Lloyd Gardner
When Bill Williams showed the manuscript of his new book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, to his mentor at the University of Wisconsin, Fred Harrington urged him not to publish it. Harrington admired his former student, and had been instrumental in bringing him back to Madison in the fall of 1957 from the University of Oregon. He was worried, however, about how such a critical book would be received, and what it might do to the career of a very promising young academic.
A Naval Academy graduate, William Appleman Williams had served in the South Pacific before being badly injured when a Japanese shell landed near his boat during an assault on an island. After leaving the Navy at the end of the war, he came to Wisconsin and completed his degree in American history. It was the height of cold war orthodoxy, even in academia. True, the University of Wisconsin had always been a stronghold of progressive thought, but Tragedy went beyond the dominant “realist” critique of American policy as overly moralistic to discuss fundamental cold war assumptions and, indeed, the forces that had shaped the nation’s foreign policies since the 1890s. In place of a critique that stressed the dangers of idealism, Williams relentlessly pursued the connections between the nation’s political economy and its foreign policy actions. Midway through the book, for example, Williams quoted William S. Culbertson, a career diplomat who specialized in trade questions from the Wilson era to the New Deal: “Our economic frontiers are no longer coextensive with our territorial frontiers.” Williams argued that this statement summed up American policy: “No one ever offered a more succinct description and interpretation of the single most important aspect of twentieth-century American diplomacy—either in general or pertaining explicitly to the nation’s involvement in World Wars I and II.”
The original publisher of Tragedy was a small firm, World Publishing, with offices in Cleveland and New York. Among the first reviews was one written by Adolf A. Berle Jr., an original “brains truster” in the Roosevelt Administration who later went into the State Department at a high level as an Assistant Secretary of State. Berle took the book very seriously and suggested it deserved respectful attention. Since Williams had been particularly critical of the New Deal as a missed opportunity to make both intellectual and material changes in American society, the review was something of a surprise. For this charge (and others) he was often a target of the liberal establishment’s special ire.
But Berle did not seem to care, even at the moment John F. Kennedy was challenging Eisenhower’s supposedly lax attitude about the Cuban Revolution as a rallying cry for liberals. He reviewed Tragedy in the Sunday New York Times Book Review—the premier location for drawing attention to new books. Entitled “A Few Questions for the Diplomatic Pouch,” it began: “Salute is due William Appleman Williams for a brilliant book on foreign affairs, gladly given despite profound disagreement by this reviewer with many of his statements and with some of his conclusions.” The book attempts a historical critique, Berle wrote, while refusing the free ride historians often give themselves by shying away from developing a theory and drawing lessons. Williams was absolutely right, he wrote, that American policy did not accommodate to revolutionary changes, and that it was now essential to start working with social systems “different from our own.” Berle saw a contradiction, however, between Williams’s economic determinism and his argument that the United States could have developed differently. “The ‘imperialism’ charge, for example, is a piece of semantics,” Berle alleged. “America in the nineteenth century did expand, but into empty land. It is one thing to conquer a subject people; another to occupy vacant real estate. Influence is acquired by expanding trade, but it is not the same as colonial domination seized by conquest.”
Other critics with much less sympathy for Tragedy’s analysis of the mainsprings of American policy would make similar comments. To the general question of economic determinism, Williams had several responses. First, he argued that his critics often confused specific economic policy issues with a general outlook. Thus, as an example, he pointed out how Washington eased pressure on Mexico during the 1938 oil expropriation crisis, out of concern about Axis rivalries, not simple Good Neighborliness. Second, he argued that policy-makers effectively internalized their beliefs about the way American democracy worked and its needs, and then they predicated policies not upon specific advantages alone (although sometimes they did do so in blunt terms), but on something called the general welfare, or, more often after World War II, national security.
To support this last point, Williams took special note of President William McKinley’s description of the impact of the burgeoning Cuban rebellion in the second half of the 1890s, the first “depression decade.” In instructions to his new minister to Spain, McKinley made it clear what he expected Madrid to do and what the United States was entitled to expect. The “chronic condition of trouble” in Cuba, he wrote, “causes disturbances in the social and political condition of our own peoples . . . and tends to delay the condition of prosperity to which this country is entitled.” Commenting on this cable Williams wrote, “It revealed beyond any possibility of misunderstanding the inner logic of all expansionist thought whereby both opportunity and difficulty, good and evil, are externalized As Frederick Jackson Turner once acknowledged in a moment of deep insight, the frontier itself was a ‘gate of escape’ from existing responsibilities; and when men began to act on the frontier thesis they merely sustained that pattern of defining issues in such a way that the solutions became progressively dependent upon external factors.”
The third answer Williams gave to the charge of economic determinism was that motivation really came down to the way one defined the world. His path-breaking interpretation of the Open Door Policy, first enunciated in specific terms by Secretary of State John Hay at the end of the nineteenth century in regard to imperial rivalries in China, posited the way Americans have approached the world ever since. There were two Open Door Notes sent to the European powers and Japan, he observed. The first, in 1899, called upon them to recognize equality of trade opportunities within their acknowledged spheres of influence, and asked for a formal response. The second, sent on July 4, 1900, in the midst of the turmoil of the Boxer Rebellion, did not ask for a response, but proclaimed that American policy was to oppose any effort to take advantage of the turmoil to impair China’s territorial or political integrity.
While most historians had seen the Hay gambit as either an idealistic gesture or an example of an effort to piggyback on British policies of keeping China alive for free trade, Williams saw the Open Door Notes as the basic foundation on which Americans constructed their foreign policy From specifics about Americas relations with China and the other powers, it rapidly grew into a generalized outlook on the world, or Weltanschauung, that incorporated objectives and means to secure a dominant position for American trade and influence around the world. The Open Door Policy was especially complementary to the nation’s self-image as well, because it resolved the problem of American expansion without recourse to formal imperialism. It proved highly successful in that regard, as well as satisfying the requirement that it serve as a rationale for criticizing “empires,” whether the old colonial ones or the Soviet Union’s policies in Eastern Europe.
The “tragedy” evolved out of the ultimate contradiction between the idea and the reality that the Open Door Policy disguised, and which left American policy-makers imprisoned within a rigid framework of their own assumptions. They were unable to adjust to the inevitable changes in the world as newly independent countries after World War II, and older countries once dominated by the European metropolis, demanded the right to determine their own history. The American claim that the Open Door Policy promoted such objectives grew ever more strident in cold war rhetoric about the Free World versus Communist slavery; but, said Williams, it was little more than a repetition of Adam Smith’s insistence that natural law determined what each country did best, and where it belonged in the larger scheme of things. Indeed, the shape of things to come could be foreseen in reactions to the Cuban revolt against Spain, and in the beginnings of upheaval in China in the Boxer Rebellion. Thus Williams put the Age of Revolutionary Nationalism much earlier, and saw a consistency in the American response that had largely been ignored. The Open Door Policy assumptions had encouraged an absolutist belief that the American Way best conformed to the natural order of things, which meant in practice that when the United States did encourage change abroad, change was to occur only within certain parameters. “This was at best naïve. Even a modest familiarity with history reveals that such alterations have wide and continuing consequences. It was at worst a knowing effort to slap a lid on dynamic development.” While America rose to world power, and triumphed in World Wars I and II, it also became embroiled in a series of military interventions that began with the War of 1898 and continued throughout the twentieth century, culminating in Vietnam.
Within a few years of its original publication in 1959, of course, the atmosphere had changed considerably. As the 1960s unfolded, the civil rights and women’s liberation movements grew and flourished. And as Washington expanded the Vietnam War, these movements merged with the peace movement. These factors all influenced the way Tragedy was being received and read on campuses and elsewhere. Williams’s critics seized on the unpopularity of the Vietnam War to explain the book’s appeal, as if it were a temporary phenomenon that would disappear once the war was won. It was not won. And Tragedy became the most influential exploration of American foreign policy attempted by a historian in the twentieth century. It continues to sell well even after fifty years, while its themes (in many variations) have been developed by a second, and now a third generation of scholars. A not uncritical review of Tragedy written by Bradford Perkins twenty-five years after its first publication noted that it had grown sharper and even more critical of policy-makers in its later revised and enlarged editions in 1962 and 1972. Williams had failed to find a system to fit everything into, Perkins contended, “but no comprehensive scheme, no broad generalizations, and few but the narrowest studies of episodes in American foreign relations will be written, if they are to shine, without an awareness of and an accommodation to William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.”
Tragedy transcended the Vietnam years. It was Williams’s second book after American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 (1952), a book that had already created a stir. American-Russian Relations grew out of his doctoral dissertation on the American reformer Raymond Robins, who was in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and who had attempted to mediate between Wilson and Lenin. Those efforts came to naught, but they struck Williams as an entry point for studying the larger pattern of American responses to the revolutions that shaped the twentieth century. The final chapter was a searing critique of “containment,” the policy “fathered” by George Frost Kennan with his famous “X” article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, the journal published by the New York Council on Foreign Relations, where articles by and for the policy-making communities and nongovernment elites involved in foreign affairs most often appear. Everyone knew almost immediately “X” was Kennan, a foreign service officer who specialized in Russia and the Soviet Union. Thus began a long-lasting debate over the “sources” of American conduct in world affairs.
Williams’s discussion of “containment” began with the Bolshevik Revolution and the aftermath of World War I. He compared Wilson’s treatment of the Baltic States at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution with Stalin’s demands for his prewar frontiers after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. Wilson had held out for reserving the Baltic States—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—as Russian territory for some post-Soviet government, which, he assumed, would have to happen sooner rather than later. But Woodrow Wilson had no doubt they were Russian territory. The United States in World War II insisted, on the other hand, that the territorial integrity of those states was an obligation the Allies must honor. The point was not to excuse Stalin’s behavior, but to note that American principle was sometimes as adjustable as a bicycle seat. Where Kennan and his supporters in government and academia saw containment as a realist approach to policy, therefore, Williams saw it as an extension of the Open Door Policy tailored to fit a temporary reality
After the first edition of Tragedy appeared in 1959, it was later revised and greatly expanded in two new editions appearing in 1962 and 1972. Williams called his book an “essay,” even in its later editions, which now included source references for the many quotations he used from policy-makers inside and outside the government. Tragedy broke with several “tried and true” techniques of the historical profession, particularly those of diplomatic historians. Williams’s emphasis on economics and ideology presented readers with a different landscape entirely to come to terms with in order to understand American policy.
In all his books, moreover, citations to State Department documents rated no higher than those from other sources such as Department of Commerce publications, or presentations at the annual National Foreign Trade Convention, or hearings before Congressional committees. He drew heavily as well from other disciplines besides history, especially sociology, but also including philosophy. One day a week during his career at the University of Wisconsin, he carried into the Memorial Library a small black notebook, walked down the hall to the periodicals room, and started through the journals from “A” to “Z.” His office bookshelves were filled with authors and titles not then familiar to history students. Responding to a critical comment that he was not multi-archival, in the sense of using documents from foreign archives, Williams quipped that perhaps American diplomatic historians were not multi-archival when it came to their nation’s records, and were overly dependent on certain political files in State Department records.
Williams seemed to take a particular delight in tweaking liberal sensibilities and turning everything topsy-turvy. Given his insistence that Tragedy was an essay, however, one could come away from reading it with a feeling that he was, at times, asking readers to disagree in order to get a seminar discussion going. He was also an excellent lecturer in large classes, holding students’ attention with the force of his material, not dramatics. Probably his most famous instance of taking such an approach came in his treatment of Herbert Hoover, who was anathema to liberals ever since the New Deal. In several places, he gave Hoover great credit for also understanding that it was possible (too easily possible) for big business to take over the government and turn the United States into some variant of a fascist regime. He also gave Hoover credit for understanding the purpose of foreign loans, and how they could be used to establish favorable conditions for expanding exports and foreign trade in general. The only difference between Hoover’s approach to these matters in the 1920s, and, say, programs like the later Point IV technical assistance plans, Williams obviously enjoyed observing, was that the latter used the American taxpayer to foot the bill for making the world open to American corporations.
It was ironic, then, that in later years, when “social history” began its surge in history departments across the country, Williams’s contributions in opening up diplomatic history in these ways received less credit than might have been expected. On the other hand, later critics had to abandon Adolf Berle’s assertion that nineteenth-century American expansionism was not imperialistic because it involved “vacant lands.” Williams had demonstrated that there was indeed a tragedy involved in an outlook that simply took it for granted that there had been no displacement of the peoples who occupied the continent before the Europeans came. It became harder and harder to draw a distinction between the American rush to occupy the continent from sea to shining sea and U.S. attitudes about the rest of the world. In the search for a true “international history,” Tragedy was a truly path-breaking book on many levels, and remains an essential accomplishment in bringing us to understand ourselves—and our boasts about the essential nation. The themes developed in the book are vital for understanding the dynamics of the twenty-first century.
All his criticisms notwithstanding, Adolf Berle accepted an invitation to speak at Williams’s graduate seminar in the spring of 1960. For almost two hours Berle held forth on the nature and mainsprings of American foreign policy, describing personal experiences in the Caribbean in the Wilson era when American Marines occupied various islands. Although he had scolded Williams in his review for using the term “imperialism” too loosely, his recounting of those times could scarcely have been describing anything other than a form of imperialism, practiced however under a different terminology that allowed Americans to go on criticizing the Europeans as the only imperialist-minded peoples.
After the seminar, Berle invited Williams to join a Latin American task force he was organizing for the likely Democratic presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy. Williams appreciated the offer; most diplomatic historians have a secret urge to be policy-makers. But he could not participate, he commented later, without compromising his belief that more than what Kennedy offered was needed if policy was really to change. Almost exactly a year later, the Kennedy Administration sought to overthrow the Castro Revolution with an invasion at the Bay of Pigs, then followed that failure with a series of efforts to overthrow or assassinate the Cuban leader, all leading to the most serious crisis of the cold war—the missile crisis of 1962. Kennedy also drew the conclusion that America’s “national interest” would have to be upheld elsewhere in Southeast Asia if the United States was to succeed in the cold war. The knot of assumptions that made up the Open Door Policy became the center of a struggle for the soul of the nation.
Bill Williams wrote several other major books, and Tragedy ought to be considered in relation to The Contours of American History, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, and Empire as a Way of Life. In all of these volumes, Williams attempted to explain American history and to offer views that challenged orthodox understandings. His objective was to provide readers with a means for coming to terms with the reality of the past and its impact on the present. In an epigraph for the final chapter of Tragedy, he quoted Callitrax, a historian in Arthur Clarke’s science fiction novel In the City and the Stars: “We have lived too long out of contact with reality, and the time has come to rebuild our lives.”