Introduction

Williams the historian was not indifferent to the plight of the foreigner, but his main interest lay in the ways the imperial mindset victimized everyone, how it encouraged parasitic relationships ranging from the general and institutional to the specific and individual. In other words, he was interested in the implied contradictions between democracy and empire. Though his method as an historian was expository argumentation, his ultimate purpose was to reconfigure the great narrative of the United States away from the creation-myth plot wherein we rejected Europe and commenced to define ourselves in a fantasy of isolation, innocence, and westward movement. In Williams’s own time, the dominant plot was the Cold War allegory of American innocence tested, that we had had involvement in corrupt world affairs thrust upon us in the 1940s and found ourselves battling the evil impulses of fascist and communist empires. Instead, Williams explained reality in terms of an evolution-myth wherein the basic assumptions of mercantilism guide U.S. definitions of democracy, primarily the need for constant expansion. In this reconfiguration, America had always been an evolving empire, to which he applied the formula, “Expansion as escape.” Very early in the process, Thomas Jefferson, whom Williams called “the great epic poet of that urge to escape,” defined our success as a rejection of “Montesquieu’s doctrine, that a republic can be preserved only in a small territory. The reverse is true.” In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Williams argued that this was America’s Original Sin: “the firm conviction, even dogmatic belief, that America’s domestic well-being depends upon such sustained, ever-increasing overseas economic expansion.” It is also the Original Sin in Ninety Days Inside the Empire, and it is revealing the only character crucial to the situation who does not appear as a consciousness is the prime economic mover, the empire builder Ralph George Crown. He is certainly a catalyst, and though his various lackeys represent some sad examples of personal exploitation, his own overarching greed and cynicism do not appear as an inner world of impulse and thought. Perhaps what the appropriately named Crown represents was beyond Williams’s imaginative grasp. Perhaps the omission implies that greed and cynicism do not actually constitute a human consciousness.

Table of Contents

• Introduction

1. Maggie and Mr. Hank
2. The Reverend
3. Squalls Along the Flight Line
4. Flying Home to Church
5. A Visit with The Judge
6. Communion
7. Afterthoughts
8. Monday Morning With The Admiral
9. Into the Dining Room
10. On Toward Walking the Streets
11. Glimpses of An Election
12. The Dream and The Reality of Violence
13. The Admiral Loses More Than a Few Good Men
14. Down That Lonesome Road

• Cast of Characters
• Credits and Acknowledgements