Walter LaFeber
Walter Fredrick LaFeber was an American academic who served as the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History at Cornell University. Previous to that he served as the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell.
LaFeber was one of the United States' most distinguished scholars of the history of U.S. foreign policy, and a leading member of the "Wisconsin School" of American diplomatic history. He was known for providing widely read revisionist histories of the Cold War with views like William Appleman Williams but more subtle; the label "moderate revisionist" has been applied to him.
LaFeber's teaching abilities led to his longstanding undergraduate "History of American Foreign Relations" class at Cornell gaining a reputation as one of the university's best and most popular courses. A number of his students went on to prominent positions in the U.S. government and academia. In 2006 LaFeber gave a farewell lecture before nearly 3,000 colleagues and former students at the Beacon Theatre in New York City.
Early life and education
LaFeber was born in Walkerton, Indiana, a town of around 2,000 people in the northern part of the state, outside South Bend, on August 30, 1933. His father, Ralph Nichols LaFeber, owned a local grocery store; his mother, Helen, was a housewife. LaFeber worked at his father's store from age eight through the end of college. He became a lifelong fan of the Chicago Cubs.At Walkerton High School, the LaFeber was a star basketball player. In one game during his senior year for the Indians, he scored 35 points, approaching the single-game record for most points scored in the South Bend sectional of the Indiana High School Boys Basketball Tournament. He graduated high school in 1951.
LaFeber attended Hanover College, a small Presbyterian liberal arts college in the southern part of Indiana. LaFeber played varsity basketball for the Hanover Panthers, as a reserve forward during his sophomore year. He also played some during his junior year. He sang in the Hanover College Choir, which provided voices for Sunday morning Presbyterian services and also gave concerts around the state, was co-chair of a "Religion in Life" Week program at the college, and was on the Hanover Board of Student Affairs, which directed extracurricular affairs on campus. He belonged to the Beta Theta Pi social fraternity, the Alpha Phi Gamma national honor society for journalism, and Hanover's own Gamma Sigma Pi honor society for academic performance. He received his BA from there in 1955.
LaFeber met Sandra Gould while at Hanover. They married in 1955 and the couple had two children.
He then went to Stanford University, gaining an MA in 1956.
There, he studied under Thomas A. Bailey, and would be influenced by Bailey's lively writing style. Contrary to some later accounts, LaFeber has said he got along well with Bailey. At the time LaFeber was not dissatisfied with U.S. foreign policy, having supported the presidential candidacies of Robert A. Taft in 1952 and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956.
At this point LaFeber went to the University of Wisconsin. In doing so he followed the advice of one of his college professors and declined an offer from Harvard University, taking advantage of what he later said was "the best professional advice I have ever received."
The study of history at Wisconsin had a heritage going back to the time of Frederick Jackson Turner, and the intellectual atmosphere at the school encouraged people to think differently.
At Wisconsin, LaFeber, and several future colleagues and co-authors, initially studied with Fred Harvey Harrington. In an era when the realistic theory of international relations predominated, LaFeber was influenced by Harrington's inductive methodology in seminar teaching, sense of irony, and suggestions that the economic interpretations of Charles A. Beard, whose work by then had largely fallen out of favor, should perhaps not be so overlooked. After Harrington moved into university administration, he replaced himself with William Appleman Williams, for whom LaFeber and fellow students Lloyd C. Gardner and Thomas J. McCormick became teaching assistants and with whom they would strike up a close bond.
LaFeber was also influenced at Wisconsin by Philip D. Curtin, who developed LaFeber's interest in the British Empire, as well as by the early American scholar Merrill Jensen and the intellectual historian Merle Curti. During his dissertation research at the Library of Congress, LaFeber found himself at the same table as historian Ernest R. May of Harvard, with both working on the same period but with very different interpretations of it. The more established May helpfully supplied LaFeber with documents he had found, which LaFeber took as an object lesson on how two fair-minded scholars can reach differing conclusions from the same sources. With his dissertation titled "The Latin American Policy of the Second Cleveland Administration" being accepted, LaFeber received his PhD from Wisconsin in 1959.
Scholarship
hired LaFeber as an assistant professor in 1959.He became an associate professor in 1963. LaFeber found an engaging environment with a number of other up-and-coming figures in the history and government departments, including Allan Bloom, Theodore J. Lowi, and Joel H. Silbey among others.
LaFeber's The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898, published in 1963, was a greatly expanded revision of his dissertation. It received the Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association; in fact the award was given based on the book having been read in manuscript form before publication. The work established LaFeber as a prominent scholar, and has remained a popular choice in academic circles for several decades.
Historian Irwin Unger, writing in 1967, did not find much to like of Williams or the Wisconsin School overall, but did praise LaFeber as the best of them, a "sophisticated and urbane historian" who was "not a crude polemicist". Unger found it particularly notable that LaFeber did not vilify the people he identified as being behind much of American foreign policy. Indeed, in the preface to The New Empire, LaFeber writes:
Finally, I must add that I have been profoundly impressed with the statesmen of these decades.... I found both the policy makers and the businessmen of this era to be responsible, conscientious men who accepted the economic and social realities of their day, understood domestic and foreign problems, debated issues vigorously, and especially were unafraid to strike out on new and uncharted paths in order to create what they sincerely hoped would be a better nation and a better world. All this, however, is not to deny that the decisions of these men resulted in many unfortunate consequences for their twentieth-century descendants.
LaFeber's publication did meet with some criticism. One later accounting of the Wisconsin School notes that in The New Empire, "LaFeber's arguments were sometimes questionable or overdrawn, and he acknowledged that he had passed by episodes that did not fit his pattern."
LaFeber's next work, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-1966, would end up going through ten editions, a rarity for a book that is not explicitly a textbook. The book emerged after the initial wave of Cold War revisionist theories had already been published and debated. Eliot Fremont-Smith of The New York Times described it as part of a succeeding wave of books that tried to refine those insights in a firmer historical grounding. Fremont-Smith praised LaFeber's work for being a "penetrating account" that was especially strong in sorting out the chronology of events and tracing the impact of domestic politics in each of the countries involved.
The relationship between the scholarship of LaFeber and William Appleman Williams has been characterized by one later historiographic survey this way:
"Williams' best-known student, who has surpassed the master in the quantity and quality of his historical output while continuing to promote the line of interpretation laid down by Williams, is Walter LaFeber."
However, not all have agreed; a broadside against Cold War revisionists was published by historian Robert H. Ferrell in 2006, who criticized their reliance on a monocausal theory. In particular he charged LaFeber with overusing the papers of Bernard Baruch, whom Ferrell said lacked real influence in determining American foreign policy.
LaFeber's later scholarly works received praise within academic and other circles. His 1978 work, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective, has been attributed with influence over elite opinion regarding the history of Panama–United States relations and with helping the United States Senate decide to ratify the Panama Canal Treaty. A revised edition in 1990 was critical of U.S. policy since then. In the wake of the United States invasion of Panama in 1989, LaFeber appeared on television frequently as an expert, and in an interview at the time, said the invasion was "an admission of failure to work out a diplomatic solution to get rid of a third-rate dictator that we had created." Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America received the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award; in it, LaFeber formulates a variant of dependency theory, called neo-dependency theory, that examines corporate interests as part of explaining the relationships between the countries involved, but still looks at the role of U.S. government policy and other factors as well.
The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750 encompasses some of what was in LaFeber's famous course. In The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History, LaFeber turned toward East Asia, surveying the breadth of the American engagement and conflict with Japan from the nineteenth century through the 1990s. While a New York Times review called it a "dense chronological account...not for the fainthearted," The Clash received both the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians.
LaFeber then shifted focus and returned to his youthful interest in basketball, examining the effect of modern sports and communication empires in his book, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism, which analyzes the rise in popularity of basketball, Michael Jordan, Nike, and cable satellite networks and their relation to, and metaphor for, globalization.
Overall, LaFeber's career has been characterized as having "imbibed the Wisconsin lessons of empiricism, criticism, and a suspicion of power."