as well as the planners' drive for the insolvency guarantee, and had earlier offered to resign. He had been able to exert little leverage on the State Department because even those who, like Charles E. Stuart, agreed with his plans for balancing trade, nevertheless opposed the favored position he wanted for agriculture. Furthermore, the department's refusal to plan for balanced trade lost most of its strength as the bond between Peek and the planners when the bank overrode Peek by making the American taxpayer liable for some of the risk of future exports. Peek's resignation threw the presidency of the bank and possibly the entire arrangement in doubt.23

Jesse Jones, chairman of the RFC, became effectively the acting president of the bank. Not missing a chance to gain influence for the RFC, Jones telegraphed Roosevelt upon Peek's resignation to recommend discontinuing one of the two export-import banks, and extending "RFC authority to include the Bank's functions." This, he said, would "greatly [reduce] operating expenses," especially if the bank pursued a "restricted program." In consonance with Roosevelt's then rising impulse to balance the budget and Hull's opposition to schemes like the NRA, Jones's recommendation aroused new fears in the camp of the planners. Warren Lee Pierson, general counsel of the bank, told the exporters and the State Department that he "thought that the Export-Import Bank would maintain its offer," but the businessmen wanted assurance. Fred I. Kent, still the American Bankers Association and the NFTC's joint representative to the Export-Import Bank, quickly descended on Jones to press for the insolvency guarantee. Kent cited to Jones Stuart's report as support for his view that "beyond doubt," the Europeans, because of their insolvency guarantee, "have a very real advantage over American exporters." Reminding Jones that the Export-Import Bank was established to stimulate exports, he pointed out that it had yet accomplished little. With a change in the bank's presidency, Kent thought it a good time to develop sound policies for the future:

23 Peek to Roosevelt, July 16, 1935, Roosevelt to Peek, July 17, 1935, Roosevelt to Jones, July 18, 1935, Roosevelt to Peek, July 25, 1935, Peek to Roosevelt, July 29, 1935, Roosevelt to Peek, Nov. 22, 1935, Peek to Roosevelt, Nov. 26, 1935, Roosevelt to Peek, Dec. 11, 1935, George N. Peek, PSF, FDRL.

specifically, the policies adopted just before the presidency changed. In any case, he told Jones, the advisory committees ought to be involved in such a decision. Jones sympathized with Kent's position but was ill-disposed toward unsecured investing with taxpayers' money. Jones had always thought of the RFC's domestic loans and its purchasing of preferred shares of financially beleaguered corporations as short-range emergency measures and they were in his opinion fully secured. The proposal of the Joint Advisory Committee possessed neither virtue.2 24

The NFTC and the Brazilian creditors meanwhile reached a settlement with the Brazilian government based on the Export-Import Bank's resolution of November 12 and asked the bank for its approval. But when Jones saw it he angrily refused to participate. The creditors had violated the bank's November resolution by including debts arising from foreign-produced goods, primarily oil. Thomas, worried that Jones "was looking with grave determination for a possible way to withdraw from the commitment," told the State Department that "he and his legal forces" believed that "the Bank had taken a legal commitment." Charles E. Stuart told Roosevelt's secretary to notify the president that "any material alteration of commitment will be tantamount to repudiation and bad faith."25

When Jones presented his terms on February 17 in the form of a resolution of the bank, however, the planners found what they wanted. The Brazilian creditors' demand for a guarantee against exchange inconvertibility was gone except in attenuated form and even then only on small amounts. But the guarantee against risk of a foreign businessman's default was in the agreement. Although Jones reluctantly gave

24 Jones to Roosevelt, Dec. 26, 1935, RFC File, Reading File, 1935-36, Jones Papers; memo by Heath, Jan. 9, 1936, FRUS, 1936, 5:284-285; Fred I. Kent to Jones, Jan. 10, 1936, General Correspondence File, E-IB, pt. 2, RFC, RG 234, NA.

25 Resolution of the Export-Import Bank, Feb. 17, 1936, General Correspondence of A. V. Dye, Records of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, RG 151, NA; Hull to Hugh Gibson, United States ambassador in Brazil, Feb. 8, 1936, FRUS, 1936, 5:293-294; Gibson to Hull, Jan. 10, 1936, 832.5151/790, Feis to Welles, Feb. 4, 1936, 832.5151/817, Feis to Hull, Feb. 12, 1936, 832.5151/818; Stuart to McIntyre, Feb. 11, 1936, OF 971, FDRL.

the point, with much discretion left to the bank, he agreed to "assist in financing the export of agricultural and manufactured articles of all character . . . when it can be done on a sound basis." Furthermore, although it still read that only in "exceptional cases" would the bank "consider taking a share of the risk," these cases were broadly redefined to include those "necessary to assist in exporting farm surpluses, or heavy goods that would materially increase employment." And since the bank had just agreed to assume 50 percent of the insolvency risk on the Caterpillar Company's sale of machinery to Turkey, with the risk to be secured by unconditional obligations of the Turkish government, the planners felt safe.26

The NRA tried to alleviate the depression through reorienting America's industrial production away from dependency upon exports and through planning an international trade that would balance imports and exports and use public funds to underwrite the risks of foreign insolvency. Failure to reorient production or to balance trade left underwriting the export risks the major thrust, which was institutionalized in the Export-Import Bank. The State Department's reciprocal trade agreements program posited domestic recovery upon restoring international commerce and based the latter upon eliminating government interference with trade and increasing American imports enough to balance exports at a level close to that of the prosperous 1920's. But the State Department's program did not generate enough imports to balance even the depression level of exports, and foreign governments

26 Resolution of the Board of Trustees of the Export-Import Bank, Feb. 17, 1936, Loan Files, Project 80, RG 275, NA; N.Y. Times, Feb. 20, 29, Mar. 1; RFC press release, Feb. 19, 1936, General Correspondence File, E-IB, pt. 2, RFC, RG 234, NA.

did not respond to exhortations to lessen their manipulation of international commerce. Although advocates of neither the NRA nor the trade agreements program succeeded in resolving the depression, both continued the effort by attempting to stimulate exports. Planners in government and private business approved that idea but feared that in a depression the competition would be too fierce and the financing risks too great for private institutions to bear. Hence, they joined the tactics of the NRA to those of the trade agreements program by publicly underwriting the risks. of some foreign buyers' insolvency while the Department of State worked to gain worldwide markets for America.

In subsequent years the Export-Import Bank spun out the meaning of the decision to underwrite the risks of foreign insolvency. The idle first Export-Import Bank, created for Russian trade, was activated for other business by merging the second bank with it in June 1936. With administration support, Congress in 1937 renewed the authorization of the bank. Stuart, seeing his recommendations accepted, his accomplishments applauded, and his task essentially completed, shortly resigned the bank's vice-presidency to accept the vicepresidency of Armco Steel Corporation, soon to be one of the bank's better customers. Warren Lee Pierson became president of the bank and promoted its services by ferreting out markets the exporters had failed to discover or thought too dangerous. When the recession of 1937 spurred fiscal solutions, the policy of stimulating employment through publicly underwriting exporting risks was already established and integrated with the national political economy. And after World War II, when foreign markets posed dangerous risks, or later, when foreign industries presented competitive threats, that policy was to some a welcome legacy of the early New Deal.

WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS

The central questions of historical interpretatation do not involve so much questions of fact-which have largely been resolved-as they do ones of how one perceives the evidence, and how one presents one's perceptions. For the primary issue between me as a revisionist and my serious critics involves our different theories of knowledge-our antithetical conceptions of reality. An honest and potentially creative conflict.

I came to history after ten years of sustained involvement in mathematics and the physical sciences. That education and experience inherently included the serious study of such giants as Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Whitehead, and Russell. Confronted with such conflicting theories of knowledge, I was inexorably drawn into the process of choosing how I would make sense of the world.

Surprising as it may seem, I did not follow Descartes into a universe composed of discrete

William Appleman Williams's contribution marks the beginning of a new feature in Prologue, "A Historian's Perspective." Under this title we hope to publish occasional essays by America's distinguished historians on the nature and purpose of historical research and writing. We hope these essays will add to the depth and scope of Prologue's commitment to bring its readers the fruits of archival research and open up further the dialogue between past and present.

Williams's piece has been excerpted from an address he gave at the 1973 annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Entitled "The Confessions of an Intransigent Revisionist," his address has been widely proclaimed as an eloquent explication of the historian's rationale.

positivistic and atomistic elements sometimes connected to each other in a mechanistic fashion. Instead, I chose Spinoza. I thought he was far more realistic in positing one organic world in which seemingly separate parts are in reality always internally related to each other; a universe in which an ostensibly positivistic fact is in truth a set of relationships with all other facts and therefore with the whole.

From the moment I encountered him, therefore, I responded to Marx. For, despite his extensive empirical research, which gives him the appearance of being a superpositivist, I recognized him as a fellow Spinozian. Hence I read him then, as I read him now, as a genius in social history and political economy-and not at all as an early computer offering the date for the birth of utopia.

I remain exhilarated by his capacity for seeing in one piece of evidence a set of relationships that reveal an economic truth, a truth about an idea, a social verity, and a political truth. I also think that there is more psychological insight in his analysis of our alienation from our humanity under Western capitalism than there is in all but a one-foot shelf of contemporary psychohistory.

Spinoza and Marx proceed from the assumption that everything is internally related to everything else. Thus the problem is not whether or how a may be related to d or p or v, but instead the question of how a and d and p and v reveal as microcosms the nature of the macrocosm. Or, conversely, how the macrocosm reveals the character of a and d and p and

v. Reality is not an issue of economics versus ideas, or of politics versus either; it is not even defined by coefficients of correlation between voting records and geographic location or by a mathematical model that proves that what was done was wrong. Reality instead involves questions of how a political act is also an economic act, of how an economic decision is a political choice, or of how an idea of freedom involves a commitment to a particular economic system. George Lukács said it all in three sentences: "It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. Whatever the subject of debate, the dialectical method is concerned always with the same problem: knowledge of historical process in its entirety. This means that 'ideological' and 'economic' problems lose their mutual exclusiveness and merge into one another."

Granted all that, my confidence in the Spinozian-Marxian strategy of intellectual inquiry was severely tested by Fred Harvey Harrington. He pushed the positivistic, interest-group approach to its furthest limits. He could dissect any decision, event, or movement into its constituent parts with a subtle, loving ruthlessness that earned him the nicknames of Mr. Cold and The Fish Eye. And he understood the techniques of quantification and statistical correlation, although he chose to translate them into the King's English.

After a time, however, the mathematician in me realized that neither he nor anyone else of his persuasion had developed either a scale for weighting the various atomistic factors or a system of differential equations that could reintegrate the parts into the whole. In the usual course of events, that is to say, discrete atomism, or sophisticated scientism, does nothing more than turn Carl Becker on his head: every historian becomes his own man, and hence there is no dialectical encounter between theories of knowledge. There is only an endless argument about which factor is the most important - or endless evasion in the name of multiple causation.

At that point Hans Gerth took me by the hand. As a brilliant, although neglected, member of the Frankfurt School, he teased and pushed me into a confrontation with the central

problem: how does a historian hone the Spinozian-Marxian theory of reality into a manageable intellectual tool? Which is to say: who mediates between our ordinary selves and genius?

Guided by Gerth, I became deeply involved with G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and George Lukács. I enjoyed the ensuing dialectical tension: that coming apart at the seams at midnight, and then the stitching it back together in a sentence or two at 3 AM. Dilthey ultimately taught me the concept of weltanschauung, the sense of three dialectically interacting world views: a workable version of Spinoza's organic reality and a realistic limit on relativism.

Foreign relations seemed to offer the most promising arena for the deployment of that intellectual strategy. Indeed, if there is a Spinozian whole for a historian, then it has to involve foreign policy and the periodization of history. My first book was the result of an effort to lay an empirical foundation for developing a set of internal relations that would make it possible to conceptualize the organic sense of reality entertained by American policymakers (and, by indirection, by the American body politic). I chose relations with Russia because it struck me that such a weltanschauung was apt to reveal itself with particular clarity during a confrontation with a different view of the world.

Out of that effort came my concept of Open Door imperialism as the weltanschauung of twentieth-century American foreign policy. I began with three atomistic documents: Secretary of State John Hay's circular letters of September 6, 1899, and July 3, 1900, and his note to the Germans of October 29, 1900. I next conceptualized those documents as the basic formulation of a general outlook that was amplified and applied to other areas of the world, as in Secretary of State Elihu Root's instructions of November 28, 1905, to the American delegation to the Algeciras Conference.

I concluded at the end of that intellectual voyage that the Open Door policy was a vast network of internal relations in the sense meant by Spinoza and Marx and therefore a weltanschauung in the sense meant by Dilthey. Viewed in that way, it is a conception of reality that integrates economic theory and practice, abstract ideas, past, present, and future poli

tics, anticipations of utopia, messianic idealism, social-psychological imperatives, historical consciousness, and military strategy.

As formulated by the protagonists at the turn of the century, the weltanschauung of the Open Door was an integrated set of assumptions that guided elitist and popular thinking and responses, and that defined bureaucratic perceptions and actions. It then became an ideology, even theology, and ultimately a reification of reality that is finally being subverted by a new reality.

It is so easy to illustrate this with the likes of John Hay, Harry A. Conant, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, Paul T. Culbertson, Charles Evans Hughes, Cordell Hull, and Henry Stimson that the challenge lies with those like Herbert Hoover and Dean Acheson. Hoover is fascinating because of his instinct to transcend the orthodoxy. Acheson is particularly revealing

because he crystallized the discussion of the 1890s in his 1944 testimony before the congressional committee on postwar planning and policy.

To avoid "a very bad time," Acheson warned, meaning "the most far-reaching consequences upon our economic and social system. ... you must look to foreign markets." True, "you could probably fix it so that everything produced here would be consumed here, but that would completely change our Constitution, our relations to property, to human liberty, our very conceptions of law. And nobody contemplates that. Therefore, you find you must look to other markets and those markets are abroad."

The issue here is not economic motives and certainly not the kind of economic determinism that Marx would have scored as absurdly simplistic. The first point is the network of internal relationships in Acheson's mind between foreign markets and everything that he treasured. Or, conversely, the inability to imagine freedom and welfare in a noncapitalistic framework. Secondly, we have a conception of markets that involves American predominance. That is not trade in the classic sense of give and take. It is the imperial dynamic of "we need, you give."

Having crystallized, Acheson began to reify. As in National Security Council Document No. 68: freedom and welfare can be secured only through "the virtual abandonment by the United States of trying to distinguish between national and global security." And then the ultimate distillation: 'We are willing to help people who believe the way we do, to continue to live the way they want to live." Acheson was not present at the creation of a policy-he merely presided over the reification of a weltanschauung.

All of which brings me back to Spinoza. Acheson provides us with a fact that contains the whole and a whole that contains every fact. So if I condense the evidence about Russian policy on reparations at Potsdam into one introductory paragraph that summarizes Moscow's comments of earlier years, and at the same time provides a preview of the Kremlin's final posture, I have not distorted history. I have done my best to encapsulate the history that I then explore; that is the definition of an essay.

Just as when I seem redundant in The Roots