Authors: Alan Brinkley
Luce never underestimated his own intelligence. Billings uncharitably called him a “thinking machine,” lost in “the clouds of theory.” Harry himself once said to Clare—according to her own perhaps apocryphal but not wholly implausible later account—that he could think of no one who was his intellectual superior. What about Einstein? Clare asked. Einstein, Harry replied, was a “specialist,” without his own range. But despite his formidable intelligence he rarely took a strong public position without borrowing from the ideas of others and without validating his work through people he admired. And so, as he set out to write an important statement about his own dangerous times, he searched widely for inspiration and advice.
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He turned first to Walter Lippmann and Archibald MacLeish, both of whom had often influenced him in the past. Lippmann had been a regular contributor to
Life
for months, publishing articles that were more aggressively interventionist than anything Luce had yet written. Through the second half of 1940 Lippmann called consistently for Americans to recognize their responsibility as world leaders. “Either we shall fulfill that destiny or the world we have lived in will perish beyond hope of an early or an easy resurrection,” he wrote in June. If totalitarian states came to control the great industrial capacity of Europe and Russia, he warned, the American economy would face “unprecedented difficulties…. A free economy, such as Americans have known, cannot survive in a world that is elsewhere a regime of military socialism.” The defeat of democratic powers in Europe, he warned in October, would mean that “we and our children would stand on the unending defensive waiting for the blow to fall.” But to Luce, Lippmann’s most persuasive argument came even before the European war began, in an essay titled “The American Destiny,” published in
Life
in June 1939. In it Lippmann
talked less of the external threats to the nation than of its internal doubt and confusion. “In the generation to which we belong,” Lippmann had argued, “unlike any that went before, the American people have no vision of their own future.” They were fearful of their own wealth and power, convinced somehow that “their incomparable assets are in fact their most dangerous liability.” The American failure, in short, was its unwillingness to accept its own greatness and its responsibilities to the world. “What Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be to the world of tomorrow,” he proclaimed. “When the destiny of a nation is revealed to it, there is no choice but to accept that destiny and to make ready in order to be equal to it.”
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If Lippmann helped Luce embrace the idea of an American destiny, MacLeish helped him express at least a part of the moral underpinning with which he would justify the nation’s mission in the world. MacLeish wrote a series of drafts for him of a “Statement of Belief” that would, he hoped, capture the urgent mission of his time. It was an argument for the importance of freedom, and for the special role the United States had always played in exemplifying and defending freedom. “Freedom is still the greatest of human causes,” MacLeish wrote, and “it is in the United States that the cause of freedom has its highest hope.” If freedom was to become the normal condition of humanity in the world, he insisted, then
the people of the United States, with their tradition of political responsibility, their mastery of the skills of industry and agriculture, their ownership of the wealth of the richest of all lands, have a better right to hope for its realization than any other nation has ever had.
Luce, as always, admired MacLeish’s literary power (so much so that he borrowed passages from MacLeish in his own later essay), but he also worried that the statements were too narrow. “Why is it so hard?” he wrote in response to an early draft. “Not because we lack faith, but because what is included in our faith is such a multitude of things seen and unseen.” His hope was to combine something of Lippmann’s muscularity of purpose with MacLeish’s moral temper. But he also sought to reshape some of his own earlier ideas and statements, which he had been developing throughout his adult life.
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His effort to articulate the meaning of America had begun in China, when, as a young boy, he attempted to construct an image of a nation he
had passionately embraced but had never seen, a nation he associated with the good that he believed his own father was doing in the world. It continued in his first years in America as a student, nowhere more clearly than in his senior-year oration at Yale in 1920:
When we say “America” twenty years from now, may it be that that great name will signify throughout the world … that America may be counted upon to do her share in the solution of every international difficulty, that she will be the great comrade of all nations that struggle to rise to higher planes of social and political organization, and withal the implacable and the
immediate
foe of whatever nation shall offer to disturb the peace of the world.
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In the crowded years during which he had worked tirelessly to create first a magazine and then a publishing empire, he spent relatively little time thinking or writing about the great missions he had embraced in his youth. But after the enormous success of his company, and in the face of the great world crisis of the late 1930s, he turned again to the task of articulating an “idea worth fighting for.” His impassioned, sometimes reckless, and often frustrating involvement with the Willkie campaign was a first step. After the 1940 election, freed of his efforts to speak through Willkie, he began to express his own views, in the aborted article, “We Americans;” in his speeches across the country in 1941; and finally in a new essay for
Life
—this time urged on by his editors, who advocated a “modern Federalist Papers for this world A.D. 1941.” The essay would become the most influential article he would ever publish.
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It appeared in the February 17, 1941, issue of
Life
under the title “The American Century,” a phrase first used decades earlier by H. G. Wells, but one that Luce now made a part of American, and global, language. To a large degree it was a commentary on the current “confused” state of American life and the nation’s uncertain relationship with the war. “We Americans are unhappy,” he began (echoing Lippman in 1939). “We are nervous—or gloomy—or apathetic…. We are filled with foreboding.” Luce then set out to explain, and dispel, the pessimism and confusion that he saw around him. Most of the essay consisted of a careful, guarded, and often prosaic analysis of the steps America had taken so far toward greater engagement in the war. “America is in the war,” he wrote, “but are we in it? … We say we don’t want to be in the war. We also say we want England to win. We want Hitler
stopped—more than we want to stay out of the war. So at the moment, we’re in.” But being “in” was not enough.
Wanting
to be “in” is what Luce asked of the American people. And why should Americans want to be fully engaged in what promised to be the most terrible of all wars? Partly because staying out of the war, he argued (in a reflection of his continuing dislike and distrust of Roosevelt), could lead to tyranny at home:
The President of the United States has continually reached for more and more power, and he owes his continuation in office to the coming of the war. Thus, the fear that the United States will be driven to national socialism, as a result of cataclysmic circumstances and contrary to the free will of the American people, is an entirely justifiable fear.
But also because Britain could not possibly win the war without American help. The United States was “the most powerful and the most vital nation in the world,” and Americans were failing “to play their part as a world power—a failure which has had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind.” America had squandered “an opportunity unprecedented in all history, to assume the leadership of the world” in 1919. It had failed again in the 1920s, and again in the 1930s. It could not do so again. The twentieth century, he insisted, must at last become what it should have been a generation earlier: “an American Century.”
“What can we say and foresee about an American Century?” he asked. His answer was bold, ambitious, idealistic—and filled with the missionary zeal that had shaped his life. “It must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills. It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people, and for the people.” America was already the “intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world,” he claimed, and Americans were “the least provincial people in the world.” But more important than that the United States now had “that indefinable unmistakable sign of leadership: prestige. And unlike the prestige of Rome or Genghis Khan or 19th Century England, American prestige throughout the world is faith in the good intentions as well as the ultimate intelligence and ultimate strength of the whole of the American people.” The creation of an American century would require great vision. It would mean a commitment to “an economic order compatible with freedom and progress.” It would mean
a willingness to “send out through the world [America’s] technical and artistic skills. Engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators.” It would mean becoming “the Good Samaritan of the entire world,” with a duty “to feed all the people of the world who … are hungry and destitute.”
Most of all, the American Century as Luce envisioned it would require:
a passionate devotion to great American ideals … a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of co-operation….[W]e are the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization—above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity…. It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.
From these elements, he concluded, “surely can be fashioned a vision of the 20th Century to which we can and will devote ourselves in joy and gladness and vigor and enthusiasm…. It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century.”
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It should not be surprising that this strangely powerful essay—which never explicitly advocated an American declaration of war but called instead for an almost evangelical commitment to righting the wrongs of the world—evoked a set of highly disparate responses. The thousands of letters sent to
Life
in response to “The American Century”—far more than the magazine normally received for other articles—contained a predictable number of protests from people still strongly opposed to entering the war. “Let America be the ‘Good Samaritan’ to
United States Citizens,”
a woman from Toledo wrote. “You are turning your magazine … into a war monger’s tool,” wrote a Pennsylvania woman. “You privileged entrenched cowards rant and rave to stir up this gory, godless thing called WAR,” a Maryland man charged, “and then drink champagne in safety and ease while the sons of the common people are slain and their children cry for bread.” Others, however, expressed great enthusiasm for Luce’s vision: “BIG STUFF!
And I like it!,” one reader wrote. “Henry R. Luce is showing the way to the American people towards their future,” said another. “GRAND WRITING GRANDER THINKING,” a New York man declared. “I hope this morning one BEAM of its GLORIOUS VISION will REACH the MYOPIC FRINGE of what was once the GRAND OLD PARTY!” More than one writer referred to him as “the Tom Paine of this generation.”
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While most readers focused on what they interpreted as a call to war, many journalists and critics responded more energetically to Luce’s vision of America’s future role in the world. Walter Lippmann—whose own writings had helped shape Luce’s views—was unsurprisingly enthusiastic, as was Robert Sherwood, the former Roosevelt speechwriter, who called it “magnificent,” and the columnist Dorothy Thompson, who wrote (in a more aggressively imperialist tone than had Luce himself), “To Americanize enough of the
world
so that we shall have a climate favorable to our growth is indeed a call to destiny.” Other less charitable critics, mostly on the Left, took a far more hostile view of what they considered Luce’s imperialist ambitions. “A new brand of imperialism is fast gaining favor in this country,” Freda Kirchwey, the editor of the
Nation
, wrote disdainfully. “Mr. Luce in a very large advertisement in his magazine
Life
calls it ‘the American Century.’” The columnist Max Lerner, who shared Luce’s belief that the United States should enter the war, nevertheless sneered at what he considered his proposals “to establish … hegemony in the world, control the world sea lanes and world,” a vision that represented “a new capitalist-conscious group … who do not fear war but regard it as an opportunity.” Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party leader, criticized Luce’s “nakedness of imperial ambition.”
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The wide range of responses to “The American Century” was in part a result of the bitter divisions over the war in early 1941. But it was also a result of the character of the essay itself. Luce’s purpose in writing the essay, he later claimed, was “to help clear away the fogs of ambiguity” around the issue of the war “so that we could get on more vigorously.” But in fact there was considerable ambiguity in the way Luce addressed his central issues. (Should America enter the war? What role should the United States play in the remainder of the twentieth century?) Luce had written elliptically about both these issues, leaving it largely to his readers to decide what concrete steps he was recommending. His language was most forceful and unguarded in the final, climactic passages, in which he presented an almost evangelical portrait of
America’s virtues and destiny, language so florid that it invited interpretations well beyond what Luce may have intended. He was surprised by the accusations of imperialism, and surprised too when critics lambasted him for suggesting that (as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio charged) he was proposing “that a victorious all-powerful United States dominate the 20th Century world as England did the 19th.” Luce’s essay was not incompatible with such a view, but it did not embrace it either. “My basic premise,” he wrote defensively in 1943, “was simply that America ought to assume in world affairs a responsibility corresponding to its strength. That surely is axiomatic—isn’t it?” Indeed, for much of the rest of his life he continued to try to explain to curious readers, both hostile and friendly, what he had really meant.
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