William Appleman Williams - Academic Career, 1948-1968

Academic Career, 1948-1968

Williams completed his M.S. in 1948 and his Ph.D in 1950. Subsequent additional research led to his first book, an expansion and revision of his doctoral thesis, published as American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 (1952). In the meantime, Williams pursued a series of appointments. His first, to Washington and Jefferson College, came in 1950. The following academic year (1951-1952) Williams taught at Ohio State University, but (according to Williams) he collided with Woody Hayes (in his first year as football coach and, like Williams, a former naval officer) over low grades for a football player that Williams would not change and the incident apparently led to his needing to find another appointment. In the fall of 1952, Williams took up what would be a tenure-track appointment to the University of Oregon where he would remain for five years (with a year in Madison, Wisconsin again on a Ford Fellowship from 1955 to 1956). When Fred Harvey Harrington became the chair of the history department at the University of Wisconsin in 1957, he arranged for an unusual direct appointment of Williams as his replacement in teaching U.S. foreign relations. Williams accepted the tenure-track appointment and returned to Wisconsin in the fall of 1957. He would remain at Madison until 1968.

Graduate students found his challenges to the established historiography quite compelling and flocked to the University to study with him, regardless of their fields. The same year that his most influential book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy was published, Williams's students who were members of the campus's Socialist Club, began publication of Studies on the Left, a manifesto of the emerging New Left in the United States. Like Williams, its articles offered a critique of the dominant liberalism, but after it moved to offices to New York in 1963, the club reflected less of his thinking and gradually declined and soon expired.

Williams departed from the mainstream of U.S. historiography in the 1950s. Whereas many U.S. historians wrote the story of the U.S. in terms of the spread of freedom, Williams argued that the U.S. had also spread as an empire. Williams's "central conception of American diplomacy," one critic has written, is that it was shaped "by the effort of American leaders to evade the domestic dilemmas of race and class through an escapist movement: they used world politics, he feels, to preserve a capitalist frontier safe for America's market and investment expansion." In this regard, Williams's understanding of American history owes a considerable debt to Frederick Jackson Turner and the first generation of American progressive historians. Because his history of American diplomacy pivots on John Hay's Open Door Notes to China–at around the same time as the closing of the internal American frontier–Williams's larger argument is sometimes referred to as the "Open Door thesis."

Williams maintained that the United States was more responsible for the Cold War than the Soviet Union. Williams argued that American politicians, fearful of a loss of markets in Europe, had exaggerated the threat of world domination from the Soviet Union. Amid much criticism, Williams made no moral distinction between the foreign policy of Joseph Stalin in Eastern Europe and the foreign policy of the United States in Latin America, Africa, or Asia. In the context of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, he went out of his way in an expanded second edition of The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1962) to strongly criticize the behavior of the Soviet Union, but he also had the Kennedy Administration's Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba as a parallel behavior. The difference in domestic policy between Stalin's Soviet Union and American democracy, he argued, made the U.S. embrace of empire all the more "tragic."

Williams inspired a generation of historians to re-think the Cold War, including Gar Alperovitz, Lloyd Gardner, Patrick J. Hearden, Gabriel Kolko, Walter LaFeber, and Thomas J. McCormick who along with Williams argued that the Vietnam War was neither democratizing nor liberating but was an attempt to spread American dominance.

He later edited a book of readings together with Gardner, LaFeber and Thomas McCormick (who had taken his place at UW–Madison when Williams left to teach in Oregon) called America in Vietnam: A Documentary History in 1989.

Williams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is often described as one of the most influential books written on American foreign policy. Bradford Perkins, a traditionalist diplomatic historian emeritus at the University of Michigan, said this in a twenty-five-year retrospective on Tragedy: "The influence of William Appleman Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy... is beyond challenge." Tragedy brought Williams to the attention of not only academics but also American policymakers. Adolf A. Berle, a former member of FDR's Brain Trust, was quite impressed with Williams after reading Tragedy and meeting him in person in Madison asked if he would be his "personal first assistant" in the new position Berle had taken in the Kennedy Administration as the head of an interdepartmental task force on Latin America. Williams turned down the offer to serve in the Kennedy Administration and later claimed that he was glad he had because of Kennedy's sponsorship of the Bay of Pigs invasion.