PARTISAN REVIEW
499
oppression, and the hatred of Yankee imperialism to be found in Latin
America strikes the man in the street as inexplicable and ungrateful.
We have only occasionally taken over the Latin American republics by
force of arms and it is widely thought that we are pouring billions of
trade and aid into the area. So last summer when the Chilean foreign
minister told the president, on behalf of all the countries of South
America, that the United States was actually taking more money out
of the hemisphere than it was putting in,
Le M onde
reported that Nixon
did not even seem to hear what was being said to him.
William Appleman Williams has labored long and hard to deprive
us of this excessive innocence. He has written from the Left but his
attitudes are provocative, innovating, unpredictable and he does much
more than simply rehearse, or apply, Lenin and the other Marxists.
He is, to take one of his most striking interpretations, convinced that
Herbert Hoover must be rehabilitated from a radical point of view (and
in the process saved from liberal slanders). And in this new book, as
in his other studies, he argues that the entire American people have
been willing participants in, and enthusiasts of, our imperialist economics
even though they were also convinced anticolonialists.
Unfortunately, I must report that in
The Roots of Modern Amer–
ican Empire
Williams rests his entire case on one of his most question–
able analyses: that the expansionism of market oriented farmers is
the
key to the American past and present. That, I think, is not the case and
it makes this new book less valuable than some of his past contributions
(particularly
The Contours of American History)
which were much
more sensitive to the dialectical complexity of our experience than this
monochromatic version of it. In saying this, I do not fault his scholar–
ship - I am not competent to do that and, in any case, I am quite
impressed by his marshaling of the facts.
It
is his interpretation that
I find wanting.
First, let Williams speak for himself.
The italicized central theme of
Roots
is: "the expansionist outlook
that was entertained and acted upon by metropolitan leaders during and
after the eighteen nineties was actually a crystallization in industrial form
of an outlook that had been developed ,in agricultural terms by the agrar–
ian majority of the country between 1860 and 1893." For the American
farmer "had always seen himself as a creature of the market place whose
wealth and welfare depended upon the profitable sale of his surplus
product." Thus a consensus was created: "The metropolitan minority
of the nation gradually accepted the expansionist aspects of the agri–
cultural concept of the world."
