PARTISAN REVIEW
501
I
think
Hofstadter and his progressive cntIcs were closer to the
truth than Williams.
It
may well be that the Populist rhetoric served
purposes other than those defined by the words themselves. But one
cannot argue that the farmer "had always seen himself" as a creature
of the marketplace when, in his soft persona, he is so consistently and
vocally hostile to commercialism. For that matter in his
Agrarian So–
cialism
Seymour Martin Lipset used the capitalist character of Amer–
ican (and prairie Canadian ) agriculture to explain leftism in the fields.
There were, Lipset said, three variants of Populism: southern, where
the race issue subverted the class movement of the poor; western min–
ing areas where silver became an ideology; and the single-crop wheat
areas.
The people in this last category produced for a highly unstable
world market. Their lives were therefore extremely insecure and their
political responses were more volatile, and radical, than, say, the dairy
farmers. These were the conditions which led to Populism and they also
provided the basis for the extraordinary strength of Debsian socialism
in the Midwest. To reduce this complex phenomenon to one of its com–
ponents, market orientation, is a great oversimplification. The reality,
I suspect, was much more dialectic and contradictory than the analysis
of it in
The Roots of Modern American Empire,
and Hofstadter (or
his critic, C. Vann Woordward) and Lipset are better guides to it than
Williams.
Secondly, one has to deal with the fact that the decisive trend
in
the last third of the nineteenth century was urban and industrial, not
agricultural. On this count, the frontier thesis about that period lacks
a solid factual basis: for every industrial worker who became a farmer
and was thus able to evade the class struggle in the city, twenty farmers
became urban dwellers. This, to be sure, does not refute Williams's
theory since he is concerned about people's consciousness of reality, not
about the reality itself. And it is true that American workers
thought
that the frontier was an escape and therefore campaigned vigorously for
free land. So Williams can argue that expansionism was a special, if sub–
jective, element in the uniquely American experience. But he cannot
hold that it was the decisive political and economic force in an age
when the United States was becoming the paramount industrial power
of the world.
Earlier agrarian expansionism was one of the crucial economic in–
terests affecting American policy. The Beards discerned an "agricultural
imperialism" under Jefferson and rightly emphasized the specifically cap–
italist character of farming in this country. On this score, Williams him–
self has provided some very illuminating analyses of the Revolutionary
