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

Monthly Review, June, 1996 by Michael Meeropol

Every one of his books, from the polemical The United States, Cuba, and Castro to the mammoth The Roots of the Modem American Empire, to the suggestive The Great Evasion, An Essay on the Contemporary Relevance of Karl Marx to the book of readings on diplomatic history The Shaping of American Diplomacy to his two polemical syntheses America Confronts a Revolutionary World, 1776-1976 and Empire As a Way of Life. An Essay on the Causes and Character of America's Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative are discussed, analyzed, and put into context. Responces of reviewers are detailed, demonstrating how petty and overtly political many "mainstream" scholars can behave when confronted with serious challenges. Buhle and Rice-Maximin pull no punches where Williams's books fail, such as The Great Evasion, or where they reveal serious omissions, such as in the persistent failure to confront the role of African-Americans as full subjects of history rather than objects of control from above. They are also quite candid about his personal failings, which were unfortunately significant for many of the people closest to him.

The book also covers his years after leaving Madison, Wisconsin for Oregon State University, including his ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful year as President of the Organization of American Historians in 1980. In his last decade, he once again became involved as a public intellectual, writing a serious column for Oregon newspapers, and "thinking seriously about alternatives" to the American Empire. Buhle and Rice-Maximin describe a fine article he published in a short-lived journal, democracy, entitled "Radicals and Regionalism," which presented his vision that struggling for a regional division of the U.S. continental empire was a useful focus for radicals weary of confronting the Empire at the national level. After that article, Williams took his own advice and wrote on western regional concerns.

His passing in 1990 deprived us all of a great mind. I can imagine him now, firing off reviews of books like The End of history, commenting wryly on the views of the "second thought" generation - including his erstwhile students and admirers like David Horowitz, Ronald Radosh, and Eugene Genovese. Better still, I can imagine how he would have scorned the self-congratulatory know-nothingism of the intellectuals celebrating the victory of the United States in the Cold War. The U.S. war for the open door" policy to the Persian Gulf would have saddened but not surprised him. The need to go on the economic offensive for 'access to closed markets" in, for example, Japan was nothing more than a 1990s version of Commodore Perry's black ships in Tokyo Bay. The need to maintain cold-war military budgets when the supposed enemy no longer exists would remind him that the first dangerous "communist hordes" confronted by U.S. imperialists were the Mexican revolutionaries. The intermingling of self-interest and missionary-like idealism that bespoke our country's involvement in Somalia and Bosnia would have merely echoed that very same marriage of idealism and expansionism as necessity that he and his students and colleagues had discovered and exposed in that great icon of U.S. internationalism Woodrow Wilson. He could have smiled with a sense of vindication as he reminded his liberal critics: "I told you our expansionist impulse had nothing to, do with 'godless Communism.' If we don't stop now before we plunge headlong into an attempt to rule the world, we are really doomed this time!"