Off Dead Center: William Appleman Williams (Page 3)

Well before the publication of The Tragedy of American Diplomacy--Williams's best-known book, it has been reissued this year on its fiftieth anniversary--tragedy had become a favored genre of scholars operating within the "vital center" of American intellectual life. "History is not a redeemer, promising to solve all human problems in time," Arthur Schlesinger cautioned in 1949 in a Partisan Review essay nominally about the Civil War but really a brief for containment; it is rather a "tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration." Other "tough-minded" liberal intellectuals, such as Richard Hofstadter and Reinhold Niebuhr, invoked the force of instinct and passion in mass society as something of a deus ex machina to stress history's tragic dimensions. The notion that evil did not "proceed from a cruel system"--that is, a system that could be engineered to produce ever more virtue--but from man's "dark and tangled aspects," as Schlesinger interpreted Niebuhr, helped transform liberalism from a politics of hope to one of fear. The policy implications were clear: the New Deal was the outer limit of reform, beyond which lay the nether lands of totalitarianism, and the Soviets needed to be confronted with the same resolve with which the Union defeated the Confederacy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt beat the Nazis.

Williams viewed this dramaturgical turn as a manifestation of America's "New Babbittry," a middlebrow provincialism that, despite gestures to liberal internationalism, garrisoned American thought from the rest of the world--as well as from its own past. In the mid-1950s, Williams was recruited to write for The Nation by editor Carey McWilliams, himself recently brought from the West to revive the magazine, politically and financially besieged for taking an anti-anti-Communist stance during the editorship of Freda Kirchwey. Both men favored a show-me skepticism in their dealings with East Coast intellectuals. But Williams, trained in European criticism and well read in Freud, was particularly unimpressed by the moral theatrics of their work and unconvinced by their justifying pretensions. "There is a great book to be written some day," he quipped, that could explain how historians like Schlesinger who blamed the cold war on Stalin's paranoia "came by the power to render such flat-out psychiatric judgments without professional training." At The Nation, McWilliams used the historian to lend "depth" to front-of-the-book reporting, giving him free rein to develop a prescient critique of still-unnamed neoconservatism. In a 1956 review/essay, Williams identified Hofstadter's celebrated The Age of Reform--with its heavy use of psychology to explain violent episodes in American history, including the Spanish-American War--as signaling a turning point in American thought. Absolved from having to examine the relationship between ideology and interests, liberals had rendered history into "myth." "Perhaps the major American casualty of the cold war," he wrote in another essay, "has been the idea of history."

But if the "New Babbitts" wanted history as dinner theater, Williams could do that too. In 1955 Williams produced a Nation "fable," casting the cold warrior as a composite of four historical types: Puritan, Planter, Hamiltonian and Homesteader:

The Puritan elected himself America's first elite. He originally intended to establish a righteous Eden. His handmaiden was to have been Calvin's Virgin of unexploited wealth. But the Devil, cleverly camouflaged as the noble savage, already claimed the Virgin. Thus the Puritan had first to contain and defeat the red man.... But the pietistic intensity of his awareness of the Devil withered the Puritan's sense of purpose. Morality ceased to be the means of communicating with God and the guide to the good life.... Only the Devil, warned the Puritan, spoke of the general welfare. Thus the Puritan gave way to the Planter, who comforted and wooed the Virgin.... Not until the Puritan pointed to the evil of the slave did the Planter and the Virgin take up the language of noblesse oblige. It was then too late. The hell of a fellow who occasionally feeds the neighborhood does not become m'Lord through rhetoric....

And on it goes, with Williams introducing the Hamiltonian empire builder, who vanquished the Planter, and the Homesteader, a potential repository of a nonimperial America but compromised by his ties to the Hamiltonian and the Planter. At this point Williams was an assistant professor at the University of Oregon, a land-grant university tucked into a remote corner of the continental United States. Yet here he was, precociously seizing on the then-influential "myth and symbol" school of American studies to sweepingly reinterpret all of US history. He perversely cast FDR not as a Hamiltonian but as a Planter who renovated noblesse oblige for the industrial age and reconciled the Homesteader (Henry Wallace!) to the "machine." Williams made the story's endpoint 1955, hoping that Soviet nuclear power would rescue history from the "Puritan memory hole" and free Eisenhower from crusaders who mistook "catechism for wisdom." The tale helps decode his subsequent writings, in particular his recurrent concern with the externalization of morality: "good" came to be understood as expansion ("Calvin's Virgin"), whereas anything that stood in its way--from American Indians to the Confederacy, from the Soviet Union to the Third World--was "evil." "Americans became very prone to define their rivals as unnatural men," he wrote, "almost, if not wholly, beyond redemption."

Three years later, Williams published Tragedy, taking Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis"--which held that the westward advance of the United States determined the unique character of American society--and standing it on its head. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Turner's ideas, Williams wrote in an earlier essay, "rolled through the universities and into popular literature as a tidal wave." But most historians had misconstrued their importance, debating whether or not the frontier had closed when Turner said it did, in the 1890s, or if a continent of "free land" actually led to political or social democracy. The very term "frontier," he argued, emphasized the "static" over the "dynamic," distracting scholars from viewing the thesis as a "classic illustration of the transformation of an idea into an ideology," the influence of which extended into the twentieth century. The real task, Williams said, was to understand how Turner served as a guide to policy-makers, including presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who saw the American border not as a line to stop at but as one to cross.

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