University Place

The Orbiting Astronomical Observatory

Our guest today, our lead speaker today, is Andrew Bacevich. He is a professor of International Relations and history at Boston University. A graduate of the US Military Academy. He received his PhD in American Diplomatic History from Princeton. Dr. Bacevich is the author of The Limits of Power: American Exceptionalism. His previous books include American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy, The Imperial Tense: Problems and Prospects of the American Empire, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, and The Long War: A New History of US National Security Policy since World War II. His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and general interest publications ranging from The Wilson Quarterly and Foreign Affairs to The Nation, The American Conservative and The New Republic. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, etc. Alfred “Al” McCoy is the JRW Smail Professor of History at the UW Madison. His books include the Politics of Heroin, which uncovered CIA complicity in the global drug trade, and A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, exploring the impact on America of a half century of propagating and practicing psychological torture.

His latest book, just released, I mean the ink is still wet, just released by the UW press and available here for the first time, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State, will prove to be another major contribution by this important scholar of empire and public intellectual. My dear friend Paul Buhle was a senior lecturer at Brown University and in retirement has returned to Madison where he earned a PhD at the university, at the UW, where he studied with Bill Williams, among others. His 40 published works include a dozen comic art volumes, five biographies and a book series on the victims of the Hollywood blacklist. He’s the coauthor with Edward Rice-Maxim of, folks you should check it out really, this remarkable biography William Appleman Williams: Learning From History. Again, thank you for coming, thank you for giving me this privilege and I give you Andrew Bacevich. (applause)

>> Andrew Bacevich: Thank you, very much, for the opportunity to make this presentation. I think that the title of my talk is, Al, correct me if I’m wrong, “What Williams Got Right and What Williams Got Wrong.”
>> Al McCoy: That’s your title.

>> Bacevich: That’s my title. I’ll do my best to focus on that. And what we’re going to do is, and you can set your watches and you can tell me if I miss, but I’m supposed to talk for about 30 minutes, and then each of my colleagues are going to talk for about 15 minutes, and then the balance of the time we’ll have for discussion. So my clock is running. The greatness of William Appleman Williams lay as a historian not as a prophet and not as a political philosopher. His frequently voiced predictions of doom, centered on visions of the world engulfed in a fiery inferno, have not yet come to pass. His proposed antidote to the pathologies afflicting his fellow citizens, centered on his obsessive yearning for community, inspired a series of proposals for political decentralization that were to be charitable, wildly unrealistic, where not simply fanciful. Now you can’t be doing this.
>> Paul Buhle: I know.
>> Bacevich: Because I’m going to start saying stuff and you’re going to shake your head no.
>> Buhle: I know. I’ll just wince quietly. (laughter)

>> Bacevich: Even as an historian his greatness was confined to a specific sphere. Although a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and a decorated veteran of the Pacific War, Williams proved to be an unreliable interpreter of contemporary military developments. Intensely preoccupied with the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, he missed a central truth of the post-war era. The invention of the ultimate weapon did not mark warfare’s arrival at some ultimate destination. A capacity to reinvent war, imparted to the American expansionist impulse, restorative powers, that Williams failed to appreciate. Military defeat did not produce a reevaluation of first principles, it merely promoted efforts to devise new techniques for deployment on the next battlefield. Writing in 1972, Williams felt certain that Vietnam “had set the outer limits of the American empire.” In fact, the reverse was true. Defeat in Vietnam produced in short-order a burst of military intervention, excuse me, military innovation that within two decades had revived the American appetite for expansionism. Likewise, as a practitioner of what scholars today refer to as international history or global history, Williams’ contributions do not stand the test of time. Granted, for Williams, global history never qualified as a central concern. Still there hovers in the background of his writings, especially when treating the 20th century, the image of what he called a world in revolution.

For Williams, social revolution defined central reality of the age. The point was one to which he returned time and again. In China, Cuba, the Soviet Union and dozens of other countries, powerful movements on behalf of radical change, inspired by collectivist or Marxian ideals with which Williams himself sympathized, were having a transformative affect. The challenge facing Americans, said Williams, was to get with the program or risk being left behind. From our present vantage point, we can make two points about the social revolutions of the past century. First, without exception they failed utterly to make good on the ideals and expectations that inspired them. Second, to suggest that social revolutions defined the 20th century is to give short shift to a myriad of other factors that shaped the war in — of the era. Resources and technology, race and religion, culture and sexuality and not least of all the age old competition for wealth and power. In short, Williams both misread the revolutions of his time and attributed to them greater significance than they deserved. Yet however much Williams may have misconstrued the evolution of modern war and the changing nature of the global order, the fact remains that he got his own country and his own people exactly right.

And these were, after all, the subjects about which he cared most passionately. Williams sought, above all, to explain the emergence of the United States as a global superpower. A breathtaking feat accomplished over a startlingly brief expanse of time. He dismissed out of hand what he called the myth that the American empire just grew like top seed. Or that Providence had mystically bestowed greatness on a people who simply wanted to tend to their own affairs. He argued that the United States had acquired power because Americans consciously sought power and relentlessly pursued power. Ideology blended with political economy to form the wellsprings of American expansionism. Williams’ singular contribution was to lay bare the typical relationship between freedom, abundance and empire throughout US history. Sustaining American freedom required ever increasing prosperity. Enhancing American prosperity required territory, resources, markets and influence.

The resulting American imperium, continental during the 19th century, global during the 20th century, derived its moral justification from the conviction that the United States had erected a uniquely righteous empire of liberty that expressed histories or God’s intensions. Here lay the real genius of William Appleman Williams. Typically classified as a diplomatic historian, he was actually, to use one of his favorite terms, the great interpreter of the American –. As depicted by Williams in books such as The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and other writings, this — consists of several elements, among them the following. A tendency to equate anti-colonialism with opposition to empire as such, thereby accrediting the United States a frequent opponent of formal empire with possessing a steadfastly anti-imperial outlook. A second element, an insistence that American values are universal values, leading to this corollary, and I’m quoting Williams, that other peoples cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they go about it in the same way as the United States. Third element, a self-serving commitment to the principle of self-determination, informed by the conviction, again quoting Williams, that all peoples must ultimately self-determine themselves in the American way if America itself is to be secure and prosperous. Fourth element, a pension for externalizing evil, fostering on inclination to believe that trials and tribulations at home have their roots abroad. Fifth element, a reflexive predilection for demonizing adversaries so that opponents of the United States are not merely wrong or misguided but are, by definition, beyond the pale. Sixth element, a belief that the American economy cannot function absent opportunities for external expansion, and that the American political system cannot function absent prosperity.

That stagnation would foster internal unrest which would threaten stability and raise, again quoting Williams, the specter of chaos. Seventh, a steady, if unacknowledged, drift towards militarization as policymakers increasingly define safety in terms of conquest or, at any rate, of domination. And finally, an unshakeable faith in American exceptionalism and American beneficence. At the end of the 1890s, a decade of severe economic crisis, this American — reached a crossroads of sorts in the wake of the Spanish American War, launched in a fever of anti-colonialism, and yet culminating in conquest and annexations, a freshly embolden United States government promulgated the terms under which it expected all powers henceforth to conduct themselves in relation to China, then very much the target of imperialist exploitation. This announcement came in the form of the famous open door notes. Which Williams interprets not simply as an expression of US policy toward China but as a sophisticated articulation of a novel grand strategy. Here for Williams was the master key. An approach to policy that aimed, again quoting, to establish the conditions under which America’s preponderant economic power would extend the American system throughout the world without the embarrassment and inefficiency of traditional colonialism. The strategy of the open door was not the work of cynics or hypocrites. Policymakers, Williams wrote, saw no contradiction between American ideals and the realty of US policy.

On the contrary, he wrote, quoting, they had, the policymakers, had internalized and had come to believe the theory, the necessity and the morality of open door expansionism. Nor was US strategy a plot conceived by the few and imposed on the many. Williams took pains to emphasize that the open door and the — from which it derived both reflected a broad-based political and popular consensus. Those who formulated policy, he insisted, acted in accordance with an outlook that had been created and accepted by the majority. A citizenry unhappy with the results, therefore had, quote, no elite or other scapegoat to blame. They had only themselves, quote, to change and to confront. His own thinking about what that change ought to entail was nothing if not heterodox. Williams, the self-styled radical, was keen to see Americans shed their preoccupation with acquisitive individualism to join in what he saw was a worldwide march towards socialism. Williams, the deeply closeted conservative, wrote admiringly of colonial era advocates of a Christian commonwealth. Here, he believed, lay a distinctly American model of community.

Williams, the product of a small town Midwestern upbringing, wistfully hoped that his fellow citizens might resurrect through remembered values of rural Iowa during the great depression. Williams the populist, who in retirement preferred playing pool with loggers and truck drivers to hanging around with the learned or the well-heeled, found among working stiffs an authenticity absent from the more sophisticated clients. In blue-collar enclaves, remnants of what America might have become, had it rejected the allure of empire, survived, he believed. In realty, Americans, to include loggers and truck drivers, — only passing interest in any of these prescriptions. The great majority remained committed to acquisitive individualism which defined their commonplace understanding of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. As a consequence, most saw little need to change. By the time Williams died the successful resolution of the Cold War had vanquished any lingering doubts about the superiority of liberal democratic capitalism. The narrative of US foreign policy had not ended in tragedy, as he had famously forecast, it had produced a triumph. In fact, however, post-Cold War triumphalism obscured a more complex reality. Call it variations on a theme.

Instead of access to Asian markets, access to Persian Gulf oil was becoming the main issue. The open door notes of 1899-1900 found their functional equivalent in the Carter Doctrine promulgated in 1980. In place of China, US policymakers were soon to fixate on Iraq. Reprising the role of Woodrow Wilson, the most eloquent exponent of America’s liberation theology, came the unlikely figure of George W. Bush who outdid Williams himself in expounding on history’s, excuse me, outdid Wilson himself in expounding on history’s purpose and in identifying America as history’s anointed agent. President Bush came to believe, and in my judgment there is little reason to question the sincerity of his belief, he came to believe that providence had charged the United States with insuring that, quote, “the untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners in our world.” Translated into specific geographic terms, the world’s darkest corners coincided with the furthest reaches of the Islamic world which not coincidentally contained the world’s most significant deposits of fossil fuels. Oil, Williams wrote with considerable — in 1980, is not the primary cause of empire. He continued, it is not even the principle definition of contemporary empire, but it is the slickest way we now lie to ourselves about the nature of empire. In our own day the lie finds expression in the global war on terror. Justified as a defensive response to an unprovoked attack launched on September 11, 2001, by jihadists hell-bent on imposing — law on all mankind. In fact, the conflict did not erupt without warning on 9/11, as Williams would surely have been among the first to point out.

Historians will long argue about when to date the beginning of this war, the toppling of the Ottomans during World War I, allowing Great Britain and France to carve up the Middle East, certainly qualifies as one candidate. Franklin Roosevelt’s deal with the Saudi Arabian king, Ibn Saud, during World War II. Security guarantees for the royal family in exchange for privileged accessed to oil might also vie for the honor along with the creation of Israel in 1948. But to pretend that the conflict began with the attack on the World Trade Center is to indulge in pointless self-deception. Furthermore, the murders perpetrated on 9/11, however vile and inexcusable, were hardly unprovoked. The attackers killed innocence but to claim for the United States itself the status of innocent victim is manifestly absurd. After several decades of jockeying, which at different times saw the United States alternately at odds with and cozying up to, most of the regions significant players, Libya and Egypt, Jordan and Israel, Iran and Iraq, the United States had long since forfeited any claim of innocence. Although to cite any single moment when America forfeited its virtue would be to oversimplify, Williams might have pointed to the overthrow of Iran’s prime minister, Mossadegh, engineered by the CIA in 1953. Finally to pretend that the aims of the United States in prosecuting — defensive is simply silly, as Williams himself certainly appreciated. The concept of defensive war is alien to the American military tradition.

The conflict in which the United States finds itself currently embroiled, which since 2001 alone has seen US forces invade Iraq and Afghanistan while also conducting operations in places as far field as Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and the Philippines, by no means qualifies as an exception. The United States is engaging in its long war not to avert the rise of a — but for the same reason that it has gone to war so many times in the past. To assert dominion that American political leaders view as strategically critical. We’ve persuaded ourselves that American prosperity, and therefore American freedom, demands that the United States must determine the fate of those energy-rich precincts. At a press conference on September 18, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated the matter succinctly, and I quote, we have a choice, either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we choose the latter. Updated and adapted to a new setting and a new era, the strategy to the open door has found the new leash on life in the long war. There is an important distinction, however. As originally conceived, the open door strategy established rules of a contest the Americans were confident they could win. Given the economic preponderance and self-sufficiency enjoyed by the United States to the first half of the 20th century, Americans welcomed the chance to engage in a global competition for markets. The game was rigged in our favor.

This is no longer the case. Today Americans buy more than they sell, and they borrow to cover the difference. Today, too, strategic self-sufficiency has given away to strategic dependence. Notably so with regard to oil. To the extent that the economic game is rigged, the rules now favor others. Ironically, given the providence of the open door, those rules favor the Chinese above all. Yet if economic competition is no longer America’s strong suit, there remains one arena in which the United States still retains a distinctive advantage. The global projection of armed force. As a consequence, the revised and updated strategy of the open door deemphasizes commerce in favor of coercion. The United States once sought to change the way they live where they were the inhabitants of Latin America, Asia and Europe by selling them the products of factories back in Detroit and Chicago.

Today the United States is engaged in an effort to change the way they live where they are the inhabitants of the Islamic world by relying on the United States Army and the United States Marine Corps to do the job. Now setting moral issues aside, and I believe that moral considerations as a practical matter never figure more than marginally in the formulation of policy, little of this would matter if the refurbished and militarized strategy of the open door now directed toward the greater Middle East produced the results promised by Rumsfeld and others. Unfortunately, they don’t. The originally conceived open door worked brilliantly, enhancing American power and abundance. The revised open door is squandering American power while exacerbating American problems with debt and dependence. The Iraq war does not provide a model for how to transform the greater Middle East. Inspired by a determination to avoid at all costs modifying our own way of life, the long war is a fool’s errand. However impressive, US military power turns out to be an inadequate substitute for America’s lost economic preponderance. Were he alive today, Williams would surely counsel against blaming our predicament against George W. Bush and his lieutenants, on the neoconservatives, on big oil or on the military industrial complex. To search for scapegoats is to evade the larger truth.

The actual imperative remains what it was in the 1960s, in his words, Americans need to confront and change themselves. Unhappily, they wouldn’t then and we won’t now. We will instead cling to the — that has for so long kept us in its thrall. As a consequence what Williams referred to as the tragedy of American diplomacy promises to continue. With the people of the United States even now oblivious to the fate that awaits them. Thank you, very much. (applause) >> Alfred McCoy: This is, as some of you may know, the 50th anniversary of William Appleman Williams’ most famous book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. And in preparing my talk today I looked on my book shelf, where it has resided for the past 45 years, and I found my graduate school copy marked in magic marker. This has been a seminal volume that influenced me very directly. And for those of you who know this book even a little bit, you’ll see the traces of Williams’ arguments in what I’m writing even as I try to move a bit beyond him.

So let me talk about the character of the US imperial state, moving beyond William Appleman Williams. At what might be midpoint in America’s century of global dominion, from 1950 to say, oh, maybe 2050, it seems about time to inquire into the character of the most powerful empire in the history of humankind. To ask, at long last, what kind of empire is this American imperium? American historians have spent so many decades in denial about the reality of this US empire that we still understand surprisingly little about its conduct, its character or its consequences for American democracy. Some 50 years ago at the peak of the Cold War consensus about America’s unique exemption from the curse of empire, Williams dared to dissent, arguing that Washington was pursuing a new form of non-territorial global hegemony that he branded open door imperialism. So controversial was this thesis and so embattled were its proponents, that Williams and his allies in the Wisconsin School of Diplomatic History devoted their careers to documenting just the broad outlines of American hegemony in China, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. Now while American scholars have spent the last 50 years forging ever more sophisticated studies of their former empires, every imaginable attribute, Americans have remained locked in a rather rudimentary binary of affirmation or denial. Empire, yes. Empire, no. Yes, you are. No, you’re not.

Etc. It’s gone on like that. It goes on like that even to this day. To fill this void between the enormity of America’s empire and the paucity of its study, five years ago a working group here at UW Madison assembled 50 scholars from four continents for a series of seminars on the nature of the US empire in Madison, Manila, Sydney and Barcelona. In pursuit of this project, our empires project asked three questions that even the most American historians have long failed to ask or answer. What is the essential character of this American empire, that is, how does it manage its administration, pacification, personnel and, most importantly, its information. Is there some defining attribute or array of attributes that distinguishes this US imperium from the other 70 empires that preceded it in world history. And then, very importantly, what impact has this exercise of empire abroad had upon the formation of American state and the quality of American democracy here at home. In sum, the scholars in our empires project are trying, individually and collectively, to address these critical questions that will one day allow us a fuller, deeper understanding of the rise, the reign and, yes, the decline of American power. At the broadest level this empires project is seeking to fulfill the intellectual and moral charge that Williams gave his historians in the introduction to his landmark book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.

He wrote, history is a mirror in which if we are honest enough we can see ourselves as we are as well as the way we would like to be. To see ourselves as we are. To begin at the beginning of America’s imperial history most mainstream US historians dismiss the events of 1898 and their aftermath as an aberration, an exception, to an American exceptionalism that freed this nation from the taint of empire. By contrast back in 1899, as the US army plunged into the bloody pacification of the Philippines, a group of American intellectuals known as anti-imperialists became deeply concerned about the impact of empire upon domestic democracy. The eminent and very conservative Yale sociologist, William Graham Sumner, warned that, quote, “the inevitable affect of imperialism on democracy was to lessen liberty and require discipline.” It will necessitate stronger and more elaborate governmental machinery for a militarism that will slowly degrade America’s Constitutional protections. Similarly in a imagined history of 20th century America published its own fictional point in the far off future, Mark Twain wrote, quote, “the lust for conquest had long ago destroyed the great American republic because trampling upon the helpless abroad had — by a natural process to endure with apathy the like at home.” But the impact of empire was less direct and much more profound than even these critics could have imagined. Picking up where Mark Twain and William Appleman Williams left off, our empires project published a collection of essays earlier this year, titled Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, trying to explore the impact of this early empire here at home. After surveying the US colonial governance in Puerto Rico, the Philippines and points in between, this volume, which we dedicated to Williams, reaches four conclusions that are noteworthy I think for even the most — of American historians. First and most fundamentally, we found that the events of 1898 were not an inconsequential aberration, but were instead catalytic in shaping the character of the American state both at home and abroad. Second and significantly, this empire violence scattered halfway around the globe, strained the resources of the US state, making colonialism a crucible for forging an activist American statecraft in fields such as public health, internal security and social engineering.

Next, a new historical actor emerges from the pages of this history. A transnational apparatus that we call the US imperial state, fusing public and private institutions, foreign and domestic allies, hard and soft power, military officers and civilian contractors to become a uniquely agile apparatus for global governance. Fourth and finally, these essays invited deeper understanding for empire as a veritable crucible of historical change, plunging both colonizer and colonized into this searing heat of a promethean fire that consumes older cultures and kingdoms as it creates new nations, new state forms and geopolitical systems. In sum, just as war tempers army in the crucible of combat, so empire recasts government in new, otherwise unimagined forms. In my own parallel study of US counter-insurgency in the Philippines throughout the 20th century, I tried to show how the security operations of this US imperial state has simultaneously suppressed social change abroad and damaged civil liberties here at home. The colonial security apparatus that we use to pacify the Philippines had its origins in what I call America’s first information revolution. During one extraordinary decade, the 1870s to the 1880s, this information revolution arose from a synergy of innovations in the management of textual, statistical and visual data that created, for the first time, the technological capacity for the surveillance of the many, literally millions, rather than just a few, a defining attribute of the modern state. But on the eve of empire in 1898, Congress, the courts and Constitution have restrained any federal application of these innovations, leaving the US government with literally zero capacity for law enforcement or domestic security operations of any sort. After 1898 however, the conquest of the Philippines made the United States, for the first time, an imperial power unleashing the potential of this new information revolution. The first US governor of the Philippines, William Howard Taft, used his extraordinary powers to create a system of total information control to suppress political opposition to US rule.

Drawing on innovations from America’s information revolution, Taft established the Philippines constabulary which was the first US federal agency with a fully developed cover operational capacity. It monitored the press, read the mails, penetrated Filipino society with a pervasive surveillance. By 1920 the other major US colonial security agency, the Manila metropolitan police, had files and photographs for 70% of the total population of the capital Manila. This application of information to pacification was but one manifestation of a distinctively American approach to empire. While Europe gained empire operated under a costly command style bureaucracy, American colonialism employed a decentralized market model, responding to problems by mobilizing a cadre of contractors for quick, cost-effective solutions. If the Europeans prized erudition, Americans preferred information accessible and succinct. Instead of an emerging in the cultural artifacts of the Philippine past, Americans adapted their information technology for hasty, inherently superficial surveys of the Philippine present through — mapping, census taking, geography, photography, scientific taxonomy and police surveillance. If the prime aim of the American state is, as James Scott argues, to establish metrics for rendering a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format, then US imperial rule was unrivaled in its ability to read alien terrains through such surface reconnaissance. Yet this superficiality, this shallowness should not be mistaken for one of seriousness. For embedded within this seemingly surface engagement was a relentless drive for omniscience, even omnipotence.

With a capacity of challenge for a lethal response unchecked by any empathy that might have come from a deeper, cultural engagement. This comparison between past and present also produces some broad cautionary lessons about the domestic costs of these overseas occupations. In both the Philippines and Iraq, the US military, trust into these crucibles of counter-insurgency, developed innovative methods of social control that had a negative impact on civil liberties here at home. As the US military plunged into a 15-year pacification of the Philippines after 1898 its colonial security agencies fused domestic data management to forge a powerful secret police. During the rapid mobilization for World War I here in the United States, these colonial precedents migrated homeward through the invisible capillaries of empire to form the nation’s first internal security apparatus that would shape the character of American political life for the next half century. There are — but significant signs that the war on terror we are now fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan may become a second such crucible, developing new surveillance technologies with domestic applications. At home there has been a massive expansion of domestic surveillance by the FBI and the National Security Agency whose data mining has, over the past eight years, swept up literally billions of domestic documents. Abroad, after six years of a failing counter-insurgency effort in the Middle East, the Pentagon has applied biometrics to pacify Baghdad and aerial surveillance integrated with electronic intercepts to produce instant field intelligence. After confining the populations of Baghdad and Fallujah behind wall cordons, the US army monitored population movements by collecting, as of early 2008, over a million Iraqi fingerprints and retinal scans, accessed by satellites, linked to a biometric database in West Virginia. Just as Philippine colonial police methods percolated homeward in the security crisis surrounding World War I, so in the aftermath of some future terrorist attack here in America, we may add routine retinal scans to the National Security Agency’s constant sweep of domestic electronic communications to lay the technological foundations for a digital American surveillance state.

Sadly, it appears that Mark Twain was right when he warned just over a hundred years ago in his dour, misanthropic manner that America could not have both empire abroad and democracy at home. Such it seems are the costs of empire. Thank you. (applause) >> Paul Buhle: Think of me as the moderator with a few comments. Or as the biographer who’s not a diplomatic or economic or military historian. I’ll make a few comments and then we’ll pass on to what I hope is going to be a very vigorous conversation. When I listen to these two really wonderful papers and frequently in Madison I think we live in a Williamesque world. Which is not so terribly different from calling it a La Follettesque world because the shadow of Bob La Follette was there for Williams in so many ways that we need to think of Bob La Follette as still the most important figure to ever come from Wisconsin. And yet it’s Williams tonight and Williams on my mind. I was cheerfully surprised to see my comic adaptation of Howard Zinn out in the hallway, A People’s History of American Empire, and realized that as we were a third of the way through the work, to be drawn by local comic artist Mike Konopacki, what we were really doing was correcting Howard Zinn with William Appleman Williams.

And perhaps it was inevitable. Not that Zinn was a writer in his facts, a wonderful, great historical figure, or ethically correct, most certainly, but that Williams made an eminent critique of the American power system in ways that no historian had done before, had really seen directly to the heart of it, while liberal historians as well as conservative historians had evaded all of the signals in front of them and chose to believe either a benign purpose or as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., always insisted much too much confusion and complexity for anyone to have a view as conspiratorial as Williams’ view. I need to move closer or move further away? Move further away. I’ve always been a loud mouth. I’ve always considered myself very fortunate to have been at the UW and graduate school just in time to take a lecture course with Williams and to visit with him in occasional office hours when I was writing the kind of paper that graduate students did rather than undergraduate assignments. Naturally, he demanded that we collect documents. He always wanted documents, for us to look at documents and think about documents and take them quite seriously. That was a rocky year indeed for Bill, 1967 to ’68. For Bill a lot more than the rest of us because we were having the educational time of our lives. Amidst demonstrations, marches and even having police clubs swung at us.

It was all quite educational. But whatever his concerns and troubles, personal as well as public, he was a huge charismatic figure, this physically dominative character. And if we criticized him sometimes, the truth is we worshipped him. More than that our anti-oratorian writing stole his ideas constantly with or without credit and have done so ever since. I was doubly lucky to write the only biography that so far has appeared of Bill’s lives and in the process to interview former wives, former graduate students and colleagues including his mentors who survived into the 1990s. And to have access to so many of his private papers. But I never thought of him or his ideas as belonging to me. Every time there would be another crisis of empire, and several have come, I’d be writing back and forth to one of his former students or even one of my former students saying how we wished Bill was around to put the matter succinctly in ways it could not be ignored by a wider public. He was so wise and so clear about these issues and didn’t let emotions or anxieties and so forth take away from his judgments in the critique of empire. Well, you can only imagine then what a thrill it’s been to have Andrew Bacevich take up a call for the return of Bill’s insights.

Professor Bacevich was, I think, the very soul of the thoughtful conservative that Bill was always looking for, probably since the forced discrediting of the warnings around 1950 from Herbert Hoover, former president, and Mr. Republican, senator Robert Taft from Ohio, against the US trying to police and control the globe. But from those voices on the right, much more effectively and determinedly than from the forces on the near left, especially after the disastrous Henry Wallace campaign for the presidency, that one heard the voices saying no, no, this is madness, don’t go ahead. There were few such in between and the quirky paleocon Bill Kauffman, an avid fan of Williams, is one of the rare public conservative voices that have come to mind in the period since. I’ve always hoped there would become more conservatives who would speak out about Williams and his significance but the voices have been rare. Professor Bacevich’s topic is the things that Williams got right and the things that Williams got wrong. I really don’t want to quibble much with the complaints of Williams’ mistakes. He was a child of the depression and as so many in the depression the thought was that the end of capitalism was inevitable, nobody knew was it going to end in a collectivism of a fascism or collectivism of a socialism or a communism, but it was commonly assumed until the recovery of the economy around 1950 and then the super-rise of the consumer economy thereafter that capitalism was stable and here to stay. On the other hand Williams’ idea of socialism, as Professor Bacevich just said, is not quite the same as any of the definitions that one heard about Russia, China, Cuba and so on and so forth. And it was a great deal closer to the visions of a cooperative society that utopians had before 1920 and that we nave kind of spiritually driven new leftists had after 1965. And I think that if Frank Lloyd Wright, after he came back from Russia in the late ’30s, was asked if he was a Communist, a really stupid typical question, he said that he didn’t want to Russianize America anymore than he wanted to Americanize Russia.

A very sage thing to say and I think in a way Williams would have agreed. His idea was that we should assist the Russians to overcome Stalinism and make their system better and hope that other countries in the world, other peoples in the world, would assist us to make our system better. Not towards a forced collectivist state, socialism, but towards something else which remained ill-defined. Late in his life and with all kinds of other things floating in front of him as in Reaganism which ended a year of great hope for ourselves, for my generation, he came closer to the older formulation of a socialism or barbarism. In the sense that we see either a cooperative world, a far more cooperative world, or ecological doom. I don’t think that’s a mistaken prediction. It may have been too hopeful in his part to think that the crisis of capitalism was any closer at hand, but after all systems change slowly and resistance against changing systems is enormous as we learn. Al McCoy, who really is the proper descendant to William’s place in the UW history department, and, I think, listening to him to the La Follettesque Madison community as well, explains so well how the national state was sophisticating its mechanism of global reach, long before the Russian revolution supposedly forced America toward an unwitting empire, that I could say no more on that topic. And we hope to hear a great deal more from him in the future and read his books and think hard about these marvelous researches and conclusions that he’s reached. Let me turn a little bit to how and why Williams was hoping for a change in the heart of America.

What he meant by letting go of the imperial urge and taking up with something else. Bill put it best when he said, exasperated but with good irony, that if Americans ever got tired of reforming the world, they could start to reform themselves at home. A wonderful, lasting thought as well as a clever adage. He was, as Professor Bacevich says, a Midwestern Protestant like myself. And strangely enough his parents were more or less the same generation as my parents. He was a Midwestern small town Protestant with an inkling for Christian socialism that developed through much of his life but never took definitive shape. He was no more a church member than a communist party member or a new leftist. Perhaps his Annapolis past would have made him uncomfortable in any of these environments. Or he didn’t have space in his life to be a joiner. So his ideas about community, the desired community, were always, as Professor Bacevich says, his own intellectual constructions.

The home town Atlantic, Iowa, was no more democratic than my own Champaign County, Illinois. And probably had the same republic businessmen in charge of the same chamber of commerce. But in his mind’s eye, and especially looking back to those depression years, he had a sort of Frank Capraesque reimagining of his extended family and the life around his home town. He wasn’t entirely wrong. Neither was Frank Capra. It’s a Wonderful Life remains one of the great American films scripted in part by several men who would be blacklisted a couple years later. A great American film because so much of the power of the state remained within the state the Iowa or Wisconsin or Illinois. So many of the local merchants, for all their faults, had not yet been Wal-Martized, and the factories, some of them owned locally, had not yet closed. Up to 1945 when It’s a Wonderful Life appeared, it seemed like America might go in the direction of more TVAs, Tennessee Valley Authority, generating its own power for a region, more regionalism in general and even of the eco-regionalism that Lewis Mumford was on the cover of Time magazine touted and greatly admired for believing in it. And that a peaceful world of trade would be negotiated through the new United Nations.

Certainly that was the vision of Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s third term vice president. In other words, the military industrial alliance that Williams himself privately called the military industrial university alliance, not unwisely at all, had not yet been set firmly into place. Williams had the mentality of the ruling groups down cold. And when his enemies, notably Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., accused him of conspiracy and oversimplification he would simply point to those documents. Where the powerful, especially before the Cold War, generally spoke very candidly about how they used power until that Cold War period when they feared revolution from the third world and so forth and so forth. They weren’t all that secretive when talking to themselves. Williams’ flaw, if we see it as a flaw, to grasp every side of a phenomena including a solution, or not to grasp every side of a phenomena, was that he had not much studied or understood social history. Reading the incredibly important Contours of American History, someone would raise that up because for most of us students of his that was more important than Tragedy of American Diplomacy. And I might add that his final book Empire as a Way of Life was a quintessence of his best thought over a lifetime despite some odd points in it. It is so much that he says in so few pages that it really deserves to be read very carefully by a very wide audience.

But one didn’t know if in writing the Contours of American History, a large synthetic book, whether he had ever read or even turned the pages of WEB Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. Reading his chapter in the 1930s, he seemed to leap over the early promise of industrial unions on to their bureaucracy and corruption into corporate-like entities as if the — had been inevitable. He became interested late in life in native American history but could not have told you much about Mexican Americans going back to the mid-19th century when they had been swallowed up and become citizens of the US by force. Most painfully he was baffled by the rise of women’s history. He only saw it as a celebration of entrance into the market economy, which we must say was quite an oversight indeed. So he was not in shape for the new social movements coming from the ’60s, and for that matter he was out of tune with the older ones. In any case, uncertain about any vision fixed upon a Marxist view of labor’s promise in particular. Then again, we must say, as Professor Bacevich has driven home in a wider scope, that promise of a social change by an upsurge of democracy from below withered away in the years of Reagan. More after Williams’ time than during it. And the new social movements were successfully stymied, as well as the terms of changing society at large.

So by the time we students of his had become middle aged we were sometimes inclined to think he was more right than we were, at least in strategic ways. Williams had, however, undercut his vision of free community because he misunderstood the sources of striving for freedom, self-actualization in many ways and a different sense of community growing out of the 1960s which caught him unaware and more or less unable to take it in and make sense of it. Still, I’m inclined to think we loved him in general for his faults as well as loving him for his virtues because if he didn’t have faults he would have been superhuman to us. He had so much to say, he was so brilliant in saying it, he was a stunning lecturer. And he explained to everyone who was thinking about the horror of the Vietnam War and everything it implied that was wrong with American society, he was the one that could go to the root of the cause and allow an orator or a sort of interlocuter or introducer of orators like myself to say we’re defending the university against the corporate takeover that’s destroying it. Don’t accuse us of trying to destroy the university, we’re not the ones. Or to say again we’re trying to save the best of American society and the American past from all the horrors that are overcoming it. Don’t accuse us of being the anti-Americans. And these, I think, are the Williams’ lessons that remain with me and leave me a bit more hopeful than my two colleagues. Thank you, very much.

(applause)