The Wisconsin School

I was discussing with a friend the Gar Alperovitz episode and remarking on how
regrettable it was that even in a military-oriented newsgroup visited by people
with an interest in Cold War history and whose lives have been directly
affected by his views, he is an unknown. And that led us to the so-called
Wisconsin school of Cold War revisionist historians (of whom GA was--is--a
member) and the probability that a lot of people who should know about it, who
have been affected by it, know little or nothing about it. So we came up with
a list of six crucial books from this school, books that radically changed
America's own view of the Cold War--as well as the view of the US held by the
rest of the West. They still have influence, as even on this newsgroup today
there are posts reflecting the world view of the US and its motives established
by the following six books. (These are not "bad" books in the sense that they
are necessarily misinformed, inaccurate, or poorly written, but their influence
has been most pernicious.)
Note that the timeframe of their publication encompasses the 1960s and the
birth of the "New Left."

1. William A. Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959. Williams, the
founder of the "Wisconsin School" argues here that US diplomacy has long been
dominated by the search for commercial markets for American products and farm
goods, to the exclusion of higher values.

2. Donald Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1961. Fleming argues that
anticommunists in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations sabotaged FDR's plan
for a postwar order that would have stressed friendly relations with the USSR.

3. Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the Use of the
Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power, 1965. Alperovitz
argued that the bomb had been dropped on Japan to warn Stalin against
interfering with American plans for the postwar world.

4. David Horowitz, Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy
in the Cold War, 1965. Horowitz took the arguments of the above three and
others who mined the same lode and turned them into a blistering anti-Vietnam
War polemic. The book became standard reading in college history courses almost
as soon as it was published. (Horowitz, a "red diaper baby," also came to be
associated with the Black Panthers. He is one of the rare ones who has
repudiated his earlier views.)

5. Gabriel Kolko, Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy,
1943-1945, 1968. Kolko contended that America's anti-Soviet policies during
WW2 were responsible for the breakdown of the Soviet-American alliance and the
beginning of the Cold War.

6. Lloyd Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign
Policy, 1941-1949, 1970. Gardner asserted that responsibility for the Cold War
belonged squarely with the United States, with the Soviet Union an innocent
victim of American duplicity.

These books caused a seismic shift in the academic and diplomatic view of the
US role in the world, a shift that denied the reality of a Soviet threat in
particular and of communism in general, and questioned the motives behind the
containment doctrine. They influenced the Nixon-Kissenger policy of detente
and profoundly affected the Carter administration's world view.
George Meany, old time union organizer, New Deal Democrat and head of the
AFL-CIO, was baffled by the sudden diffidence of even old time anti-communists
like Nixon and blasted detente, asserting that "the cause of human rights in
this world is dependent on the strength--the economic strength, the military
strength and the moral strength--of the United States of America."
But the Wisconsin School had made him and his views a dinosaur. In 1975 came
Paul Warnke's famous 1975 "Apes on a Treadmill" essay in Foreign Policy, in
which he called for global downsizing of American power and an end to efforts
to match Soviet military strength--if we quit the arms race, the Soviets would,
too.
Succeeding Nixon-Ford came Carter, who, within months of his innauguration,
spoke of "the intellectual and moral poverty" of US post WW2 actions, based on
"flawed principles and tactics." (speech 5-22-77)
Of course, the result of all this was defeat in Vietnam, the expulsion of
Taiwan from the UN, the Breshnev doctrine and all the rest of it, down to this
day.


Chris Mark