Nowhere was the new attitude more visible than in Life—as Longwell had predicted in 1935 and as Luce now mandated in 1939—which became one of the nation’s most important chroniclers of war and the great champion of the Allied cause. A special issue of Life shortly after the invasion of Poland was devoted entirely to the war and not only portrayed the anguish of the Polish people as “German bombers rain death and destruction on Warsaw” but outlined in terrifying detail the ominous power and terrible ambitions of the Nazi empire. Among its many warnings were the first of many hypothetical scenarios showing the catastrophic possibilities of a German victory, including the total destruction of British and French industry through airpower. But it also began what would become an earnest celebration of the courage and resourcefulness of Britain. (The issue included the results of a new Fortune survey that showed 83 percent of Americans in favor of the Western Allies’ winning the war—and only 1 percent hoping for a German victory.)11
For the next two years Life was the adoring chronicler of the British war effort and of the plucky courage of the British people. “The R. A. F. Fliers Are Young and Brave,” the magazine announced as it presented portraits of “smiling, keen, and confident” British “heroes.” Stories about the German bombing of London were accompanied by photographs of beaming, “unruffled” “Thumbs Up” young women singing, “We’re going to show the world who’s who.” Despite the blitz, Life assured its readers, “the life of London continues with calm, incongruous persistence.” The devastating British retreat from France at Dunkirk was an opportunity to salute the “unshaken, unbroken, unbeaten” British military.
Time and Life both became as well the indomitable foes of America’s “appeasers” and isolationists. “Rather than risk involving U.S. troops in the War,” Life wrote contemptuously (and not wholly inaccurately), the “appeasers” were “prepared to see Great Britain defeated and Hitler’s power extended to the very sea gates of America.” Unflattering photographs of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, U.S. ambassador to Britain Joseph Kennedy, and U.S. senator Burton K. Wheeler accompanied a portrait of Lawrence Dennis, “America’s No. 1 intellectual Fascist.” Time was particularly hard on Lindbergh, “who to many Americans represents the narrowest isolationism, the broadest appeasement.” Uncharacteristically dense essays explained to Life readers the great dangers of a German victory—among them a five-page article by Walter Lippmann describing the terrifying economic consequences of Axis control of Europe and the likelihood that Germany would then dominate and devastate the United States. “The small American businessman has long complained about how difficult it is for him to survive in the competition with the large American corporation,” Lippmann warned. “What will he do when he has to face the competition of totalitarian monopoly organized on a continental scale?” At the same time a newly energized March of Time issued one of its most ambitious films: “The Ramparts We Watched,” an unapologetic call for American military preparedness. And Fortune began to mobilize its readership for the struggle as well. “The people of the U.S. must now choose among retreat, isolation, and international leadership,” the magazine wrote late in 1939.12
The rapid and dramatic movement of the Time Inc. magazines from ironic detachment to committed advocates of the Allied cause did not escape the notice of the editors of The New Yorker, Luce’s most persistently biting (and wittiest) satirists. Harold Ross, always eager to tweak what he considered the pomposity of Luce and his magazines, took note of Life’s simultaneous fascination with “pretty women” and its doomsday fantasies as it attempted to prepare its readers for war. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, The New Yorker ran a satirical cartoon version of Life Goes to a Party titled “Life Goes to the Collapse of Western Civilization.” It was most likely based on a trivial 1941 Life story about “twin sisters from Flint,” Lois and Lucille, arriving in New York hoping to break into show business and meet “successful, cultured and refined people.” The New Yorker parody told the story of two “pretty New York models”—Meenie and Babs—who move smiling and wide-eyed through a war-torn New York, always dressed in the latest and most provocative outfits. In one frame the girls dress in “scanty sport clothes for the task of lugging $3,450,000 in inflated United States currency to famed Elizabeth Arden’s to buy a tube of vanishing cream.” In another Babs and Meenie “buoyantly participate in a bread riot for a lark.” “Goodness gracious,” Babs exclaims, “if I ate even one slice of bread I’d have to stop wearing tailored suits.”13
Luce had reacted to The New Yorker’s satirical 1936 profile of him with almost violent fury. But by 1941 he was so deeply immersed in the cause of the Allies that he gave The New Yorker, and his other critics, virtually no notice at all. His newly powerful sense of mission kept his gaze squarely on the global crisis, and on the important role he believed he must play in it. His frustration with America’s slow path to intervention grew steadily, but no more than his frustration with his own inability to change the nation’s course. Roosevelt, he charged, was guilty of “apelike fumbling;” but in fact, he somewhat narcissistically insisted, “it is all, all our fault … that all this monkey-business happens when we are ‘the most potent editorial force’ in America.” The intensity of his commitment even led him to propose transforming Fortune from a magazine of business to the “Magazine of America as a World Power.” His staff talked him out of this radical notion, but not out of the sentiments that it reflected.14
Luce’s view of the impending war, and of America’s role in the global crisis, was not as clear or consistent as he later liked to claim. He had repudiated isolationism and had aligned himself with the growing circle of influential Americans who insisted that the United States must lead the world. But like many internationalists of the late 1930s, he had moved erratically from one strategy to another—wavering on how likely he believed the outbreak of war to be and wondering how deeply engaged with the conflict the United States should become. At some moments he was convinced that American military engagement was inevitable; at others he continued to argue that preparedness and aid to Britain would be enough. He sometimes admired Franklin Roosevelt’s halting, cagey movement away from isolationism. (“How to express one’s admiration and gratitude,” he wrote the president in mid-1940. “I’d like to say it this way—that your speech at Charlottesville is the most important human utterance since Lincoln’s at Gettysburg.”) He sometimes railed against what he considered the president’s timidity and fecklessness. (The administration, he wrote a few months later, “has contributed, blunderingly and unwittingly, to the conditions which have led to war.”) In the last months before the outbreak of war in Europe, he became an excited advocate of a quixotic proposal by the journalist Clarence Streit for a federation of the Atlantic democracies—a new form of global governance that would strengthen the ability of anti-fascist nations to resist aggression. Streit promoted this idea in a briefly influential 1939 book, Union Now:
I believe there is a way through these dangers, and out of the dilemma, a way to do what we all want, to keep both peace and freedom, and keep them securely and be done with this nightmare…. The way through is Union now of the democracies that the North Atlantic and a thousand other things already unite … a great federal republic built on and for the thing they share most, their common democratic principle of government for the sake of individual freedom.
In later years Luce would look with something close to contempt on such notions of global governance—a plan that would have brought the United States into a federation that would reduce its sovereignty and embed it into something like the European Union of a half century later. But at the time he was looking for any answer he could find; and in the ominous summer of 1939 he saw “Union Now” as “the only way to begin the re-liberation of human energy and imagination and hope and will.”15
Luce was excited, frightened, hopeful, angry. The war brought out the best of his missionary temperament—commitment, energy, moral inquiry, and high purpose; and it brought out
the worst as well—arrogance, impatience, didacticism, and occasional dogmatism. His restlessness was visible in his almost obsessive writing in the early months of the war, memo after memo, outlining more and more ideas and beliefs. “Danger,” he wrote in July 1940 in a message to his staff. “The country is in Danger. Danger. Danger. The country is in Danger…. Alas you have only to look about you to know that the country does not feel as we do.” As he often did when restless and frustrated, he turned to travel, which brought him into direct contact with the reality of the crisis and helped clarify his own views of how to respond to it.16
For more than a year before the outbreak of war, Luce traveled periodically through Europe, meeting with important people, conveying his impressions to his staff, and supervising stories reflecting his views. If he had not already been convinced of the unsavoriness of the Nazi regime, he made his disillusionment clear during a visit in spring 1938. Just as Luce’s impression of the Soviet Union had been profoundly shaped by the physical discomforts he had experienced while traveling across Russiain 1932, he was struck as well by what he considered the general shabbiness of life in Nazi Germany—the terrible food, the shortage of toilet paper, “the worst [conditions] I have encountered in years…. There is no luxury in Germany.” But he was even more appalled by the “intensity” of anti-Semitism, a “brand of hatred” about which, he said, “there has been no exaggeration.” And yet he remained optimistic about the prospects for peace and continued to hope that the Nazi regime might still evolve into a responsible state. A few days later he met President Edvard Beneš during a visit to Czechoslovakia, and described him as “an able idealist, great leader of a brave people” likely to defend his country successfully against Hitler’s threats. It was characteristic of Luce that he became absorbed with whatever country he had most recently visited, and he often pressured the magazines to pay attention to anything that had struck his interest there. His excitement about Beneš led to an admiring cover story on him, only months before the nation’s demise at the hands of Germany.17
A year later, in the spring of 1939, the writer John Gunther encountered Luce on a ship en route to Europe. The two men, who barely knew each other, struck up a shipboard friendship. Gunther later wrote to his wife about Luce’s revealing account of himself. “He’s aloof and sensitive at first, then bursts out in long, semi-articulate, highly intelligent talk.” Gunther took note as well of Luce’s apparent frustration and uncertainty. Luce was “ashamed to say I’m 41,” an age at which he felt he should know more than he did and wanted to “go to school again.” Luce spoke ruefully as well of how much of his life had become defined by his wealth and power, how too often he found himself in the company of rich reactionaries (“French semi-Fascists and ‘Après nous le déluge—let them eat cake millionaires,’” Gunther described some of their shipboard companions, whom Luce chose to avoid). But Luce expressed as well his continuing uncertainty about the crisis that he knew would soon define his life and that of the world. “If he had to choose between Fascism & Communism,” Gunther wrote, “(awful choice) he would choose communism because it meant more for ‘the people as a whole.’” Despite Luce’s great power, Gunther noted, “one almost senses a feeling of inferiority, or at least disatisfication [sic] with himself in spite of all he has accomplished.”18
Once in Europe, Luce quickly abandoned his plans for “a very good rest” and plunged instead into frantic travel and interviewing. During a trip to Poland in late July (a month before Germany invaded), he continued to believe that “the chances of war this year are rather less than 50–50” in part because of his admiration for “the strength of Polish policy vis-à-vis Germany.” After the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August he described the agreement as evidence of German weakness—and of Hitler’s fear of the strength of the Allied front. “The Allies are winning,” he wrote. “Americans have not realized how strong was the resistance-determination in England and France.” And yet only days later, at lunch in Paris with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, he spoke animatedly about the likelihood of catastrophic war. He returned to New York and wrote of a “war of words and nerves,” of “rolling barrages of slander timed to the minute … whispering campaigns, mystification, currency raids, posters, mass meetings, blackouts—weapons against which military men can only point their guns in vain.” In early September, with German tanks rolling into Poland, he was reproaching himself for not seeing the danger more clearly and not having advocated more effectively for preparedness and defense. “It is my fault for not having insisted harder,” he lamented, and he promptly told his editors “that we didn’t blame Hitler enough for starting the war, that we were too hard on Britain.” Billings—an isolationist at heart—complained in his diary: “They want Life to go overboard for the Allies. ‘I had tried to keep the issue fair and objective.’” But always the good soldier, he quickly fell into line.19
In the spring of 1940 Clare began an extended tour of Europe, this time to assess for Life the impact of the still relatively quiet war. (A year later she published her observations in a successful book, Europe in the Spring.) In April, as German forces began their great offensive, Luce raced to Paris to join her and to assess the changing situation for himself. (It was a classic example of Luce’s practice of journalism—serial visits with heads of state and other dignitaries.) After a whirlwind round of interviews with French officials and a short visit to London, he wrote back perceptively to his editors that the “stand-out fact” of the war was “plain and simple aviation.” England, France, and the United States, he argued, were in many ways better prepared for a long war than was Germany. But in a short war they were in great danger because of the enormous German advantage in airpower. If the “Allies had two or three thousand additional airplanes,” he insisted, “the war would be shortened … the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men on both sides would be saved.” The United States should not only increase airplane production but should also release to the Allies “every single airplane which they are willing to pay cash for.” His editors accused him of oversimplification and kept the intensity of his feeling on this issue out of the magazines, but Luce did not back down. “Airplanes, airplanes, is the cry you hear from the land and … from the sea,” he replied. The course of the war in the following months proved him to be mostly right.20
A few days later, on May 8, he and Clare were in Holland, which, like most of Europe, was awaiting the beginning of the German blitzkrieg that everyone by now knew was imminent. “Where will [Hitler] strike?” Luce wrote. “Anywhere”—except the already obsolete Maginot Line in western France. In fact German troops began flowing across the Dutch border almost as soon as the Luces arrived, and they quickly decamped to the American Embassy in Brussels. Early the next morning, a maid woke them with the news that “The Germans are coming again.” They rushed to the window and looked out across the square, “when we heard a tremendous explosion…. The house across the street collapsed. The sirens began to blow … Red Cross ambulances appeared.” Everyone in the embassy was frightened, particularly as the sound of German artillery began to be heard to the north. “But after that,” Luce observed, “they got used to the war and were very mad.” With the building vibrating from the noise of bombing, shelling, and air-raid sirens, the embassy staff made breakfast “because not eating would not keep the Germans away.” Clare ignored the warnings of the embassy staff and strolled across downtown Brussels, watching Belgians read the grim news in their papers, noting women and children on their normal shopping rounds, and observing soldiers assembling with “great calm.” Failing to find a taxi (they had all been commandeered by the army), she uncharacteristically rode a streetcar back to the embassy. Because the city was “in a state of siege,” she and Harry stayed in the embassy and had “a very good luncheon in the mirrored gallery … the Ambassador served his best wine.” Clare noted that they heard “three more alarms between the eggs mornay and the dessert course.” As darkness fell “on the fir
st day of the big show,” Harry and Clare looked from the embassy balcony again to see “the green square where the glass from the bombhouse lies like jagged hail” and where two children had died. The next morning, shortly after Clare cabled to Life her own “eyewitness account of the first day of the Germans’ grand attack on the western world,” they were driven back to Paris in a car provided by the embassy. As always his thoughts turned immediately to what these events meant for the United States. “Don’t ever doubt Hitler keeps a close eye on American opinion,” Luce wrote as he departed from Brussels. Concern about the American reaction, he claimed, was the reason the German bombing of Belgium was relatively restrained. Hitler is “well pleased with the impotence of American opinion up to date, but the possibility of engaging America is the only thing which would really scare him.” A few weeks later, back in New York, Luce responded to a friend’s request for a conversation “when your desk is clear” with a blunt retort: “Desk won’t be clear until Hitler either gives or receives the peace of death.”21
“Our great job from now on is not to create power but to use it,” Luce wrote Larsen from Europe in the spring of 1940. On his return to New York he gave two national radio addresses warning Americans that their way of life was threatened by “mighty and ruthless nations…. What can we do now?” he asked. “We can strip off the false cloak of neutrality and announce to the world—that we stand for … democracy.” Luce was in effect announcing a new phase of his career in which he would use his magazines, and his personal influence, to shape public policy and national opinion. His first step in doing so was to become deeply engaged, for the first time in his life, with a presidential campaign.22
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