William Appleman Williams

Learning From History

Paul Buhle, Edward Rice-Maximin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136657702
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Williams' controversial volumes, The Tragedy of AmericanDiplomacy, Contours of American History, and other works have established him as the foremost interpreter of US foreign policy. Both Williams and others deeply influenced by him have recast not only diplomatic history but also the story of pioneer America's westward movement, and studies in the culture of imperialism.

At the end of the Cold War, when the US no longer faces any great enemy, the lessons of William Appleman Williams' life and scholarship have become more urgent than ever before. This study of his life and major works offers readers an opportunity to introduce, or re-introduce, themselves to a major figure of the last half-century.

1

A LITTLE BOY FROM IOWA

WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS BEGAN HIS DAYS as he would end them, far from the centers of metropolitan culture. He often claimed that his origins explained his insight into U.S. history and had undergirded his moral strength to sustain himself through political hard times. Seen more objectively, the issues of his life look very different, far more contradictory and more pathos-ridden than he could admit. And yet something about his self-evaluation rings true. As he grappled to interpret his experiences through his historical studies but also in personal interviews, a private family memoir, and an unpublished novel, he could not possibly escape the stamp of the small-town Midwest, the Depression, and the fatherless family. But he had also spent his life literally discovering a wider world and trying to make sense of it in his own highly personal terms.

Attacked frequently as an America-hater, Williams cared about the nation passionately, even obsessively, as if from a sense of family responsibility. He believed that his family background and his life as a Naval officer reflected the economic development and the imperial mission that gave the modern nation its shape. But he also believed that the same resources and initiative could make possible a society organized along very different lines. His fondest political hopes were doomed to disappointment. But his capacity to marshall intense scholarship within a large philosophical framework permitted him a very unique insight into America as a civilization. Few others could have framed such insight in a sustained historical narrative, and Williams himself had enormous difficulty in doing so.

A Midwestern literary regionalist, some modern-day Hamlin Garland, might be able to capture through fiction the emotional toll exacted on the historian’s life as he struggled to make sense of society and of himself. The novelist would have to contend, as well, with Williams’s own fictionalizing. In attempting to explain or to interpret the sources of his immanent critique of American society, Williams created through screened memory a vividly nostalgic, heavily stylized childhood and native setting.¹ Decades after penning an appendix to his master’s thesis, which described closely and without sentimentality the elite rule of his little hometown, he thus reinterpreted the same place in near-idyllic terms. It had become, quite remarkably, a site of approximate social equality and deep-felt community where citizens learned the importance of both public participation and individual restraint.

Here lay the source of the rending tension which might also be seen as the driving contradiction of Williams’s life. The locale of community, for him the modern-day version of the Greek city-state, is likewise the source of Empire. Its ethos is successful in its own terms—and tragic as well. He projected this historical experience in all directions, from his idiosyncratic interpretation of agrarian history to his strained views of feminism and the family to his understanding of what a socialist movement might be and do. He also internalized the tension, as he sought to control the story of his life and give it a unified meaning.

Examined carefully and without his blinders, Williams’s life and life’s work express again and again the same contradictions of individualism and community, Empire and anti-Empire. Woven in and around the saga of boyhood, military academies, war, graduate school, scholarship and political engagement, the tensions reveal themselves.

Williams’s own late-shifting version of the past reflected his growing disillusionment with the direction of the country and likewise his despair with the radical left. But he had another purpose, which he pursued through a last burst of non-history writing.² He had a large personal debt to acknowledge and, if possible, to repay. He later wrote repeatedly of various individuals and groups who had “honored” their “traditions” in one way or another.³ They had done rightly, earning his praise and support, unlike those who fecklessly cast off the past without considering its consequences for the present and future. He blessed his childhood home, the mother and grandparents who raised the boy without a father.

Between the lines of the memoir, he asked himself why it had been William Appleman Williams, the most unlikely intellectual, who finally wrote controversial and influential books. He continued to set down his responses to the riddle even as his life drained away; he never finished. No wonder a high-school classmate, asked at the time of Williams’s death about his classmate’s notorious Marxism, answered matter-of-factly that no one could have anticipated anything like it. The sweetheart of his high-school years and wife of his youth agreed with this judgment.⁴ The personally secretive Midwesterner and unabashed romantic eluded even his intimates’ efforts to understand the sources of radicalism in his background.

Nor would they have been able to explain his rise into the nation’s most important historian. To do so would be to unravel what Williams himself never could fully or candidly analyze: the complex chain of events leading him from childhood and adolescent years to Naval officership to civil rights activist and historian-in-training, or from Depression-era Iowa to wartime Annapolis to post-World War II Corpus Christi and late-1940s Madison, Wisconsin. Full understanding would require deep insight into a character fragmented by childhood tragedy, rebuilt through personal determination, challenged by world events, and settled as firmly as it could be settled through the self-identification of the citizen-scholar.

Some of his more perceptive friends found him looking perpetually for a community like the one he believed he had left behind. Others would say that the later Marxist internationalist, jazz buff, and intimate friend of gay intellectuals—during the days of hiding and persecution—had become a bohemian, if not necessarily an outsider, precisely in response to the claustrophobia of small-town life. Perhaps these two alternatives are not so contradictory after all.⁵

1

William Appleman Williams, during his days as a radical graduate student, carefully depicted his native Atlantic in commercial terms. Shipping center for crops, poultry, and livestock, this town of several thousand residents was also a commercial-retail locus of fertile southwestern Iowa in the later nineteenth century. Among the mostly German and Danish descendents, a small group of extended families dominated manufacturing, financing, merchandising, the judiciary, and political clout. If Atlantic nurtured one resident’s radicalism and historical perspective, it most likely did so by fostering a boy’s sense of contrast, perhaps the contrast between the small community’s day-to-day social life on the one hand and the real power-wielding on the other. But this begins the story too late; Williams the memoirist insisted that his legacy be traced back several generations at least.

Williams’s mother, Mildrede, who deserves to be called the most enduring influence on his life, traced her family back through the Appleman line to a Welsh-born Redcoat who deserted General Howe to join George Washington’s forces. This Welshman’s Philadelphia wife had ancestors in America long before the Revolutionary war. Williams’s father, William Carlton Williams, could find still another revolutionary soldier in his family tree, a New Hampshire militiaman blinded in combat.⁶ In short, Williams’s family had been more than present at the primal act of national independence: he was self-conscious heir to the great tradition.

If Williams often felt “that American History is a pot of imperial porridge … of who fought where for what conquest,” he could nevertheless find a family exception here and there. His mother’s great-grandfather, Zopher Hammond, bought his son’s way out of service in the Civil War and insisted that the North should have seceded first or simply let the South go its own way. Born in Patchogue, New York, in 1804, Zopher may have been the original “Little America” believer in the family, unwilling to pay the price for Empire. Zopher’s son, Joseph, Williams’s great-grandfather, attended Hillsdale College in Michigan and resettled in Marshall County, Iowa, in 1866. His Iowa-born wife, Amanda Louis Havens, was reputedly the first “strong-minded” woman of several generations of them to come. The couple moved by wagon to Iowa’s southwest, claiming through the Homestead Act some of the richest farmland anywhere on earth.⁷

Williams neglected to mention the less rational, helter-skelter qualities of settlement and the troubled memories left behind. A naturally beautiful region of the Nishnabotna River Valley and the main drainage basin of southwestern Iowa, it had once been home to the Ioway, the Oto, the Omaha, and other tribes. Before its settling, James Audubon had praised the beauty of its trees, native wildflowers, and fabulously beautiful birds (a county was subsequently named after him), which were mostly destined like the Indians themselves to disappear for productive agriculture and commerce. The Mormons had crossed en route to the West in 1846, and a generation of later settlers debated the name of a nascent municipality. Thinking mistakenly that they were exactly halfway between the two oceans, they tossed a coin to decide whether to call their new place by one or the other. “Pacific” won, but another town had already been given that name, so they christened it “Atlantic.”⁸

Williams’s ancestors had made a shrewd economic choice. The farmer of the 1860s was no primitive pioneer but a modern agrarian. He needed mechanical mowers, hay rakes, reapers, corn planters, seeders, along with improved plows and decent weather, to realize a profit on his considerable investment. Still, corn, wheat, oats, rye, and other crops afforded abundant yields, while hogs, cattle, and (in southern Iowa particularly) even sheep production raced ahead. Decades later, the entire region would be known as the “Corn Belt,” an oversimplified appellation that signified rich soil, adequate rain, and a summer heat which could make daily life extremely uncomfortable (not to speak of the bitter winters with their savage plains winds), but which also made possible a good living.

Iowa community life naturally reflected the intense self-consciousness of its businessmen-farmers. The local and regional newspapers described in detail the agricultural and market developments which made one line or another profitable or unprofitable. Farmers and their journalists put special emphasis on improvement of stock and a range of other innovations such as veterinary sciences (including rudimentary pesticides).⁹ Williams took great pride in the solid business sense of his ancestors and their communities. A major investor in Atlantic had convinced the Rock Island Line to build its main trunk system for the region through the town and to stop every train there. As he wrote in the introduction to Roots of the Modern American Empire, the fathers of Atlantic then “plotted the town by plowing a furrow straight south from the spot they selected for the depot.”¹⁰

Grids went up in the 1870s for the development of wide streets suited to civic affairs, while Joseph and Amanda Hammond established themselves outside town on a spread not far from the future golf course of the well-to-do. In Williams’s imaginative recreation, they regularly joined perhaps five hundred neighbors on market days to sell surplus, take shaves or haircuts, buy calico, and gossip. Historians’ accounts, indeed, describe this period as the “golden age” of the county fair, a market day writ large with exhibitions of machinery and seminars on scientific husbandry along with various competitions, including “female equestrianism.”¹¹

Williams’s predecessors surely played their part in the rituals that he regarded with admiration. They raised churches with stained-glass windows, created schools, founded a public library, scheduled a lecture series and musical events. He viewed it as a “marvelous mix of town and country,” much the way that Lewis Mumford had described the early nineteenth-century New England village. If considerably less picturesque than the rocky hills that many Yankee residents had left behind, Atlantic was at once human scale and connected by its visiting trains to New York, Chicago, Omaha, and San Francisco. Thus the great anti-imperialist Williams could write, without a hint of irony, that “Atlantic was part of the empire.”¹² And not an insignificant part: according to his own account, Atlantic made itself the major agricultural-merchandizing center between Des Moines and Omaha. With less than six thousand residents, it reputedly maintained the nation’s highest rate in turnover of retail goods for many years, off and on, until the Depression.

Atlantic and the surrounding region also entertained its share of dissidents and even radicals for at least an occasional moment in the nineteenth century. John Brown had briefly made his headquarters in Tabor—itself named for the legendary Czech city of communal resistance against king and clergy—during the 1840s. Never a major center of agrarian agitation like nearby Kansas or Nebraska, Iowa saw its Greenbackers and Populists mount third-party challenges during the 1870-80s. The major weekly of agrarian movement during the middle 1880s, Industrial West (later, the Farmers’ Tribune) was published in Atlantic. One of its editors, Knights of Labor activist J. R. Sovereign, used the Atlantic base to project himself into Grand Master Workman of that fading organization a few years later.¹³ After these unsettled days, modestly successful agrarian reforms and the rise of a world market for local commodities prompted Atlantic to become staunchly conservative, in politics and moral alike.

Given worldly success and social homogeneity, its citizens seemingly had no more pressing reason to doubt or to wonder. Less sympathetic observers might have described them as indifferent or hostile to the dramatic rise of the Socialist Party with its many small-town locals in Kansas or Oklahoma, likewise toward the Industrial Workers of the World headquartered in nearby Chicago. The great hopes and the savage repression of radicals made little impression on them because they evidently had other things on their minds. Indeed, during the war, a local manufacturer of folding stoves and Army cots produced nearly five million dollars of goods for the government. Afterwards, the large Atlantic Canning Company plant added sweet pumpkins to its profitable line of corn, converting the globes into pulp and sending the seeds as far away as China. From the perspective of the Atlantic Legion Memorial Building, which served as a community center, life was no doubt good.¹⁴

Writing about Atlantic during his graduate student days, Williams dissected the mentalité of the elite. Their way of seeing the world, he claimed, was based on parroting the ultraconservative Chicago Tribune positions on national and international issues. Local newspaper editorials—as Williams related from his own personal experiences—were hammered out at a breakfast club composed of the elite’s second string. Their view of the world, notably of foreign affairs (and especially revolutions abroad, i.e., threats to continued U.S. economic expansion) lacked any element of enlightened conservatism let alone liberal acceptance. Perhaps this had been manipulation of small-town democracy from the metropolis, but it was not one that local elites resisted. They had chosen to respond to events in strictly business terms. It did not make them mediocre minds, or mediocre stylists. Indeed, the paper’s savant Edwin Percy Chase won a Pulitzer Prize for the best editorial of 1934. But it limited their capacity to see other possibilities.¹⁵

But through the rose-colored glasses of the later Williams, the flourishing life of the county seat had been, if perhaps a “disorienting distortion of the reality of America,” nevertheless “the best that could happen.” He proved it with that most elusive evidence-memories of his childhood and the recollections of neighborliness which mattered to him most. Thus, for instance, he recalled Jewish and black families perfectly integrated into the community, when in reality so few existed that segregation would have been all but impossible.

Williams had his own version of the dark side of Atlantic social life. The town’s proprietors sold medicinal whiskey and laudanum over the counter of the nominally dry town, and thousands of gallons of moonshine liquor mysteriously found their way into waiting hands. Railroad workers, farmhands, traveling businessmen, and prostitutes (“soiled doves” in the police blotter of the local press) drank and carried on beneath the averted eyes of the authorities. When law-breaking occasionally turned violent through the misdeeds of a frontier-style gang of criminals, citizens acted in concert to crush it. Williams’s own great-grandmother died with a gun still under her pillow. She never used it, but presumably would not have hesitated had the need arisen.

The degraded and sometimes dangerous lower classes existed only at the margins of Atlantic life, certainly never becoming likely protagonists of social change. Hired agricultural workers were no more than “bummers,” transients hired for harvest but expected to be gone soon. Railroad laborers, more stable but still fewer in number, kept to themselves.¹⁶ To all this we might easily trace Williams’s later aversion to class models of socialism, and his hopes for the “ordinary” middle class as the agency of redemption.

Williams’s ancestors experienced troubles of their own, but rather than economic or social one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. A Little Boy from Iowa
• 2. Madison and History
• 3. A Radical Professor in the Cold War
• 4. High Times in Madison, 1957–1963
• 5. Trouble, Foreign and Domestic
• 6. At Home in Oregon
• 7. Vindication in Defeat
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index