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

Monthly Review, June, 1996 by Michael Meeropol

Orators against the Vietnam War on campus and in the community ... crammed the Tragedy of American Diplomacy before mounting the stage and calling for the nation to consult its sleeping conscience ... Vietnam proved him right, and showed [cold-war liberals] by contrast to be hypocritical and self-serving or (at a generous estimate) simply dead wrong. p. 146

If Tragedy was the work that most influenced the public consciousness, Contours provided food for thought for generations of students of U.S. history and society. Buhle and Rice-Maximin's discussion of that work alone is worth the price of their book. This will be valuable for those of us who last read Contours too many years ago and will be especially valuable for those reading it for the first time. In discussing that work, Buhle and Rice-Maximin hit upon another of Williams's great strengths as a "public historian."

Placing individuals within an all-encompassing and increasingly destructive system, Williams nevertheless treated them with personal sympathy ... Once again as in Tragedy, students and others could read Williams as a "pro-American," a radical who saw great potential and good in his society even when he viewed the outcome of their actions with distress. p. 126

But there is much more to Williams's remarkable life and career than these two outstanding books. Some of his graduate students and others influenced by him played a major role in founding and developing the journal Studies on the Left and then went on to make major contributions to our understanding of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. The rise of an influential school known as "Cold War Revisionism" of which Tragedy was a seminal work was so frightening to the political and intellectual establishment that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. published an article in foreign Affairs seeking to "blow the whistle" on such dangerous trends.(6) In 1973, Princeton University Press published James Maddox's scurrilous attack on Williams and six other historians writing in the tradition that saw U.S. expansionism and hostility to Soviet (and other) national interests as the primary cause of die Cold War. Buhle and Rice-Maximin detail the response of Williams and the history profession.(7)

And that's not all. Details of Williams's "baptism of fire" as a radical in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1946 are presented. In a letter to this reviewer in 1986, Williams remarked that he really learned about the power and purposes of institutions (the Catholic Church, the Navy, the racist establishment) while participating in the struggle for integration in that town. Two years after leaving Corpus Christi, he used the insight that towns like Corpus Christi had a "power structure" to write an appendix to his masters thesis detailing that structure of power in his hometown Atlantic, lowa. He often remarked that he was hurt worse from being beaten in Texas than he ever was in the military, although he had suffered an injury while at sea in that ended his naval career and gave him back problems the rest of his life.