From the ShelfHow the Door Opened

546 pages.

WILLIAM A. Williams is known to the Establishment as "the father of revisionism." His Russian-American Relations 1781-1947 (1949) and The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959, rev. ed. 1962) saw the cold war less as a Western response to Soviet military and political aggression than as a result of American efforts to continue a long process of economic expansion in the form of an "informal empire" (based on a form of free trade known as the "Open Door policy"). Other scholars, notably Gar Alperovitz, Barton J. Bernstein, Walter LeFeber, Thomas McCormick, and Gabriel Kolko have illustrated the workings of open-door expansion in specific cases. Fortunately, the dynamics of Soviet polities have been sufficiently explored by Deutscher, Moore, Marcuse, Shulman, and Ulam to show that NATO was based on an inflated myth and that Stalin actually sold out revolutionary movements outside the sphere of Soviet conquest. But anti-communism has become a foundation of our foreign policy.

In attacking the ideology of anti-communism as part of a larger status-quo policy, Williams' Tragedy constructed an over-arching theory for American foreign policy since the 1890's. "Open-door expansion" was its unifying theme. Far from claiming direct links between U.S. economic interests and political policy as Harry Magdoff has recently done in The Age of Imperialism, Williams focused on the ideology of intellectual, political, and business leaders. By 1898, a consensus view had emerged, to the effect "that the system of entrepreneurial capitalism could function successfully only if the marketplace constantly expanded." This conviction necessarily caused military and diplomatic involvements in defense of our overseas interests, although, as Gar Alperovitz has said, the ideological and economic threads have become too tangled now to argue a simple cause and effect sequence.

So strong was the illusion of salvation through expansion that any threat to open-door access to new markets was defined as a threat, not only to American interests, but to human freedom in general. Thus, at the close of Wolrd War II, the United States consciously led in the creation of international agencies-the U.N., the World Bank, the OECD, the IMF, GATT-in order to ensure a stable arena for dynamic American economic growth. The Soviet Union did not fit into this scheme-and became our enemy.

Conscious of the dangers inherent in such an effort to seek economic well-being outside our borders Charles Austin Beard in The Open Door at Home (1934) attacked the open door policy. He advocated an entirely new, non-expansionist economic and political orientation in order to achieve two crucial objectives: (1) to provide a minimum standard of living for all Americans in a non-socialist but planned redistribution of wealth; and (2) to avoid the possibility of being drawn into foreign wars which did not directly threaten our survival. By renouncing Cordell Hull's trade-expansion policy, the United States could cut back on expensive military and naval forces which could not defend our commercial interests abroad in any case). We would then be free to choose whether or not to intervene in foreign disputes on grounds of national interest rather than economic necessity.

WILLIAMS on several occasions acknowledged his respect for Beard, most explicitly in his Contours of American History (1961), where he wrote, "that the Pulitzer Prize Committee has yet to find either the intelligence or the courage to honor him even posthumously is one of the most illuminating aspects of our time."

Significantly, however, in his writings on foreign policy Beard was never credited with demolishing the open-door illusion. Williams does not mention him in the remarkable preface to The Roots of the Modern American Empire, which chronicles the growth of this fascinating theory of American imperialism. Extensive research shows that Williams had adopted the substance of Beard's anti-expansionist vision by 1950. Beard himself, it should be noted, explicitly recognized that agriculture, as much as industry, clamored for foreign markets as a means of avoiding depression. "Cold-war revisionism," then, turns out to be, at least in part, a revival of Beard.

In The Contours, Williams pushed the origins of the imperial ideology back into the earliest days of the Republic. In The Roots of the Modern American Empire, he broadens this insight and creates a new "consensus" view of American social and economic history. As he told an audience at Harvard last year, he has found that American farmers first fully enunciated the rationale of marketplace expansion as a necessary condition for democracy and prosperity. The agrarians, between 1860 and 1893, coherently argued that such expansion "extended the freedom of all men." Their conception was adopted by industrialists in the crisis of 1893. Typical of agrarian expansionism was The Prairie Farmer's demand to Congress in 1898: open up Cuba for trade and establish "peace and sound government" there. The principle of intervention in the name of freedom was now an integral part of U.S. foreign policy.

Both Beard and Williams rejected the label "isolationist." First of all. The Tragedy persuasively argued that in the so-called "isolationist" 1920's American interests and commitments were world-wide: by uniltateral action (such as the official Dawes and Young loans to the faltering German economy) we sought to buttress free trade throughout the world. Secondly, the kind of reorientation Beard and Williams advocated would not inherently isolate the United States from the world. With less proclivity to intervene in the interests of a world market system, we might feel more inclined to act vigorously out of unselfish interest in cooperation with a world organization to solve the general problems of hunger and misery. By ceasing to define all non-market economies as enemies, we might forge ? less dangerous world political system. Since the open door policy has failed to stabilize a revolutionary worid, endorsement of self-determination of nations as a principle of foreign policy might allow the tempest to run its course and find a new equilibrium. This Williams supported in The Tragedy, calling it "an open door for revolutions."

Although he believes that "the farmers were unhappily proved correct in their analysis of the 1860's-under a capitalist marketplace political economy their welfare depended upon overseas market expansion," Williams rejects economic determinism. Pleading for a reversal of the open door policy, he claims we can "give the [largely agrarian] peoples of the world a chance to make their own history by acting on our own responsibility to make our own history."

In tones recalling The Great Evasion (1964), Williams rejects "mass democracy" within the marketplace system and advocates decentralization in a final section entitled "From Empire to Community." As he used to stress in his lectures at Wisconsin, the honest investigation of historical problems leads inevitably beyond history into the most fundamental of political questions. His new book is a testament to that kind of faith in the relevance of history. The real debate on how to live without the open door must now begin.

(The author is a graduate student in History. )