What Happened to the New Left? (1/3)

[Michael Eisenscher]

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE NEW LEFT?
TOWARD A RADICAL READING OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS
(1999 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture)

For the past two decades, even before Charles Maier's now well-known
indictment of our field, historians of foreign relations have been
wringing their hands, furrowing their brows and anguishing over what we
do and where we're headed.(1) For the most part, and especially in the
past few years, the often-virulent dialogue has centered on the issue
of methodology as partisans of traditional, narrative history have
attacked those who are adapting theories from social history and
literary criticism such as gender, postmodernism, or heuristics to
their studies of foreign relations.

As Frank Costigliola, Anders Stephanson, Frank Ninkovich, William
Walker, Kristin Hoganson, Bob Dean, Laura Belmonte and others have
attempted to broaden the parameters of the field by studying culture,
language and gender in the diplomatic arena, they have been excoriated
by traditionalist historians in print, on the H-Diplo "discussion"
list, in casual conversation.(2)

I do not wish to ruminate about that methodolgical debate here [though
I will comment on it briefly below] but to raise another issue that I
believe is more important to the practice of diplomatic history:
ideology. Namely, I would argue that the attack on methods is a
thinly-disguised assault on what has become the "Left" is our field.

Where Robert Berkhofer suggests that contextualism is a methodology, I
would broaden the framework to suggest that methodology, furthermore,
is ideology.(3) The way we examine our subjects goes a long way in
determining what our conclusions will be. As any quantum physicist will
tell you, observation is inherently disruptive.

Ergo, those who use postmodern theory or gendered language to analyze
the conduct of America's global affairs are likely to take a critical
view of U.S. behavior in the world. Like white males who cry "reverse
discrimination," traditionalists and conservatives in the field are
complaining that the postmodernists and culturalists have established a
"hegemony" in diplomatic history. In its most virulent form, many
traditionalists argue, as Sally Marks of Rhode Island College put it,
that "those determined to pack their departments with exponents of the
new history are short-sighted, lemming-like, intolerant, irresponsible,
and shortchanging students (and anything else appropriate one can think
of)."(4) Thus, the current debate over theories and methods is another
part of what Anders Stephanson termed the "containment of ideology" in
a critique of John Gaddis's work in 1993.(5) For their part, historians
who use social and cultural theories also claim victimhood, finding the
need to defend their methods in as many venues as possible. Both have
it wrong.

Indeed, traditional, conservative, and/or narrative historians have
little if anything to complain about. Their works dominate the field,
they publish in volume, they get jobs and promotions. But those on the
cultural Left are not shut out either.

Books and articles on gender and foreign policy are published
regularly; articles in Diplomatic History and elsewhere trumpeting
these new theories are common; proposals for major conferences
featuring new approaches stand a better chance at acceptance than
traditionalist panels; and younger scholars taking social and cultural
approaches have not been shut out of an increasingly-tight job
market.(6)

If any particular group or approach is conspicuously absent from the
mainstream in our field, it is the economic or structural Left, the
descendants of the New Left of the 1960s one could maintain. The New
Left, so widespread and popular just over a generation ago, has
virtually disappeared from the landscape of diplomatic history, swept
away by an ideological counterrevolution from the right and an
abandonment from today's so-called Left. But, as Bill Walker pointed
out in his address at the Thomas Paterson tribute conference, "we
should take pride in the achievements of earlier revisionist
generations."(7) That, apparently, is not yet happening. In the 1990s,
only about ten percent of the articles in Diplomatic History have
focused on economic or material aspects of U.S. foreign relations and
of those I would only include Emily Rosenberg's presidential address as
having a leftist cast. Just three of the fifteen essays on methods and
theories in the study of foreign relations in the Mike Hogan-Tom
Paterson collection, Explaining the History of American Foreign
Relations, deal with economic or materialist issues (Louis Perez on
dependency; Tom McCormick on world systems theory; and Hogan on
corporatism).(8) A library search for books on arms sales, the World
Bank, or the military-industrial complex will come up with few, if any,
works written by historians. Even a perusal of the syllabi on Nick
Sarantakes's fine website for diplomatic historians [admittedly not a
scientific sample] reveals that the most popular authors assigned are
Bill Brands, Melvyn Leffler, John Gaddis and others while only Walter
LaFeber appears from the New Left, and that more likely for The
American Age rather than a monograph. Indeed, to the current generation
of young scholars and graduate students, the New Left is something of a
relic, or to use Ross Perot's favorite analogy, similar to the crazy
aunt who everyone whispers about but isn't taken seriously. It's time
to change that. The New Left revolutionized and modernized the study of
diplomatic history and is as vital, even more so I would argue, today
as in the 1960s. Indeed, the analysis and conclusions reached by New
Left authors in a previous generation remain effective guides to the
study of American foreign policy not just for the Cold War, but for all
of U.S. diplomatic history.

The Rise of the New Left

The New Left emerged, or maybe more appropriately erupted, onto a field
dominated by an increasingly stale debate over idealism vs. realism and
stifled by a consensus on the virtue of America's role in the world. It
benefitted from some of the sharpest minds in the historical profession
and then from a large-scale hunger on the part of Americans to learn
more about the nation and the system that was waging a destructive and
immoral war against the people of Vietnam. Building on the work of
Charles Austin Beard and beginning with the publication of William
Appleman Williams' Tragedy of American Diplomacy in 1959, New Left
authors proliferated and arguably dominated the field for the next
decade or so. Many of the titles they produced became widely read and
may be considered classics in the field:

The New Empire and many versions of America, Russia, and the Cold War
by Walter LaFeber;

Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy and Architects of Illusion by
Lloyd Gardner;

Arno Mayer's amazing books on World War I and its aftermath and equally
amazing works on World War II and its aftermath by Gabriel and Joyce
Kolko; Thomas McCormick's China Market; Gar Alperovitz on Atomic
Diplomacy; books and essays by Carl Parrini, Martin Sklar, Carl
Oglesby, Barton Bernstein, and Thomas Paterson; an awesome body of work
from Noam Chomsky.(9) Though a diverse group of scholars, New Left
authors shared a commitment to analyze the economic, materialist
(domestic) forces conditioning American foreign policies, most
importantly the Open Door; to question corporate and presidential
power; to counter claims, in the Cold War era, of monolithic Communism
and Soviet aggression; and to critically examine claims of American
benificence and goodwill in the world. Many New Left works embodied all
those traits, but others, such as Alperovitz, did not stress economics
but may be included because their work diverged so markedly from the
official stories being produced by historians willing to apologize for
American power.

The New Left clearly influenced countless scholars in our field,
changed the way we do diplomatic history, and helped facilitate the
growth of new approaches to the field such as corporatism, world
systems theory, or dependency theory. In the work of scholars like Mike
Hogan and Bruce Cumings we see the inheritors of the New Left. In my
own case, the New Left has had a tremendous impact on my studies and my
career. The first books I read in grad school-in a diplomatic history
course taught by Bill Walker, who was covering for Marvin Zahniser at
Ohio State that semester- were Tragedy and The Politics of War. Coming
from an undergraduate background where I studied Greek and Roman
history these books were truly eye-opening!

Subsequently, I read LaFeber, McCormick, Jerry Israel, N.Gordon Levin
and many others writing in a similar vein, as well as more traditional
authors such as Samuel Flagg Bemis, Thomas Bailey, George Frost Kennan,
and John Lewis Gaddis. But I had been taken in by the systemic and
critical approach of the New Left, which had confirmed some fuzzy
thoughts I had about the nature of American power in the world during
the Vietnam era, and I decided to study diplomatic history as a
result.

Since then, my enthusiasm for the New Left has only grown, but I've
been just as disturbed over the past two decades by the trend away from
doing the kind of histories pioneered by Williams and his posse.
Historians still produce works critical of America's global actions and
some, though a diminishing number, still examine economic foreign
policy. In the main, however, the Left in diplomatic history has been
contained and not a little bit rolled back. Conventional wisdom,
basking in Cold War triumphalism and weighty studies of national
security, has virtually returned to the earliest interpretations of
U.S. foreign relations, claiming that American leaders acted globally
[albeit, sometimes, agressively] in pursuit of legitimate strategic
objectives or to counter dangerous global trends [especially Communism]
or to promote American values abroad. Examinations of "hegemony,"
"empire," or of the "military-industrial complex" are noticeably
absent. Amid this self-proclaimed "post-revisionist synthesis," I want
to ponder the question "what happened to the New Left?"(10)

Right Supremacy and the Cultured Left

When I think of those historians in our field who are most recognized
by both their colleagues and the public generally they are all
conservative or at least "mainstream"

scholars, defenders or apologists for every U.S. administration since
FDR: John Gaddis, of course, and Melvyn Leffler have both won the
Bancroft Prize and have access to the pages of the establishment's
in-house organ Foreign Affairs.

Stephen Ambrose and Robert Dallek are regular talking heads on various
PBS programs, as is Michael Beschloss. On H-Diplo, the electronic
discussion list for the field, conservatives, many on the government
dole who post multiple messages daily, assault practicioners of the new
methods and critics of the American century even as one of their own,
William Stueck, blasts them for failing "to launch a systematic
counterattack on the view that race, class, and gender are the three
fundamental categories of historical analysis."(11) Indeed, H-Diplo,
supposedly an open forum for debating issues of foreign relations, has
become something of an electronic version of Commentary, where the far
right debates the center right over the propriety of U.S.

behavior in the world, and critics of American diplomacy rarely any
longer even see fit to contribute. Even young apologists for the
establishment like Douglas Brinkley and Tim Naftali have access to the
New York Review of Books and New York Times.

Indeed, privilege has its membership.

This triumphalism and conservative hegemony over the field of
diplomatic history--"right supremacy" I like to call it--has probably
been the biggest factor in the demise of the Left over the past
generation or so. To some not insignificant degree, this is probably a
product of international trends in the aftermath of Vietnam and
attached to the demise of liberalism, when Ronald Reagan and George
Bush dramatically increased military spending, brought back Cold War
rhetoric reminiscent of John Foster Dulles, took on the Soviets via
proxies [who later would become Taliban] in Afghanistan, invaded Panama
on the sham pretext of cutting off the supply of drugs to the United
States, and, despite American and world condemnation, subverted leftist
governments in Latin America while training and supplying murderous
juntas which slaughtered and "disappeared" hundreds of thousands of
their own, most notoriously in Guatemala.(12) Meanwhile, on the
Communist side, the emergence of the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev gave
temporary hope for a new socialism and, possibly, real global
cooperation and meaningful detente, but the Soviet system was probably
too badly decayed for perestroika to work. Thus, by the late 1980s and
early 1990s, Reaganism, and Thatcherism, were riding high, the
Sandinistas were out of power and the FMLN in El Salvador was laying
down its arms, the Wall had fallen, and the Kremlin was collapsing.

But even before that turn of events, even prior to Gaddis's
proclamation in his 1983 DH article that revisionism was dead, few
scholars were still producing critical economic analyses of American
foreign policies and concepts like "empire by invitation" were
replacing studies of hegemony.(13) Few talked about the consequences of
American policies abroad on local peoples. Even amid controversial
Reagan-Bush foreign policy decisions, in the Middle East and Latin
America in particular, historians did not respond as they had in the
Vietnam era by producing a spate of revisionist works.

Since then, Gaddis first and then Leffler have emerged as the spokesmen
for the field, offering versions of history that differ markedly from
the New Left and gaining broad acceptance. Indeed, when they surveyed
the field in a DH historiographical essay in 1993 Randall Woods and
Howard Jones contended that the Gaddis/Leffler "national security
approach" was not only the most prevalent interpretation but the right
one.(14) This trend, I think, is most unsatisfying. While Gaddis and
Leffler, and others who write like them, do make certain allowances for
American errors, their work can border on Court History. Indeed,
conservative diplomatic historians in general share a warm and fuzzy
relationship with American power. As I ponder the field I am reminded
of Noam Chomsky's powerful query in his essay "The Responsibility of
Intellectuals"in 1969: "The question 'What have I done?' is one that we
may well ask ourselves, as we read, each day, of fresh atrocities in
Vietnam-as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be
used to justify the next defense of freedom."(15)

Why do the ranking scholars in our field bring Chomsky's plea to mind?
I don't here need to go into a deep discussion of Gaddis and Leffler.
Mike Hogan, Bruce Cumings, Bill Walker, and Anders Stephanson, among
others, have already critiqued their work, and better than I could in
any event.(16) But I do want to speak to Gaddis's and Leffler's most
recent efforts that show their coziness to power and reveal the
inconsistencies in their thought. Leffler, as we know, argues that
American policymakers, with a preponderance of prudence, acted in
defense of a "political economy of freedom" and shut down the Soviet
threat. But his ideas cannot be easily pigeonholed.

Over the past two decades, Leffler has become something of the Leonard
Zelig of the field, changing his interpretations on a fairly consistent
basis from his earlier, quasi-New Left ideas, to Preponderance, where
he praises the wisdom of the American establishment, to his more
critical introduction to Origins of the Cold War, which he co-edited
with David Painter, to his dialogue with Bill Walker in DH and the
SHAFR Newsletter.(17)

Leffer, oddly it would seem, admits that "no one [in official circles]
feared Soviet military aggression" in the late 1940s and that the most
vexing issues facing U.S.

policymakers-the dollar gap, reconstruction in Western Europe, dealing
with Germany and Japan-"were not the making of the Soviet Union."(18)
After Bill Walker pointed out the inconsistency of waging a costly and
aggressive Cold War against an enemy that posed no imminent threat,
Leffler elaborated on his argument: "The point of my writings is not
that American actions were a 'realistic response to Soviet
initiatives,'"

he asserted, "but that they were an understandable and prudent response
to the multitude of opportunities that the Kremlin had to aggrandize
its power. No where . . .

do I say that the Kremlin would have used its power to take advantage
of all these opportunities. My argument is that U.S. policymakers
feared that these trends could play into Stalin's hands."(19) What
precisely does he mean? If American initiatives were not a realistic
response to Soviet actions (and therefore they are presumably
unrealistic) how can they be "understandable and prudent?" How does
building a series of worst-case scenarios based on a potential threat
of Soviet behavior and consequently militarizing the American economy
and culture and containing or repressing democratic movements abroad
and at home constitute an "understandable and prudent" policy? American
actions, if one is to accept Leffler's own premise of the Soviet
non-threat, were reckless, imprudent, and more than a little
irrational.

Leffler, though ultimately validating American power in the early Cold
War, does employ some critical analysis and nuance to his work. Gaddis,
however, presents a much more triumphal interpretation of America's
Cold War exploits, sort of a "hallelujah choir" for the empire. This is
not terribly surprising if one has read Gaddis's work from his earlier
efforts to the present. I recall reading The United States and the
Origins of the Cold War while a grad student and having an ambivalent
response until he concluded, Arthur Schlesinger-like, that U.S. actions
or overtures to the Soviet Union were moot because Stalin's personal
pathologies made compromise impossible. From there, Gaddis began
experimenting with new methodologies and language and, in Strategies of
Containment, as Anders Stephanson observed, "move[d] diplomatic history
closer to the advice factories of political science, the mirror of
power par excellence."(20) By 1993, with Communism in Europe
disintegrated and the West triumphant, he not only elaborated on his
analysis of Stalin's responsibility for the Cold War in his SHAFR
Presidential Address but essentially indicted the New Left en masse for
being apologists for the Soviet Union and Uncle Joe, a theme taken up
most recently by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who, in defending Elia Kazan's
role as informer in the McCarthyite period, charged that critics of
Kazan should be denounced "for the aid and comfort they gave to
Stalinism." In his most recent work, We Now Know, that line of thought
reaches its apex, or nadir depending on one's perspective.(21) The
title, Gaddis claims, is conditional and temporal, as in "this is what
we now know so far" but the arguments in the book seem definitive, as
in "we now know this to be true." Gaddis claims that recent works based
on newly-opened archives in former Communist nations have proven that
Soviet aggression, conditioned by Stalin's personality, made Cold War
inevitable and compromise impossible.

To agree with Gaddis would be easy, as Richard Nixon might have said,
but it would be wrong. There are problems with his approach. The number
of Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese documents so far declassified
and accessible is minuscule. It is also ironic that so many scholars,
who cautioned against believing anything coming out of the Soviet Union
during the Cold War, now take any document that adds weight to their
argument as gospel. More pointedly, many scholars, using documents from
the same sources that Gaddis claims attest to Soviet perfidy and
imperialism, reach quite different conclusions. David Fogelsong,
working on an earlier period, shows that the Cold War arguably began in
the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I as the
Americans attempted to oust the new regime. Michael Jabara Carley, as
Lloyd Gardner observes, uses Soviet documents "to bolster the case that
Stalin's foreign policies were essentially pragmatic responses to a
world riven by ideological confrontation." And, in a 1996 Foreign
Affairs overview of histories based on the ex-Communist archives,
Melvyn [Zelig?] Leffler comes close to conceding that the New Left had
it right a generation ago, that Stalin, albeit ruthless and repressive
in certain circumstances, was pragmatic, defensive and not adventurous
in international affairs. And the best source on the new collections,
the Bulletin of the Cold War International History Project, has
published a series of articles over the years that add a great deal to
our understanding of the early Cold War years but do not offer a
definitive version of that era, an "official story" that is not open to
challenge or interpretation.(22)

To steal and adapt Warren Kimball's line from some time ago, one
wonders if We Now Know is much more than "orthodoxy plus (new)
archives," for indeed Gaddis's conclusions vary little from his
previous effort: the United States used the A-Bomb for a "simple and
straightforward reason"-to end the hostilities quickly and avoid a
massive loss of American lives if a land war in Asia were to
occur-while, on 8 August, the Soviet Union entered the Pacific theater
in an "undignified scramble to salvage an unexpectedly unpromising
situation."

Americans, with "little imperial consciousness or design" and
anti-imperialist traditions, finally gained "the self-confidence
necessary to administer imperial responsibilities" in the later 1940s
to combat the Soviet threat. The United States, which "had played an
even more decisive role in defeating Japan than the Soviet Union had in
vanquishing Germany," had a right to shut out the USSR from the
Japanese settlement in response to earlier expressions of "Stalin's
unilateralism."(23)

And so it goes: despite some differences, the Chinese had inordinate
influence over Ho Chi Minh;

Castro, probably a closet Bolshevik from the first, was a knockoff of
both Mao and Ho, climbing aboard the bandwagon of history toward world
revolution, driven by the Marxist-Leninist ideologies; the Soviet,
believing that Capitalism was on the ropes, rejected involvement in the
Bretton Woods system despite American efforts to integrate the
Communist states; and "we will never know for certain what Stalin or
Mao might have done with a nuclear monopoly."(24)

But what of countervailing evidence or counter interpretation? Is
Stalin's "undignified" entry into the Pacific War more worthy of
criticism than thermonuclear attacks on Hiroshima?

Did it really take American policymakers nearly a half-century to
develop the "confidence" to hesitantly construct an empire? Was the
U.S. role in the Pacific truly more determinative than that of the
Soviet Union-which lost about 25 million people and countless farms and
factories while tearing the guts out of the Wehrmacht, especially when
compared to the comparatively minimal American losses? Did American
multilateral dreams at Bretton Woods really include the USSR? Ho taking
direction from the Chinese? And while it's true that we don't know what
Stalin or Mao might have done with a nuclear monopoly, we do now know
what happened on 6 August 1945!

In describing We Now Know, I think Lloyd Gardner got it right. "Gaddis
resolves old Cold War question marks by positing Stalin as the demiurge
that contains within himself power to unleash a revolutionary force of
eager zealots with the expressionless gaze of a brutish power. Stalin
the brutal realist accounts for . . . the Iron Curtain, while the
romantic revolutionary . . . drive[s] the Soviet state toward the goal
of world revolution." Ultimately, Gaddis revives, unintentionally or
not, the old canard from the 1940s and 1950s about the "international
communist conspiracy."

Gaddis's explanations, Gardner concludes, "finally accounts for nearly
everything that happened-and permits Western policies to be seen as a
normative response to the threat of the "other."(25) After reading We
Now Know, it's fair to ask whether the book was written by a historian.
Far too often Gaddis overlooks larger patterns such as American
expansion and its attendant need for markets, raw materials, and
investment; he does not address changes or fluctuations in Soviet
actions, or is dismissive of them; he either dismisses or fails to
understand the systemic needs and motivations of all sides; he does not
perceive larger structures-ideological, political, cultural,
material-which shape policies and behavior by all parties to the
conflict. His work, however, is virtually canon among many in the
field, and there is not much of a Left to respond to it.

While Gaddis, Leffler and others have redirected the field away from
the revisionism of the 1960s and 1970s and toward a common, if not
consensus, interpretation of the "wisdom" of American policymakers
acting against the ideologically-driven Communist threat, there has not
been an extensive "left" to offer a strong rebuttal. Although the
triumphalism of the past two decades has been a principal factor in the
movement away from New Left revisionism, the emphasis on the methods
and theories of social and cultural history by what passes for today's
"Left" diplomatic historians has contributed to the state of the field
just as much. Where the Left in the 1960s studied the systemic nature
of American expansion, especially the domestic economic forces behind
it, today's critical work in the field tends to focus on issues such as
gendered language, postmodern constructions of the state, ideology,
emotions, and other less tangible matters than trade, investment, or
deficits, for example. In our field, this follows a larger trend in
American history generally. The major journals, Journal of American
History and American Historical Review, have only rarely had articles
about foreign relations over the past decade, apparently preferring
studies of bathing and posture. In JAH, for instance, there have been
three articles by diplomatic historians in the 1990s: Andrew Rotter on
gendered images of South Asia, Eileen Scully on sex markets in China,
and Frank Costigliola on George Kennan's gendered language.

These are a far cry from the New Left of the 1960s, which is especially
ironic because Rotter and Costigliola both wrote outstanding first
books on foreign policy that made extensive use of economic
analyses.(26)

Today, however, there is about as much chance of getting an article on
economic foreign policy published in one of the major journals outside
the field as of me being the keynote speaker at a conference of The
History Society, even if I am a well-dressed Sicilian Marxist. All
kidding aside, the emergence of this new group is testament to the
status anxiety of many in the field, including some of our best known
practitioners like Walter LaFeber and Lloyd Gardner, who use more
traditional historical methods. But at the same time, the leadership,
including Eugene and Elizabeth Genovese and Marc Trachtenberg, is quite
conservative, at times virulently so and, as I said above, there is
most often a link between attacks on methodology and ideology. In fact,
Trachtenberg complains that "increasingly, the old ideal of historical
objectivity is dismissed out of hand. The very notion of 'historical
truth' is now often considered hopelessly naive. Instead, the tendency
is for people to insist that all interpretation is to be understood in
essentially political terms. If objectivity is a myth, how can our
understanding of the past be anything but an artifact of our political
beliefs? Indeed, if all interpretation is political anyway, then why
not give free rein to one's own political views? Why not use whatever
power one happens to have to 'privilege' one's own brand of
history?"(27) As I read these words attacking new methods, they are
eerily similar to countless attacks I have read in the past by
conservative historians analyzing the New Left.

Having said that, it's equally clear that the current trendy
alternative to this conservative triumphalism-cultural and gender
studies-fails to adequately explain the nature of American foreign
relations. These new approaches that focus on gender and language and
similar conceptions do have some merit, and the conservative attack on
them is in good measure an attack on their conclusions, which are
critical of power. But gender assumptions and choice of words are
principally a good starting point for analysis rather than conclusive
in their own right.

Certainly, American policymakers, overwhelmingly male and products of
privileged backgrounds in most cases, were predisposed to think, act,
and talk in a certain way and it adds to our understanding of foreign
policies if we examine the cultures from which these men came and the
way they looked at the world. It seems, however, that masculine
ideologies or language, which are artificially constructed and reflect
larger values, tend to be instruments of policy rather than agents.
That is to say, if one wants to demonize a perceived threat or an
enemy, it is an effective strategy to describe that person or group or
nation in feminine, weak terms. Thus, as Rotter pointed out, U.S.
policymakers spoke of the Indians in feminine terms while Pakistanis
were considered more masculine. But isn't the prima facie cause of
America's Indian problem the threat of neutralism on Nehru's part. So a
tilt toward Pakistan makes great sense for political reasons but it's
easier to explain and promote using cultural ideas like gender.
Likewise, in a paper given at the January 1999 AHA conference,
Costigliola described a tour of California by George Kennan to rally
support for containment. He received the most positive responses when
he spoke before "stag gatherings of businessmen." In San Francisco ,
however, Kennan's audiences, under the "maternal wing"of local
organizers, were filled with "pretense, jealousies and inhibitions,"
and were "easy meat for Soviet agents of every sort"-terms associated
with feminine or homosexual characteristics. "Politically," he
concluded, "these people are as innocent as six year old maidens."(28)
Again, however, it seems that the salient point here is that Kennan's
criteria for manliness and femininity is one's support of containment;
the words used to describe the individuals thus fall in line with the
policies advocated.

Language reflects material and class interests and, without that
component as part of an analysis, we get a terribly incomplete
picture.

Kristin Hoganson, in Fighting for American Manhood, a study of gender
politics in the origins of the wars of 1898, takes a similar approach.
She studies the machismo of TR, the role of women in the political
process, the gendered language of the establishment and the media, and
concludes that one of the principal reasons for war in Cuba and the
Philippines was a desire to reclaim America's virility and martial
spirit. Hogan's argument is intriguing, at times compelling, but, once
more, I wonder how important the thought and language of political
leaders, businessmen, ministers and editorialists is compared to the
material interests involved in finding a way out of the economic morass
of the 1890s. It is hard to find explicit issues of political economy
or class in Hoganson's opaque work, in large part because all
motivating factors share equal billing.(29) But isn't class one of, if
not the, principal factors in developing one's culture. Are not the men
who make foreign policy sons of privileged backgrounds, well-educated,
well-to-do, sophisticated, at least compared to most Americans,
well-connected, commercially-minded.

Don't those class attributes mean anything? Aren't individuals just
as-more I would contend-likely to agree on policies when their material
interests intersect than when they happen to be the same gender?

I don't mean to bash advocates of this approach; indeed I think that
Costigliola and Rotter, as well as Frank Ninkovich and William Walker,
all who use these new methodologies to some extent, are superior
historians. But these studies of culture and ideology often omit the
class backgrounds of policymakers, overlook the economic imperatives
conditioning their prescriptions for American action, ignore the
material relationships between business, the state, and elites in other
lands, pay no heed to the idea of power. Indeed, I would argue that the
best studies of the culture or ideology of American foreign policy
would include Gardner's Architects of Illusion, Kolko's The Roots of
American Foreign Policy, or Richard Barnet's Roots of War, all of which
see the class backgrounds of the "wise men" of foreign policy as a
major characteristic of their culture, indeed of the culture of the
entire Establishment.(30) But, from this culturalist left we rarely see
that element considered and thus get only a fragmented view of policy,
one that tends to emphasize the means used to justify American actions,
rather than explain the reasoning behind them in a holistic manner. It
should be instructive that the world's leading linguist and one of its
most astute critics of empire, Noam Chomsky, does not himself merge
these disciplines;

indeed he finds them of little use, a diversion from an accurate
rendering of the past. "While left intellectuals discourse
polysyllabically to one another," he charges, "truths that were once
understood are buried, history is reshaped into an instrument of power,
and the ground is laid for the enterprises to come."(31) Indeed, just
as the "right supremacy"

historians are elitist, materially, the cultural left is equally so,
intellectually. It needn't be that way.

A Radical Reads Diplomatic History

Just as Bertolt Brecht showed how history would be remembered
differently if related by a worker rather than a bourgeois
intellectual, the history of U.S. foreign relations reads, or sounds,
quite different when given a revisionist interpretation. We tend to
forget that not that long ago, such radical readings of U.S. foreign
policy were not uncommon. Most recently, in the Vietnam era and during
the fight against Reagan's interventions into Central America, large
percentages of Americans-over two-thirds in most polling-believed that
the U.S. war in Vietnam was not only a mistake but also "morally wrong"
and, a decade or so later, were strongly opposed to the wars against
the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and support of the reactionary regimes in
El Salvador and Guatemala. A revisionist, materialist, critical reading
of American foreign relations over the past two centuries is as valid,
as needed, today as it was a generation ago. As such, a brief survey of
American diplomatic history from a radical perspective may be in order
here.

Well before there was anything like a New Left in diplomatic history to
examine the materialist motives and actions of American policymakers,
there were economic imperatives driving America toward an expanded role
in the world, and we sometimes find recognition of this in curious
places-like the writing of Samuel Flagg Bemis. Though he never put it
in such terms, Bemis's overall thesis-American successes from European
distresses-showed that American diplomats were as exploitative,
cynical, backstabbing-and effective-as their counterparts across the
Atlantic as they pursued a new nation and a new system based on the
free movement of goods and capital and Most Favored Nation agreements,
along with reform, to create global economic partners.(32) Indeed, the
hallmark of Independence-era foreign policy, John Adams's "Model Treaty
for Alliances," could have been used a century later as a model for the
Open Door as it urged a "Commercial Connection, i.e., make a Treaty to
receive her [French] ships in our Ports [and] let her engage to receive
our Ships into her Ports."(33) Could Cordell Hull, James Baker, or
Robert Rubin quibble with such sentiments?

Into the nineteenth century, materialist concerns continued to dominate
America's expanding role in foreign affairs. Whether it be
continental-such as the extermination of Natives and theft of Indian
lands or using violence to acquire Spanish or Mexican lands, or
international-sending Commodore Perry's fleet to Japan, making plans to
take Cuba at Ostend, supporting filibusters in Central America, buying
Alaska, and so forth, the United Sates was motivated by materialist
factors such as gaining new agricultural lands, extending the
"slavocracy,"

gaining natural resources, finding markets, penetrating areas for
capital investment.

Indeed, American leaders did not even have to choose this direction,
for it was their "manifest destiny" to eliminate red and brown people
and violate the national sovereignty of other lands.(34)

When, in the aftermath of the Civil War, American farmers and workers
began to produce far more goods than the domestic market could absorb,
the United States embarked on a wide path to empire.(35) As a
diplomatic official explained in 1898, "it seems to be conceded that
every year we shall be confronted with an increasing surplus of
manufactured goods for sale in foreign markets if American operatives
and artisans are to be kept employed the year around. The enlargement
of foreign consumption of the products of our mills and workshops has,
therefore, become a serious problem of statesmanship as well as of
commerce." John D.

Rockefeller thought likewise, observing in 1899 that "dependent solely
upon local business, we should have failed years ago. We were forced to
extend our markets and to seek for foreign trade."(36) Such market
concerns merged with a growing sense of American power; Secretary of
State Richard Olney boasted, for instance, that "the United States is
practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the
subjects to which it confines its interposition."(37) At the turn of
the century, then, the United States was confident, indeed agressive,
as it approached new areas of the globe.

At the outset of the twentieth century, the connections between
"statesmanship" and "commerce" were becoming closer than ever. As John
Hart's brilliant examination of American policy during the Mexican
Revolution showed, an interlocking group of American bankers who were
also Democratic Party leaders and investors and landholders in Mexico
shaped the U.S.

response to the Villa and Zapata movements, while, more generally,
these cutting-edge capitalists were instrumental in determining overall
foreign policy. As soon-to-be President Woodrow Wilson observed in
1907, "since . . . the manufacturer insists on having the world as a
market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of
nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions
obtained by financiers most be safeguarded by ministers of state even
if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the
process."(38)

As it turned out, the safeguarding of concessions and outraging of
sovereignty became benchmarks of American diplomacy from 1900 forward.
In China, Russia, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, and
elsewhere American policymakers forced open doors for private
investment and markets, intervened in the domestic affairs of
independent nations, or sent American troops to foreign lands to
establish "order," thus giving rise to Will Rogers's famous quip that
"I was shocked the other day-I actually saw a Marine on American soil."
One of those Marines, General Smedley Butler, left one of the more
compelling critiques of U.S. imperialism, calling himself a "racketeer,
a gangster for capitalism." During his thirty-three years in the
Marines, Butler "helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for
American oil interests in

1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City
Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a
dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The
record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the
international banking house of Brown Brothers 1909-12. I brought light
to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I
helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. In
China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way
unmolested. . .

Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few
hints.

The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I
operated on three continents."(39)

And what of the "Great War" to make the world "safe for democracy?" I
am still taken with the work of Charles Tansill, a revisionist if not a
leftist, and Scott Nearing, an unapologetic socialist, who examined and
revealed the economic underpinnings of American diplomacy during the
Wilson years. With American trade with Britain and France running
thousands of times greater than with Germany, the United States
becoming a creditor nation, J.P.

Morgan and Robert Lansing brokering loans to the Allies, and an
emerging left to be contained, it seems easy to understand just what
Wilson meant by "democracy," Lansing, for his part, was explicit,
warning that if the United States did not bail out the British and
French, the United States would suffer "restriction of output,
industrial depression, idle capital, idle labor, numerous failures,
financial demoralization, and general unrest and suffering among the
laboring classes."(40)

In the so-called isolationist interwar years, as William Appleman
Williams pointed out, American business and political interests
continued to grow abroad, increasing both America's economic role and
influence globally.(41) At the same time, the U.S. response to German
aggression in Europe provided New Dealers with the rationale to create
finally a permanent government spending program, based on military
needs, to end the depression and to create a new economic order. During
the war and in its aftermath, as the Kolkos especially detailed,
American policymakers were developing military strategies with an eye
toward postwar economic hegemony and aggressively pursuing political
arrangements that extended economic clout into all points along the
globe while containing forces abroad and at home that might challenge
American power and its military-industrial complex.(42) Speaking with a
candor that was typical for him but rare for U.S. policymakers, George
Frost Kennan admitted in 1948 that "we have 50 percent of the world's
wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population . . . . Our real task in
the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships that will
allow us to maintain this position of disparity."(43)

As the "American Century" entered its second half, then, the United
States was on a crusade to extend capital and conquer global markets.
Through government spending programs like military aid and the Marshall
Plan, political-economic leaders created a new and extensive reliance
in other lands upon American economic support, which in turn provided
markets and anti-democratic political alliances so that the United
States controlled 50 percent of the world's trade and had developed
cooperative economic and military agreements with a group of "our sons
of bitches," one could say. At the same time, U.S. business and
government leaders were establishing corporative economic arrangements
at home and trying to export such ideologies abroad, thereby creating
transnational political and financial institutions that would, in time,
surpass the state or democracy as the driving force in American
diplomacy.

With NSC-68 and the outbreak of war in Korea, American hegemony got a
huge boost, now possessing a rationale for permanent military buildups,
anticommunist interventions everywhere, and proxy wars throughout the
Third World. NSC-68, along with the Red Scare, provided a dynamic
one-two combination to American democracy, making any dissent against
the Military Keynesian state appear to be disloyal and rigidly
confining reform along mainstream, non-threatening lines and into
established political channels.(44)