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Ninety Days Inside The Empire: A Novel by William Appleman Williams

Introduction

Page iii

This description, however, lists the very classifications the narrative itself complicates. Ninety Days Inside the Empire communicates its opinions, but is not polemical and does not seek to give answers; it is certainly not confessional or even recognizably autobiographical in the usual celebration of an individual’s experience. Although there is a character—Hellcat pilot Lieutenant Kerry Trevor Wye—given some of Williams’s own experiences, such as a severe beating by renegade deputies, he is not the subject of the novel, just another witness-participant, and is not privileged by narrative emphasis. The narrative presents the inner lives of a large number of characters, military and civilian, male and female, black and white, insiders and outsiders, even—this must have been fun for Williams—an anxious Admiral’s meditations on his sexual-performance problems.

shoulder boards
shoulder boards
From the William Appleman Williams Papers, Special Collections, Oregon State University

Pilots pin
Pilots pin
From the William Appleman Williams Papers, Special Collections, Oregon State University

C. Wright Mills called William Appleman Williams “a socialist at heart,” the qualifier at the end admitting that Williams was not in his own life a political activist, member, or organizer for radical groups. Ninety Days Inside the Empire is among other things a homage to youth and what it felt like, and how ideas learned as abstractions and felt in the heart make their way into life choices. Discussing his childhood in Iowa, Williams wrote, “To put it bluntly: I learned how to say ‘no’ to myself in the name of community. Or, in the contemporary idiom, I learned that doing one’s own thing was capitalism’s most sophisticated form of cooptation.” This is a fair definition of his socialism. As a historian of the twentieth century, he made a radical argument that the United States had almost from its beginnings hitched its stars to the wagon of empire and adopted strategies to which Socialism appeared as the antithesis. The Founding Fathers, he noted in Contours of American History, were of “an American gentry who were guided by the precepts of mercantilism,” and he quoted Sir Francis Bacon to show that mercantilism was a zero-sum vision: “The increase of any estate must be upon the foreigner, for whatsoever is somewhere gotten is somewhere lost.” The gentry in this novel operate on that assumption.