PARTISAN REVIEW
505
me once again acknowledge his excellent intentions, the very real value
of much of his scholarship and the intellectual courage which takes
him down so many unexplored paths into the American past.
My
com–
plaint is that, for once, reality is not as antisocial and vicious as it might
seem. I hope, in particular, that the young radicals will learn of how
deeply imbued with expansionism this nation was and is, but that they
will also realize that in our past and present there are resources - more
than Williams acknowledges - to fight to change that heritage.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Professor William Appleman W<illiams is, among historians, the
most influential exponent of an economic interpretation of American ex–
pansionism. He is one of the few contemporary American historians who
can be said to have founded a school; and both his own trenchant writings
and the multiplying books of his disciples have had marked impact on
the way younger historians think about American foreign policy.
In earlier works, Professor Williams placed the motives of expan–
sionism in an industrial context. The American quest for empire, he
argued, had arisen out of the need to provide markets for the surplus
generated by industrial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century;
the policy declared in the Open Door notes was based on the belief that
capitalism could continue to work only if the market for manufactures
continued to expand. In
The Roots of the Modem American Empire,
Professor Williams now adds his later view that the expansion'ist outlook
adopted by businessmen in the eighteen nineties had actually been for–
mulated a good while before by agricultural interests, acting on the con–
viction that their own prosperity required foreign markets.
Cotton, of course, had long depended on exports; and during and
after the Civil War, American commercial agriculture as a whole started
to become habituated to overseas sales. The depression of the early eigh–
teen seventies intensified the need for foreign markets. Then the export
boom of the late seventies confirmed the agrarian faith in overseas ex–
pansion. It was this agrarian pressure, Professor Williams contends, that
