Report formalized the process whereby the nations that blocked or challenged America's market expansion were defined as primary threats to American prosperity and freedom".

William Windom, market expansionist, agriculture-friendly Minnesota Senator and Treasury Secretary for Presidents Garfield and Harrison

The sometimes contradictory nature of such impulses was expressed by Jeremiah Simpson, a Populist Congressman from Kansas, when he said, "We have some very serious problems to face. Our country is filled up. There is no west to go to. We are full, and we will have to acquire Canada, British America, and Mexico, or overflow". Yet, despite this aggressive-sounding rhetoric, he envisioned this process taking place voluntarily, as expanding trade relations exposed more and more people on the North American continent to the beauties of American capitalism, which would make them want to join the American Union. Because everybody wants to be an American, right?

It's also worth noting, as Williams does, that it was the farming interests that successfully insisted on non-annexation of Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

Conclusion

A book like Roots which gives heavy emphasis to economic drivers of foreign policy and the actions of organized business interest groups can be misread as "determinist" history. That's not what Williams was doing, though. He makes it clear that particular understandings of the world, partisan political calculations, specific calculations of diplomatic strategies, personal political rivalries and the accidents of history are all vital parts of the way people actually create national policies. And the United States also had to contend with the actions of other countries. Not even the most pacifist-oriented US government could have ignored the effects of British economic clout, for instance, or there attempts to expand their power in the Western hemisphere.

Williams' book is an important lesson and reminder that foreign policies have very important domestic roots, and that expansionist tendencies are not only produced by responses to external threats. It's also a healthy reminder that idealistic rhetoric in foreign policy can have some more pragmatic and selfish tendencies behind it.

Tags: guerra hispano-estadounidense, spanish-american war, william appleman williams, william jennings bryan, william mckinley, william windom