Populists here, populists there

This is a good piece by Santiago Zabala on "populism," a word that gets tossed around a lot these days about US and European politics: Don't be afraid of populism Aljazeera 16/19/2016.

When the American TV pundits use it, their working definition doesn't seem to go much beyond "something vaguely disreputable." This column even cites the recently-deceased political theorist Ernesto Laclau's work on the topic.

If you ever hear Chuck Todd or someone else on the Sunday morning shows mention the name Ernesto Laclau, it's probably a sign that something really dire has happened. Like a major rift in spacetime or something along those lines.

I like the fact that Zabala makes meaningful and realistic distinctions. "If populism is now the only available political form able to deepen the central value of equality that governs modern democratic societies, we must remember that there is a substantial difference between right-wing and left-wing populism in Europe."

He doesn't get into the concept of "sucker populism," a term used to describe the superficial notion in American politics that "left" and "right" populists can form some kind of substantive political coalition of a strategic kind, as distinct from shared positions on some individuals issues. But the distinction Zabala makes between current North Atlantic versions of left and right populism is very relevant to the "sucker populism" analysis.

In memory of good old William Jennings Bryan, I'll note here the original movement that used the name "populist" for itself was very much a left-leaning reform movement of workers and farmers.

Time travel blogging: a fundi for peace

Williams Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) is remembered for the escapade which he concluded just before he died, his defense of the fundamentalist anti-evolution cause in the "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Tennessee. But he first became famous as the leader of the Populist Party who was also the Democratic nominee for President in 1896. The Populists were a "third party" that achieved some real clout.

He served as Woodrow Wilson's first Secretary of State. Bryan resigned in 1915 over his concern that Wilson's policies were leaning too heavily toward involvement in the European war. I just came across a quotation from Sir Cecil Spring Rice, British Ambassador to the US, from a letter he wrote in November of 1914, when the war was still in its early months:

Bryan spoke to me about peace as he always does. He sighs for the Nobel Prize, and besides that he is a really convinced peaceman. He has just given me a sword beaten into a ploughshare six inches long to serve as a paperweight. It is adorned with quotations from Isaiah and himself. No one doubts his sincerity, but that is rather embarrassing for us at the present moment, because he is always at us with peace propositions. This time, he said he could not understand why we could not say what we were fighting for. The nation which continued war had as much responsibility as the country which began it. The United States was the one great Power which was outside the struggle and it was their duty to do what they could to put an end to it. -I felt rather cross and said that the United States were signatories to the Hague Convention, which had been grossly violated again and again without one word from the principal neutral nation. They [the US] were now out of court. They had done nothing to prevent the crime, and now they must not prevent the punishment. —He [Bryan] said that all the Powers concerned had been disappointed in their ambitions. Germany had not taken Paris. France had not retaken Alsace, England had not cleared the seas of the German Nary. The last month had made no appreciable difference in the relative positions of the armies, and there was now no prospect of an issue satisfactory to any Power. Why should they not make peace now, if they had to make peace a year hence after another year's fruitless struggle. It would be far wiser if each said what it was fighting for and asked the United States to help them in arriving at a peaceful conclusion. (my emphasis)

Is anyone likely to say about today's Christian fundamentalist leaders like James Dobson, Pat Robertson or Maverick McCain's soulmate John Hagee that one of them was "a really convinced peaceman"? The idea is just laughable.

It's also a dramatic image, the cynical and worldly British diplomat sniffing about how "cross" he was at the foolishness of this rube who couldn't "understand why we could not say what we were fighting for". Also at the impertinence of this backwoods hick who challenged him with the notion, "Why should they not make peace now, if they had to make peace a year hence after another year's fruitless struggle."

By any sane measure that I can conceive, if those royalist fools in Europe had decided at that time to end their war, they would have avoided years of needless slaughter, which at the end had as its principal result setting the stage for the next World War. It left the Russian, Austrian, German and Ottoman Empires as wreckage in its wake. Much of the trouble in the Middle East today can be traced to the noble office of British and French imperialists trying to carve up the former Ottoman lands to their liking. At least the British had since enough after years of pointless colonial war in Iraq during the 1920s to call it a day and leave.

Psa-aah, he expects us to say what were fighting for. What a silly man! That Sir Cecil sounds like a man after John McCain's own "maverick" heart.

(Spring Rice quote from "Why We Went To War" by Newton Baker Foreign Affairs Oct 1936)

Tags: first world war, william jennings bryan

The Republican outlier candidates (and some comments on the Maverick)

Still shaken from my intense exposure this past week to far more CNN TV than I usually absorb, I can't help but notice that most of the punditocracy is eager to write Brother Huck and Ron Paul out of the Republican Presidential contest.

It's easier to understand with Paul. I'm surprised he hasn't done better in the primaries. But then, I was expecting him to spend a lot of that impressive bundle he raised online to do ad buys in the media markets where primaries are being held. But, as the ever-diligent Dave Neiwert tells us in Ron Paul and that money Orcinus blog 01/30/08, he hasn't been doing that. Dave speculates that Paul is saving the money for a third-party run. But who knows? Maybe he plans to use it to do image-boosting advertising for Stormfront, the White Citizens Council and the John Birch Society.

Christian populism a century ago: William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner

Clearly, Brother Huck has little chance to win the nomination. But he could come on strong in some of the Southern primaries and remain a player in the nomination process. And his campaign has provided us an important glimpse at the state of Republican Party Christianism.

Michael Kazin looks at the difference between Brother Huck's brand of so-called populism and the original version in What Evangelical Populism Lost: Why Huckabee Is Not Another William Jennings Bryan Washington Independent 01/28/08:

However, the differences between the two men are significant—and reveal how radically the fault-lines of religion and politics changed over the last century. In Bryan’s heyday, most Americans were evangelical Protestants, and split their votes about evenly between the two major parties. But now they are about a quarter of the population, and have been the GOP’s most reliable constituency since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Huckabee, whatever his rhetoric of the moment, is a loyal member of that right-wing flock.

The former Baptist preacher, like Reagan, does have a knack for coining one-liners that Bryan, the most popular orator of his time, would have admired. "In many ways,” Huckabee mused recently, “I’m like a lot of people in the United States: I’m a guy over 50 looking for a job." But the policies he advocates have almost nothing in common with those of the Great Commoner.

Bryan helped initiate the progressive income tax; Huckabee wants to abolish it in favor of a national sales tax that would fall most heavily on the working and middle class. Bryan tried to expand federal power to aid working people; Huckabee opposes universal health care “mandated by federal edict.” Bryan was the first major-party nominee to receive the official backing of organized labor; most unions shun Huckabee, who governed a right-to-work state where Wal-Mart has its headquarters. Bryan hated war and resigned as secretary of state in 1915, when he thought President Woodrow Wilson was leading the U.S. into the hell of World War I; Huckabee strenuously supports the war in Iraq.

Christianist "populism", 2008: Brother Huck

Nicholas Kristof in his Sunday column defends the Huck by using a favorite Christian Right verbal trick (Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love New York Times 02/03/08):

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Good grief! Can New York Times columnists be this dumb? Well, I've followed David Brooks for years, so I know the answer to that question.

I wonder if Kristof even realizes that in Fundispeak, "New York liberals", as well as "Hollywood", are understood to mean "Jews". Especially in the context he uses the concepts (okay, he uses "Los Angeles" instead of "Hollywood"), which is of people "deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith". Since Brother Huck's religious faith is Christianity, presumably other Christians wouldn't want to make fun of his faith.

What Kristof repeats here is the whine of which Protestant fundamentalist white folks are so fond, of casting themselves as a persecuted minority. But when Kristof writes that "we [liberals] have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals", it makes me recall the old Lone Ranger/Tonto joke where the punch line is Tonto saying, "What do you mean 'we', Kemosabe?"

Look, the groups we know as the Christian Right have worked actively since 1979 to become a force in American politics. They've suceeded. But there's reason to be careful what you pray for. Because now it's become impossible to understand a great many Republican Party policies, not least our current Middle East policies, without understanding the Christian fundamentalist religious viewpoint from which they stem. As much as it might be convenient, the Christianists can't form a religious-based political bloc and still hope to discourage any criticism of their political positions by declaring that the criticism is offensive to their religious.

Kristof also uses a columnists' trick, which to me is getting very old, of basing his column on unnamed and unidentified parties, e.g., "liberals" at cocktail parties in New York and Los Angeles. He also blurs the distinction between "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" in making his comment about the unidentified groups who "do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur". In the American context, evangelicals are conservative, Protestant Christians who generally espouse a "born-again" theology. Fundamentalists are a subset of evangelicals. It's a distinction that fundamentalists and non-fundamentalist evangelicals have made going back at least to the 1950s.

Outside of the strange and mysterious cocktail parties Kristof frequents, it's a huge leap of faith - or a huge conceptual disconnect, take your pick - between evangelicals of the Jimmy Carter or Jim Wallis type who may do "do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking," etc., and a theocrat like Mike Huckabee. Is Kristof really under the impression that Brother Huck and the Christian Right groups with which he has worked hard to align himself are interested in, to take one example, ending their advocacy of "abstinence-only" sex education programs which often leave their participants uninformed about basic safe sex considerations? Those programs are the very opposite of "superb work" in fighting AIDS. Did Brother Huck talk to the White Citizens Council about the need to end "prison abuses"?

Kristof's column gives a very misleading impression that the newly-prominent moderate/liberal evangelicals are somehow the same people that ten years ago were hardcore Christianist conservatives. I'm sure that's true in some individual cases. But his column fails to make the long-standing distinction between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalist "evangelicals". Maybe Kristof only recently discovered the latter. Or maybe he's just clueless about the distinction.

Among the "inlier" Republican candidates, there's little doubt about which one our "press corps" loves the most. Joe Conason discusses their love affair with the bold Maverick in Will the press get over its love for McCain? Salon 02/01/08. Patrick Ottenhoff at the Political Insider blog also looks at the adoring posture of the press generally toward that bold Maverick in McCain's Standing with His Base is as Strong as Ever 01/28/08.

Jim Lobe at his LobeLog blog reports that McCain is Now the Neo-Con Candidate 02/02/08:

With the elimination of both Rudy Giuliani last week and Fred Thompson the week before, neo-conservatives who were not already in his camp will be rushing to support Sen. John McCain. Of course, McCain was the early favorite of Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard back in 2000, and the latter’s most recent coverage, particularly by Dick Cheney favorite Stephen Hayes (he of the famous “Case Closed” leak that purported to prove beyond any doubt that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were long-standing friends and collaborators) has made clear that they are solidly in McCain’s camp.

Tags: christianism, christian fundamentalism, mccain, mike huckabee, ron paul, william jennings bryan

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

Still persecuted after all these years?

William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner

Many people familiar with the political career of William Jennings Bryan, the "Great Commoner," have been puzzled how he could go from being the fiery leader of the Populist Party who captured the 1896 Democratic Party presidential nomination after his Cross of Gold speech, to being the most famous opponent of the teaching of evolution in the public schools, facing off against Clarence Darrow in the legendary "Scopes Monkey Trial" of 1925.

But there is some internal logic to his position. There seems to be no reason to believe that his religious beliefs were cynical rather than sincere. And a big part of the logic was Bryan's solidarity with the disinherited and the disadvantaged. Paolo Coletta wrote in William Jennings Bryan: Political Puritan, 1915-1925 (1969):

As the political scene passed him by - cynics said he had nothing left but his real estate [business] and his God - Bryan appeared to be a religious anachronism to those satisfied with the status of the Protestant churches in the 1920's, "corpulent and contented" in an "Age of the Babbitonian Captivity," in which Christ appeared as a glorified Rotarian and the business of the church was to sell the church. To those unhappy with the materialism and commercialism of their church, however, he was a marvelous exponent of the belief that the reformation of the social order as well as that of the individual was within the province of the church and that reform action could proceed only after agreement was reached upon ethical premises which in turn rested upon theological principles. For his defense of the old-time religion he became a hero to rural America, in most of the evangelical press, and also in some of the secular press not only because he had a message but because he was "brilliant in championship of his Christian ideals." [my emphasis]

The combination of a real estate business and God seems like the California ideal of 2005. But apart from that, Bryan's simplistic and reactionary view of evolution in the context of the Christian religion did not lead him to embrace the Gospel of Wealth.

In fact, one of the reasons he was so opposed to what he understood to be the Darwininian doctrine was his opposition to the Social Darwinism that had become so popular among America's robber barons in the late 19th century. The British scientist Herbert Spencer had popularized the doctrine through his book Social Statics. But when Spencer visited the United States and heard first-hand to what extremes his American acolytes had taken his doctrine to justify an obscence maldistribution of wealth, even he was apalled.

John Kenneth Galbraith gave an account of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous American advocate of Social Darwinism in religion of his day in The Age of Uncertainty (1977) in his own distinctive style:

His reconciliation [of Christianity and Darwinism] involved a distinction between theology and religion. Theology, like the animal kingdom, was evolutionary. Such change did not contradict the Holy Writ. Religion was enduring. Its truths did not change. Darwin and Spencer belonged to theology; the Bible was religion. So there was no conflict between natural selection and the Holy Scripture. I do not understand this distinction, and it is fairly certain that neither Beecher nor his congregation did either. But it sounded exceptionally good.

Beecher had other good news for his affluent flock. God particularly loved sinners, for He greatly enjoyed redeeming them. So, by implication, one could go out of an occasional evening and sin. The ensuing repentance and redemption would then do wonders for God's morale. Beecher thereupon proceeded to follow his own advice. Robert Shaplen, the author of the definitive study of Beecher's private and litigious life and later one of the most authoritative reporters on Vietnam and the Vietnam war, has shown how faithful he was in this regard. Besides comforting his rich parishioners on the legitimacy of their wealth, Beecher comforted their wives - some of them at least - by taking them to bed. Eventually one, Elizabeth Tilton, was assailed by the thought that even though Beecher was being redeemed, her case was not so clear. So she confessed not to God as intended but to her husband, and he sued Beecher. The jury disagreed on Beecher's guilt. No one who has since looked at the evidence has had any similar doubt.

Earlier on, I mentioned that Beecher had told Spencer of his hope that they would meet again in heaven. There must be many, and I am one, who would prefer not to meet either.

One certainly doesn't have to be a flat-earther to see the problematic nature of this application of Darwinism.

In the following description by Coletta, we see how Bryan positioned his anti-evolution position as a defense of the poor against the powerful:

Bryan's religious belief was simple, sincere, courageous, and anti-intellectual in the tradition of such evangelical preachers as Theodore Frelinghuysen and George Whitefield in the eighteenth century; Charles Grandison Finney and Dwight L. Moody in the nineteenth; and Billy Sunday and Billy Graham in the twentieth. He appealed to the disinherited in religion as well as in politics, with his support coming from the southern parts of the country, which showed the greatest amount of illiteracy among whites. Conversely, to much of the North and East he was a straightlaced moralist and Fundamentalist who wonderfully exemplified persistent intolerance to new intellectual currents.

"I have linked my life with principles that will never die," said Bryan. He defined religion as "the relation which man fixed between himself and his God," and morality as "the outward manifestation of this inward relation." The relation between man and his God, he alleged, was "the most potent influence that acts upon a human life." The "cultured crowd" that looked down contemptuously upon religion as fit only for the ignorant and uneducated assumed an unwarranted intellectual superiority, for religion rested not upon superstitious fear of the invisible forces of nature but upon man's consciousness of his finiteness and sinfulness. God was so self-evident that no proof of his existence was needed. Moreover, "It is easier for the human man to believe in ... God [as the Creator] than to believe in any other theory of creation."

The comment about how the "cultured crowd" looked with contempt on fundamentalists echoes complaints today about "elitism" that have become a stock component of the Republicans' efforts to persuade the public that the party of Wall Street is actually interested in protecting the ordinary voter against a snobbish "elite."

This pitch appeals with particular success with white Protestant fundamentalists. But in Bryan's day, there was a much more obvious reality-based reason to see fundamentalists as deprived and abused by the rich and powerful. But the notion that they were being persecuted for their religion was about as fanciful then as it is today.

Do I need to add that William Jennings Bryan would find himself more than a little uncomfortable in company with the Pat Robertsons, Jerry Falwells and James Dobsons of today?

Tags: christian fundamentalism, populism, william jennings bryan