I was raised by wolves—my graduate advisers never bothered to teach me anything about the protocols of professional, academic history, probably because nobody expected us mongrels from NIU would get jobs in higher education—but they were pretty damn smart. And they were mostly alumni of the “Wisconsin School,” a loose congeries of scholars that, among other things, honored the Progressive historiographical legacies of Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard in devising a “revisionist” brand of US diplomatic history.
William Appleman Williams is the most famous of that crowd. His graduate adviser, Fred Harvey Harrington, replaced himself in the History department—he’d been appointed president of the University of Wisconsin—by hiring Williams away from Oregon State in 1957. Wild Bill then joined an extraordinary faculty that included Howard Beale, Merrill Jensen, Merle Curti, Gerda Lerner, George Mosse, and Richard Current (not to mention Hans H. Gerth over in sociology, the Frankfurt School refugee and PhD adviser of C. Wright Mills). Among the equally extraordinary graduate students in History at that moment were Warren Susman, Herbert Gutman, Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, Eleanor Hakim, Roz Baxandall, Martin Sklar, and Carl Parrini (the latter two were my “mentors” at NIU, if that is the right word: the only guidance they offered me, or anyone else, was their example).
The “revisionist” position on American diplomacy informed and inspired by Harrington and Williams is often characterized by historians and political scientists as an instance of economic determinism because the revisionists, among them Gardner, LaFeber, Thomas McCormick, Marilyn Young, Emily Rosenberg, Joan Hoff, Michel Hunt, Michael Hogan, and Bruce Cumings, emphasize the relation between the development of American capitalism and the evolution of US foreign policy. It is true, the revisionists have paid close attention to the economic dimensions of the Open Door—the name of the new American Empire, announced in 1899-1900 as a series of notes from the State Department—but they have never equated foreign relations and dollar diplomacy. Their goal has always been to dismantle the stale, and imaginary, opposition of “realism versus idealism” which till regulates conventional thinking about the making of US foreign policy; the means to this end is the revisionists’ recognition that (1) until the very late 20th century, policymakers saw no contradiction between their commitment to the globalization of capitalism and the realization of the highest possible morality in the world, and that (2) capitalism is more than an economic phenomenon to be comprehended in terms of economic theory or history.
The fact is that the economic determinists have always been the policymakers themselves. Their assumption, from Thomas Jefferson, the first Secretary of State, to John Hay, the author of those Open Door Notes, on toward John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, and Hillary Clinton, has been that economic growth underwrites social stability—it pacifies class conflict—and this accordingly permits an ideological consensus, an unspoken agreement, which confines political discourse to issues that don’t require reallocation or redistribution of resources (except of course from those without standing as persons at the law, who must remain silent as they are legally stripped of their assets). The camp followers of the policy-makers have been journalists like Walter Lippmann, James Reston, and Thomas Friedman, cheerleaders all until their readers back home remind them that war is a drug.
Until the 20th century, economic growth was imagined and accomplished by settler colonialism, a repetition of primitive accumulation on the American frontier, in other words by expropriating indigenous land and turning it into parcels of private property that, with the requisite supply of (free or slave) labor, could produce commodities for sale on a world market. Herman Melville summarized the social effects of the frontier, so conceived and exploited, in his epic poem of 1876, “Clarel”:
“The vast reserves, the untried fields, these shall long keep off and delay/The class struggle, the rich and poor man fray.”
Abraham Lincoln had a more sophisticated understanding of how the frontier worked. It wasn’t just a “safety valve” for surplus population, where workers dissatisfied with their proletarian lot could settle as freeholders and become stalwart republican citizens; it was also an investment field, a less-developed country or periphery to be enriched by, and in turn enrich, the metropolitan core. Here’s how he put it in a speech on behalf of John C. Fremont, the new Republican Party’s presidential nominee, in 1856: “Have we no interest in the free Territories of the United States—that they should be kept open for the homes of free white people? As our Northern States are growing more and more in wealth and population, we are continually in want of an outlet through which it [sic: not just population, but also wealth] may pass out to enrich our country. In this we have an interest—a deep and abiding interest.” [I quote Melville from memory, Lincoln from Collected Works (1953): 1: 412-13.]
The frontier was officially closed by the Census Report on the American population of 1890, an event that Turner rendered as an epochal moment in both the history and the historiography of the US. Thereafter economic growth couldn’t be the function of territorial expansion, resettlement of populations, and trade between regions divided by specialization. Nor, it seemed, would military conquest and colonial exploitation work to develop backward areas and bring them into the orbit of modernity—the proud savagery of the losers in the postbellum South proved that point. What then?
The architects of the new American Empire were quite familiar with the class struggles of the late-19th century, which were more numerous, intense, violent, and consequential here (in the US) than anywhere else. (For evidence of this familiarity, see “The Social Analysis of Economic History and Theory” AHR 92 [1987]: 69-95 and/or chaps. 1-2 in my Origins of the Fed [1986] and/or chaps 2-3 in my Pragmatism and Political Economy [1994].) Which is to say they interpreted class conflict as a contest over shares of the national income accruing to labor and capital—a contest that was at once social, political, and cultural (or, if you like, ideological). If the volume of national income grew at a sufficient rate, this contest could be contained within a consensus that governed social relations, political discourse, and cultural habits: that way, the volume of the respective shares would grow in accordance with the needs of a growing proletarian population (labor), on the one hand, and the requirements of owners and investors (capital) on the other, so that a bid for a greater share of national income by one class at the expense of the other would be unnecessary. The economic record of the late-19th century proved that labor would win the class struggle, so conceived, unless capital mustered enough cultural and political resources to convince most Americans that capitalists were the proper trustees of the social system, not parasites on the body politic.*
This schematic was projected onto the global economy by the vision of an Open Door world. Peace among advanced capitalist nation-states could be preserved so long as the volume of world income grew at a pace that would allow each to keep its requisite share, and thus not face internal class conflict over the distribution of national income between capital and labor. Without such growth, the incentives to beggar-thy-neighbor policies such as tariff barriers, trade wars, and exclusive spheres of interest carved out of colonial conquest in Africa and Asia would increase, and so, accordingly, would the likelihood of war as the ultimate assertion of national interest.
In this sense, there was broad agreement among pro- and anti-capitalist thinkers about the economic origins of world war. V. I. Lenin cribbed from J. A. Hobson, of course, but the latter had already borrowed from the American economist, policy-maker, and diplomat Charles A. Conant, a pro-capitalist theorist of imperialism who worked for presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. It was Woodrow Wilson who asked in a speech of September 5, 1919, in St. Louis, whether there was any man, woman or child in his audience who did not know that the “seed of war” in the modern world was the “hot, commercial rivalry” among nations for access to a share of world markets and investment outlets.
The only real difference between Wilson and Lenin, or Conant and Hobson, which separated all pro- and anti-capitalist thinkers, was that the former believed this inevitable imperialist rivalry could be sublimated by constant, consistent growth in the volume of world income—a purpose best served by dismantling the colonial system Europe had imposed on less-developed countries, which impeded the free flow of capital as well as finished goods—and by formalized international governing bodies (not just bilateral treaties, but permanent, trans-national institutions with enforceable mandates). The exception to the rule was Karl Kautsky, the Marxist who thought that “ultra-imperialism,” in effect a Wilsonian bargain between advanced capitalist nations on their rightful shares of world income, could modulate the imperialist imperative every such nation had to address.**
Charles A. Beard wrote The Idea of National Interest (1934) with this odd consensus in mind. It became the Ur-text of revisionist diplomatic history—on this Williams was insistent—because Beard conceived of foreign policy as a means to the end of pacifying domestic conflicts, which included class struggle over the shares of national income accruing to capital and labor. Williams often cited the key phrase from Federalist # 10 to name the local origin of the constant, restless, eventually global expansionism that animated American history from the very founding of the nation: “extend the sphere,” James Madison wrote, by which he meant expand the social reach and the political scope of the republic, and thereby produce a greater variety of economic interests. This ever increasing complexity, this density of interests, would presumably guarantee that no one of them could assert its dominance over all others, as, for example, had happened in smaller, less heterogenous polities, where the rights of persons (in modern parlance, labor) had been sacrificed to the rights of property (capital).
Williams and his fellow revisionists assumed that expansion, a.k.a. imperialism, was a way to thwart majority rule and thus guarantee the safety of the rights of property; foreign policy was ipso facto a means to the end of capital’s victory in the domestic conflict that would answer the perennial question of “who rules at home?” The attribution is unwarranted, I think—Madison wanted to postpone majority formation, not thwart it—but the assumption has produced more interesting and illuminating scholarship on US diplomatic history than any other, including the alternatives on offer from either hard-boiled “realists” like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan or hapless “idealists” like Arthur Link and Dexter Perkins. Revisionist diplomatic history can thus be characterized as a better accounting of the same facts its intellectual rivals muster, because it recognizes that US foreign policy emphasizes constant economic growth under capitalist auspices (hence imperialism) as the sine qua non of social stability, ideological consensus, and political comity—at home and abroad.
The revisionists have always understood that their recognition of the Open Door’s regulative principle was a powerful critique of capitalism; the alternative implied by the critique was a stationary state and its corollary, an anti-imperialist foreign policy, both presumably attainable only under socialist auspices. This alternative, which was first fully articulated by John Stuart Mill, has been the Left’s unstated premise for at least a century. It has now become the avowed goal of that fraction of the Left, socialist or not, which assigns priority to arresting climate change by whatever means necessary. But it’s not the Left’s priority. On this broad section of the political spectrum, economic growth still functions as sine qua non—whether as the means to “grow the middle class,” to promote full employment, or to blunt identity politics.
[Part II to follow, beginning with Michael Tomasky’s The Middle Out (2022)]
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*On this schematic, see esp. Carl P. Parrini, Heir to Empire (1969).
**See Conant, The United States and the Orient (1901); Hobson, Imperialism (1902); and Lenin, Imperialism (1914). The affinities and borrowings between Conant, Hobson, Lenin, Kautsky, and, yes, Wilson, not to mention Luxemburg and Hilferding—a consensus, as it were, that united observers of radically different social origins and political propensities—are painstakingly demonstrated in fugitive essays on Conant, Kautsky, et al., by Carl P. Parrini, for example in Lloyd Gardner, ed., Redefining the Past (1984) and Walter LaFeber & Thomas McCormick, eds., Behind the Throne (1993); in Martin J. Sklar’s The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (1988); and in a remarkable unpublished paper from 1976 by the late Paul A. Wolman, my friend and fellow graduate student at Northern Illinois University. For a more general treatment of imperialism in and after the American Century, see my World Turned Inside Out (2009), chapter 6, and related citations in the bibliographic essay.
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https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/vectors-of-inflation
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/liz-truss-growth-policies-better-than-populist-grievance-politics-by-michael-r-strain-2022-10?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=8a617cd56c-sunday_newsletter_10_16_2022&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-8a617cd56c-107115341&mc_cid=8a617cd56c&mc_eid=5c47be853f
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/opinion/los-angeles-city-council.html
Jim, I hope you cross posted this to your FB page.