The American Century, by Henry R. Luce

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The American Century, by Henry R. Luce

Postby admin » Sat Oct 15, 2016 9:13 pm

The American Century
by Henry R. Luce
17 February 1941
Life Magazine

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"I'm well aware that we have to get our act together, and by getting our act together, we will be able to look at the next hundred years as an American century that will have benefits for all of us, and that's really my core conviction and what I will spend my time trying to contribute to for the years to come.” [Hillary Clinton remarks at Sanford Bernstein, 5/29/13]

-- HWA Speech Flags (HRC Paid Speeches), by Tony Carrk


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.

More tragic, and the cause of them all, was the plight of democracy among ourselves. Democracy had been a strenuous unity of thought and action, a rule for life and death. We were now making of it a "way of life," smooth to the heart's content. It had been a faith militant and triumphant. It was now disintegrating into a routine of "liberties and comforts." To the frustrated masses who felt the meaning draining out of life, the ruling classes promised a coming age of plenty, with rising standards of living. Poverty and insecurity remained, but our mechanical prowess, with its millions of gadgets, was the answer to the ancient needs of man.

An education adrift in a relativity that doubted all values, and a degraded science that shirked the spiritual issues and promised all material delights while withholding the fulfillment of the promise in the mirage of an ever-imminent future, did not lull the masses into tranquillity. They were goaded to despair.

The despair of the masses needs only ruthless leadership to become the revolt of the masses. The leadership was provided in the Old World. The emptiness of man's heart was filled with the pride of the conquering horde or with the slumber of the enslaved herd, and today mass-man, rootless man, has been summoned to the destruction of the civilization by which he had been betrayed. There are no rules in this battle, and there is no pity. A stricken world is seeking to obliterate itself.

-- The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, by Herbert Agar, Christian Gauss, Frank Aydelotte, Oscar Jaszi, G. A. Borgese, Alvin Johnson, Hermann Broch, Hans Kohn, Van Wyck Brooks, Thomas Mann, Ada L. Comstock, Lewis Mumford, William Yandell Elliott, William Allan Neilson, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Reinhold Niebuhr, Gaetano Salvemini


* * *

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.

There is no compromise or truce in the totalitarian mind, and as it takes two to be at war it takes two to be at peace. Whether and when we may be called to actual battle may still lie hidden in the alternatives of the impending future. But the major choice is no longer ours. War, declared or undeclared, actual or virtual, has chosen us.

-- The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, by Herbert Agar, Christian Gauss, Frank Aydelotte, Oscar Jaszi, G. A. Borgese, Alvin Johnson, Hermann Broch, Hans Kohn, Van Wyck Brooks, Thomas Mann, Ada L. Comstock, Lewis Mumford, William Yandell Elliott, William Allan Neilson, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Reinhold Niebuhr, Gaetano Salvemini


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?

The New World, if any, is the United States -- now faced with an isolation of which no isolationist ever dreamed. With its natural allies in the Old World stricken or dead, with scattered elements of the European empires gravitating around it for protection, and with the Latin-American republics more in need of succor than likely to provide any as long as progressive leadership among them is threatened by totalitarian conspiracy, it is this country virtually alone that carries man's burden -- the heir to all civilization if England falls, the leader and healer if England endures and bleeds.

An immediate war of "liberation and rescue" seems an absurd assignment. But more absurd is the design for America to crawl behind her ditches in a pretended self-sufficiency like Byzantium in the Dark Ages, in the delusion of a permanent separation, which would be slow death, or in the hope that the European victors might wait for "God's good time" to come, leaving to America the choice of the moment for her war of rescue.

-- The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, by Herbert Agar, Christian Gauss, Frank Aydelotte, Oscar Jaszi, G. A. Borgese, Alvin Johnson, Hermann Broch, Hans Kohn, Van Wyck Brooks, Thomas Mann, Ada L. Comstock, Lewis Mumford, William Yandell Elliott, William Allan Neilson, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Reinhold Niebuhr, Gaetano Salvemini


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.

But the perpetuity of change and struggle need not be identified with the alleged inevitability of slaughter and arson. War, as practiced by man in the short span of time which history records, is neither a biological fate nor a moral law. Far from being the most shining light of life as proclaimed by the totalitarian voices of destruction, war is chaos and horror. Slavery and human sacrifices also had their apologists and priests; they also were revered as immutable features in the society of man, and were abolished at last. Blood-feuds, ordeals, and duels were proscribed by collective law; while legalized warfare itself is returning on wings, before our eyes, from standards of epic piety and chivalric honor to the indiscriminate atrocity of primal murder. These very vicissitudes of rise and degradation show that nothing eternal and holy inheres in the institution of war. It will perish if man so wills. Whatever the misuse of a commanding ideal in the ideological verbiage of the gay 20's, the "outlawry of war" is and remains the next step in the progress of man. Peace, universal peace, is the sine qua non if man's advance is to be resumed beyond the present threat and ruin.

Peace, however, is not the parasitic pacifism which has eaten into our civilization and even now shelters Trojan horses and parachute columns behind the lines of our defenses. Peace at any price is peace at the price of submission. "If we mean by peace slavery," said Spinoza, “then nothing is more wretched. Peace is the harmony of strong souls, not the fightless impotence of slaves." As the price of liberty is eternal vigilante, so the price of peace is readiness to fight -- the readiness that is all.

-- The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, by Herbert Agar, Christian Gauss, Frank Aydelotte, Oscar Jaszi, G. A. Borgese, Alvin Johnson, Hermann Broch, Hans Kohn, Van Wyck Brooks, Thomas Mann, Ada L. Comstock, Lewis Mumford, William Yandell Elliott, William Allan Neilson, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Reinhold Niebuhr, Gaetano Salvemini


Friends and allies of America? Who are they, and for what? This is for us to tell them.

DONG 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 20th 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 environment 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.

The teachers of totalitarian philosophy have said that "everything must be within the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state." Democracy teaches that everything must be within humanity, nothing against humanity, nothing outside humanity. The dictatorship of humanity, on the basis of a law for the protection of human dignity, is the only rule from which we may hope for life for ourselves and resurrection for the nations that have fallen.

Definite legislation alone, however changeable in its details according to the needs of the times, and vitalized with the ever-flexible suggestions from the trial and error of the unwritten law, can describe the intricate relations of individual rights and social duties, of liberties and discipline. Nothing short of it can steer the Republic between the shoals of a self-destructive leniency and the suicidal contradiction of a fully "authoritarian democracy." But the fundamental principle is that the democratic concept of freedom can never include the freedom to destroy democracy and freedom. If no liberty is granted to the murderer and arsonist, no liberty can be granted to whosoever and whatsoever threaten the divine spirit in man and above man.

This is -- in an interpretation suited to the modern mind -- the spirit which Christ called the Holy Ghost. In its ultimate sacredness He set a limit to all tolerance and charity. "Wherefore I say unto you, all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men."

The President of the United States has said: "Most of us, regardless of what church we belong to, believe in the spirit of the New Testament." The statement is true even for great numbers of people who are not, or never were, under the direct influence of the Scriptures. It is true even for most of those who reject all kinds of transcendent belief and cling, or think they cling, to rational knowledge and scientific experiment alone.

The universality of the New Testament, the true cathollicity of its religious vision, was first announced by Christ Himself when He added: "And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man" -- against Christ Himself -- "it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him." The religion of the Holy Ghost, and nothing else, is the "spirit of the New Testament" of which the President of the United States spoke.

This universal religion, harbored in the minds of our age, this common prayer of democracy militant which must be the hymn of democracy triumphant, was anticipated by sages and saints of all ages. Its substance matured out of whatever rose highest in man's speculations and hopes.

-- The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, by Herbert Agar, Christian Gauss, Frank Aydelotte, Oscar Jaszi, G. A. Borgese, Alvin Johnson, Hermann Broch, Hans Kohn, Van Wyck Brooks, Thomas Mann, Ada L. Comstock, Lewis Mumford, William Yandell Elliott, William Allan Neilson, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Reinhold Niebuhr, Gaetano Salvemini


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 disappointment. 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.

Yet the universal religion of the Spirit acknowledges with reverence the incorruptible substance of truth which lies under the surfaces and the errors of the separate confessions risen from the common ground of ancient and medieval civilization.

In this acknowledgment is the foundation of religious freedom in democracy.

Democracy, in the catholicity of its language, interprets and justifies the separate creeds as its own vernaculars.

It follows, then, that none of these vernaculars, however venerable and lovable, and whatever their right to citizenship, can take the place of the universal language which expresses the common belief of man. The latter explains and annexes all dogmas as symbols; the churches, in the fetters of literalism, anathematize as heresy and error the symbolical meaning that is the dogma's inmost truth. No matter how dismayed we may be by the subjugation of Europe and Asia and the ruin of more than half the civilized world, we shall not imitate the backward course of Julian the Apostate during the break-up of ancient civilization, or of the Roman populace running for asylum and atonement to old gods after the capture of their city by the Goths. We shall not turn, under the counsel of despair, from a higher and vaster religion to lesser ones.

Old cults, developed and crystallized over the centuries, will have the honorable protection of democracy; but no Church, however powerful or far-spreading, can be offìcially acknowledged as a religion of the state, and no Church can be granted primacy or privileges above other churches. Indeed, the desire for such a place of privilege or pre-eminence on the part of any Church would be a measure of its inadequacy to the fundamental principle of democracy. The separation of state and Church, as first provided in the Constitution of the United States, is and remains the base from which arises the supremacy of world-humanism and world-democracy -- the catholicity of the common creed, which embraces and interprets every lesser faith.

This common creed already exists; toward its luminous center all higher minds already point, from whatever distant horizon they may set out. The yoke of this creed is as easy as it is inevitable; its doctrines are as plain as they are undebatable. It teaches that a divine intention governs the universe -- be it called God or Deity or the Holy Ghost or the Absolute or Logos or even Evolution. The direction of this intention is from matter to life and from life to spirit, from chaos to order, from blind strife and random impulse to conscience and moral law, from darkness to light.

It teaches that in the universe we know the human species is the spearhead of the divine intention, man the necessary ally of that "power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." It teaches that man's growth or progress or evolution is not backward toward the savagery of the superman or the gleam of the beast of prey, but forward toward the radiance of the angel. It teaches that if the divine intention is to be fulfilled, the pursuit of the good, under the inspiration of faith, hope, and charity, must imply resistance to evil, with battle when necessary. It teaches that life is service, and death a gate to life -- whatever the destiny of the individual person in the "undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns." For individual life is humble in the knowledge of its limits, under the all-human dogma of fallibility. It has meaning only by participation in the unlimited past, into the illimitable future; and no one man or race or generation can embody the heritage and the promise of Man.

The legacies of Greece and Palestine contribute almost equally to this creed. Passages of Plato foreshadow it. Tenets from the Lord's Prayer still sound and ever will sound adequate to it: "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

-- The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, by Herbert Agar, Christian Gauss, Frank Aydelotte, Oscar Jaszi, G. A. Borgese, Alvin Johnson, Hermann Broch, Hans Kohn, Van Wyck Brooks, Thomas Mann, Ada L. Comstock, Lewis Mumford, William Yandell Elliott, William Allan Neilson, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Reinhold Niebuhr, Gaetano Salvemini


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.

DIPLOMATIC HISTORY, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring 1999). © 1999 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.
CREDIT: HENRY LUCE, LIFE MAGAZINE.
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Re: The American Century, by Henry R. Luce

Postby admin » Sat Oct 15, 2016 10:37 pm

Henry Luce's Empire of Fascism
by Steven P. Meyer and Jeffrey Steinberg
June 25, 2004
Executive Intelligence Review.

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In the Feb. 7, 1941 issue of Life magazine, founder and publisher Henry Luce authored and signed an editorial, "The American Century," announcing that the American Synarchists intended to rule the world at the close of the war and impose their own jaded version of "American values" on the world, through "any means necessary." Luce's thesis was reproduced and mass-circulated throughout the United States.

The populations of the world, exhausted from the destruction of war and the bestiality of Hitler, Stalin, and Hiroshima, naturally hoped for something better. But the universal glimmer of optimism, of being able to rebuild, was further shattered when Allen Dulles, John J. McCloy, and their associates, including Luce, deployed to create the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CFF), whose explicit purpose was to launch a fascist assault on truth as science and on Classical culture.

Time magazine was created in 1923 as a mouthpiece for the American Synarchists, grouped around the banking interests of J.P. Morgan. It is hardly a coincidence that, simultaneous to the launching of Time, in Europe, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, another leading Synarchist, was launching his Pan-European Union, which would be a leading propaganda vehicle for the winning of support among Europe's financial oligarchy for the "Hitler-Mussolini" universal fascism project.

Henry Luce was just out of Yale University, where he was a member of the secret society Skull and Bones (class of 1920). Morgan funnelled Luce start-up cash, and Luce tapped numbers of his friends from his secret brotherhood to create and run what would become a propaganda empire. In 1930, for example, Luce chose Russell Davenport, an intimate Bonesman, to become Fortune magazine's first editor-in-chief.

Initial members of the board of directors of Time included Henry P. Davison, Jr., a fellow classmate and Bonesman, whose father was a senior partner at J.P. Morgan. Davison brought in Dwight Morrow, another Morgan partner, to finance the start-up. Morgan interests were further strengthened, when in 1927, John Wesley Hanes was placed on the board. Start-up funding also came from William Hale Harkness, a board member, who was related to Rockefeller partner Edward S. Harkness.

Luce's personal lawyer, who would come to represent his entire media empire, was his brother-in-law Tex Moore, of Cravath, deGersdorff, Swaine and Wood, the same firm which deployed both Allen and John Foster Dulles to facilitate bringing Hitler to power in the early 1930s.

Luce was an intimate of Britain's Lord Beaverbrook and the Prince of Wales, who were notoriously pro-Hitler and members of the Cliveden set. He also formed an extremely close relationship with Winston Churchill, himself a promoter of Hitler in the early 1930s.

Americans were introduced to Benito Mussolini and Fascism in one of Time's first issues when the Synarchists decided to celebrate Il Duce's 40th birthday, and have Americans join them, by placing his portrait on the cover of the Aug. 6, 1923 issue of Time. This would be the first of five cover appearances.

Luce was America's fascist "Elmer Gantry." He toured the country selling fascism to America's business elite and upper class on the one hand, and using his mass propaganda outlets to "sell it to the mickeys" on the other.


Luce unabashedly promoted Synarchy. Appearing before business groups, he promulgated the idea that America's corporate and banking elites were more powerful and important than the U.S. government, stating, "It is not a seat in Congress but on the directorate of the greatest corporations which our countrymen regard as the greater post of honor and responsibility." Likening America's financial tycoons to Europe's aristocracy, he featured both in the pages of Fortune magazine.

In an article in 1928, Luce declared the U.S. Constitution obsolete and called for "a new form of government." What was this new form of government? In March of the same year, in a speech to businessmen in Rochester, N.Y., he stated "America needs at this moment a moral leader, a national moral leader. The outstanding national moral leader of the world today is Mussolini." On Nov. 28, 1930, he stated to a Chicago audience that Mussolini's Italy was a success story: "A state reborn by virtue of Fascist symbols, Fascist rank and hence Fascist enterprise." Luce further declared, on April 19, 1934 in a speech to the Scranton, Pa. Chamber of Commerce, "The moral force of Fascism, appearing in totally different forms in different nations, may be the inspiration for the next general march of mankind."

While Luce organized the upper crust through Fortune, he fed the general population a carefully crafted diet of stories about Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco through the writings of his foreign news editor, Laird Goldsborough, a publicly avowed fascist, anti-Semite, and pro-Nazi who in 1933 interviewed both Hitler and Mussolini.

Luce had a visceral hatred of FDR and the New Deal. He attacked them both on his speaking tours and in print. Intimates reported that he became apoplectic with violent rage at the mere mention of FDR's name.

Luce's role in the Morgan-organized "Smedley Butler" coup plot against Roosevelt was significant. Luce prepared the entire July 1934 issue of Fortune as a detailed study of the political, cultural, and economic experiments of Italian fascism. This was unheard of. The issue was timed to appear as the coup went into its final month, and it was undoubtedly intended to rally upper-class support for the coup and the transition to an American form of fascism.

Although Luce later promoted the turn away from fascism, when it was necessary to defeat Hitler, he heralded the postwar policy of the Anglo-American Synarchists with his famous 1941 Life magazine editorial, "The American Century," which announced the Synarchist goal of Anglo-American world domination at the close of the war. Luce wrote: "We must accept whole-heartedly 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." The editorial was mass-produced and circulated widely; it appeared in full in the Washington Post and Reader's Digest. Although he did not include the point in this editorial, Luce would soon argue, also in the pages of Life, for preventive nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

The outlook of today's Beast-Men, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, is a continuation of the policies represented by Luce and the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s. Cheney's inner core of neocons are all signers of the founding principles of William Kristol's Project for a New American Century, explicitly modelled on Luce's theme. The Children of Satan, as Lyndon LaRouche has determined they rightly be called, had Henry Luce as one of their godfathers. Luce's brothers at Skull and Bones gave him the secret name of "Baal."

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was created to implement Luce's "American Century." Luce helped finance its operations, and his trusted vice president at Time-Life, C.D. Jackson, oversaw much of its policy as special advisor to the President for psychological warfare.
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