The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party. John Nichols
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this very day.
Luce and Wallace both rejected isolationism. The publisher’s oft-stated allegiance to “God, the Republican Party and free enterprise” was that of the multinational capitalist—not that of the right-wing zealots who were spinning conspiracy theories about FDR’s strategies for getting the U.S. into the war. The vice president, meanwhile, was a stalwart internationalist. Yet, these were very different men with very different values.
In the February 17, 1941, issue of his enormously popular Life magazine, Luce published his famous essay “The American Century.” He argued that the United States was already in the war informally, as part of a “collaboration” with Winston Churchill’s embattled Britain, and all but certain to be formally engaged before the fighting was done. “Almost every expert will agree that Britain cannot win complete victory—cannot even, in the common saying, ‘stop Hitler’—without American help,” Luce wrote. Now, he argued, “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.”
Luce proposed to rise to the occasion with a Pax Americana, a worldview that historian John Morton Blum would suggest “contemplated a political, economic and religious imperialism indistinguishable, except by nationality, from the doctrines of Kipling and Churchill.” In the field of national policy, Luce explained,
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.
Denouncing “this virus of isolationist sterility [that] has so deeply infected an influential section of the Republican Party,” Luce advocated interventionism with a purpose: to make himself and people like him richer. Dropped amid his rumination on the language to be employed in discussing the role of the United States—“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”—were pronouncements that left little doubt regarding his own aims and those of his class. The United States 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. … America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise … America as the principal guarantor of the freedom of the seas … America as the dynamic leader of world trade.” Reflecting on how, “throughout the 17th century and the 18th century and the 19th century, this continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes,” Luce now proposed Manifest Destiny for the world. He offered an expanded calculus in which other nations might be considered based on what they “will be worth to us.” He ended by declaring “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.”
Luce’s article would prove to be highly popular with and influential for the powers-that-be. But Sidney Hillman, president of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, saw it as little more than a proposal that “American big business exploit the rest of the world.”
The publisher devoted much of his article to attacking FDR and the New Deal, and haughtily dismissed the Roosevelt-Wallace landslide of just three months earlier by asserting that Roosevelt “owes his continuation in office today largely to the coming of the war.” Luce adopted the language of FDR’s right-wing critics, claiming that the administration had saddled the country 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.”
Nothing about Luce’s “American Century” sat well with Henry Wallace. As a counter, the vice president proposed “the Century of the Common Man.”
A Long-Drawn-Out People’s Revolution
Wallace traveled to New York on May 8, 1942, to address the Free World Association, having cleared the agenda-setting speech he was about to deliver with Roosevelt, who despised Luce. The Free World Association stood at the forefront of international “Stop Hitler Now” campaigning, promoting active resistance to Nazism, working with American Jewish groups to reveal the horrors of the Holocaust and arguing that the authoritarian threat must be answered first by winning the war and then by developing a global democratic federation.
Wallace titled his speech “The Price of Free World Victory,” and it was in it that he addressed the future circumstance of the common man.
“Some have spoken of the ‘American Century,’ ” he said, referring directly to Luce. “I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come into being after this war —can be and must be the century of the common man. … No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism.”
Wallace described World War II in Biblical terms that spoke directly to millions of Americans and people around the world listening in via radio. (He personally translated the speech into Spanish and repeated its essential themes in a separate broadcast to Latin America.)
Satan is now trying to lead the common man of the whole world back into slavery and darkness. For the stark truth is that the violence preached by the Nazis is the devil’s own religion of darkness. So also is the doctrine that one race or one class is by heredity superior and that all other races or classes are supposed to be slaves. The belief in one Satan-inspired Fuhrer, with his Quislings, his Lavals, his Mussolinis—his “gauleiters” in every nation in the world—is the last and ultimate darkness. Is there any hell hotter than that of being a Quisling, unless it is that of being a Laval or a Mussolini? In a twisted sense, there is something almost great in the figure of the Supreme Devil operating through a human form, in a Hitler who has the daring to spit straight into the eye of God and man. But the Nazi system has a heroic position for only one leader. By definition only one person is allowed to retain full sovereignty over his own soul. All the rest are stooges. They are stooges who have been mentally and politically degraded, and who feel that they can get square with the world only by mentally and politically degrading other people. These stooges are really psychopathic cases. Satan has turned loose upon us the insane.
Rallied against Satan and his stooges, suggested Wallace, were veterans of “a long-drawn-out people’s revolution.”
“In this Great Revolution of the people,” he explained, “there were the American Revolution of 1775, the French Revolution of 1792, the Latin American revolutions of the Bolivarian era, the German Revolution of 1848, and the Russian Revolution of [1917]. Each spoke for the common man in terms of blood on the battlefield. Some went to excess. But the significant thing is that the people groped their way to the light. More of them learned to think and work together.”
The applause from the crowd in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Commodore Hotel, which included refugees from Nazi-occupied lands and their liberal allies, built with each line.
Wallace continued: “No compromise with Satan is possible. We shall not rest until the victims under the Nazi and Japanese yoke are freed. We shall fight for a complete peace as well as a complete victory.” The vice president defined “complete peace” in starkly anti-imperialist terms. “Yes, and when the time of peace comes, the citizen will again have a duty; the consumer will have a duty—the