500
MICHAEL HARRINGTON
In
The Great Evasion,
Williams had made the triumph of this ex–
pansionist attitude the central problem, from a left-wing point of view,
of American history. For when the workers adopted the frontier thesis,
he argued, they evaded the challenge of building the good society. In–
stead of facing up to capitalist reality they took refuge in the free soil
panacea and later accepted the imperialist consequences of that view.
In
The Contours of American History,
Williams asserted that American
leaders after World War II "fearing another depression (or a backslide
into the one in the 1930s) ... turned once again to overseas expansion
of the frontier." Indeed, the anticommunist policy of containment "was,
no doubt unconsciously, the product of analyzing the Soviet Union from
the assumption of the frontier-expansionist theory of history. Denied the
chance to expand, ran the doctrine, the Soviet System would break
down."
All this adds up to a most iconoclastic reading of the American
past. In a way, Williams uses the Turner thesis in order to criticize the
traditional deductions which were drawn from it. For a Turnerian like
Woodrow Wilson, the key term in the theory about the expansion of
frontier was "frontier." Its disappearance, he held, required new in–
novations (for that matter, the Debsian socialists, who studied Turner
at their midwestern "encampments," believed that the end of the frontier
was the herald of socialism itself). But for Williams the crucial word
is "expansion" and what happened was that America, under Wilson and
other liberals, preferred war and overseas adventure to the task of build–
ing a genuine commonwealth at home.
I think Williams is quite right to emphasize how profoundly, and
unconsciously, imperialist the American attitude has been. But his spe–
cific case that agrarianism was the basis of this development does not
hold up - and it leads him to a one-sided description of the Populists
and other farm radicals.
There is an irony in all this. Some years ago Richard Hofstadter
published his account of the two sides of Populism: the "soft" side
which was radical, ideological and anticommercial; the "hard" side which
was business oriented. As the hard side prevailed over the soft, Hof–
stadter said, there was a transition in farm politics "from pathos to
I
parity." The agrarians, he concluded, shifted from great schemes to con-
trol the volume of money to the very practical interest-politics of con–
trolling the volume of farm products. To many progressive historians
this was a libel of the Populists, the result of essentially conservative
scholarship. But now Williams comes along and, from the Left, is even
more systematic in debunking the Populists than Hofstadter had ever
been. Farmers, of all people, are now made responsible for imperialism.
