Word: opened
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Conscious of the dangers inherent in such an effort to seek economic well-being outside our borders Charles Austin Beard in The Open Door at Home (1934) attacked the open door policy. He advocated an entirely new, non-expansionist economic and political orientation in order to achieve two crucial objectives: (1) to provide a minimum standard of living for all Americans in a non-socialist but planned redistribution of wealth; and (2) to avoid the possibility of being drawn into foreign wars which did not directly threaten our survival. By renouncing Cordell Hull's trade-expansion policy, the United States...
Significantly, however, in his writings on foreign policy Beard was never credited with demolishing the open-door illusion. Williams does not mention him in the remarkable preface to The Roots of the Modern American Empire, which chronicles the growth of this fascinating theory of American imperialism. Extensive research shows that Williams had adopted the substance of Beard's anti-expansionist vision by 1950. Beard himself, it should be noted, explicitly recognized that agriculture, as much as industry, clamored for foreign markets as a means of avoiding depression. "Cold-war revisionism," then, turns out to be, at least in part...
...necessary condition for democracy and prosperity. The agrarians, between 1860 and 1893, coherently argued that such expansion "extended the freedom of all men." Their conception was adopted by industrialists in the crisis of 1893. Typical of agrarian expansionism was The Prairie Farmer's demand to Congress in 1898: open up Cuba for trade and establish "peace and sound government" there. The principle of intervention in the name of freedom was now an integral part of U.S. foreign policy...
...market system, we might feel more inclined to act vigorously out of unselfish interest in cooperation with a world organization to solve the general problems of hunger and misery. By ceasing to define all non-market economies as enemies, we might forge ? less dangerous world political system. Since the open door policy has failed to stabilize a revolutionary worid, endorsement of self-determination of nations as a principle of foreign policy might allow the tempest to run its course and find a new equilibrium. This Williams supported in The Tragedy, calling it "an open door for revolutions...
Although he believes that "the farmers were unhappily proved correct in their analysis of the 1860's-under a capitalist marketplace political economy their welfare depended upon overseas market expansion," Williams rejects economic determinism. Pleading for a reversal of the open door policy, he claims we can "give the [largely agrarian] peoples of the world a chance to make their own history by acting on our own responsibility to make our own history...