READING: Henry Luce (1941): The American Century
Luce’s manifesto and the world order that it… signposted...
Luce’s manifesto and the world order that it… signposted…
Henry Luce’s “The American Century” is an editorial artifact. It come from a hinge moment: February 17, 1941—ten months before Pearl Harbor. Back then the United States formally neutral, materially belligerent, and psychologically divided.
It is a piece both programmatic and polemical: a manifesto by a publisher who believed the emergent American scale of industry, technology, finance, media, prosperity, good order, and above all liberty imposed obligations along with opportunities. Read it as an intervention in policy. Read it also as an aspirational framing of a century that Henry Luce thought the United States could shape, for good, via the drive of its productive capacity and the contagiousness of its culture.
I think the right way to approach Luce is to ask three questions:
What problem did he think he was solving? What tools did he believe America had at hand to solve it?
And how well did Luce’s setting forth the “American Century” as an agenda map onto what actually happened from 1941 to the present?
The problem, for Luce, was not only Hitler and totalitarianism. It was the broader sickness of interwar capitalism:
a planet with a technological capacity to produce abundance;
a social-distribution system that kept millions hungry;
a world full of states able to mobilize for war;
and institutions unable to deliver peace.
Luce diagnoses American malaise—nervousness, gloom, apathy—as a failure of intellectual and moral clarity, a refusal to name what the United States was already doing (in the war short of war) and what it ought to do (commit to an outward-facing liberal order). His rhetorical move is to declare the question of “whether” moot—America is already in the war—and to focus on “how” to win and “for what” to win.
That pivot from ontology to teleology—less “are we?” and more “what are our aims?”—is the kernel of the essay.
On tools, Luce points to concrete levers: freedom of the seas, world trade on American scale, technical assistance and human-capital exports, an explicit Samaritanism—feeding the hungry alongside arming democracies—and the projection of “Freedom under Law” as a normative brand. He does not imagine a world parliament. He does imagine a world environment hospitable to American growth, secured by American influence. In his triad—industrial capacity, moral aspiration, and cultural prestige—he anticipates the toolkit that later becomes the Bretton Woods system plus the Marshall Plan plus the Hollywood-jazz-consumer-goods soft power gradient.
If you want a single sentence from Luce that prefigures the postwar order, it is his insistence that America is “responsible… for the world-environment in which she lives.” That is the embryo of the liberal internationalist claim: your domestic prosperity depends on shaping global rules.
Now, how well did the map match the territory? The institutional sequence from 1944 onward—IMF, World Bank, GATT; NATO; the UN system; the Marshall Plan; OEEC to OECD—was a remarkably faithful implementation of Luce’s instincts, albeit designed by Roosevelt-Truman-Acheson-White rather than an editorial board. American scale and credibility financed reconstruction, underwrote convertibility, and incentivized export-led growth. The post-1947 prosperity cycle—Europe’s “economic miracle,” Japan’s high-speed growth, then the Four Tigers—leveraged American demand, technology diffusion, and rules.
The “American Century” in that sense happened.
Between 1950 and 1990 the global economic frontier was anchored on American productivity and policy. To borrow a favorite metric: by 1973, the advanced capitalist world had cut the share of its population in poverty to historical lows while tripling real output per worker relative to 1939. That is not solely an American achievement—but the order that enabled it was America-centered.
Why read Luce today? Because he ties moral aims to material instruments. Freedom and justice are not slogans but outputs of institutions, flows, and logistics—ships, planes, rules, and grain. The “Good Samaritan” line is not charity; it is also stabilization policy. And he insists that leadership is a responsibility, not a prerogative. Senior partnership is earned by underwriting common goods, accepting constraints, and listening. When America does that—at Bretton Woods, in postwar reconstruction, in the liberalization of trade conditioned by domestic cushioning—it is indeed a “powerhouse” of ideals. When it does not, prestige decays faster than hard power can compensate.
Luce, Henry. 1941. “The American Century.” LIFE Magazine, February 17.
The American Century
We Americans are unhappy. We are not happy about America. We are not happy about ourselves in relation to America. We are nervous – or gloomy – or apathetic.
As we look out at the rest of the world we are confused; we don’t know what to do. “Aid to Britain short of war” is typical of halfway hopes and halfway measures.
As we look toward the future – our own future and the future of other nations – we are filled with foreboding. The future doesn’t seem to hold anything for us except conflict, disruption, war.
There is a striking contrast between our state of mind and that of the British people. On Sept. 3, 1939, the first day of the war in England, Winston Churchill had this to say: “Outside the storms of war may blow and the land may be lashed with the fury of its gales, but in our hearts this Sunday morning there is Peace.”
Since Mr. Churchill spoke those words the German Luftwaffe has made havoc of British cities, driven the population underground, frightened children from their sleep, and imposed upon everyone a nervous strain as great as any that people have ever endured. Readers of LIFE have seen this havoc unfolded week by week.
Yet close observers agree that when Mr. Churchill spoke of peace in the hearts of the British people he was not indulging in idle oratory. The British people are profoundly calm. There seems to be a complete absence of nervousness. It seems as if all the neuroses of modern life had vanished from England.
In the beginning the British Government made elaborate preparations for an increase in mental breakdowns. But these have actually declined. There have been fewer than a dozen breakdowns reported in London since the air raids began.
The British are calm in their spirit not because they have nothing to worry about but because they are fighting for their lives. They have made that decision. And they have no further choice. All their mistakes of the past 20 years, all the stupidities and failures that they have shared with the rest of the democratic world, are now of the past. They can forget them because they are faced with a supreme task – defending, yard by yard, their island home.
With us it is different. We do not have to face any attack tomorrow or the next day. Yet we are faced with something almost as difficult. We are faced with great decisions.
We know how lucky we are compared to all the rest of mankind. At least two-thirds of us are just plain rich compared to all the rest of the human family – rich in food, rich in clothes, rich in entertainment and amusement, rich in leisure, rich.
And yet we also know that the sickness of the world is also our sickness. We, too, have miserably failed to solve the problems of our epoch. And nowhere in the world have man’s failures been so little excusable as in the United States of America. Nowhere has the contrast been so great between the reasonable hopes of our age and the actual facts of failure and frustration. And so now all our failures and mistakes hover like birds of ill omen over the White House, over the Capitol dome and over this printed page. Naturally, we have no peace.
But, even beyond this necessity for living with our own misdeeds, there is another reason why there is no peace in our hearts. It is that we have not been honest with ourselves.
In this whole matter of War and Peace especially, we have been at various times and in various ways false to ourselves, false to each other, false to the facts of history and false to the future.
In this self-deceit our political leaders of all shades of opinion are deeply implicated. Yet we cannot shove the blame off on them. If our leaders have deceived us it is mainly because we ourselves have insisted on being deceived. Their deceitfulness has resulted from our own moral and intellectual confusion. In this confusion, our educators and churchmen and scientists are deeply implicated.
Journalists, too, of course, are implicated. But if Americans are confused it is not for lack of accurate and pertinent information. The American people are by far the best informed people in the history of the world.
The trouble is not with the facts. The trouble is that clear and honest inferences have not been drawn from the facts. The day-to-day present is clear. The issues of tomorrow are befogged.
There is one fundamental issue which faces America as it faces no other nation. It is an issue peculiar to America and peculiar to America in the 20th Century – now. It is deeper even than the immediate issue of War. If America meets it correctly, then, despite hosts of dangers and difficulties, we can look forward and move forward to a future worthy of men, with peace in our hearts.
If we dodge the issue, we shall flounder for ten or 20 or 30 bitter years in a chartless and meaningless series of disasters.
The purpose of this article is to state that issue, and its solution, as candidly and as completely as possible. But first of all let us be completely candid about where we are and how we got there.
America Is in the War
…But are we in it?
Where are we? We are in the war. All this talk about whether this or that might or might not get us into the war is wasted effort. We are, for a fact, in the war.
If there’s one place we Americans did not want to be, it was in the war. We didn’t want much to be in any kind of war but, if there was one kind of war we most of all didn’t want to be in, it was a European war. Yet, we’re in a war, as vicious and bad a war as ever struck this planet, and, along with being worldwide, a European war. Of course, we are not technically at war, we are not painfully at war, and we may never have to experience the full hell that war can be. Nevertheless the simple statement stands: we are in the war. The irony is that Hitler knows it – and most Americans don’t. It may or may not be an advantage to continue diplomatic relations with Germany. But the fact that a German embassy still flourishes in Washington beautifully illustrates the whole mass of deceits and self-deceits in which we have been living.
Perhaps the best way to show ourselves that we are in the war is to consider how we can get out of it. Practically, there’s only one way to get out of it and that is by a German victory over England. If England should surrender soon, Germany and America would not start fighting the next day. So we would be out of the war. For a while. Except that Japan might then attack the South Seas and the Philippines. We could abandon the Philippines, abandon Australia and New Zealand, withdraw to Hawaii. And wait. We would be out of the war. 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.
We Got in Via Defense
…But what are we defending?
Now that we are in this war, how did we get in? We got in on the basis of defense. Even that very word, defense, has been full of deceit and self-deceit. To the average American the plain meaning of the word defense is defense of the American territory. Is our national policy today limited to the defense of the American homeland by whatever means may seem wise? It is not. We are not in a war to defend American territory. We are in a war to defend and even to promote, encourage and incite so-called democratic principles throughout the world. The average American begins to realize now that that’s the kind of war he’s in. And he’s halfway for it. But he wonders how he ever got there, since a year ago he had not the slightest intention of getting into any such thing. Well, he can see now how he got there. He got there via “defense.”
Behind the doubts in the American mind there were and are two different picture-patterns. One of them stressing the appalling consequences of the fall of England leads us to a war of intervention. As a plain matter of the defense of American territory is that picture necessarily true? It is not necessarily true. For the other picture is roughly this: while it would be much better for us if Hitler were severely checked, nevertheless regardless of what happens in Europe it would be entirely possible for us to organize a defense of the northern part of the Western Hemisphere so that this country could not be successfully attacked. You are familiar with that picture. Is it true or false? No man is qualified to state categorically that it is false. If the entire rest of the world came under the organized domination of evil tyrants, it is quite possible to imagine that this country could make itself such a tough nut to crack that not all the tyrants in the world would care to come against us. And of course there would always be a better than even chance that, like the great Queen Elizabeth, we could play one tyrant off against another. Or, like an infinitely mightier Switzerland, we could live discreetly and dangerously in the midst of enemies. No man can say that that picture of America as an impregnable armed camp is false. No man can honestly say that as a pure matter of defense – defense of our homeland – it is necessary to get into or be in this war.
The question before us then is not primarily one of necessity and survival. It is a question of choice and calculation. The true questions are: Do we want to be in this war? Do we prefer to be in it? And, if so, for what?
We Object to Being in It
…Our fears have a special cause
We are in this war. We can see how we got into it in terms of defense. Now why do we object so strongly to being in it?
There are lots of reasons. First, there is the profound and almost universal aversion to all war – to killing and being killed. But the reason which needs closest inspection, since it is one peculiar to this war and never felt about any previous war, is the fear that if we get into this war, it will be the end of our constitutional democracy. We are all acquainted with the fearful forecast – that some form of dictatorship is required to fight a modern war, that we will certainly go bankrupt, that in the process of war and its aftermath our economy will be largely socialized, that the politicians now in office will seize complete power and never yield it up, and that what with the whole trend toward collectivism, we shall end up in such a total national socialism that any faint semblances of our constitutional American democracy will be totally unrecognizable.
We start into this war with huge Government debt, a vast bureaucracy and a whole generation of young people trained to look to the Government as the source of all life. The Party in power is the one which for long years has been most sympathetic to all manner of socialist doctrines and collectivist trends. The President of the United States has continually reached for more and more power, and he owes his continuation in office today largely to the coming of the war. Thus, the fear that the United States will be driven to a national socialism, as a result of cataclysmic circumstances and contrary to the free will of the American people, is an entirely justifiable fear.
But We Will Win It
…The big question is how
So there’s the mess – to date. Much more could be said in amplification, in qualification, and in argument. But, however elaborately they might be stated, the sum of the facts about our present position brings us to this point – that the paramount question of this immediate moment is not whether we get into war but how do we win it?
If we are in a war, then it is no little advantage to be aware of the fact. And once we admit to ourselves we are in a war, there is no shadow of doubt that we Americans will be determined to win it – cost what it may in life or treasure. Whether or not we declare war, whether or not we send expeditionary forces abroad, whether or not we go bankrupt in the process – all these tremendous considerations are matters of strategy and management and are secondary to the overwhelming importance of winning the war.
What Are We Fighting for?
…And why we need to know
Having now, with candor, examined our position, it is time to consider, to better purpose than would have been possible before, the larger issue which confronts us. Stated most simply, and in general terms, that issue is: What are we fighting for?
Each of us stands ready to give our life, our wealth, and all our hope of personal happiness, to make sure that America shall not lose any war she is engaged in. But we would like to know what war we are trying to win – and what we are supposed to win when we win it.
This questioning reflects our truest instincts as Americans. But more than that. Our urgent desire to give this war its proper name has a desperate practical importance. If we know what we are fighting for, then we can drive confidently toward a victorious conclusion and, what’s more, have at least an even chance of establishing a workable Peace.
Furthermore – and this is an extraordinary and profoundly historical fact which deserves to be examined in detail – America and only America can effectively state the war aims of this war.
Almost every expert will agree that Britain cannot win complete victory – cannot even, in the common saying, “stop Hitler” – without American help. Therefore, even if Britain should from time to time announce war aims, the American people are continually in the position of effectively approving or not approving those aims. On the contrary, if America were to announce war aims, Great Britain would almost certainly accept them. And the entire world including Adolf Hitler would accept them as the gauge of this battle.
Americans have a feeling that in any collaboration with Great Britain we are somehow playing Britain’s game and not our own. Whatever sense there may have been in this notion in the past, today it is an ignorant and foolish conception of the situation. In any sort of partnership with the British Empire, Great Britain is perfectly willing that the United States of America should assume the role of senior partner. This has been true for a long time. Among serious Englishmen, the chief complaint against America (and incidentally their best alibi for themselves) has really amounted to this – that America has refused to rise to the opportunities of leadership in the world.
Consider this recent statement of the London Economist:
If any permanent closer association of Britain and the United States is achieved, an island people of less than 50 millions cannot expect to be the senior partner. . . . The center of gravity and the ultimate decision must increasingly lie in America. We cannot resent this historical development. We may rather feel proud that the cycle of dependence, enmity and independence is coming full circle into a new interdependence.
We Americans no longer have the alibi that we cannot have things the way we want them so far as Great Britain is concerned. With due regard for the varying problems of the members of the British Commonwealth, what we want will be okay with them.
This holds true even for that inspiring proposal called Union Now – a proposal, made by an American, that Britain and the United States should create a new and larger federal union of peoples. That may not be the right approach to our problem. But no thoughtful American has done his duty by the United States of America until he has read and pondered Clarence Streit’s book presenting that proposal.
The big, important point to be made here is simply that the complete opportunity of leadership is ours. Like most great creative opportunities, it is an opportunity enveloped in stupendous difficulties and dangers. If we don’t want it, if we refuse to take it, the responsibility of refusal is also ours, and ours alone.
Admittedly, the future of the world cannot be settled all in one piece. It is stupid to try to blueprint the future as you blueprint an engine or as you draw up a constitution for a sorority. But if our trouble is that we don’t know what we are fighting for, then it’s up to us to figure it out. Don’t expect some other country to tell us. Stop this Nazi propaganda about fighting somebody else’s war. We fight no wars except our wars. “Arsenal of Democracy?” We may prove to be that. But today we must be the arsenal of America and of the friends and allies of America.
Friends and allies of America? Who are they, and for what? This is for us to tell them.
Don Dang or Democracy
…But whose Dong Dang, whose Democracy?
But how can we tell them? And how can we tell ourselves for what purposes we seek allies and for what purposes we fight? Are we going to fight for dear old Danzig or dear old Dong Dang? Are we going to decide the boundaries of Uritania? Or, if we cannot state war aims in terms of vastly distant geography, shall we use some big words like Democracy and Freedom and Justice? Yes, we can use the big words. The President has already used them. And perhaps we had better get used to using them again. Maybe they do mean something – about the future as well as the past.
Some amongst us are likely to be dying for them – on the fields and in the skies of battle. Either that, or the words themselves and what they mean die with us – in our beds.
But is there nothing between the absurd sound of distant cities and the brassy trumpeting of majestic words? And if so, whose Dong Dang and whose Democracy? Is there not something a little more practically satisfying that we can get our teeth into? Is there no sort of understandable program? A program which would be clearly good for America, which would make sense for America – and which at the same time might have the blessing of the Goddess of Democracy and even help somehow to fix up this bothersome matter of Dong Dang? Is there none such? There is. And so we now come squarely and closely face to face with the issue which Americans hate most to face. It is that old, old issue with those old, old battered labels –the issue of Isolationism versus Internationalism.
We detest both words. We spit them at each other with the fury of hissing geese. We duck and dodge them.
Let us face that issue squarely now. If we face it squarely now – and if in facing it we take full and fearless account of the realities of our age – then we shall open the way, not necessarily to peace in our daily lives but to peace in our hearts.
Life is made up of joy and sorrow, of satisfactions and difficulties. In this time of trouble, we speak of troubles. There are many troubles. There are troubles in the field of philosophy, in faith and morals. There are troubles of home and family, of personal life. All are interrelated but we speak here especially of the troubles of national policy. In the field of national policy, the fundamental trouble with America has been, and is, that whereas their nation became in the th Century the most powerful and the most vital nation in the world, nevertheless Americans were unable to accommodate themselves spiritually and practically to that fact. Hence they have failed to play their part as a world power – a failure which has had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind. And the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.
“For such purposes as we see fit” leaves entirely open the question of what our purposes may be or how we may appropriately achieve them. Emphatically our only alternative to isolationism is not to undertake to police the whole world nor to impose democratic institutions on all mankind including the Dalai Lama and the good shepherds of Tibet.
America cannot be responsible for the good behavior of the entire world. But America is responsible, to herself as well as to history, for the world-environment in which she lives. Nothing can so vitally affect America’s environment as America’s own influence upon it, and therefore if America’s envi-ronment is unfavorable to the growth of American life, then America has nobody to blame so deeply as she must blame herself. In its failure to grasp this relationship between America and America’s environment lies the moral and practical bankruptcy of any and all forms of isolationism. It is most unfortunate that this virus of isolationist sterility has so deeply infected an influential section of the Republican Party. For until the Republican Party can develop a vital philosophy and program for America’s initiative and activity as a world power, it will continue to cut itself off from any useful participation in this hour of history. And its participation is deeply needed for the shaping of the future of America and of the world.
But politically speaking, it is an equally serious fact that for seven years Franklin Roosevelt was, for all practical purposes, a complete isolationist. He was more of an isolationist than Herbert Hoover or Calvin Coolidge. The fact that Franklin Roosevelt has recently emerged as an emergency world leader should not obscure the fact that for seven years his policies ran absolutely counter to any possibility of effective American leadership in international co-operation. There is of course a justification which can be made for the President’s first two terms. It can be said, with reason, that great social reforms were necessary in order to bring democracy up-to-date in the greatest of democracies. But the fact is that Franklin Roosevelt failed to make American democracy work successfully on a narrow, materialistic and nationalistic basis. And under Franklin Roosevelt we ourselves have failed to make democracy work successfully. Our only chance now to make it work is in terms of a vital international economy and in terms of an international moral order.
This objective is Franklin Roosevelt’s great opportunity to justify his first two terms and to go down in history as the greatest rather than the last of American Presidents. Our job is to help in every way we can, for our sakes and our children’s sakes, to ensure that Franklin Roosevelt shall be justly hailed as America’s greatest President. Without our help he cannot be our greatest President. With our help he can and will be. Under him and with his leadership we can make isolationism as dead an issue as slavery, and we can make a truly American internationalism something as natural to us in our time as the airplane or the radio.
In 1919 we had a golden opportunity, an opportunity unprecedented in all history, to assume the leadership of the world – a golden opportunity handed to us on the proverbial silver platter. We did not understand that opportunity. Wilson mishandled it. We rejected it. The opportunity persisted. We bungled it in the 1920’s and in the confusions of the 1930’s we killed it. To lead the world would never have been an easy task. To revive the hope of that lost opportunity makes the task now infinitely harder than it would have been before. Nevertheless, with the help of all of us, Roosevelt must succeed where Wilson failed.
The 20th Century Is the American Century
…Some facts about our time
Consider the 20th Century. It is not only in the sense that we happen to live in it but ours also because it is America’s first century as a dominant power in the world. So far, this century of ours has been a profound and tragic disap- pointment. No other century has been so big with promise for human progress and happiness. And in no one century have so many men and women and children suffered such pain and anguish and bitter death.
It is a baffling and difficult and paradoxical century. No doubt all centuries were paradoxical to those who had to cope with them. But, like everything else, our paradoxes today are bigger and better than ever. Yes, better as well as bigger – inherently better. We have poverty and starvation – but only in the midst of plenty. We have the biggest wars in the midst of the most widespread, the deepest and the most articulate hatred of war in all history. We have tyrannies and dictatorships – but only when democratic idealism, once regarded as the dubious eccentricity of a colonial nation, is the faith of a huge majority of the people of the world.
And ours is also a revolutionary century. The paradoxes make it inevitably revolutionary. Revolutionary, of course, in science and in industry. And also revolutionary, as a corollary in politics and the structure of society. But to say that a revolution is in progress is not to say that the men with either the craziest ideas or the angriest ideas or the most plausible ideas are going to come out on top. The Revolution of 1776 was won and established by men most of whom appear to have been both gentlemen and men of common sense.
Clearly a revolutionary epoch signifies great changes, great adjustments. And this is only one reason why it is really so foolish for people to worry about our “constitutional democracy” without worrying or, better, thinking hard about the world revolution. For only as we go out to meet and solve for our time the problems of the world revolution, can we know how to re-establish our constitutional democracy for another 50 or 100 years.
This 20th Century is baffling, difficult, paradoxical, revolutionary. But by now, at the cost of much pain and many hopes deferred, we know a good deal about it. And we ought to accommodate our outlook to this knowledge so dearly bought. For example, any true conception of our world of the 20th Century must surely include a vivid awareness of at least these four propositions.
First: our world of 2,000,000,000 human beings is for the first time in history one world, fundamentally indivisible. Second: modern man hates war and feels intuitively that, in its present scale and frequency, it may even be fatal to his species. Third: our world, again for the first time in human history, is capable of producing all the material needs of the entire human family. Fourth: the world of the 20th Century, if it is to come to life in any nobility of health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American Century.
As to the first and second: in postulating the indivisibility of the contemporary world, one does not necessarily imagine that anything like a world state – a parliament of men – must be brought about in this century. Nor need we assume that war can be abolished. All that it is necessary to feel – and to feel deeply – is that terrific forces of magnetic attraction and repulsion will operate as between every large group of human beings on this planet. Large sections of the human family may be effectively organized into opposition to each other. Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space. But Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny. Peace cannot endure unless it prevails over a very large part of the world. Justice will come near to losing all meaning in the minds of men unless Justice can have approximately the same fundamental meanings in many lands and among many peoples.
As to the third point – the promise of adequate production for all mankind, the “more abundant life” – be it noted that this is characteristically an American promise. It is a promise easily made, here and elsewhere, by demagogues and proponents of all manner of slick schemes and “planned economies.” What we must insist on is that the abundant life is predicated on Freedom – on the Freedom which has created its possibility – on a vision of Freedom under Law. Without Freedom, there will be no abundant life. With Freedom, there can be.
And finally there is the belief – shared let us remember by most men living – that the 20th Century must be to a significant degree an American Century. This knowledge calls us to action now.
America’s Vision of Our World
…How it shall be created
What can we say and foresee about an American Century? It is meaningless merely to say that we reject isolationism and accept the logic of internationalism. What internationalism? Rome had a great internationalism. So had the Vatican and Genghis Khan and the Ottoman Turks and the Chinese Emperors and 19th Century England. After the first World War, Lenin had one in mind. Today Hitler seems to have one in mind – one which appeals strongly to some American isolationists whose opinion of Europe is so low that they would gladly hand it over to anyone who would guarantee to destroy it forever. But what internationalism have we Americans to offer?
Ours cannot come out of the vision of any one man. It must be the product of the imaginations of many men. 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.
In general, the issues which the American people champion revolve around their determination to make the society of men safe for the freedom, growth and increasing satisfaction of all individual men. Beside that resolve, the sneers, groans, catcalls, teeth-grinding, hisses and roars of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry are of small moment.
Once we cease to distract ourselves with lifeless arguments about isolationism, we shall be amazed to discover that there is already an immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common. Blindly, unintentionally, accidentally and really in spite of ourselves, we are already a world power in all the trivial ways – in very human ways. But there is a great deal more than that. America is already the intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world. Americans –Midwestern Americans – are today the least provincial people in the world. They have traveled the most and they know more about the world than the people of any other country. America’s worldwide experience in commerce is also far greater than most of us realize.
Most important of all, we have 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 in the ultimate intelligence and ultimate strength of the whole American people. We have lost some of that prestige in the last few years. But most of it is still there.
No narrow definition can be given to the American internationalism of the 20th Century. It will take shape, as all civilizations take shape, by the living of it, by work and effort, by trial and error, by enterprise and adventure and experience.
And by imagination!
As America enters dynamically upon the world scene, we need most of all to seek and to bring forth a vision of America as a world power which is authentically American and which can inspire us to live and work and fight with vigor and enthusiasm. And as we come now to the great test, it may yet turn out that in all our trials and tribulations of spirit during the first part of this century we as a people have been painfully apprehending the meaning of our time and now in this moment of testing there may come clear at last the vision which will guide us to the authentic creation of the 20th Century – our Century.
Consider four areas of life and thought in which we may seek to realize such a vision:
First, the economic. It is for America and for America alone to determine whether a system of free economic enterprise – an economic order compatible with freedom and progress – shall or shall not prevail in this century. We know perfectly well that there is not the slightest chance of anything faintly resembling a free economic system prevailing in this country if it prevails nowhere else. What then does America have to decide? Some few decisions are quite simple. For example: we have to decide whether or not we shall have for ourselves and our friends freedom of the seas – the right to go with our ships and our ocean-going airplanes where we wish, when we wish and as we wish. The vision of America as the principal guarantor of the freedom of the seas, the vision of Americas [sic] as the dynamic leader of world trade, has within it the possibilities of such enormous human progress as to stagger the imagination. Let us not be staggered by it. Let us rise to its tremendous possibilities. Our thinking of world trade today is on ridiculously small terms. For example, we think of Asia as being worth only a few hundred millions a year to us. Actually, in the decades to come Asia will be worth to us exactly zero – or else it will be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year. And the latter are the terms we must think in, or else confess a pitiful impotence.
Closely akin to the purely economic area and yet quite different from it, there is the picture of an America which will send out through the world its technical and artistic skills. Engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators. Throughout the world, these skills, this training, this leadership is needed and will be eagerly welcomed, if only we have the imagination to see it and the sincerity and good will to create the world of the 20th Century.
But now there is a third thing which our vision must immediately be concerned with. We must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world. It is the manifest duty of this country to undertake to feed all the people of the world who as a result of this worldwide collapse of civilization are hungry and destitute – all of them, that is, whom we can from time to time reach consistently with a very tough attitude toward all hostile governments. For every dollar we spend on armaments, we should spend at least a dime in a gigantic effort to feed the world – and all the world should know that we have dedicated ourselves to this task. Every farmer in America should be encouraged to produce all the crops he can, and all that we cannot eat – and perhaps some of us could eat less – should forthwith be dispatched to the four quarters of the globe as a free gift, administered by a humanitarian army of Americans, to every man, woman and child on this earth who is really hungry.
But all this is not enough. All this will fail and none of it will happen unless our vision of America as a world power includes a passionate devotion to great American ideals. We have some things in this country which are infinitely precious and especially American – a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of co-operation. In addition to ideals and notions which are especially American, we are the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization – above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity. The other day Herbert Hoover said that America was fast becoming the sanctuary of the ideals of civilization. For the moment it may be enough to be the sanctuary of these ideals. But not for long. 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.
America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skillful servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice – out of these elements 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.
Other nations can survive simply because they have endured so long – sometimes with more and sometimes with less significance. But this nation, conceived in adventure and dedicated to the progress of man – this nation cannot truly endure unless there courses strongly through its veins from Maine to California the blood of purposes and enterprise and high resolve.
Throughout the 17th Century and the 18th Century and the 19th Century, this continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes. Above them all and weaving them all together into the most exciting flag of all the world and of all history was the triumphal purpose of freedom. 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.
I wonder if Luce would have preferred Wilkie's platform to Roosevelt's in the 1940 election. Much of Luce's beliefs in the power of American business seemed more allied to Wilkie than Roosevelt's more socialist action.
Luce mentions that teh war would make America more Socialist, the same argument made by Orwell in 1940s Britain as the Blitz was happening. Orwell welcomed it for a post-WWII system, while Luce clearly wants America to return to its pre-WWII system. (Perhaps he was still sulking over the TVA?)
Were Middle Americans more traveled than people in other countries, especially Britain? My sense is that today, Californians are less traveled than the average Brit, some having not even visited another state.
Luce makes much of "freedom" in teh USA, but clearly has a blinkered POV concerning Civil Rights. WWII Britain was apparently far less racist than the US army quartered there. While Americans were doing well, the indigenous population of N. America (not just in the USA) was very much isolated and deprived of its prior position. The USA squandered its Goodwill with the disastrous Vietnam War, and made a hash of its meddling in the Middle East, culminating in another disastrous and unnecessary war in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
While Luce seems to welcome American influence over the world, and OGH supports the US-inspired institutions and economic benefits that resulted, there was considerable grumbling over cultural imperialism and US corporate crushing of European businesses after the war. The "ugly American" was rather obvious by the 1970s and still seen in the 1980s. Even now, Americans fleeing to live in Britain are not exactly getting much love from the local populations.
Lastly, I wonder if Chinese intellectuals are making some sort of similar assessment of the world? China is now the largest global manufacturer. It has a larger population. While it has relatively little cultural influence, that could change or be felt in different cultural products. We don't know the outcome of this century, but America seems to have increased its self-destruction again, possibly irreversibly.
The current regime is both isolationist and bullying. If this is to be the "real America" of the coming decade[s], who is going to save us if we cannot save ourselves? What will it mean for the rest of the world, especially the democracies still centered in Europe?
I am impressed, and not favorably, by the seemingly consistent efforts here to debunk Luce, presumably for fear of endorsing America First bullshit. By contrast, it would be useful to read the essay for its possible merits.
For my part, I was immediately impressed that this thing was literate, in contrast to Luce's Time Magazine and to pretty much all public dialogue in this century. Who writes sentences like that outside of academic journals and the like? The message tends to be expressed in the jingoistic phrases that we all hate as a conditioned reflex. But what in its advocacy do we not like? International communication and trade? America as not the boss of the world but a central and essential part of the system? America as a leader in science and technology? A world in which everyone has enough to eat?
Who doesn't like these?? Oh, yes, I know who doesn't. Would that he had the literacy to read this, the brains for that, and an ability to overcome his malignant narcissism.