talist exploitation"- that phrase tells us more about the historian using it than the history he is studying. In fact, when I wrote about this period, I chose the neutral and unfamiliar word "multilateralism" and tried to invest it with a limited set of connotations. In Through The Looking Glass, Alice objects to Humpty Dumpty's belief that he can mean by a word just what he chooses it to mean. Alice doubts whether he can make words mean what he wants them to. Humpty says the question is which is to be master, Humpty or the concept. The answer is that Humpty, at least, is not; concepts are social products whose interwoven associations escape our individual control. This is a simple point, recognized, in respect to appeasement, even by the conventions of dictionary makers. As Webster's Third New International Dictionary says, appeasement is the conciliation of a potential aggressor by political or economic concessions usually at the sacrifice of principles. The trouble is that diplomatic historians, supposedly striving for impartiality, have not recognized the point; the historiography of the period is built around the idea.1 Well, it is past time to leave the primrose paths of linguistic speculation and muck around in the data.

What happened between 1930 and 1950 instead of appeasement? During the years of the Weimar Republic the United States worked to reintegrate Germany into the Western political and economic community. The Americans believed that a strong central European economic unit was essential to the political wellbeing of Europe. In the thirties they carried on this policy. They contributed to the continued discrediting of the Versailles Treaty, perhaps to strengthen the forces of European order against the Soviets, at least to help recreate the vigorous sort of Germany they envisaged as necessary to the stability of the pre-1914 world. In practice they supported the rebuilding of a powerful commercial and industrial nation. Surely the Americans were not happy with Hitlerite Germany and later came to loathe it and sought to transform its political system. But American policy aimed always at preserving the German economy. Cordell Hull, especially, assumed that economic strategies that left Germany

1 So far as American diplomatic history goes, the chief work is Arnold A. Offner's American Appeasement (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).

commercially and industrially powerful would determine the success of the political transformation.

The chief fault of Anglo-American diplomacy in the interwar period may indeed have been a false belief that a vigorous German polity was necessary to European peace and prosperity. Given that the British and the Americans wanted to maintain their dominant positions, it may have been that they could only have achieved this end easily if Germany were weak or fragmented. If this was so, it is clear that World War I taught them little. Because from 1939 to 1944 the American State Department planned that Germany would emerge as an industrialized power after the war, continuing the department's prewar ideas. From 1945 to 1947, United States diplomats worked to effectuate these wartime plans, and from 1947 on their desire for a satisfied Germany was coupled with a desire for a mighty buffer against the Russians.

From the beginning of the second European war, the State Department, still under Hull's leadership, tenaciously argued for a postwar Germany that was unified, industrially potent, and content. The department consistently urged that the Allies could easily transform the German political culture and this transformation would leave Germany pacific and economically satisfied. In fact, Hull and his associates contended, European stability could be guaranteed only if Germany were a dominant power. To be sure, Roosevelt was a formidable, if erratic, opponent of some of the State Department's plans. And historians have not been kind to Henry Morgenthau, who believed that the Allies must smash Germany if Europe were to be secure. Poor deluded Morgenthau! The experiences of 1870 to 1939 had taught him that a powerful Germany was inconsistent with a status quo beneficial to France, Britain, and the United States. Fortunately, Morgenthau's views got only a brief hearing in higher policymaking circles. More important, although the War Department battled with the State Department for bureaucratic control of policy, the military in Germany operated on assumptions congruent with those of Hull. The bombing offensive did not attempt to destroy the German war economy; it sought to stop it from operating by damaging key points. In the immediate postwar period the army's program was-first

at the simple level of action, then at the explicit level of policy-to restore the German economy. The Americans never carried out the minimal Potsdam reparations program. Many of the industries that had direct war potential were left standing, and reparations from current production never went to the Soviet Union. Finally, throughout the forties the Americans continued to act on the premises of the thirties - that economic means would achieve desired political ends; appropriate commercial policies toward Germany would reshape her political system.

It is true that recovery was nowhere evident in Germany (and in Europe) from 1945 to 1947. But the chaos and suffering of the postwar period occurred not because the United States wished for a harsh peace but because American decisionmakers grossly misconceived the measures needed to rehabilitate both Germany and the Western European allies. After Roosevelt's death and the immediate triumph of State Department ideas by July of 1945, the Americans came to a consensus in their plans: Germany was to be punished initially by having her excess production shipped to the Allies; then she would be reintegrated into the Allied system as a potent industrial force. After the catastrophic events of 1946 drove home to the Americans the enormity of the wartime dislocation and the inadequacy of their efforts, the Marshall Plan provided a realistic attempt at reconstructing the economic and social fabric of Europe, including western Germany.

The successful reintegrationist policy-triumphant appeasement if you will-that occurred under the stimulus of the Marshall Plan was nonetheless not the doing of the United States alone. Although American diplomats underestimated what it would take to restore the German economy, they had worked toward that restoration from the beginning of 1945. By 1947 when they had finally estimated aright, they were frightened that Congress would deny them the great sums of money Europe and Germany would need. Congressional support for foreign aid was not forthcoming until the executive branch could plausibly argue that the money was needed to protect Europe from the menace of communism. Thus the Russians made America's German policy successful. In fact, Soviet-American tensions had spurred the rearming of Germany by 1955. Ten years after her defeat, Germany was asked by the west

ern Allies to contribute to their common defense under NATO, and the German army on the continent was soon larger than that of the French.

Of course, there is one crucial factor that I have omitted in this brief account-the division of Germany. With the victory of State Department policy, diplomats had pressed for a liberal and economically strong capitalist Germany that was united. Whatever would have satisfied the Soviets in Germany, a nation unified along liberal capitalist lines would not have done so, and the divergent assumptions of the Russians and Americans ultimately left no alternative but a divided Reich. What significance did this event have for appeasement in the forties? At this point my analysis becomes more speculative. I would contend that the policies of the forties worked because they were carried out in an ideological context that ruled out a unified Germany. Russo-American hostility was the one thing that kept the Germans apart. Because some Germans were enemies of others, it was possible to rebuild each half of the nation and (speaking of western Germany) to fulfill some of the AngloAmerican hopes of the 1930s. The general policy of Britain and the United States from the post-Versailles period to the Korean conflict came to a happy fruition only because the conflict with the Soviet Union had brought about a measure of victory for an antithetic policy, the fragmentation of Germany. In many ways it is surprising that commentators have regarded the partition of Germany as such an unfortunate affair 2- especially since these commentators also deplore the Anglo-American policies of the thirties. If appeasement in the thirties was wrong, wasn't it a proper response in the forties to partition the Reich? Or, if German unification was desirable, then wasn't appeasement a proper tactic? Would Britain and the United States be secure today if Germany were unified?

The central point is that in the thirties and forties, the United States (and Britain) pursued

2 I have contributed to this confusion myself. See my The United States and the Division of Germany (Ithaca, 1972), pp. 2, 167, 181. Neither the division of Germany nor of Europe seems to me to be unfortunate. What was unfortunate was the context in which they were divided. The cold war and pathological anticommunism in the United States led, I feel, to American involvement in Southeast Asia. For defense of this speculation, see Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York, 1972).

a consistent strategy. The experience of German "aggressiveness" in two world wars did not shatter their belief that a strong, industrialized, and democratic Germany was essential. But the last two elements in this policy succeeded because the first one failed: an industrialized German democracy was congruent with European stability only after the ideological rigors of the cold war made the Germans in the West the sworn enemies of their brothers in the East, when partition had destroyed Ger

man power as an independent variable in the world political system. And it is the muchmaligned cold war that we have to thank for this happy turn of events.

Scholars who believe Germany was appeased in the thirties are, in logic, bound to analyze this aspect of the cold war as appeasement, and certainly this tells us something about what was going on. But I prefer a way of thinking about these matters that clarifies more than it obscures.

C

NHPRC NEWS

At its September 13 meeting the National

Historical Publications and Records Commission recommended grants totaling $509,905 for its records and publications programs and adopted a broad range of policy statements. Four institutions will receive grants totaling $41,395 for records proposals, and thirteen institutions will receive grants totaling $468,510 for new and continuing letterpress and microform publications.

The Nevada Historical Society will use $17,120 for a survey of local records relating to Nevada's years as a U. S. Territory (1850-64), and the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan will use $2,895 to transfer deteriorating glass disc recordings of public affairs radio programs, 1942-55, to magnetic tape.

The other grants for records proposals are: $12,580 to the Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas, for the preservation and arrangement of records pertaining to the economic and social development of Galveston and the Southwest; and $8,800 to the Eleutherian MillsHagley Foundation, Wilmington, Delaware, for a survey of and preservation plan for historical records of the seven railroads combined in April 1976 to form the ConRail system.

Among the recommended new publications are a five-year comprehensive microfilm and selective letterpress edition of the correspondence, speeches, and editorials of nineteenthcentury black abolitionists. The University of Wisconsin at La Crosse will receive $28,310 toward first-year costs. The commission also approved a proposal from the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives for a microfilm publication of the massive John P. Harrington Collection on American Indian History and Language. An initial grant of $24,762 will enable the archives staff to begin the task of arranging materials for the estimated seven-hundred-reel series of field notes, unpublished manuscripts, and cor

respondence relating to eighty-nine Indian languages in the Northwest, California, the Southwest, Mexico, and South America.

For a definitive edition of Mary Boykin Chestnut's Diary From Dixie, Yale University will receive $100,000 over a three-year period; the Supreme Court Historical Society will receive $25,000 in matching funds for the first year of work on a documentary history of the Supreme Court, 1789-1800; the California Institute of Technology will be given $14,072 for a microfilm edition of the papers of Nobel Prizewinning physicist Robert A. Millikan; and Bryn Mawr College will receive $19,250 for a microfilm edition of the papers of M. Carey Thomas, dean and later president of the college, 1894-1922.

The commission also recommended grants to numerous continuing microfilm and letterpress projects, among them the Robert Morris, Daniel Chester French, John C. Frémont, Daniel Webster, Baron von Steuben, Tench Coxe, John Marshall, Aaron Burr, and Panton, Leslie and Company publications.

Pamphlets on procedures for applying for NHPRC grants are available from the Executive Director, NHPRC, National Archives, Washington, DC 20408.

The commission voted to require that all proposed microform projects (records and publications programs) meet NHPRC technical standards; to reaffirm its policy of accepting proposals for the preservation and arrangement of all types of historical records, including sound recordings and photographs; to accept oral history proposals relating to the preservation of magnetic tapes and transcripts but not to provide funds for the collection and transcription processes; and to discourage proposals for topical surveys or guides to collections already in repositories while accepting proposals for guides to entire holdings and for records surveys of materials not primarily in repositories.

The commission resolved to discourage grant requests relating to elected or appointed government officials while they are in office and not to consider such proposals unless most or all of the papers are already in repositories.

The commission decided to place future publications proposals in categories of aid ranging from "full funding" to "encouragement without funding" and to give funded projects preference in the distribution of subvention funds. In another action, the commission adopted a general policy statement on editorial annotation, indicating its concern with editorial excesses and stating that it will continue to offer editorial advice but will not set arbitrary limits on annotation.

In 1977, the commission and the University of South Carolina will again cosponsor a twoweek summer Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. The curriculum will consist of lectures and supervised projects in all aspects of documentary editing from selection and annotation of documents to proofreading and indexing. The 1976 institute included participants from the staffs of the Virginia State Library, the Tennessee State Archives, and the Newberry Library, and graduate students and faculty of various colleges and universities. For information about the 1977 institute or the 1977-78 fellowships in advanced editing, which provide for a year of intensive training

with a commission-approved project, write to the Executive Director, NHPRC, National Archives, Washington, DC 20408.

The commission has contacted more than 10,000 institutions and organizations throughout the country as the first step in producing a Directory of Repositories of Historical Records. The directory will provide summary information on all types of historical records in as many repositories as possible, as well as other basic information about each repository. It will include many more institutions than any previous guide. More than 1,100 repositories, including many small institutions with specialized collections, have thus far returned an information form to the commission, and another 400 have indicated they will do so. Approximately 75 percent of those responding had not been listed in the commission's 1961 Guide to Archives and Manuscripts in the United States, and 84 percent are not yet listed in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections.

This is the first stage in the production of a comprehensive guide to historical source materials in the United States. Institutions that have not yet received a repository information form are invited to contact the commission. Those that have not yet returned the form are urged to do so as soon as possible. For further information, write to the Guide Staff, NHPRC, National Archives, Washington, DC 20408. The telephone number is 202-724-1630.