William Appleman Williams was a historian known for his sharp critiques of American foreign policy. A graduate of Kemper Military Academy in Boonville, Missouri, and later of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, he served as an officer in the Pacific during World War II, receiving an honorable discharge and a Purple Heart at war's end. He went on to the University of Wisconsin, where he took his Master's and Ph.D. degrees in history. Before coming to Oregon State University in 1968, he taught in Madison, in the process establishing the "Wisconsin School" of diplomatic history. During his career he was a Distinguished Fulbright Scholar at the University of Melbourne and, in 1979, was elected President of the Organization of American Historians. He retired from OSU in 1986 to his coastal home at Waldport, Oregon. On March 6, 1990, Williams died at the age of 69. Nine years later The Modern Library named his volume, The Contours of American History, one of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books Written in English in the 20th Century.
William Appleman Williams was a prolific and influential writer. His revisionist works -- particularly The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) -- challenged prevailing views of American history, deploring the United States as an imperialist power forcing its economic and ideological will around the globe. Hailed by Eugene Genovese as, "the best historian the Left has produced in this country," the genially combative professor termed himself a radical, isolated from the center of American intellectual life. He was particularly critical of US foreign policy, especially America's role in the Cold War and in Vietnam. In the estimation of Gore Vidal, Williams was, "the best school teacher who ever taught history in Oregon."
With passionate arguments and complex analysis, he championed self-determination for all people, and argued that refusal by Americans to acknowledge a national desire for expansion and global hegemony has led to major errors and confusion over the nation's future. "The act of imposing one people's morality upon another people is an imperial denial of self-determination," he wrote in his 1976 book America Confronts a Revolutionary World: 1776-1976. "Once begun, there is no end of empire except war and more war."
Detractors accused him and other revisionists of employing a double-standard, by justifying or explaining Soviet actions in the context of national security, while measuring Western actions against a utopian ideal. Reviewers termed his works provocative, honestly stated and admirable, but they challenged some arguments as flawed, simplistic and naïve in relying on good intentions and communal feeling.
Indeed, there was much that was paradoxical about the career of William Appleman Williams: the perpetual outsider whose personal influence on American historiography was probably greater than that of any of his contemporaries, a deeply American figure whose interpretation of US foreign policy found readier and wiser acceptance among non-Americans than among his own countrymen. Despite these paradoxes, proponents and critics both are compelled to acknowledge Williams's life and work as characterized by intellectual independence and moral seriousness.
