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.48
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.49
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.”50
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.”51
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 beli
ef 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.”52
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.53
And yet, despite the lack of precision and despite the many misconceptions it helped to create, “The American Century” did have something significant to say about both the present and the future. For the world of 1941 the essay was a powerful work of propaganda, published first in the most popular magazine in America, and then republished and circulated widely throughout the United States, and the world, over the following months. It was designed to rouse Americans out of what Luce considered their slothful indifference and inspire them to undertake a great mission on behalf of what he considered the nation’s core values. Despite Luce’s demurral on the crucial question of military intervention in the war, the essay made a powerful case in accessible (and in some ways populist) language for the enormous stake the United States had in the outcome of the conflict. No one reading “the American Century” could miss Luce’s warning that a totalitarian world would doom the nation’s hopes for the future. And for those looking beyond the war, the essay was unequivocal in its belief in the extraordinary role the United States could and must play in the world, and the extraordinary power and virtue America would bring to its tasks, despite Luce’s strenuous insistence that “you can’t extract imperialism from the American Century.”54
A little more than a year after Luce’s essay appeared in Life, in the first months of America’s formal entry into the war, Vice President Henry A. Wallace wrote what was in some respects the most important response to “The American Century”—a speech delivered on May 8, 1942, widely known as “The Century of the Common Man” (although its actual title was “The Price of Free World Victory”). Wallace would later become a controversial, even reviled, figure for his leadership of dissenting leftists in the early years of the Cold War, his bitter criticisms of what he considered America’s excessive militarism and aggression, and for his perhaps unwitting alliance with communists in his 1948 presidential campaign as the candidate of the short-lived Progressive Party. But he gave his 1942 speech at a high-water mark in his political career. A little over a year into his vice presidency, he had a reputation—soon to be shattered—as the second most important figure in government, as the “assistant president,” as Roosevelt’s likely heir. He spoke in 1942 as a prominent, mainstream Democrat—an important and influential figure in the Roosevelt administration—attempting to rouse the public to more fervent support of a war that the nation was not yet clearly winning.55
Wallace was implicitly critical of what he, like others, considered the imperialistic rhetoric of Luce’s 1941 essay, and he was careful to distance himself from any notion that the United States could, or should, unilaterally impose its values and institutions on the world. But he too presented a vision of the future that included a central role for the United States in both inspiring and shaping a new age of democracy. “This is a fight between a slave world and a free world,” he said. “Just as the United States in 1862 could not remain half slave and half free, so in 1942 the world must make its decision for a complete victory one way or the other.” Naturally Wallace expected all “freedom-loving people”—who were not Americans alone but among whom Americans stood preeminent—to answer that question and to shape the postwar world. Their answer, he said, was embodied in the Four Freedoms Franklin Roosevelt had proclaimed in January 1941, freedoms that “are at the very core of the revolution for which the United Nations have taken their stand.” And just as Luce’s vision of an American century included a vision of exporting Western industrial abundance to the world, so Wallace insisted that “the peace must mean a better standard of living for the common man, not merely in the United States and England, but also in India, Russia, China, and Latin America—not merely in the United Nations [as the Western Alliance then called itself], but also in Germany and Italy and Japan.”56
“Some have spoken of the ‘American Century,’” Wallace added, in an obvious effort to differentiate himself from Luce. “I say the century on which we are entering … can be and must be the century of the common man.” In the years to come, as Wallace’s own vision (and political fortunes) changed, he came increasingly to see his speech as a full-throated rejoinder to what he considered Luce’s more imperialist vision. At the time, however, both Wallace and Luce spoke warmly about each other’s remarks and seemed to agree that they were on the whole fighting the same battle. (“I do not happen to remember anything that you have written descriptive of your concepts of ‘the American Century’ of which I disapprove,” Wallace wrote Luce shortly after he delivered his speech. Luce’s essay, he added, “is almost precisely parallel to what I was trying to say in my talk.” Luce in turn congratulated Wallace on the speech and even argued later that he was, if anything, overreaching. “Not every mission is appropriate to the political state,” he said pointedly in a 1943 speech. “To claim for it an unlimited mission to do good is to invite infinite confusion, ugly strife, and ultimately disaster.”)57
But whatever differences Wallace may have had with Luce, his vision of a world modeled on American notions of freedom, his commitment to spreading the fruits of economic growth to the world, his insistence that “older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization,” and perhaps most of all the extravagant rhetoric with which he presented these ideas—all made his speech less an alternative to Luce’s essay than a variation on it. “There are no half measures,” Wallace concluded (with language no less evangelical than the language Luce had used to end his own essay). “No compromise with Satan is possible…. We shall fight for a complete peace and a complete victory. The people’s revolution is on the march, and the devil and all his angels cannot prevail against it. They cannot prevail for on the side of the people is the Lord.”58
“The American Century” and “The Price of Free World Victory” were important documents of their time, but not because their influence on the contemporary public conversation was profound. They were significant primarily because they were highly visible symbols of a growing movement among American leaders, and eventually among many others, to redefine the nation’s relationship to the world
and, in the process, to redefine America’s sense of itself. Luce and Wallace were unlikely, and perhaps to some degree unwitting, partners, but together they helped launch an idea that survived well beyond the dark days in which they wrote—an idea that could not accurately be described as imperialism but that did outline a mission for the United States in the world that would when implemented (as it largely was) profoundly change the shape of the nation and the globe.
Given the intensity of Luce’s engagement with the global crisis, it is surprising that until mid-1941 he had focused relatively little attention on China. He had visited Asia only once since his departure from his parents’ home in 1914; and even that 1932 visit only briefly renewed his active interest in Asia. Nor had his magazines in the 1930s given more than ordinary coverage of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the expansion of the war into other regions of China. Through the first months of 1941, Luce was principally concerned with Europe, and with the survival of Britain in the face of the German threat. But in the spring of that year he accepted an invitation from the Chinese government to visit Chungking, an event that helped renew a passion for China that would continue for the rest of his life.
Luce’s wartime involvement with China began modestly in the late 1930s with a philanthropic project—an effort initiated by Ida Pruitt, a teacher at Peking University and the daughter of Chinese missionaries, and the writer Edgar Snow, who had already become famous for his reportage on the Chinese Communist Party and his celebrated book Red Star Over China. Together Pruitt and Snow began promoting an effort to produce industrial cooperatives to help poor Chinese villagers manufacture modest goods for sale. Luce was responsive to their appeal, and in 1939 he began mobilizing wealthy friends and acquaintances to help support it. But he soon turned to a larger effort. Early in 1941 a group of eminent public figures—among them John D. Rockefeller III, Paul Hoffman (the president of the Studebaker car company), Thomas W. Lamont of the Morgan bank, David Selznick, Wendell Willkie, and Luce himself—began to coalesce around a much more ambitious goal: the creation of a broad effort to raise private money “for the relief of the Chinese—both soldiers and civilians,” which became known as United China Relief (UCR). Luce had strongly encouraged the formation of the organization, but he declined invitations to chair it and for a time expressed considerable pessimism about its likely success. (In its first two months it raised only forty thousand dollars, not enough even to cover its expenses.) Nevertheless he allied himself with the effort and actively assisted it. “This is probably the most important letter I have ever tried to write,” he began a letter to wealthy friends requesting support. “We have now undertaken to raise $5,000,000…. If we are successful in this effort, it will help to confirm, perhaps for years to come, the wide-spread belief in China that America feels kindly toward China.” To help advance the project, he said, he would himself travel to China to provide “a first-hand report on the situation” and to try to enlist Mme. Chiang Kai-shek to support the initiative.59
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