PARTISAN REVIEW
83
pire" as used in early American political literature. I trust he will
abandon such unscrupulous philological adventures in the future. His
suggestion that Cleveland was acting on behalf of the American business
community in the Venezuela crisis may be sufficiently refuted by re–
minding him of Theodore Roosevelt's comment: "Outside the moneyed
interests in New York and Boston, the American people, like Congress
and the press, are solidly behind the President in defense of the Monroe
Doctrine." His explanation of the fact that the Populist platform of
1892 did not mention foreign markets could hardly be more feeble. In
his book Pl'Ofessor Williams argues for several hundred pages that Amer–
ican agriculturalists in the last half of the nineteenth century thought
of nothing but foreign markets. Then the People's Party arose in 1892
as the national culmination of a generation of agrarian discontent. Nearly
1300 Populist delegates adopted a platform at Omaha in 1892 - a
document of 2500 words into which the embattled farmers poured their
analyses, grievances and nostrums. Yet not a resolution, not a plank, not
a word about foreign markets! Only an historian not merely obsessed
but blinded by his thesis could fail to regard this omission as worthy
of note. That the omission was hardly accidental can be suggested by
the fact that the Populists did not mention foreign markets either in
their platforms of 1896, 1900, 1904 or 1908.
I regret most of all that Professor Williams still flinches from taking
up the very serious intellectual challenge that must result from any
effort to make sense of his position - that is, what he really thinks
about foreign trade.
In
The Roots of the Modern American Empire
he writes as if every expression of a desire
to
sell or exchange domestic
products in other countries were evidence of original sin. Students who
read his tracts come away with the idea that anyone who talks of for–
eign markets must display, by definition, the brand of Old Nick. Yet
Professor Williams continually refuses to tell us what, if he had been
President at any point in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, he would
have done.
If
multilateralism is so vicious, how, if at all, would Professor
Williams have us conduct foreign trade?
I do note a significant admission in a recent letter to the
New York
Review of Books
(28 January 1971). Here Professor Williams, after
his volumes of theology about the iniquity of foreign markets, suddenly
writes: "international trade [i.e., foreign markets] will be an essential
part of a drastically reformed or revolutionary America . . . and the
problems of controlling the political ramifications of major trade pat–
terns are not unique to capitalism."
If
Professor Williams has the in–
tellectual honesty to pursue the implications of this admission, he would
considerably improve both his analysis and his history.
