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Saturday, July 21, 2007

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

posted at 2:20:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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