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leaders and unpublished doctoral dissertations. There are enough quota–
tions in which farm businessmen urge expansion into overseas markets to
leave us gasping.
But what does that mass of historical detail accomplish, except as
a barricade of citations against the assaults of fellow professionals, who
are known to get weak in the groin at the sight of manuscript material,
unpublished letters and archival documents?
At the end of his preface, Williams performs the second part
of
the usual sleight-of-hand operation of the historian - the rush from the
historical data back to the theme of relevance, so fast as to obscure the
fact that the connection between the data and the relevant question
is
tenuous. Here are the last six sentences of his preface:
American farmers evolved and agitated just such a militantly
expansionist foreign policy between 1860 and 1893. That policy
played a major causal role in the advent of American imperialism
after 1893, and continued to exert a pervasive influence on Amer–
ican thinking about foreign affairs throughout the twentieth century.
So we return to the relevance of history. American farmers, act–
ing at a time when they composed the great majority of the na–
tion's population, were crucial actors in developing an outlook that
has carried our contemporary industrialized system to a major crisis
in foreign affairs.
If
we can understand that history as a prelude
to changing those ideas and policies, then we nonagrarians who
compose the great majority of today's Americans can give the other
(largely agrarian) peoples of the world a chance to make their
own history by acting on our own responsibility to make our own
history.
If
that be isolationism, then the time has come to make
the most of it.
That passage tells it all: Williams's laudable intent, his historical
findings, and the weak connection between those findings and that intent.
If
our objecnive is "changing those ideas and policies" (so that other peo–
ples of the world will no longer suffer from them) how does the specific
message of this book (that the post-1893 expansionism of American
corporate and metropolitan leaders was preceded by militant expan–
sionist thought among farmers) accomplish that objective? I cannot see
that it does. How does knowing that it was
farmers
as well as indus–
trialists who believed in expansionism add to what we already know:
that the United States was expansionist in its policy, and that this was
supported by an ideology of Manifest Destiny, bringing freedom and
Christianity and democracy to the benighted heathen, Wilsonian ideal–
ism and so on? How does the stress on the pre-1893 period help up?
We already know expansionism was continuous as fact and as ideology
