As we see it: Vietnam '68; Dr. William A. Williams

Whole questioning of you around the Warney national educational radio presents as we see at Vietnam 68 a series of appearances of noted spokesman presenting their various views on the war in Vietnam. As we see it Vietnam 68 was conducted over a period of five weeks last spring on the campus of Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Under the sponsorship of the Miami University Student Senate because of the time period that is elapsed between the time these discussions were presented and the president these speeches should be taken to represent the views of the speaker at that time. Nevertheless even with current events concerning the South-East Asian area these speeches represent a valuable background on the Vietnam situation. The speaker for this program is Dr. William a Williams a noted educator and author. Dr. Williams is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and is the author of several books including the shaping of American diplomacy and the great evasion.

Here is Dr. William a Williams. Needless. I think sometimes we talk about the war in Vietnam as always kind of a classroom situation. I suppose more or more words have been spilled about this war in the course of it's fighting in almost any other way. I'm always impressed and I have become more and more impressed in the last three years and how we're using words as a substitute for other things. And I feel very deeply about the war. I think it would be both bullish and a mistake to try to hide that from you. But I think we all feel very deeply about war and I would like to ask you to join me in a minute's silence

for all the people who have lost their lives on every side. Marines in North Vietnamese South Vietnamese and civilians of both sides. And in a sense what's happened to this country because of the war. So informally that's in your minute of sorrow for all these people. Right. Thank you.

Tonight I'd like to talk not so much about the war in the narrow sense because I think we're standing in danger both as individuals and as a country of thinking about the war as a problem and we think about the war as the issue and I would like to suggest to you that this is one of the reasons we are so hung up on. I mean many read in many respects the war is not the issue. The war is a symptom and we're like a physician who hasn't been trained quite well enough or perhaps a third year law student who hasn't had quite enough experience in the in the court of law. We tend to think of the symptom and overlook the cause. You remember at the time of the civil rights movement and the passage of the civil rights bill ever Dirks made a remark one of many

of his famous remarks in which he said when the time of an idea comes there's nothing that can stop it. And I'd like to turn it around tonight and I'd like to say that when the death of an idea has arrived there's nothing you can do to say what I'm suggesting to you is that the cause of the war is an idea which we Americans have followed for a long time and we are experiencing the death of an idea and we are experiencing it in the context of war and the disruption of our domestic society and we're experiencing experiencing it in a sense and we are becoming one way or another obsessed with the war. We discuss everything in terms of the war we judge each other in terms of the war and show. And so I think that we are really experiencing the death of an idea and the

death of an image of what we are and what our role in the world is. And the first thing I would like to suggest to you in this vein is that this is an idea an image of ourselves that goes back a long long time. That's why I cut so deep. Why the intensity of feeling about the war is so strong. It goes back at least a hundred years this conception of America and its relationship to the world. And I think we can understand better why the contemporary crisis if we put the crisis in some time. The context. So when we talked a little bit about his background the development and the nature of this idea that we're witnessing the death the first thing I think it's very important for us to realize particularly in today's Con he said this was not an idea and a conception of America that was forced

upon the majority by a minority. We're very prone in the midst of large 968 to think whether we support the war or whether we don't support them. To think of the problem in terms of a leadership which is made these decisions and we have to go along. I think it's very important for to realize that this is not the way it happened. And then our poor father has a majority evolved his power in a dark and put it into operation. So the U.S. can we get it man and Ali Noorani or angry or disappointed or rusty we're really getting angry and frustrated and critical of ourselves of American society in this basic sense. This conception of America and its place in the world and its responsibilities in the world to develop and the end of

the Civil War up to 199 out of an attempt of the majority of the country to solve certain fundamental problems that he faced and these problems are the same problems that any society is going to remain ongoing has to deal with. Now you can order them differently you emphasize different want different specific problems but I want to talk about them in the following order. First of all what is conception of America and its place in the world developed out of an attempt to solve a fundamental economic problem how to maintain prosperity you know large industrialising society. I think you have to realize that America's contemporary image of itself and its place in the world grew out of the depression of the 87 years of people who are facing economic problems and the worse economic problems this country ever faced

that time. And the between the depression of the 1870s and the depression the nine Americans came to thieve at their economic well depended upon two kinds of things. It depended upon the making of what we think of as a free market place and that secondly it ended up on the overseas expansion of that free economic marketplace and the two things are matters and we often get confused. I myself get confused about sometimes. And I think it's very important that we separate these two things. First of all some America is America by a great many Americans if you want to get down count heads probably we do we need in 70s in the 1890s a majority of the adult population in this country

came to the conclusion that their individual specific economic welfare was dependent upon overseas economic activity. In Cincinnati and this part of Ohio in general it's fascinating to go back and read what the former who did constitute the majority of this country felt about markets and how they felt that they had to hand overseas markets to maintain their prosperity so that in a narrow immediate individual concrete scene Americans came to feel this way. The second respect in which they came to feel lose weight. Ultimately probably came to be the most important and that this and a great many came to feel that the system not their own little bit but the American economic system when they undertook to explain

how that system works. They explain how it works in terms of its expansion overseas and had to have more market you had to have more opportunities for investment. You had to have access to all material. And so I noticed that really bypassed the whole question of whether a man who holds this new is himself selling anything overseas or not. So the question of personal motive is really in all what you gon on as an idea. About how reality works. American prosperity and the American economic system work satisfactorily in this way. So the way to solve the first problem the economic problem develops is an idea that United States has to meet regularly intimately and successfully involved in the world marketplace.

But the system won't work that way as well as some people in dealing individually at their business work that way. So all we got tonight is an idea about how to solve the economic problem. The second problem that Americans were concerned with in the latter part of the 19th century was a political. How do you maintain representative government and social order in a society which is torn by conflict which some people are richer than other people. Many people are poor and then a small group that opportunity seems limited and that the difficulties of having a functioning democracy appear to be very real. Many believe at many different levels of American society wealthy and poor

influential and not influential came to feel that the way to have a political democracy and a way to have social peace was not to deal with the problem politically but that that political welfare and social well-being depended upon economic prosperity that everybody had a job and everybody had an opportunity to market it to political and social problems. Would you like to hear him say. What you got here it seems to me is a rather in fashioning a neat and very consequential shift. You've defined a political problem in nonpolitical terms you don't deal with the mark with questions of political democracy in representing in those terms direct you define the solution to the political

problem to be in economic terms. So the two things have to take your eye off the political problem as a political problem and you re-emphasize your already great emphasis on economic welfare and the functioning of the economic system. The third problem that Americans face and I don't think we've dealt as historians or even the social scientists in the Rhone or seen intellectuals in the broader sense of oh I don't think we've dealt with this problem as well as we should have and that is American after the Civil War. Ashton's a very difficult question because he confronted a very difficult problem. Now we've saw the Negro problem of slavery. How do we make America meaning. Because I'm let's say 1845 through the Civil War and Reconstruction that was a problem

around which Americans had decided that they would make themselves medieval people. They would confront and resolve the slavery issue. They were all abolitionists and we don't need to get sidetracked on how well or how well they did solve the slavery. But the question of identity and meaning as in America had been defined in those terms. Let's say for me the end of the war with Mexico and through reconstruction and however we may look back and say oh wow I wish you'd done better job by 76 American who'd come to the conclusion they dealt with that they had to find themselves in those terms and had coped with the problem as they defined they had freed the negro and they had wrestled with the question of giving him political equality in terms of voting rights and so on and they had convinced themselves

however mistake that the negro and an equal opportunity in the marketplace. One of the way in which Americans came to deal with this problem what the meaning of America was. Involve foreign policy very directly and that was that Americans from the depression of the 70s up to the turn of the century came to feel that the meaning of America lay in extending America's freedoms to the rest of the world. This would be in America a separate and distinct and highly gratified me to carry this image of American society around the world whether in terms of the missionary movement on terms of

sending our leaders around the world sending our educated doing good works in this 19th century style. What Americans became increasingly throughout the 19th century to feeling freedom for themselves. Would not be satisfactory in life. They help other people have the same freedom. What we have here. I would suggest to you in summary is a very highly explosive kind of resolution a domestic problem. You've got an economic problem and a political problem and a question of identity. If you want to use the modern terminal you've got all of the very fundamental problems for any society define in terms of action outside your own society.

Don't define a question of meaning for example after a 276 in terms of further advancement of the breed or the war you don't define the problem of politic in terms of do we who constitute convention you don't define the problem of economics in terms of a very serious sustained restructuring of the domestic market. All Lisa Louis. These primary process have become intertwined and increasingly defined in terms of America's action outside America economic system comes to be seen as punctuation because it is part of the world marketplace. Political problems defined as solving themselves. Given our Constitution if we can maintain prosperity

and meaning for Americans increasingly define in terms of helping other people to have more freedom and to preserve this kind of freedom at the end of the 19th century between 1895 in nineteen hundred and one nineteen hundred and three or four depending upon how you want to argue about such matters is date. But the United States did at a policy level. Was to formulate a very explicit state of what I am arguing had been the majority decision about how to solve problems. Now all policy formulation Zomi by leaders and the leaders at that time happened to be in the McKinley administration. Most of the most of these solutions to these problems. Were defined in industrial terms. In agricultural terms even though they

developed been evolved and talked and discussed and formulated in Iran seen by Americans who were largely agrarian. And yet formulated in industrial terms by leadership of the Republican Party which was largely industrially oriented rather than agriculturally Horia with the policy that they formulated in those terms was the policy our kind out. Policy being put into operation. It was basically this that American power would be put at the disposal to create a condition throughout the world that Americans had decided it was necessary to their own welfare at home and secondly the conditions that would enable the United States to extend and maintain the

freedoms that they felt were necessary and his arm for all. So what you really get by the turn of the 20th century is a commitment of American power to do. Cite for it when and if you don't change the law. A commitment of an American of American power to do precisely what we're doing in Vietnam. And if you want to have a strikingly brought home to you back and yawning open door note of 1890 because he say precisely. All well and some don't. Sometimes you need exactly the same language. And what second case do Rocky players when he says what we're doing in Vietnam. This out work on the world which I presented to you is simply as directly as I can. Largely for purposes of clarity. Didn't go without

criticism and I wouldn't want to be misunderstood as saying it went without criticism or opposition. But the fascinating thing to me is to realize how much their criticism was criticism about how best to do it rather than whether this was the right thing to do. How many American knows of you and any has been seriously are you aware in 1990 that the economic welfare of this country did not involve a vast overseas operation. Almost none it was almost noon. Now the dramatic way in which these thieves in the solution to these problems came to reinforce. We began to act this way and we began to think his way increasing. It seems we brought home classically with Woodrow Wilson. The war to save democracy the war or creating in the

issues throughout the world which we had decided were necessary not desired necessary in order to maintain American society on this and of the kind that we won. And furthermore those were the conditions we've that were desirable and in our world. Even more striking it seems to me is that many of the people who criticize Woodrow Wilson's attempt to do's were people who put their finger on the potential dangers involved in this and now many people opposed milling in the street and no doubt for many different kinds of reasons from personal right on through the spectrum of human motivation. One of the striking things about the leadership of the opposition is that they all say and in their own idiom they all

said at least two very significant things and I think it is worthwhile that point out one of the one of the most brilliant spokesmen of opposition to undertake he was a very conservative man named Elihu Root and Root said something that strikes me as almost eerie as we stand here concerned about the war in Vietnam. He said to undertake this kind of a program in the name of the United States. Is to commit the United States to preserving the status quo in there. And if it's not nice to be here it's ridiculous. In other words he is a man who looked at the world in real ways that however desirable people might think it would be for the rest of the world to be like the United States. It was simply a nonsensical undertaking.

It could not be done. Now another critic of the Wilsonian effort in a sense to institutionalize these solutions to problems we had devised and through the 19th century was a man quite different group. Senator Warner wider who thought the whole undertaking was immoral and a fundamental violation of American commitment to the right of revolution to the principle of self-determination. And so. And in many ways in many ways diplomacy. See in the United States from 1920 through the first part of the 1930s in many ways diplomacy reflected the ambivalence you know among Americans

as to whether you could do this which is a kind of pragmatic test. And secondly you know whether this was the right solution to these problems. It seems to me quite clear that the Second World War consolidated this traditional definition of America that Americans have evolved and worked up in the latter part of the 19th century and reached it's been given its first dramatic statement and personification. And by Woodrow Wilson and seems to be the United States emerged from the Second World War in which we define the United States and here we defined the welfare of the United States and we defined the meat of life in America or America very large in

terms of the world system headed. The United States I think is misleading and I think in his point in discussion and sidetrack from the major issues whether you want to call this an imperial policy or not it's certainly not in my area were in the old 19th century colonial sense of the term. What's important for us is Americans to realize is that our little in that conception of this country and how little in that conception of American security has to do with what goes on in the United States of America. It defines America to an almost unbelievable degree as a variable of what goes on in the rest of the world. And in this fundamental sense it's really the projection of answering those initial questions in the way that people went way

back in the 19th century. You end up by saying you solve America's problems in terms of the world that the world is not functioning right. You can't. Solve America's problems at home because you've already defined the solution to America's problems at home in terms of the rest of the world. Put it simply by the end of the second world war that seems to me that Americans not just in the lead. Most had said that X turn on TV and actually turn on the right are the crucial factors. The crucial variable in the functioning of the American system. Now. That has two things that are very striking about one year's very betrayed

week in implicit not explicit assumption that everything is hunky dory you know.