The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  In early November, after Roosevelt was easily elected to his third term (albeit by a significantly smaller margin than in his previous two elections), Luce rationalized that “the real news … is the size of the minority vote…. Comments should show what tiny fraction changes in New York, Ohio, Illinois, and what other few states would have elected Willkie.” And “the chief thing to speculate about,” he added, “is the future of Willkie. This is really much more interesting than whether Whoosis is going to get what job in Washington…. Willkie is as unprecedented as the Third Term.” In a letter sent out to many correspondents a few days after the voting, he still had nothing good to say about Roosevelt and argued instead that “the man you ought to thank God for more than for any other American … is a fellow you don’t know anything about: Wendell Willkie. Any candidate could have, and perhaps any other candidate unwittingly might have, torn this country apart instead of uniting it in a passionate fervor pro-democracy.”35

  Luce’s ardor for Willkie began to fade almost as soon as the election was over, but it did not vanish altogether. Willkie visited Luce at Mepkin in December en route to a Florida vacation, and they continued to correspond, to meet, and to work together on shared causes—although at a less intensive pace—over the following years. His admiration for Willkie survived, but his enthusiasm did not, especially once Willkie began cooperating openly with Roosevelt.36

  At the same time that Luce was immersed in the Willkie campaign, he was also working quietly to persuade Roosevelt to take a more aggressive stance toward the war. The awkwardness of this situation was not lost on either man. While Luce was excoriating the president in his magazines, working actively against his reelection, and accusing Roosevelt of incompetence and something close to tyranny, Roosevelt was privately condemning Luce’s “bias” and “propaganda” and making vague threats (rarely implemented) to challenge Luce’s power. “There are some things in life that one should not let certain people get away with,” Roosevelt wrote in 1940 after a petty dispute with Time about some inconsequential reporting errors. Luce, he complained, was “slippery.” George Washington “had the courage to admit a lie,” he wrote (crossing out the word “lie” and replacing it with “sin”), but “Henry Luce lacks that ability.” And yet both men were pragmatic enough to know when to put their mutual dislike aside, and both sought ways to use each other to advance their own ends, which in reality had more in common than either was willing to admit.37

  In the summer of 1940, as the military situation in Europe deterioriated and as Luce immersed himself in the Willkie campaign, he joined a nonpartisan group of influential men who were trying to pave the way for more active American support for Britain. The renowned Kansas editor William Allen White had just created the highly public Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which worked actively to combat isolationism through public exhortation. The group Luce joined, by contrast, relied on quiet and mostly secret diplomacy. They first convened in July 1940 at the midtown Columbia University Club and agreed to create a formal organization, which they later named the Century Group, after the elite New York men’s club in which they held most of their subsequent meetings. Its director was Francis Pickens Miller, a Virginia congressman with ties both to the Council on Foreign Relations and to the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies; and its members included other political figures (Lewis Douglas, Roosevelt’s former budget director, now a Willkie Republican; Robert E. Sherwood, a playwright and Roosevelt speechwriter; Will Clayton, an official in the State Department); theologians (Henry Sloane Coffin, the renowned president of Union Theological Seminary and Henry Van Dusen, who later succeeded him); academics (among them Ernest Hopkins, the president of Dartmouth College); and the publishers of the Louisville Courier-Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the New York Herald Tribune. But there was probably no one in the thirty-member group more influential than Luce; and although he at times expressed discomfort at being a member of what was essentially a lobbying organization (a discomfort that rarely inhibited his participation in the Willkie campaign), he gradually became one of its most active members. He helped pay for the office and staff that the group opened on Forty-second Street, and he made himself increasingly central to their efforts to change American policy.38

  The group often disagreed about tactics, but they were united from the start on one large issue: “that the survival of the British Commonwealth … is an important factor in the preservation of the American way of life,” and that “the survival of the British Fleet … is a factor of critical importance in the defense of the United States.” Very quickly these concerns coalesced around a specific proposal: sending some recently decommissioned American destroyers to the Royal Navy, an action that “would probably make the difference between defeat, and victory.” But the committee was stymied at first by the legal and political obstacles that they knew would stand in the way. America’s neutrality laws required that any nation receiving military supplies from the United States must pay for them, and Britain had no capacity to finance a purchase of this magnitude. And because the issue was arising in the year of a presidential campaign, everyone realized as well that Roosevelt would need political cover for anything he might do. “If saving western civilization hinges on these boats,” Miller wrote Luce, “then a way through the technicalities must be found.” Luce consulted the columnist Joseph Alsop for advice on how to influence Roosevelt, and he took to heart Alsop’s blunt advice: “Suppress Lew Douglas’s name … a red flag to the Presidential bull…. If possible, a courtier-like approach…. The President is very tired, and when tired is seemingly best dealt with from the position of the kow-tow.” At the next meeting Luce argued that Roosevelt would need a “quid pro quo” from the British to justify the transfer of the ships, and he proposed that “these destroyers should be offered to Britain in exchange for immediate naval and air concessions in British possessions in the Western Hemisphere.” Luce had not been the first person to embrace this idea. It had been circulating in elite conversations, and even in the press, for at least several weeks. But Luce was largely responsible for directing the Century Group toward the proposal.39

  Having agreed on strategy, the group quickly turned to tactics. Who should see whom? they asked themselves. What should be “the method to cut through the technicalities”? How was the country “to be aroused”? The members responded in the way that powerful people usually do—by contacting other powerful people. Luce and Coffin visited Secretary of State Cordell Hull. They were pleased by Hull’s approval of their idea, Luce wrote, but discouraged by his demeanor, “bordering on fatalistic despair…. The noble old soldier has been working so long in an atmosphere of frustration and defeat that he has perhaps lost the necessary faith in the possible victory of his cause.” A few days later he called first on Frank Knox, the former Republican newspaper editor (and 1936 Republican vice presidential candidate) whom Roosevelt had recently named secretary of the navy; and then Lord Lothian, the British ambassador. He urged them both to support the destroyers-for-bases plan. Knox and Lothian surprised him with welcome but unexplained optimism—an optimism Luce did not at that moment share, because the day before he and Clare had spent the night at the White House.40

  It was ostensibly a social event, organized around a screening for the president of the new March of Time film, “The Ramparts We Watch.” On their arrival the Luces were shown to a White House bedroom—“utterly without charm,” Harry wrote—and then proceeded to the president’s private study on the second floor. Roosevelt was sitting behind his desk gleefully mixing what Luce considered “excellent martinis.” (The president drank two.) The party included some of Luce’s colleagues—Roy Larsen and Louis de Rochemont and their wives—as well as such usual companions of the president as Missy LeHand, his secretary, and Harry Hopkins, his most trusted aide. After dinner the group convened in the “stifling hot” upstairs corridor to watch the film, which the president seemed to like; and shortly after that Luce me
t privately with the president in his study.41

  Luce found the conversation disappointing. He moved immediately to what he later called “my big question … has he or has he not made up his mind about sending destroyers to Great Britain.” Roosevelt equivocated, dismissing the idea as politically impossible at one moment, then describing the congressional lobbying he would have to do to enhance the proposal’s chances. He was struck by the president’s “air of great confidence…. He feels a sort of reincarnation.” Years later, after Harry’s death, Clare described the evening and claimed that Roosevelt had pressured Harry to support the destroyers-for-bases deal in his magazines, that only with such backing could he hope to persuade Congress to agree to the plan. Harry’s own contemporary memoir of the event mentions no such proposal, but he did indeed begin immediately to promote the idea in Time, with a lengthy essay pointing out the importance to the United States of bases in the Caribbean, “the first outpost of U.S.’s maritime frontier.” What had once been an afterthought—using the acquisition of bases in the Caribbean to facilitate the much more important need to send destroyers to Britain—now cleverly became, in public at least, Time’s principal goal. It was exactly the kind of support Roosevelt needed to give him the cover to pursue the deal. At the same time Luce, along with others, worked to persuade Willkie not to oppose the destroyers-for-bases deal in the campaign. Willkie agreed, even though he must certainly have known that such a decision could strengthen Roosevelt’s chances for reelection. On September 3, after a month of intricate negotiations with the British government, Roosevelt announced that he was issuing an executive order (not reviewable by Congress) to acquire British bases in the Caribbean “in exchange for fifty of our over-age destroyers”—a deal almost identical to the one Luce had proposed to him in July. The president’s “bold stroke,” Time exultantly if slightly grudgingly reported, “was received with cheers that drowned out criticism of the secret and questionable method by which it was carried out.”42

  In November, only days after the presidential election, Luce quietly resigned from the Century Group, explaining that “happily, we are well embarked on armament and military production; we are pretty generally agreed on aid-to-Britain, etc.” The committee’s job was far from over, he conceded, but its task had shifted from influencing the president to influencing the public. “I think that as an editor I should not be an active member of a policy promoting group…. I doubt whether I should be in a position of being busily engaged in trying to influence myself!” Coming so soon after the end of the campaign, it is likely that Luce was also aware of the danger he had created for himself and his company by becoming such an obvious and partisan supporter of Willkie. It was time, he seemed to be signaling, for him to stop being a political activist and to focus again on his company and his magazines.43

  But Luce could not contain himself for long. In December 1940 he found himself embroiled in a secret effort, spearheaded by a shadowy pacifist, Malcolm Lovell, to explore the possibility of a settlement of the war. Lovell arranged a meeting with an attaché in the German consulate in New York, Hans Thomsen; and Luce, perhaps out of curiosity and perhaps out of his continuing hope that he would somehow transform the course of world events, unwisely agreed to attend. Nothing came of the flirtation except to create another reason for the White House, which learned of the meeting, to distrust him. In the meantime, he continued an active correspondence with the members of the Century Group, who continued to fear that “our present scale of help will only achieve that miserable result … of just keeping England going until we get strong enough not to care.” Luce warned them of allying with the “extreme Anglophiles” but agreed that the government’s policy remained inadequate. Early in the new year he briefly involved himself in an Illinois Senate race, in an effort to ensure that a “non-isolationist candidate” would be nominated by the state Republicans. And by late January he was back in the thick of the effort—again orchestrated by many of the same establishment leaders with whom he had collaborated in 1940—to promote what became Lend-Lease, the much more expansive system of aid to Britain (and later other Allies, including the Soviet Union) that Roosevelt proposed and Congress approved in March 1941. Luce wrote an editorial for Life in January, “We Americans,” which advocated the bill, but he sullenly backed away from it when confronted with objections from his editors to running an explicit editorial. He embarked instead on a speaking tour, in which he actively promoted Lend-Lease, and he began to speak more openly than ever before about direct American participation in the war. “I say that we are already in the war,” he pronounced dramatically to an audience in Pittsburgh. “The irony is that Hitler knows it—and most of the American people don’t.” But he was also exploring larger themes: the nature of America’s power and wealth, its capacity to reshape the world, its moral obligations. “Ours is the power, ours is the opportunity,” he proclaimed to a group of oilmen in Tulsa, “and ours will be the responsibility whether we like it or not.” On his return to New York he began contemplating a more systematic statement of his ideas on the war, a manifesto that would, he hoped, both confront the momentous issues facing the nation and thrust Luce himself into the center of the great debate.44

  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.45

  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.”46

  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 mi
ssion 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.47

  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: