Williams, William Appleman

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

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

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

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

In the decades after his death, Williams’s understanding of the American empire has continued to draw scholarly devotees, the most important of whom are doubtless Andrew Bacevich (like Williams, trained by his own, if far more extensive, military background) and Gregory Grandin. For each of them as for many others, the military, social and ecological catastrophe inevitable in the US invasion of Iraq had been wholly predictable, the agreement-in-advance by the “Blob” of bipartisan foreign policy experts inside the Beltline just as predicable. The further floundering of US foreign policy, unable to detach itself from imperial aims, had been anticipated by Williams long before his death.

Berger, Henry W., ed. A William Appleman Williams Reader: Selections from His Major Historical Writings. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1992.

Buhle, Paul M., ed. History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Buhle, Paul M., and Edward Rice-Maximin. William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Gardner, Lloyd, ed. Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1986.

Wallace, Mike. “An Interview with William Appleman Williams.” In Visions of History, edited by Henry Abelove et al. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

The William Appleman Williams Papers, 1877-2012, at Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR, http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/williams/manuscripts/pagei.html