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WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS
effortlessly "relevant," in Zinn's sense of the phrase. The reasons I
decided against that course can be reviewed in terms of Zinn's models
of the Radical and the Professional Historian. I am unconvinced by
his models because they are not models in any rigorous
~nse:
his para–
graph about the Professional, for example, is merely a series of asser–
tions about how a Professional may be presumed to think and act.
In a similar way, his criteria for the Radical have been met in practice
by a number of historians who were or are liberals - and even some
conservatives.
But let me use Zinn's Radical Model (p. 523) as a basis for ex–
plaining why I decided not to do
The Roots
as an essay. First consider
what his Radical is about: to discover and communicate information
and analyses that will help a citizen "gain such an awareness that he
might be induced to change his ideas and work to transform the gov–
ernment's" policies. Then review points three and four: "learning what
interests
were involved" and "learning how the above facts were mys–
tified by national leadership, how they became a generally accepted
mythology...." There is nothing there, or elsewhere in his model, that
blocks Zinn's Radical Historian from concerning himself with
the ex–
isting radical awareness
of his chosen subject, as well as with the liberal
or conservative awareness - or with the unawareness of others.
Now one of the most persistent characteristics of radical awareness
about imperialism involves a propensity to conceptualize in terms of the
powerful minority (or elite) and the manipulated majority. There
is
much evidence for this analysis in many situations, and I have found it
wholly convincing in such cases. But the data will not support that
in–
terpretation in some instances, and in others it is clear that the majority
is being controlled through the manipulation of ideas, ideals, beliefs and
symbols which it has done much to generate and sanctify as dogma.
As I attempted to explain in my preface (not too effectively, it
appears), my continuing research into the growing manipulation of
the majority by the metropolitan minority during the twentieth century
kept turning up agriculturalist rhetoric and action that increasingly
engaged my attention and concern. I came to question the radical (my
own) awareness which held that the agriculturalists were antiimperial–
ists as well as anticolonialists. Which is to say that Zinn's Radical His–
torian is subversive of the radical awareness at any given moment. In–
deed, his model would have no claim on our attention if it did not
generate that result.
The more research I did, the more I became convinced that the
existing radical awareness (as well as that of other groups) was serious–
ly mistaken in this instance. I decided it would
be
useful to present the
