The Publisher (52 page)

And yet, despite the lack of precision and despite the many misconceptions it helped to create, “The American Century” did have something significant to say about both the present and the future. For the world of 1941 the essay was a powerful work of propaganda, published first in the most popular magazine in America, and then republished and circulated widely throughout the United States, and the world, over the following months. It was designed to rouse Americans out of what Luce considered their slothful indifference and inspire them to undertake a great mission on behalf of what he considered the nation’s core values. Despite Luce’s demurral on the crucial question of military intervention in the war, the essay made a powerful case in accessible (and in some ways populist) language for the enormous stake the United States had in the outcome of the conflict. No one reading “the American Century” could miss Luce’s warning that a totalitarian world would doom the nation’s hopes for the future. And for those looking beyond the war, the essay was unequivocal in its belief in the extraordinary role the United States could and must play in the world, and the extraordinary power and virtue America would bring to its tasks, despite Luce’s strenuous insistence that “you can’t extract imperialism from the American Century.”
⁵⁴

A little more than a year after Luce’s essay appeared in
Life
, in the first months of America’s formal entry into the war, Vice President Henry A. Wallace wrote what was in some respects the most important response to “The American Century”—a speech delivered on May 8, 1942, widely known as “The Century of the Common Man” (although its actual title was “The Price of Free World Victory”). Wallace would later become a controversial, even reviled, figure for his leadership of dissenting leftists in the early years of the Cold War, his bitter criticisms of what he considered America’s excessive militarism and aggression,
and for his perhaps unwitting alliance with communists in his 1948 presidential campaign as the candidate of the short-lived Progressive Party. But he gave his 1942 speech at a high-water mark in his political career. A little over a year into his vice presidency, he had a reputation—soon to be shattered—as the second most important figure in government, as the “assistant president,” as Roosevelt’s likely heir. He spoke in 1942 as a prominent, mainstream Democrat—an important and influential figure in the Roosevelt administration—attempting to rouse the public to more fervent support of a war that the nation was not yet clearly winning.
⁵⁵

Wallace was implicitly critical of what he, like others, considered the imperialistic rhetoric of Luce’s 1941 essay, and he was careful to distance himself from any notion that the United States could, or should, unilaterally impose its values and institutions on the world. But he too presented a vision of the future that included a central role for the United States in both inspiring and shaping a new age of democracy. “This is a fight between a slave world and a free world,” he said. “Just as the United States in 1862 could not remain half slave and half free, so in 1942 the world must make its decision for a complete victory one way or the other.” Naturally Wallace expected all “freedom-loving people”—who were not Americans alone but among whom Americans stood preeminent—to answer that question and to shape the postwar world. Their answer, he said, was embodied in the Four Freedoms Franklin Roosevelt had proclaimed in January 1941, freedoms that “are at the very core of the revolution for which the United Nations have taken their stand.” And just as Luce’s vision of an American century included a vision of exporting Western industrial abundance to the world, so Wallace insisted that “the peace must mean a better standard of living for the common man, not merely in the United States and England, but also in India, Russia, China, and Latin America—not merely in the United Nations [as the Western Alliance then called itself], but also in Germany and Italy and Japan.”
⁵⁶

“Some have spoken of the ‘American Century,’” Wallace added, in an obvious effort to differentiate himself from Luce. “I say the century on which we are entering … can be and must be the century of the common man.” In the years to come, as Wallace’s own vision (and political fortunes) changed, he came increasingly to see his speech as a full-throated rejoinder to what he considered Luce’s more imperialist vision. At the time, however, both Wallace and Luce spoke warmly about each other’s remarks and seemed to agree that they were on the whole fighting
the same battle. (“I do not happen to remember anything that you have written descriptive of your concepts of ‘the American Century’ of which I disapprove,” Wallace wrote Luce shortly after he delivered his speech. Luce’s essay, he added, “is almost precisely parallel to what I was trying to say in my talk.” Luce in turn congratulated Wallace on the speech and even argued later that he was, if anything, overreaching. “Not every mission is appropriate to the political state,” he said pointedly in a 1943 speech. “To claim for it an unlimited mission to do good is to invite infinite confusion, ugly strife, and ultimately disaster.”)
⁵⁷

But whatever differences Wallace may have had with Luce, his vision of a world modeled on American notions of freedom, his commitment to spreading the fruits of economic growth to the world, his insistence that “older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization,” and perhaps most of all the extravagant rhetoric with which he presented these ideas—all made his speech less an alternative to Luce’s essay than a variation on it. “There are no half measures,” Wallace concluded (with language no less evangelical than the language Luce had used to end his own essay). “No compromise with Satan is possible…. We shall fight for a complete peace and a complete victory. The people’s revolution is on the march, and the devil and all his angels cannot prevail against it. They cannot prevail for on the side of the people is the Lord.”
⁵⁸

“The American Century” and “The Price of Free World Victory” were important documents of their time, but not because their influence on the contemporary public conversation was profound. They were significant primarily because they were highly visible symbols of a growing movement among American leaders, and eventually among many others, to redefine the nation’s relationship to the world and, in the process, to redefine America’s sense of itself. Luce and Wallace were unlikely, and perhaps to some degree unwitting, partners, but together they helped launch an idea that survived well beyond the dark days in which they wrote—an idea that could not accurately be described as imperialism but that did outline a mission for the United States in the world that would when implemented (as it largely was) profoundly change the shape of the nation and the globe.

Given the intensity of Luce’s engagement with the global crisis, it is surprising that until mid-1941 he had focused relatively little attention on China. He had visited Asia only once since his departure from his parents’ home in 1914; and even that 1932 visit only briefly renewed his
active interest in Asia. Nor had his magazines in the 1930s given more than ordinary coverage of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the expansion of the war into other regions of China. Through the first months of 1941, Luce was principally concerned with Europe, and with the survival of Britain in the face of the German threat. But in the spring of that year he accepted an invitation from the Chinese government to visit Chungking, an event that helped renew a passion for China that would continue for the rest of his life.

Luce’s wartime involvement with China began modestly in the late 1930s with a philanthropic project—an effort initiated by Ida Pruitt, a teacher at Peking University and the daughter of Chinese missionaries, and the writer Edgar Snow, who had already become famous for his reportage on the Chinese Communist Party and his celebrated book
Red Star Over China
. Together Pruitt and Snow began promoting an effort to produce industrial cooperatives to help poor Chinese villagers manufacture modest goods for sale. Luce was responsive to their appeal, and in 1939 he began mobilizing wealthy friends and acquaintances to help support it. But he soon turned to a larger effort. Early in 1941 a group of eminent public figures—among them John D. Rockefeller III, Paul Hoffman (the president of the Studebaker car company), Thomas W. Lamont of the Morgan bank, David Selznick, Wendell Willkie, and Luce himself—began to coalesce around a much more ambitious goal: the creation of a broad effort to raise private money “for the relief of the Chinese—both soldiers and civilians,” which became known as United China Relief (UCR). Luce had strongly encouraged the formation of the organization, but he declined invitations to chair it and for a time expressed considerable pessimism about its likely success. (In its first two months it raised only forty thousand dollars, not enough even to cover its expenses.) Nevertheless he allied himself with the effort and actively assisted it. “This is probably the most important letter I have ever tried to write,” he began a letter to wealthy friends requesting support. “We have now undertaken to raise $5,000,000…. If we are successful in this effort, it will help to confirm, perhaps for years to come, the wide-spread belief in China that America feels kindly toward China.” To help advance the project, he said, he would himself travel to China to provide “a first-hand report on the situation” and to try to enlist Mme. Chiang Kai-shek to support the initiative.
⁵⁹

Harry and Clare flew together on the still relatively new Pan Am Clipper service to Hong Kong and arrived at the end of April 1941 in a nation at war. By then China and Japan had been fighting for more than
a decade, beginning with the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931, and escalating sharply in 1937 when the Japanese army swept through eastern China. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s leader since 1928, moved with his army far inland to Chungking, where the government regrouped. The war with Japan was not the only conflict Chiang faced. Civil strife had plagued China since the early twentieth century—conflicts between warlords and the Kuomintang (the Nationalist revolutionary party Sun Yat-sen had created in 1912), and later a conflict within the Kuomintang itself, between Communists and Chiang’s Nationalists. In 1928 the Communists—under the leadership of Mao Zedong—left the Kuomintang and formed a government and an army of their own, which Chiang considered as dangerous an enemy as the Japanese invaders. Despite appeals from many sides that the factions unite to fight Japan together, Chiang was never able (and perhaps never willing) to cooperate with the Communists, a failure that would have momentous consequences throughout the war and beyond.

After arriving in Hong Kong, the Luces flew in the dead of night to Chungking on what Harry called “the most dangerous [airline] in the world”—a five-hour journey in a darkened plane, most of it over Japanese-occupied territory. They landed in a dry riverbed outside the city, and the passengers were carried up the steep bank in sedan chairs. That same day Luce watched a Japanese air raid from the terrace of the American Embassy and was struck less by the violence than by the efficiency with which the residents took cover. A similar optimism colored virtually everything he encountered during his weeks in China, finding silver linings in almost every cloud. The government’s desperate escape to Chungking, he wrote, “has now brought modern ideas and methods to the vast agricultural hinterland … and has also served to give all the Chinese people an idea of what their total nation is…. The Chinese are discovering, in these years of bitter suffering, their own potentialities.” Shortly after his arrival he observed that while “China is seething with political factions,” it was also “accomplishing miracles in their defense of the country.” The Nationalist army, he wrote, “is the best thing in China, morale is magnificent against appalling difficulties.”
⁶⁰

But nothing contributed more to his optimism than his first encounter with Chiang Kai-shek, whom he was already describing as “the greatest ruler Asia has seen since Emperor Kyan Hsi [Kangxi] 200 years ago.” He and Clare had received an invitation to visit Madame Chiang to discuss United China Relief. She was, Harry wrote, “an even more exciting personality than all the glamorous descriptions of her….
What instantly convinced me of her greatness was her delivery of the most direct and unrestrained compliment to my wife’s beauty I have ever heard.” Sometime during their conversation, Luce sensed a door opening, and moments later he saw “a slim wraith-like figure in khaki [moving] through the shadow”: the Generalissimo joining him for tea. Harry presented him with “a portfolio of photographs of himself and Madame,” and Chiang “grinned from ear to ear … as pleased as a boy.” They left after an hour of conversation “knowing that we had made the acquaintance of two people, a man and a woman, who, out of all the millions living, will be remembered for centuries and centuries.”
⁶¹

A few days later the Luces boarded a tiny Beechcraft and flew to the headquarters of a Chinese army division on the northern front, across the Yellow River from a Japanese encampment. It was a harrowing flight, traversing three steep mountain ranges while buffeted by high winds. There was no active combat under way during their brief visit, but they trekked through the encampments and entrenchments to the riverbank and looked across at the Japanese forces. Despite the terrible damage inflicted on the towns and villages near the front, Luce was again impressed by what he considered “as fine a morale, as strict discipline and as intent an expression as ever characterized any army in history.” Clare took pictures to illustrate a story on the war she would later publish in
Life
. Harry took notes to send back to his editors. And even in the midst of the disarray of an active front, Chinese officers managed to organize teas and dinners to cement their relationship with a man they knew only as a powerful American in a position to help their cause.
⁶²

Luce’s trip to China had a profound effect on his view of the war—and of the world. It renewed and intensified his love of the country and his faith in its ability to join the family of successful nations. Every place he went, no matter how damaged or desperate the surroundings, he took note of signs of progress: bankers demonstrating knowledge and sophistication in the management of the currency; soldiers in trenches working on primers as they tried to learn to read; officers helping them study “the doctrine of democracy with the teaching of Sun Yatsen and the American constitution as text books;” generals reading Clausewitz and other Western classics of military strategy; and many members of the Kuomintang elite—including Chiang Kai-shek and Mme. Chiang—converting to Christianity. “What strikes me about these far inland cities,” he wrote of a brief stop in Sian, a large provincial capital, “is how modernized they have become … I see America and the 20th century
stamped all over them.” On his return to New York he began working furiously to raise money for United China Relief, which very rapidly met and exceeded its initial goals. UCR raised over four million dollars in 1941, most of it in the last four months of the year, the beginning of an impressive multiyear total of nearly fifty million dollars. But his most important task, he now believed, was to heighten American consciousness about the crisis in China and make the war in the Pacific as important to Americans as the war in Europe. “As long as the Army of the Republic of China remains in being,” he said in one of a series of speeches he made shortly after his return to the United States, “Japan is doomed to defeat and disaster no matter what policy she tries.” It was “absolutely certain that without China we cannot achieve a victory.” In his discussions with his colleagues at Time Inc. he was even blunter: “I’m still convinced as I always have been that we must win the war in Asia first…. I wonder whether we have taken China seriously enough…. What about a full-out consideration of full-out aid to China? … When is the time to put Chiang Kai-shek on the cover again?”
⁶³