Grandin Greg - The Contours of American History

First published in 1961
Published with a new introduction by Verso 2011

New foreword Greg Grandin 2011

The new foreword by Greg Grandin appeared in a slightly different form in the Nation (July 1, 2009) and is republished here with the kind permission of that publication.

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The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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In memory of my father, and for my mother; parents who gave me by example the wisdom and the life inherent in both meanings of Napoleons neglected axiom:

You commit yourself, and thenyou see.

One may easily see history as only a succession of chances or conjuncturesbut, if so, there is nothing to study, there are no correlations to be made between events, and in fact there is only a rope of sand, a series of non sequiturs which one can do nothing but narrate .

But it is the optical illusion or the occupational disease of the research student to imagine that only the details matter, and that the details are all of equal valuethat the statesman has no cohesive purpose but is merely a bundle of contradictionsand that everything is under the rule of chance, under the play of absurdly little chanceshistory reducing itself at the finish to an irony of circumstance.

Herbert Butterfield, 1959

I have always thought that a basic division among human beings is between those preoccupied with the question How and those preoccupied with the question Why. This is a great How age. But Why remains unanswered, and will doubtless in due course again claim attention.

Malcolm Muggeridge, 1958

The schizophrenic discipline of the Historian is a harrowing way to stay sane.

William Appleman Williams,
The Roots of the Modern American Empire

Why William Appleman Williams, for Gods sake? asked Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in 1999 when he learned that Williams The Contours of American History had been voted one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library. Schlesinger had spent the better part of half a century fighting the influence of Williams, describing him in 1954 as pro-communist to the president of the American Historical Association. In 1959 the New York Times picked Schlesingers The Coming of the New Deal and Williams The Tragedy of American Diplomacy as best books of the year, calling the first, in a nod to a liberalism still vital, a spirited study and the second a free-swinging attack on U.S. foreign policy, hinting at the raucous dissent to come. But forty years later, Schlesinger considered the fight won. The victory of the United States in the cold war had disproved Williams jeremiads against an American empire careening toward disaster, while the concomitant collapse of the left had confirmed Schlesingers position as curator of Americas historical sensibilityliberal, democratic, pragmatic. Schlesinger was one of the Modern Librarys jurors, and his own The Age of Jackson made the cut. Still, he couldnt keep Williams, dead for nearly a decade, out of the pantheon. For Gods sake.

Williams was not the first historian to identify the United States as an empire, yet he was unique in linking domestic disquiet to a long history of expansion, which in his grandest formulationThe Contours of American History, reissued here on the fiftieth anniversary of its publicationhe traced back to beyond Englands Glorious Revolution, making him one of Americas most consequential dissident intellectuals. His early criticisms of containmentWashingtons post-World War II efforts to isolate the Soviet Union and limit the spread of communismnearly got him blacklisted (the manuscript of Contours was subpoenaed by House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, perhaps the only work of interpretative history to have been so cited). They also got him labeled a moral relativist when in fact he was an ethical absolutist: what is good for the United States is a non-negotiable good for them. And if all that the rumors of catastrophe mean, he said on Americas bicentennial, is that the barbarians will land at Plymouth Rock, I can only say that I will give over in peace. They would move us off dead center.

By this, Williams meant breaking the cycle in which outward movement through territorial conquest, market expansion or war becomes the default solution to all social ills, and he spent most of his career trying to identify the problem that expansion deferred. At his most polemical and Freudian, tendencies that escalated in tandem with the Vietnam War, he argued that Americans denied and sublimated their violence by projecting it upon those they defined as inferior. And he was acutely attuned to how moralizing about the failures of other countries could be an excellent career move. Williams is considered the founder of New Left diplomatic history. Yet he should be more aptly remembered as a theorist of liberalism; his most important contributionwhat makes his work so enduringly generative but at the same time often misunderstoodwas to identify the arena of foreign relations as where normative ideas concerning how best to organize society got worked out. In particular, Williams argued that over the long course of U.S. history, liberalisms prime contradictionsthe tension between community and private property, individualism and society, virtue and self-interestwas harmonized through constant expansion, first territorially then economically. Empire, he once wrote, was the only way to honor avarice and morality. The only way to be good and wealthy.

William Appleman Williams was born in 1921 in the wheat and oat town of Atlantic, Iowa, founded after the Civil War and named, according to the historian, by a flip of a coin because it sat halfway between the two coasts. He credited his interest in politics and history to an underappreciated prairie cosmopolitanism (his mother and grandmothers were liberated women), one as open to the worlds ideas as the local farmers were, via the Rock Island Railroad, to the continents two great ocean markets. Educated at Missouris Kemper Military Academy, he graduated from Annapolis and then served in the Pacific in World War II. At wars end, the Navy sent him to Corpus Christi, Texas, to train as a pilot. But in retaliation for his work with the NAACPwhich, with the help of local communists, was taking on General Motors, King Ranch and the local Catholic Churchhe was ordered back to the Pacific to take part in Operation Crossroads, an experiment that entailed the nuclear destruction of Bikini Atoll to test the effects of radiation on military personnel and equipment. A wartime back injury prevented his participation, sparing him the illnesses that afflicted many Crossroads alumni but leaving him in a shoulder-to-thigh cast for months. With little to do except read, he deepened his interest in history and philosophy. Shortly after he left Texas, an African-American activist was murdered. Williams often cited this and other instances of routine violence that demands for equality were met with, as well as his close-call escape from Crossroads, as contributing to his radicalization. Yes, sir, that will make a socialist out of you, he once said to an interviewer, referring to the killing, unless you are dead.