502
MICHAEL HARRINGTON
War in terms of a dispute over markets between the colonists and
the
English. But by the eighteen nineties the money and power of the indus–
trialists was much more important, much more fundamental, than that
of the farmers.
It is, of course, quite true that those capitalists would use any
elements of the American ideology, including the agrarian, that would
serve their own purposes. But that does mean that expansionism was
"a crystallization in industrial form of an outlook that had been de–
veloped in agricultural terms." The test as to which class determines
the basic outline of policy and which one has its rhetoric co-opted is easy
enough: which class is dominant.
If
a sophisticated representative of
the corporations like Mark Hanna (and Williams is extremely helpful
in understanding him) was willing to consider nationalizing the rail–
roads, that hardly made him a Populist or a socialist.
It
simply shows
that shrewd ruling classes are always willing to use the language, and
even parts of the program, of their opponents so long as they bolster
the
status quo.
It is also not crucial that during this period the farmers were the
majority and the urban centers the minority. As I get Williams's im–
plication in stressing this point, that is one more reason for making
the agricultural expansionists cause and the metropolitan expansionists
effect. But the ruling class was hardly chosen on the basis of a head
count.
It
was, of course, a tiny minority (as all ruling classes, except
the as yet unseen socialist nonclass, are). But it commanded the decisive
means of production in the society - which were industrial.
Yet even though the agrarians did not dominate the capitalists of
the cities they did have a fateful influence upon American working-class
history. For in the period when the European proletariat was organizing
itself into the mass socialist parties of the Second International, its
counterparts in the United States were forever being sidetracked by the
panaceas which came from the fields. More often than not in the period
before 1900, laborism was co-opted by the inflationist schemes of the
farmers. But even though the agrarians were, alas, successful in this
case in having a profound influence upon another class, that still did
not make them the basic, creative force in American life, as Williams
argues.
In this assessment of WilIiams's version of tum-of-the-century
im–
perialism, I am obviously much closer to the traditional Marxist analysis
than he is. But when I tum to the application of his thesis to more
recent times, I must fault him for being too much of an orthodox leftist.
And this is quite relevant to> radical politics in America today given
the almost fetishistic status of the word imperialism.
