William Appleman Williams, the Tragedy of Empire. - book reviews

Monthly Review, June, 1996 by Michael Meeropol

Thomas Jefferson, the Abolitionists, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, the Populists, Woodrow Wilson, the labor movement, and especially Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal all were identified as playing major roles in the U.S. policy of expansionism. In opposition to this seemingly inevitable historical thrust, Williams found unlikely heros. John Quincy Adams had at one point in his career argued that the United States had expanded enough and ought to be content with less than the entire continent. William E. Borah, known as one of the "isolationist" Senators who defeated Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations was identified by Williams as clearheaded conservative critic of imperialism. But Williams reserved his most quixotic praise for the man both liberals and radicals were brought up to hate in the 1940s and 1950s, Herbert C. Hoover. According to Williams's analysis, expressed most forcefully in Contours but developed as well in Tragedy, Hoover was a man who saw very clearly the difficulties of adjusting U.S. society to the presence of large corporate entities dominating the political economy in the early twentieth century.(4) He also saw very clearly the danger of an expansionist impulse that saw the activities of other nations as potential threats to U.S. well-being whenever they seemed to be closing off a sector of the world to potential expansion. Thus, Williams thought Hoover's unwillingness to treat Japan's 1931 expansion into Manchuria as a causus belli indicated a desire to consider alternatives to expansionism as a source of domestic prosperity.(5) Needless to say, choosing Adams, Borah, and Hoover as heros made Williams a peculiar individual on the U.S. left.

Yet his method of presentation and his skillful blending of economic reality with political, cultural, and even religious rhetoric made his analysis of U.S. expansionism immediate to a younger generation estranged from "foreign sounding" ideologies that emphasized class struggle, the export of capital, the specifically Leninist conception of imperialism. Even individuals brought up conversant with Old Left modes of analysis often found Williams's formulations easier to understand and much easier to communicate to their nonradical friends and acquaintances.

Thus protestations that the United States was merely protecting the world from "godless communism" could be easily refuted by reference to the anti-revolutionary activity of the Wilson Administration in Mexico. Even more significant to many readers was Williams's emphasis that U.S. leaders were virtually unanimous in their belief after the Second World War that the United States had an overwhelming military and economic advantage over our erstwhile ally the Soviet Union, and that seen from the other side" our insistence on the open door in Eastern Europe was the truly expansionist activity." Turning Kennan on his head, Williams produced enough evidence and analysis to suggest that it was Soviet policy in Eastern Europe that was "containing" U.S. expansion rather than vice versa. Buhle and Rice-Maximin drive home the importance of Williams's work for the 1960s anti-war movement with this telling observation: