very popular among the New Left and Williams has been called "the favorite historian of the Middle American New Left". However, the Wisconsin School and the New Left were distinct, with the latter more radical in outlook. Indeed Williams left the University of Wisconsin in the late 1960s in part because he disliked the militant direction that student protests were taking there. Oregon years Also tiring of the grind of teaching graduate students, Williams moved to Oregon in 1968 to, in the words of his biographer, Paul Buhle, "teach undergraduates, live by the ocean, and live in a diversified community of 'ordinary' Americans". While teaching at Oregon State University, Williams "called for a return to the Articles of Confederation and a radical decentralization of political and economic power". "Not only did he see the U.S. under the Articles as relatively anti-imperial, he also believed that the strong localism made possible under the Articles was the only form of governance suitable to real Americans living real lives". Williams served as president of the Organization of American Historians in 1980. He retired from Oregon State University in 1988, and died in Newport, Oregon, in 1990. Always a bit eccentric and not a little idiosyncratic, Williams gave his interpretation of the nation's past a moralistic tone, finding soul mates in conservatives like John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover. He always distrusted cosmopolitanism and championed small communities, while distrusting intellectuals who sneered at the unwashed masses. For all his radicalism, he never outgrew the kind of populist approach that he believed was an important part of the American heritage. In this sense he fit in well with his Wisconsin colleagues, William B. Hesseltine and Merrill Jensen, all of whom added to what has been called the "Wisconsin school" of historical interpretation. Criticism To some degree, Williams's economic interpretation of American diplomacy has been criticized on the same grounds as Charles A. Beard's larger economic analysis of American history. In 1974, for instance, N. Gordon Levin Jr., compared Williams to Beard and argued that the Open Door model "is inadequate because it insists on forcing all political-moral and strategic motivations" for American foreign policy into "the Procrustean confines" of relentless economic expansion. Williams' response was that he was merely re-stating what American intellectual and political leaders said at the time. Another serious critique of Williams's work was offered by Robert W. Tucker in 1971, followed