Agro-Imperial America

The Roots of the Modern American Empire

William Appleman Williams, 1969

William Appleman Williams (1921-1990) was a prominent American revisionist historian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He is best known for The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), which caused Adolf A. Berle to invite Williams to assist him as Berle took on a diplomatic post in the Kennedy administration focusing on Latin America (Williams declined). In his Introduction, Williams said, “One of the striking problems confronting the modern executive…is created by the way the organization and operation of the corporation destroy the old social and economic ecology without creating a new balance based on a community of association, interest, and mutual responsibility. That was precisely what happened…when consolidated capital from outside the region moved into the Red River Valley and created the huge bonanza grain farms of the 1870s and early 1880s. The approach ultimately failed because its economies of scale proved insufficiently rewarding over a period of time, because it provoked serious political opposition, and because it failed to generate the development of a society (let alone a community).”

This interested me, because it was pretty much what I had been saying about colonialism in rural America. And also because Williams was right: once the focus became colonial, rewards were judged based on competing opportunity costs of capital, not the inherent qualities, (success or failure, viability, sustainability, etc.) of the local operation. Williams went on to cite James Jerome Hill as “a corporation leader who did learn from the weaknesses and failure of the bonanza farms, and who applied that lesson for the benefit of his own corporation and for the rest of the people in the region. Hill did not become a utopian, or even a reformer in the usual sense of the term, but he did recognize and act on the necessity of dealing with the needs of the agricultural society in which he operated. He realized that all corporations would go the way of the bonanza farms unless they became more relevant and responsive to the requirements of the rest of society.” I wonder if a biography of Hill has ever been done on this middle ground, where he’s neither a robber baron nor a saint?

Williams’s thesis, which he rendered in italics: “The expansionist outlook that was entertained and acted upon by metropolitan American leaders during and after the 1890s was actually a crystallization in industrial form of an outlook that had been developed in agricultural terms by the agrarian majority of the country between 1860 and 1893.” In his account, the desire to expand agricultural markets pushes what ultimately became American expansionist foreign policy. In the early 19th century, this took the form of what Adam Smith had called “tension and antagonism between the metropolis and the country.” Britain was the metropolis in this case and the whole US was the “granary and slaughterhouse” that fed it. As America grew, Williams said the farm sector’s export focus remained a prime mover of expansionism. Although William Jennings Bryan claimed “agriculturalists were as truly businessmen as their metropolitan counterparts,” Williams said Bryan did not convince them he could improve conditions for their business.

Williams concluded that both the “agricultural expansionists” and the urban leaders who appropriated their ideas failed to “maintain an operating balance between the expansion of freedom and the expansion of the marketplace” because “the overwhelming majority of farm businessmen shared the more conservative views of the dominant metropolitans. Indeed, they had generated and shaped that outlook.  And, for that matter, many of the reformers soon acquiesced or assented. The result was an overpowering imperial consensus that defined freedom in terms of what existed in America; or, in its most liberal form, in terms of what Americans sought for themselves.” In the final lines of his epilogue, Williams cautioned radicals: “because we are now just beginning, I suggest that we be very careful about winning when it requires us to become more like what we find so unacceptable. For those kinds of victories can very easily change us into small businessmen promoting a marginal product.”