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William Appleman Williams (1921–1990) was one of the 20th century's most prominent historians of American diplomacy. His major body of writings was published while he was on the faculty of the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Williams tacked a course as a historian which departed from traditional history. Whereas many U.S. historians wrote the story of the U.S. in terms of the spread of freedom, Williams argued that the U.S. had also spread as an empire. Williams's "central conception of American diplomacy," one critic has written, is that it was shaped "by the effort of American leaders to evade the domestic dilemmas of race and class through an escapist movement: they used world politics, he feels, to preserve a capitalist frontier safe for America's market and investment expansion." In this regard, Williams's understanding of American history owes a considerable debt to Frederick Jackson Turner and the first generation of American progressive historians. Because his history of American diplomacy pivots on John Hay's Open Door Notes to China--at around the same time as the closing of the internal American frontier--Williams's larger argument is sometimes referred to as the "Open Door thesis." Williams maintained that the United States was as much responsible for the Cold War as was the Soviet Union. Williams argued that American politicians, fearful of a loss of markets in Europe, had exaggerated the threat of world domination from the Soviet Union. Amid much criticism, Williams made no moral distinction between the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin and the democratically elected leadership of U.S. presidents. Williams inspired a generation of historians to re-think the Cold War, including Lloyd Gardner and Walter LaFeber, who along with Williams argued that the Vietnam War was neither democratizing nor liberating but was an attempt to spread American dominance. Williams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is often described as one of the most influential books written on American foreign policy, particularly by academics on the political left. His work has also been praised highly by libertarians on the right such as Murray Rothbard.
Biography Williams was born and raised in the small town of Atlantic, Iowa. He earned a degree in engineering at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. After serving in the Pacific in World War II, he moved to University of Wisconsin-Madison to begin graduate studies. He earned a Master's Degree and a PhD there and came under the influence of the great historians Fred Harvey Harrington, Merle Curti, and Howard K. Beale. After teaching at various other colleges, he returned to Madison in 1957 to teach in the History Department. After witnessing the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s in Madison and tiring of the grind of teaching graduate students, he moved to the Oregon State University in 1968 to spend the rest of his career teaching undergraduates. He served as President of the Organization of American Historians in 1980. He retired in 1988 and died in Oregon in 1990. -His father was a stunt pilot who died in a plane crash when Williams was ten. Criticism To some degree, Williams's economic interpretation of American diplomacy has been criticized on the same grounds as Charles A. Beard's larger economic analysis of American history. In 1974, for instance, N. Gordon Levin Jr. compared Williams to Beard and argued that the Open Door model "is inadequate because it insists on forcing all political-moral and strategic motivations" for American foreign policy into "the Procrustean confines" of relentless economic expansion. Another serious critique of Williams's work was offered by Robert W. Tucker in 1971, followed by Robert James Maddox in 1973, and by Howard Schonberger in 1975. Tucker’s arguments challenged those of Williams by arguing that United States foreign policy had been generally passive, rather than aggressive, before 1939. Tucker’s arguments were elaborated and expanded later by other scholars. Maddox in The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War criticized Williams, Lloyd Gardner, and other revisionist scholars for pervasive misuse of historical source documents and for a general lack of objectivity. In 1986, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. criticized Williams from a liberal perspective in The Cycles of American History. Revival Some of Williams' ideas about the imperial nature of American foreign policy have been reivived by Andrew Bacevich, who uses them as a starting point for his own critique of US policies since the end of the Cold War in American Empire. Bibliography | ||||||||
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