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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2010
Fifty years have passed since the publication of The tragedy of American Diplomacy, the seminal work by New Left scholar William Appleman Williams. The work fired off one of the most important salvos of historical revisionism, heralding the arrival of the ‘Wisconsin School’ of American historiography. In examining the expansionist and consuming tendencies of American power and capital, Williams ushered in a movement which has left an enduring mark. Despite attacks on its credibility and an assortment of drawbacks, Tragedy remains a strong antidote to triumphalist narratives of American history, and pressingly important in the current political climate.
1 Noted in Greg Grandin, ‘Off dead centre: William Appleman Williams’, The Nation, 20 July 2009.
2 Paul Buhle and Edward Francis Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams: the tragedy of empire (New York, NY, 1995), p. xii; William A. Williams, The tragedy of American diplomacy (Cleveland, OH, 1959). In this piece, references to Tragedy are to the 1959 version unless specifically stated. Herein, the 1972 version is Tragedy 1972.
3 Harry Elmer Barnes, ‘Revisionism: a key to peace’, in James J. Martin, ed., Revisionism: a key to peace and other essays (San Francisco, CA, 1980), pp. 10–11.
4 Discussion on Panel 63: Roundtable: Thinking with Empire in US International History, 27 June 2009, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Conference.
5 Man errs as long as he strives.
6 James Livingston, ‘William Appleman Williams: fifty years after his book on the tragedy of American diplomacy’, History News Network, 4 May 2009, http://hnn.us/articles/81726.html; Reinhold Niebuhr, The irony of American history (New York, NY, 1952).
7 Andrew J. Bacevich, ‘Tragedy renewed: William Appleman Williams’, World Affairs, Winter 2009, www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Winter/full-Bacevich.html. For examples, see Walter LaFeber, The new empire: an interpretation of American expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY, 1963); Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic aspects of New Deal diplomacy (Madison, WI, 1964). An excellent survey is Thompson, John A., ‘William Appleman Williams and the American “empire”’, Journal of American Studies, 7, (1973), pp. 91–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Joseph Siracusa, ‘Relevance of Williams’ Tragedy', H-Diplo, Humanities and Social Sciences Online, Discussion Log, 8 Nov. 2005.
9 Alsop, Joseph, ‘View of another American scandal’, St Petersburg Times, 23 June 1973, p. 21Google Scholara.
10 See R. David Myers, Toward a history of the New Left: essays from within the movement (Brooklyn, NY, 1989).
11 Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: remapping the history of the American Left (London, 1987), pp. 215–16. For a survey of the movement's treatment of history, see Paul Buhle, ed., History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970 (Philadelphia, PA, 1990).
12 Grandin, ‘Off dead centre’.
13 Buhle, Marxism in the United States, pp. 215–16.
14 Norman Graebner and Louis L. Snyder, Cold War diplomacy: American foreign policy, 1945–1960 (Princeton, NJ, 1962).
15 Livingston, ‘William Appleman Williams’.
16 See Binoy Kampmark, ‘The Greeks of old: modelling the British empire for a twenty-first century America’, in Kenneth Christie, ed., United States foreign policy and national identity in the twenty-first century (London, 2008), pp. 101–14.
17 See, for example, Robert Kagan, ‘Armed for reality’, Washington Post, 13 Dec. 2009.
18 Joseph M. Siracusa, New Left diplomatic histories and historians: the American revisionists (updated edn, Claremont, CA, 1993), p. 25.
19 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and social classes, trans. Heinz Norden, ed. Paul M. Sweezy (New York, NY, 1951), notably the essay, ‘Zur Soziologie der Imperialismen’.
20 Williams, Tragedy 1972, p. 38.
21 John Hay to Andrew D. White, Department of State, Washington, 6 Sept. 1899, in Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, 1899, pp. 129–30.
22 Williams, Tragedy, pp. 39–40.
23 Tyrrell, Ian, ‘Making nations/making states: American Historians in the context of empire’, Journal of American History, 86, (1999), pp. 1015–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 1021.
24 Consider the contributions in William Haas, ed., The American empire: a study of the outlying territories of the United States (Chicago, IL, 1940); Tyrrell, ‘Making nations/making states’, p. 1021.
25 See Heiss, Mary Ann, ‘The evolution of the imperial idea and U.S. national identity’, Diplomatic History, 26, (2002), pp. 511–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Richard Warner Van Alstyne, The American empire: its historical pattern and evolution (London, 1960); idem, The rising American empire (Oxford, 1960); Combs, Jerald A., ‘Norman Graebner and the realist view of American diplomacy history’, Diplomatic History, 11, (2007), pp. 251–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Thomas McCormick, China market: America's quest for informal empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago, IL, 1967); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–1966 (New York, NY, 1967).
28 Bruce Cumings, ‘The poverty of theory in diplomatic history’, in Michael J. Hogan, ed., America in the world: the historiography of American foreign relations since 1941 (New York, NY, 1995), p. 37.
29 For the link, see Buhle and Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams, p. xii.
30 Ibid., p. 40; interview in Henry Abelove, et al., eds., and the MARHO – Radical Historians Organization, Visions of history (New York, NY, 1983), p. 129.
31 Quoted in Thomas McCormick, ‘What would William Appleman Williams say now?’ History news network, 24 Sept. 2007, http://hnn.us/articles/42971.html.
32 Most notably, see James Burnham, The managerial class (New York, NY, 1944).
33 Williams, Tragedy 1972, p. 312.
34 G. W. F. Hegel, in E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, eds., Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt, 1970), xv, p. 523, a1196; Rochee, Mark W., ‘Introduction to Hegel's theory of tragedy’, PhaenEx, 1, (2006), pp. 11–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 12.
35 Charles Maier, Among empires: American ascendancy and its predecessors (Cambridge, MA, 2006), p. 3.
36 Niall Ferguson, Colossus: the price of America's empire (New York, NY, 2004).
37 Quoting Kaplan in Greg Grandin, ‘Human rights and empire's embrace: a Latin American counterpoint’, in Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Greg Grandin, Lynn Hunt, and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Human rights and revolutions (2nd edn, Lanham, MD, 2007), p. 192.
38 Robert W. Tucker, The radical left and American foreign policy (Baltimore, MD, 1971), p. 56; Perkins, ‘Tragedy’, p. 6.
39 Staughton Lynd, review of Tucker's The radical left and American foreign policy, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 403 (1972), p. 207.
40 Lundestad, Geir, ‘Moralism, presentism, exceptionalism, provincialism and other extravagances in American writings on the early early Cold War years’, Diplomatic History, 13, (1989), pp. 527–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Williams, Tragedy 1972, pp. 2, 16.
42 Grandin, ‘Off dead centre’.
43 Perkins, Bradford, ‘The tragedy of American diplomacy: twenty-five years after’, Reviews in American History, 12, (1984), pp. 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 2; Williams, Tragedy, p. 35; Williams, Tragedy 1972, p. 45.
44 Perkins, ‘The tragedy’, p. 3.
45 Williams, Tragedy 1972, pp. 1, 307.
46 Ibid., pp. 206–7.
47 Edward Segel, ‘Relevance of Williams’ Tragedy', H-Diplo Debate, 12 Nov. 2005. Debates are available at: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/.
48 Randolph Baxter, ‘Relevance of Williams’ Tragedy', H-Diplo Debate, 10 Nov. 2005.
49 Quotes from Grandin, ‘Off dead centre’.
50 Robert J. Maddox, The New Left and the origins of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 1973), p. 16.
51 Williams, Tragedy, pp. 246–7; Maddox, The New Left, pp. 20–1, 35; Whittle Johnson, review of Maddox, Robert James, ‘The New Left and the origins of the Cold War’, American Political Science Review, 71, (1977), pp. 358–9Google Scholar, at p. 358.
52 Williams, Interview, in Abelove et al., eds., Visions of history, p. 132.
53 Siracusa, ‘The relevance of Williams’ Tragedy'.
54 Note on H-Diplo debate by Kelly J. Shannon, ‘The relevance of Williams’ Tragedy', 10 Nov. 2005.
55 Words of Robert Kagan, quoted in Grandin, ‘Off dead centre’.
56 Marilyn B. Young, The rhetoric of empire, 1895–1901 (Cambridge, MA, 1968).
57 Buhle and Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams, p. xiii.
58 William Appleman Williams, ‘Confessions of an intransigent revisionist’, in Henry W. Berger, ed., A William Appleman Williams reader: selections from his major historical writings (Chicago, IL, 1992), p. 338.
59 Perkins, ‘The tragedy’.
60 William A. Williams to Joseph M. Siracusa, 4 Oct. 1970, copy in Siracusa, New Left diplomatic histories and historians, p. 119.