PAR.TISAN R.EVIEW
519
sidered on its own merits and not as part of an argument over foreign
policy. The example of the Soviet Union leaves one cold about the pro–
position that the abolition of capitalism would affect impulses toward
imperialism; for no change in the system of ownership will reduce the
power of the professional military in a time of accelerating nuclear tech–
nology and chronic international crisis. In his passion to make history
relevant, Professor Williams ends by abandoning both history and rel–
evance.
As an account of the rise of the overseas-markets thesis in nine–
teenth-<:entury America,
The Roots of the Modern American Empire
is impressive. As an account of the roots of the modern American em–
pire, it is pretentious, tendentious and shallow.
Howard Zinn
William Appleman Williams was writing eye-opening accounts
of American expansionism while marooned alone for many years in a
sea of conservative apologia and liberal timidity. (C. Wright Mills was
on another island; even as outcasts they were kept apart by disciplinary
rules.) That took courage. But with civilization at the crest of hypocrisy,
the combat must be renewed every time the sun rises, and so Williams
is still grappling with the question of how to write history that blows
our minds clean of jingoism, that suggests we might live differently.
His job is complicated by an odd juncture of events: that he is
no longer alone, and a flotilla of radical historians is pushing hard ahead,
with cries for "relevance" from all sides; that the historical establish–
ment, always nervous, reacts to this with their only real defense,
scru–
tinizing the new radical history to see if "professional standards" are
met (Oscar Handlin wrote such a haughty, empty review of Williams's
The Contours of American History
for the
American Historical Review
a few years back ).
I am only guessing that these are the pressures on Williams. In any
