PARTISAN REVIEW
71
a weakness in the index accounts for his judgment).
On
the basis of
having explored the market expansionist outlook and proposals of various
individuals and groups that began in the late eighteen-eighties
to
co–
alesce as the Populist movement, I open a discussion of that development
on page 329. I first detail the intimate relationship between the sub–
treasury proposal and marketplace expansion. Then I return (pp. 334-35)
to a major theme: the foreign policy aspects of the agitation for silver.
Next (pp. 338-39), I indicate how the Ocala Conference integrated
those issues into its demands, along with the related agitation for trans–
portation reforms and for action against alien landowners. (A digression
on the last point: the antialien ownership movement did involve eco–
nomic motives, but I also relate it to foreign policy because of its rela–
tion to the frontier thesis, and its role in defining the nation's rivals
and in intensifying nationalist spirit. All those considerations involve ideas
and psychology.) Returning to Populist leaders (pp. 345-46), I offer an
explicit formulation of James Kyle's silver-market-expansionist argument,
and a detailed review of Jerry Simpson's involvement with market ex–
pansionism and the frontier thesis.
That is the background for any discussion of the foreign policy
aspects of the Populist platform of 1892 (pp. 352-53). All the issues
and arguments here reviewed were in that platform. I stand on the
evidence, on my analysis and on what I said in the Introduction (p. 34) :
"Much of the Populist program . . . derived from agriculture's long
emphasis on foreign markets." Schlesinger describes all that as trying
"to force the Populist platform of 1892 into the overseas-markets strait–
jacket." I suggest that his analysis of my account is far wider of the
mark than my analysis of what happened.
Schlesinger offers a bit of almost everything. (Some of it is not
worth serious attention, and because of space limitations I am restrict–
ing my comments to points that bear directly on
The Roots.)
Consider,
for example, his extreme literal-mindedness in reading President Grover
Cleveland's 17 December 1895 message on the Venezuela boundary
crisis (p. 509):
if
a document does not contain the word
market,
then
apparently for Schlesinger it cannot be a manifestation of analyzing a
situation (or proposing action) on the basis of a marketplace concep–
tion of the world. (The answer to his rhetorical question, incidentally,
is in my book and in another volume he cites on page 508 - Walt
LaFeber's
The New Empire.)
Or examine Schlesinger's comments on Marx, Marxism and im–
perialism.
If
we go to his citation, the careful study by Shiomo Avineri,
we discover a rather different (and more accurate) presentation of what
Schlesinger calls (p. 507) M'arx's relatively "benign view" of imperial-
