7. Review of William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

7. Review of William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

August 29, 1962

Dr. Ivan R. Bierly

William Volker Fund

Dear Ivan:

William Appleman Williams’s, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is an essay on the history of twentieth-century American foreign policy, filled with penetrating and suggestive insights.²³ Williams is one of the foremost young socialist historians in the country; in contrast to the bulk of “Establishment historians,” Williams is refreshingly frank in his dedication to the socialist perspective. This frankness places him outside of the “Establishment” and thereby permits him to levy penetrating criticisms at what has been going on. There is sufficient to criticize, and Williams is particularly concerned with the rise and maintenance of American imperialism. Williams’s central thesis is that the policy of the “Open Door”—generally dismissed by historians as vaguely moralistic and of only ephemeral importance—holds the key to virtually the entire foreign policy of America in the twentieth century, which he refers to as “open-door empire.”

The gist of “open-door imperialism” is the shrewdness to refrain from imperial conquest of backward nations, in the style of Western Europe, and instead to exercise such control indirectly and quasi-covertly, masked by an elaborate camouflage of moralizing, Wilsonian idealism to remake the globe, etc. This covert American imperialism—backed up by coercive diplomatic pressures—includes economic pressure (for markets, monopolistic concessions to favored American firms, control of resources, etc.) and the manipulation of foreign governments and political parties. The upshot of all this, as Williams indicates, is that residents of foreign countries are not fooled for very long by the moralizing, but that the American people are—with the accelerating result that the foreign natives and the American people find it almost impossible to understand each other’s positions: “What does he mean, ‘American imperialism’?”

There is no need to look very hard for defects in the Williams book. They abound. In the first place, this is in no sense a definitive or highly scholarly work. Presumably, Williams himself would not claim this. There are no footnotes, even to direct quotations, and the material is centered on fruitful insights rather than on detailed scholarship. Furthermore, the insights are often the reverse of fruitful. Williams doesn’t seem to understand the period before the turn of the twentieth century at all; in particular, he grievously confuses territorial American expansion over unused land areas on the American continent with American imperialism in the rest of the world. Here he fails to learn from his mentor Charles Beard and “continentalism” (or rather, the mentor of his own mentor, Merrill Jensen).

He also makes egregious mistakes, such as trying to force William Graham Sumner into the mold of “expansionist”—presumably to fit Williams’s preconceived notion that, to be “saved,” American capitalism required imperialism to acquire foreign markets, even though he admits that Sumner was strongly opposed to the imperialist advent of the Spanish-American War. Also, Williams makes little mistakes showing poor proofreading, such as that Samuel Gompers was a “corporate leader.” (Although, Williams might well classify the AFL as part of the corporativist structure.) And, his research being skimpy, Williams is content to take a few scattered statements by senators and the like at face value, and also fails to track down the specific economic interests underlying foreign policy, in addition to the person’s general economic views.

It is, indeed, in the economic area that Williams, ridden by socialist ignorance, makes the greatest blunders. He persists in confusing legitimate private foreign investment as equally “imperialist” as subsidized or coerced foreign investment by government. He believes that both are equally injurious to the backward countries. He believes with Marx—and, as he shows, with all the Marxist-in-reverse advocates of American imperialism such as Brooks Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, etc.—that the vast productive machine of American capitalism requires foreign investment and foreign markets for survival, due to the falling rates of profit at home.

This fallacy, however, has one especial advantage: that Williams is alive to the numerous people who have held this fallacy; one of his important contributions is to show that not only Brooks Adams used this argument for the Spanish-American War, but such supposedly “enlightened” folk from various shades of the political spectrum, such as Dean Acheson, Marquis Childs, and William Henry Chamberlin, have used the exact same arguments to justify the Cold War, foreign aid, the Marshall Plan, etc.—the latter two even quoting Brooks Adams himself!

Despite the above defects, the Williams book abounds in penetrating insights and leads for further research. He has a searching critique, for example, of Wilson and his “imperialist idealism”; of William Jennings Bryan’s phony “anti-imperialism”; a brilliant refutation of the common “legend” that the Republican administration of the 1920s was “isolationist”; and a detailed showing of how it was the reverse; an illuminating discussion of the nature and origins of the Cold War with the Soviet Union: from the Allied intervention in the civil war, through the nonrecognition policy of the 1920s, to World War II and after.

Of particular interest here is Professor Williams’s contention that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration was not notably less anti-imperialist, nor even much less anti-Soviet, than the other administrations. Williams maintains the nonsensical view that Roosevelt’s New Deal “saved capitalism” from socialism; but he makes out a stronger case for Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” being (1) not much different from Hoover’s, and (2) a milder but persistent continuation of “open-door imperialism.” In addition, Williams takes issue with the standard “left-wing” view of the Cold War and FDR by contending that Franklin Roosevelt, too, pursued a Cold War policy as early as 1942, and he points out quite a few interesting instances.

As in the case of other views of Williams’s, these cannot simply be taken whole; they require much more thorough investigations of the historical record. Certainly, the Williams book would not be suitable, for example, for National Book Foundation distribution. But it is books with truly independent points of view that do a great deal for the furthering of historical knowledge.