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4 William Appleman Williams, Republican Leftist: History as Political Lesson
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145 William Appleman Williams, Republican Leftist: History as Political Lesson The purpose of history is not to explain our situation so that we settle down as what C. Wright Mills has called Cheerful Robots in the Best of All Worlds. Neither is its function to propel us into orbit around some distant Utopia. . . . History’s great tradition is to help us understand ourselves and our world so that each of us, individually and in conjunction with our fellow men, can formulate relevant and reasoned alternatives and become meaningful actors in making history. —William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History, 1961 History does not offer any answers. Men and women of the present must provide the answers. Hence the historian must return to his own society as a citizen and, with no quarter asked or given, engage other citizens in a dialogue to determine the best answers to these questions. —William Appleman Williams, “The Crown on Clio’s Head,” 1970 William Appleman Williams tried to show the importance of studying history to the New Left and was once called “the dean of America’s historical ‘left.’” Of the intellectuals examined here, he most identified with his professional discipline. It follows that he was more comfortable with academia, though he, too, had serious doubts about the institution’s capacity to nurture intellectual life. The fact that he was born in Iowa and never located for any extended period of time east of the Mississippi meant that he never made it into the orbit of the New York Intellectuals. He was too much of a midwestern populist and too enamored with the political leanings of Progressive -Era historians (e.g., Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard) to travel comfortably in those circles. And unlike C. Wright Mills, a southwestern populist, he never tried.1 1. Flyer in the William Appleman Williams Papers, Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers, The Valley Library, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, folder of correspondence with Jeffrey Safford. For Williams’s biography, I rely upon Buhle and Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams, as well as an extensive c.v. in the William Appleman Williams Papers, General Correspondence folder. Unfortunately, the papers from the period of Williams’s life 146 Intellectuals in Action Williams did share numerous traits with Mills and Paul Goodman, however . First, he became politicized during World War II. But even here he was distinct. No pacifist or libertarian, he joined the Naval Academy in 1941 and served in the navy during the Good War. Even with this act of military patriotism, Williams would later recognize the “dehumanizing and undemocratic character” of the war machine that worried Goodman and Mills. At the time, he took note of a disturbing tendency documented thoroughly in the pages of politics—the racist policies of the U.S. military and society at large. Still in the navy in 1945, Williams cut his teeth on political organizing by helping the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with a local struggle for racial equality in Corpus Christi, Texas. African Americans in the town had demanded an end to discriminatory practices at local businesses and hoped to create what civil rights leaders would eventually call a more unified and “beloved community ” in the process. Williams supported them and helped edit the NAACP newsletter, where he spelled out a democratic vision of racial equality. From this point onward, Williams clearly identified with the left. It is important that a desire to achieve racial equality—not economic equality—prompted his commitment.2 After serving in the military, Williams benefited from the G.I. Bill and attended the University of Wisconsin eight years after Mills had been there. While Mills took the pragmatists as his “intellectual godfathers,” ProgressiveEra historians served as Williams’s intellectual inspiration. Like Mills, though, Williams pursued interdisciplinary studies and wound up being influenced by Hans Gerth, which made his historical work more attuned to current social issues and theories and hence more akin to Mills’s pursuits. Like Goodman, Williams was also deeply influenced by the sort of teachings found among Gestalt therapists—especially the belief that self-actualization had to occur within face-to-face communities and through meaningful work. Indeed, like Goodman, Williams would become a vocal advocate of that I focus on here—1945 to 1968—have largely been destroyed. Williams’s interest in Progressive -Era historians (among other things) placed him in opposition to the major historian among...