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HOWARD ZINN
one (by showing how, in the past, old institutions have fallen, how move–
ments for change have succeeded, how consciousness has been trans–
formed) .
Much of the literature of "revisionist" history of American foreign
policy has aimed at one or more of the four points above, thus helping
to change the public consciousness. We might cite some outstanding ex–
amples: D. F. Fleming's
The Cold War And Its Origins,
Gabriel Kolko's
The Politics of War
and
The Roots of American Foreign Policy,
Harry
Magdoff's
The Age of Imperialism,
David Horowitz's
The Free World
Colossus,
Gar Alperovitz's
Atomic Diplomacy,
I.
F. Stone's
The Hidden
History of the Korean War.
And William Appleman Williams's
The
Tragedy of American Diplomacy.
In the second model (which I will term the Professional Model),
we would follow a different procedure. We would acknowledge in some
general way the need to make the world better, to eliminate war, ag–
gression, poverty, intolerance, alienation, and express the hope that his–
tory may help us in that purpose. Then we would turn to (or rather,
jump
to, because if we only turned a bit, we might easily, by turning
again slightly, remind ourselves of our original aim) some specific his–
torical "question" and amass huge piles of data around it. We would
easily forget our original aim (changing things) because specific pieces
of the data, and the questions we posed, would be
interesting.
The am–
biguity of the concept "interesting" would help us make our jump,
be–
cause we would have started with one meaning of the word (serving
an interest, such as social change) and ended up working on another
meaning (satisfying our intellectual curiosity, filling a gap in the profes–
sional literature). The greater the documentation in answering the sec–
ond interest, the easier to hide the lack of connection with the first
interest. The result is to fulfill Tolstoy's definition of the historian as
a deaf man answering questions no one has asked. (Except that, as Tol–
stoy was coming to the end of his life, the professional historian emerged,
to ask those questions himself, and thus to give work to a new, enor–
mous priesthood.)
In
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy,
and in other of his writ–
ings, William Appleman Williams met the first model- the Radical
Historian. In
The Roots of the Modern American Empire,
it seems to
me he more closely fits the second model- the Professional Historian.
He inundates us with data to answer professionally interesting ques–
tions: who was expansionist first, the agricultural businessman or the
industrial businessman? when did expansionist ideology become impor–
tant, before or after 1890? But what does this do for us? We know that
the market economy of the modern world, based as it is on national
