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HOWARD ZINN
throughout our history. Williams's own book,
The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy,
told us both these things.
Is it, then, the corollaries of this thesis that are important? For
instance, that it was not merely a small elite that pushed and rationalized
expansionism but, in Williams's constantly reiterated phrase, "the
agri–
cultural majority of the country"? Here Williams falls into the common
error of more orthodox historians of assuming that the voices of the
leadership echo those of the mass. His evidence of expansionist senti–
ments is drawn from the statements of leaders of the agrarian move–
ments, and journals of farm opinion. Throughout the book, he seems to
use "agricultural majority" and "farm businessmen" interchangeably.
Any farmer who produces for even the smallest local market is a "farm
businessman" but his documentation is clearly from the bigger farm
businessman. What of the subsistence farmers, migrant farm laborers,
tenant farmers, sharecroppers? What of the black farm population of the
South, which was huge in that period?
But let us assume that the majority of farmers, even
if
not voci–
ferous advocates of expansionism, were a silent majority giving passive
support to the policy. What does this tell us beyond what we know;
that in any era, the tendency is for the ideology of the leadership of
society to pervade the rest of the society, as in the case of workingmen
in our era. and the war in Vietnam. Now if Williams were to show us
not the
fact
of this pervasiveness of ideology, but the
process
by which
it is made to take effect, we might learn something about the creation
of consciousness among masses of people. But we do not get this.
Or take another subthesis of the book: that, from the Revolutionary
period on, the agricultural expansionists "tied freedom for individual
men to the existence of a free marketplace." But this is no more
than
the universal (not just American, but worldwide; not just agrarian, but
industrial) justification for aggression in terms of benefiting other people.
At the very end of his introductory overview, Williams seems to promise
to show us the process by which this profit-taking freedom of the entre–
preneur is confused with the personal freedom of all:
"If
we can under–
stand how we became an imperial metropolis in the name of the free–
dom and prosperity of the country, then perhaps we can free our minds
and our wills to achieve freedom and prosperity without being an
im–
perial society."
But that promise is not fulfilled; instead we get an endless recount–
ing of the
fact
of this confusion, through a series of quoted statements.
The promise, if met, would be most relevant
to
a strategy of social
change; we might learn how to disentangle the complex mythology con-
'r
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