The Spirit of Atlantic

“The Empire is peace.”
—Napoleon III

Bill Williams was an Eagle Scout, basketball star, paperboy, and jazz drummer in the Atlantic, Iowa, of the Depression. He was a wholesome mixture of small-town bohemian and Jimmy Stewart: he shared bottomless ice cream sodas with his girlfriend and read Hemingway; he played piano and made a soapbox derby racer. The Atlantic he lived and would carry with him always was a place, as the authors of this excellent biography write, of “judges handing down suspended sentences for theft of food, theater managers looking away when kids opened the back door for their poorer friends, and storekeepers keeping a ‘tab’ that they rightly suspected would never be repaid.” Bill Williams grew into William Appleman Williams, the brave and idiosyncratic historian of United States diplomacy and American life, and it is the genius of his biographers Paul M. Buhle and Edward Rice- Maximin to locate Williams’s “patriotic anti-imperialism” in “his roots in the small-town America of the Depression.” Although writing a biography of a historian can be tricky business (the dramatic potential of “he approached the card catalogue gingerly” is limited), theirs is a superb study of the genesis of an American radical and a proprietary patriot. “Attacked frequently as an America-hater, Williams cared about the nation passionately, even obsessively, as if from a sense of family responsibility.”

Both sides of his family traced their lineage to Revolutionary War soldiers; Williams was a “self-conscious heir to the great tradition.” He believed his Atlantic (an ironically named hometown for a Beardian isolationist) to be virtually classless: like so many of our best Americans—Sinclair Lewis revisiting Sauk Centre, Jack Kerouac ever on the road back to Lowell—Williams’s life can be read as an attempt first to escape, then make peace with, then vigorously champion, his hometown. Williams’s mother was a melancholy teacher, his father a barnstorming pilot who was killed in a plane crash when the boy was eight. Charles Lindbergh once flew over the Williams home as a gesture of friendship; the historian later wrote of the Lone Eagle as a “last national hero from the past” who embodied the “nineteenth-century dream that the individual could become one with his tools and his work.”

Young Williams won appointment to the Naval Academy. He wore his “Annapolis ring the rest of his life . . . sometimes consciously fingering it to unnerve his left-wing graduate students.” His classmates informally voted him most likely to join the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he got his fill of war in the Pacific in 1944-45. So he traveled as far inland as he could go, ending up at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied for his doctorate with the storied Progressive Americanists of Madison: Fred Harvey Harrington, William B. Hesseltine, and Merrill Jensen (who, like Williams, preferred the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution). American independents all, “defenders of free thought and of resistance against the national juggernaut state,” the “Madisonians seemed at once quaintly outdated and yet almost recklessly courageous in the face of cold war pressures.” Madison fit Williams; he would return as a professor, a citizen-scholar, and spend his most productive years in La Follette’s state. He can be viewed as one of the last of the Progressive Republicans of the Midwest and West: those Sons of the Wild Jackass, as Williams’s hero William Borah and his brethren were known. Williams was reviled in the 1950’s and early 60’s for the same reason that Bob La Follette would have been execrated in an age of Nixon and McNamara and Kennedy: as smalltown Midwesterners operating from a set of radically different assumptions from those prevailing, they were rooted in an America that had been marked for extermination by the ruling class and its smug publicists. Atlantic had been swallowed by the Atlanticists.

Williams viewed “Open Door imperialism” as the propellant of American foreign policy: markets were to be pried open with crowbars and gunboats, and this expansion (the ideology of the cancer cell, as Edward Abbey was to say) “denies and subverts American ideas and ideals.” The corporate state that developed at home to administer this imperialism was choking the last breaths out of the 10,000 Atlantics that made up America. And the villains, in Williams’s view, were the pantheon-dwellers: the Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Wilson. The wise men, by contrast, were “the people who lost”—the “Enlightened conservatives,” most famously Herbert Hoover, who sought to “evolve a way of having and eating the expansionist cake without paying for it by imperial wars.”

I find Williams unconvincing on many matters: Hoover; his shoehorning of even tertium quid characters into the expansion/Open Door framework; his contention that 19th-century populism was motivated by a desire for overseas markets; his perverse admiration for allegedly benevolent Establishment men such as George W. Perkins, the House of Morgan henchman who as the “dough Moose” ran Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party. Nevertheless, he thought up his own ideas and signed his own name; and as the authors note, Williams “inverted the dominant assumptions of American intellectuals by viewing conventional liberalism not as a great liberating force but as a suffocating ideology that has preempted both solid radicalism and thoughtful conservatism.”

Williams the solid radical defended Hoover the thoughtful conservative, perhaps because the socialism of small communities that Williams endorsed bore similarities to the “corporatist decentralism” that Williams and his students found in Hoover. (See especially Joan Hoff Wilson’s Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive.) But something even nobler pushed Williams toward Hoover: Iowa patriotism. His was a praiseworthy attempt to stick up for the much-maligned Hawkeye President, rather in the same way that John Updike has devoted a play and a novel to the great temporizer, his fellow Pennsylvanian James Buchanan.

Hoover stood outside the “bipartisan imperialism” to which both parties are devoted. Williams shrewdly noted that when a “deeply conservative corporation director” like Averell Harriman could run for office using “the rhetoric of left-liberals,” the rulebook must be a lie. The jolt of this awareness can make a man stark raving sane: I think of Jeff Bridges in the final scene of one of the best recent American movies, Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981), when the feckless Santa Barbaran Bridges discovers that all his cynical friend’s wild conspiracy theories are true. So too for Bill Williams, the “bereaved patriot,” when he came to realize that “the Old Left,” as Buhle and Rice-Maximin write, “had hidden its socialist ideas inside a liberal casing and identified the enemy as the Far Right, when in reality a bipartisan corporate liberalism had long guided the State.”

The bipartisans are always looking for bright young men who know that we’re living in “the real world,” as the snake hisses when he offers you the apple. Adolf Berle sought to bring Williams—who voted for Nixon as the “lesser evil” in 1960—into the Kennedy administration and the Council on Foreign Relations. Williams suspected that he was being neutered, made “ready to join the system,” and he refused. He preferred Madison to Washington, and as he said of the Kennedys, “Don’t ask me why, I just don’t trust them.”

Williams maintained a surprising distance from the New Left, though not so surprising when one reads of his “socially conservative sensibilities,” his consistent belief that the middle class was the American bedrock, and his disdain for feminism. (He was also a thrice-married adulterer.) Surely Williams was the only hero of the New Left who subjected his children to “Annapolis rituals such as shining their shoes and holding them up for inspection when he came home.” At the apex of his reputation, he packed his family off to the Pacific coast, where he took a sharp pay cut to teach at Oregon State and live near the ocean in one of the small, working-class, poolhall towns he so loved and idealized. He fished and built model airplanes—including replicas of The Spirit of St. Louis.

Williams was an old-fashioned American village eccentric, contentious and refractory and sentimental to the core, and you either dig the type or you don’t. One of my favorite Williams remarks concerns his Iowa paladin: “Hoover, in the depths of the hell of 1931, said that ‘what this country needs is a great poem. Something to lift people out of fear and selfishness.’ If you kill a Quaker engineer who came to understand that—and to believe in and commit himself to that—then you have murdered yourself.”

A boy never forgets a visit from Charles Lindbergh, and if you can understand why Lindbergh’s father, a Minnesota congressman, was called “the Gopher Bolshevik,” then Williams the patriotic radical socialist Iowan makes perfect sense. His prescriptions may have been wrong, but what the hell, he wasn’t a druggist, he was an American. He closed Empire as a Way of Life with a story about stealing “a very fine and expensive knife from the best hardware store in town”:

My maternal grandmother, Maude Hammond Appleman, discovered what I had done. She confronted me with the question: did you steal the knife? Yes, I stole the knife. Why? Because I wanted it, because I liked it, because I can use it. She said: the knife is not yours. You have not earned it. You will take it back.

 

I said: I CAN’T do that.

She said: You WILL do that. NOW.

Oh, my: the moral force of the declarative sentence.

And so I walked back along those long and lonely blocks to the store. And in through the door. And up, face to face, with the member of that small community who owned the store. And I said: I stole this knife and I am sorry and I am bringing it back.

And he said: Thank you. The knife is not very important, but you coming down here and saying that to me is very important.

Remembering all that, I know why I do not want the empire. There are better ways to live and there are better ways to die. 

 

[William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire, by Paul M. Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin (New York: Routledge) 318 pp., $18.95]

The Spirit of Atlantic

“The Empire is peace.” —Napoleon III

Bill Williams was an Eagle Scout, basketball star, paperboy, and jazz drummer in the Atlantic, Iowa, of the Depression. He was a wholesome mixture of small-town bohemian and Jimmy Stewart: he shared bottomless ice cream sodas with his girlfriend and read Hemingway; he played piano and made a soapbox derby racer. The Atlantic he lived and would carry with him always was a place, as the authors of this excellent biography write, of “judges handing down suspended sentences for theft of food, theater managers looking away when kids opened the back door for their poorer friends, and storekeepers keeping a ‘tab’ that they rightly suspected would never be repaid.” Bill Williams grew into William Appleman Williams, the brave and idiosyncratic historian of United States diplomacy and American life, and it is the genius of his biographers Paul M. Buhle and Edward Rice- Maximin to locate Williams’s “patriotic anti-imperialism” in “his roots in the small-town America of the Depression.” Although writing a biography of a historian can be tricky business (the dramatic potential of “he approached the card catalogue gingerly” is limited), theirs is a superb study of the genesis of an American radical and a proprietary patriot. “Attacked frequently as an America-hater, Williams cared about the nation passionately, even obsessively, as if from a sense of family responsibility.”

Both sides of his family traced their lineage to Revolutionary War soldiers; Williams was a “self-conscious heir to the great tradition.” He believed his Atlantic (an ironically named hometown for a Beardian isolationist) to be virtually classless: like so many of our best Americans—Sinclair Lewis revisiting Sauk Centre, Jack Kerouac ever on the road back to Lowell—Williams’s life can be read as an attempt first to escape, then make peace with, then vigorously champion, his hometown. Williams’s mother was a melancholy teacher, his father a barnstorming pilot who was killed in a plane crash when the boy was eight. Charles Lindbergh once flew over the Williams home as a gesture of friendship; the historian later wrote of the Lone Eagle as a “last national hero from the past” who embodied the “nineteenth-century dream that the individual could become one with his tools and his work.”

Young Williams won appointment to the Naval Academy. He wore his “Annapolis ring the rest of his life . . . sometimes consciously fingering it to unnerve his left-wing graduate students.” His classmates informally voted him most likely to join the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he got his fill of war in the Pacific in 1944-45. So he traveled as far inland as he could go, ending up at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied for his doctorate with the storied Progressive Americanists of Madison: Fred Harvey Harrington, William B. Hesseltine, and Merrill Jensen (who, like Williams, preferred the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution). American independents all, “defenders of free thought and of resistance against the national juggernaut state,” the “Madisonians seemed at once quaintly outdated and yet almost recklessly courageous in the face of cold war pressures.” Madison fit Williams; he would return as a professor, a citizen-scholar, and spend his most productive years in La Follette’s state. He can be viewed as one of the last of the Progressive Republicans of the Midwest and West: those Sons of the Wild Jackass, as Williams’s hero William Borah and his brethren were known. Williams was reviled in the 1950’s and early 60’s for the same reason that Bob La Follette would have been execrated in an age of Nixon and McNamara and Kennedy: as smalltown Midwesterners operating from a set of radically different assumptions from those prevailing, they were rooted in an America that had been marked for extermination by the ruling class and its smug publicists. Atlantic had been swallowed by the Atlanticists.

Williams viewed “Open Door imperialism” as the propellant of American foreign policy: markets were to be pried open with crowbars and gunboats, and this expansion (the ideology of the cancer cell, as Edward Abbey was to say) “denies and subverts American ideas and ideals.” The corporate state that developed at home to administer this imperialism was choking the last breaths out of the 10,000 Atlantics that made up America. And the villains, in Williams’s view, were the pantheon-dwellers: the Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Wilson. The wise men, by contrast, were “the people who lost”—the “Enlightened conservatives,” most famously Herbert Hoover, who sought to “evolve a way of having and eating the expansionist cake without paying for it by imperial wars.”

I find Williams unconvincing on many matters: Hoover; his shoehorning of even tertium quid characters into the expansion/Open Door framework; his contention that 19th-century populism was motivated by a desire for overseas markets; his perverse admiration for allegedly benevolent Establishment men such as George W. Perkins, the House of Morgan henchman who as the “dough Moose” ran Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party. Nevertheless, he thought up his own ideas and signed his own name; and as the authors note, Williams “inverted the dominant assumptions of American intellectuals by viewing conventional liberalism not as a great liberating force but as a suffocating ideology that has preempted both solid radicalism and thoughtful conservatism.”

Williams the solid radical defended Hoover the thoughtful conservative, perhaps because the socialism of small communities that Williams endorsed bore similarities to the “corporatist decentralism” that Williams and his students found in Hoover. (See especially Joan Hoff Wilson’s Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive.) But something even nobler pushed Williams toward Hoover: Iowa patriotism. His was a praiseworthy attempt to stick up for the much-maligned Hawkeye President, rather in the same way that John Updike has devoted a play and a novel to the great temporizer, his fellow Pennsylvanian James Buchanan.

Hoover stood outside the “bipartisan imperialism” to which both parties are devoted. Williams shrewdly noted that when a “deeply conservative corporation director” like Averell Harriman could run for office using “the rhetoric of left-liberals,” the rulebook must be a lie. The jolt of this awareness can make a man stark raving sane: I think of Jeff Bridges in the final scene of one of the best recent American movies, Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981), when the feckless Santa Barbaran Bridges discovers that all his cynical friend’s wild conspiracy theories are true. So too for Bill Williams, the “bereaved patriot,” when he came to realize that “the Old Left,” as Buhle and Rice-Maximin write, “had hidden its socialist ideas inside a liberal casing and identified the enemy as the Far Right, when in reality a bipartisan corporate liberalism had long guided the State.”

The bipartisans are always looking for bright young men who know that we’re living in “the real world,” as the snake hisses when he offers you the apple. Adolf Berle sought to bring Williams—who voted for Nixon as the “lesser evil” in 1960—into the Kennedy administration and the Council on Foreign Relations. Williams suspected that he was being neutered, made “ready to join the system,” and he refused. He preferred Madison to Washington, and as he said of the Kennedys, “Don’t ask me why, I just don’t trust them.”

Williams maintained a surprising distance from the New Left, though not so surprising when one reads of his “socially conservative sensibilities,” his consistent belief that the middle class was the American bedrock, and his disdain for feminism. (He was also a thrice-married adulterer.) Surely Williams was the only hero of the New Left who subjected his children to “Annapolis rituals such as shining their shoes and holding them up for inspection when he came home.” At the apex of his reputation, he packed his family off to the Pacific coast, where he took a sharp pay cut to teach at Oregon State and live near the ocean in one of the small, working-class, poolhall towns he so loved and idealized. He fished and built model airplanes—including replicas of The Spirit of St. Louis.

Williams was an old-fashioned American village eccentric, contentious and refractory and sentimental to the core, and you either dig the type or you don’t. One of my favorite Williams remarks concerns his Iowa paladin: “Hoover, in the depths of the hell of 1931, said that ‘what this country needs is a great poem. Something to lift people out of fear and selfishness.’ If you kill a Quaker engineer who came to understand that—and to believe in and commit himself to that—then you have murdered yourself.”

A boy never forgets a visit from Charles Lindbergh, and if you can understand why Lindbergh’s father, a Minnesota congressman, was called “the Gopher Bolshevik,” then Williams the patriotic radical socialist Iowan makes perfect sense. His prescriptions may have been wrong, but what the hell, he wasn’t a druggist, he was an American. He closed Empire as a Way of Life with a story about stealing “a very fine and expensive knife from the best hardware store in town”:

My maternal grandmother, Maude Hammond Appleman, discovered what I had done. She confronted me with the question: did you steal the knife? Yes, I stole the knife. Why? Because I wanted it, because I liked it, because I can use it. She said: the knife is not yours. You have not earned it. You will take it back.

 

I said: I CAN’T do that.

She said: You WILL do that. NOW.

Oh, my: the moral force of the declarative sentence.

And so I walked back along those long and lonely blocks to the store. And in through the door. And up, face to face, with the member of that small community who owned the store. And I said: I stole this knife and I am sorry and I am bringing it back.

And he said: Thank you. The knife is not very important, but you coming down here and saying that to me is very important.

Remembering all that, I know why I do not want the empire. There are better ways to live and there are better ways to die. 

 

[William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire, by Paul M. Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin (New York: Routledge) 318 pp., $18.95]