The Short American Century

Andrew J. Bacevich, Andrew J. Bacevich

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674068643
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Writing in Life magazine in February 1941, Henry Luce memorably announced the arrival of "The American Century." The phrase caught on, as did the belief that America's moment was at hand. Yet as Andrew J. Bacevich makes clear, that century has now ended, the victim of strategic miscalculation, military misadventures, and economic decline. To take stock of the short American Century and place it in historical perspective, Bacevich has assembled a richly provocative range of perspectives.What did this age of reputed American preeminence signify? What caused its premature demise? What legacy remains in its wake? Distinguished historians Jeffry Frieden, Akira Iriye, David Kennedy, Walter LaFeber, Jackson Lears, Eugene McCarraher, Emily Rosenberg, and Nikhil Pal Singh offer illuminating answers to these questions. Achievement and failure, wisdom and folly, calculation and confusion all make their appearance in essays that touch on topics as varied as internationalism and empire, race and religion, consumerism and globalization.As the United States grapples with protracted wars, daunting economic uncertainty, and pressing questions about exactly what role it should play in a rapidly changing world, understanding where the nation has been and how it got where it is today is critical. What did the forging of the American Century—with its considerable achievements but also its ample disappointments and missed opportunities—ultimately yield? That is the question this important volume answers.

CHAPTER 1

Life at the Dawn of the American Century

Andrew J. Bacevich

As contemplated by average Americans, sitting in their living rooms and leafing through their favorite magazine, the outside world in mid-February 1941 seemed nothing if not troubled. Occupying the center of attention was Great Britain, its people stoic in the face of a widely expected invasion. Although the intensity of German air raids had diminished in recent weeks (a pause that some called the “Lullablitz”), Londoners were still spending their nights in underground shelters. Fleet Street speculated endlessly about what the Nazis might be planning, British newspapers buzzing with stories “of gas clouds to be blown across the Channel, of paralyzing gas, of inaudible sound waves that make people sick, of 40,000 troop gliders, of air-troop landings in 500 places at once.” Although small numbers of demonstrators, “alleged to be Communists,” were complaining that food rationing arrangements favored the privileged and well-to-do, the British upper lip remained admirably stiff.

Emissaries from Washington bore witness to the travails of the British people and “absorbed every detail of Britain’s war effort.” One such visitor was Harry Hopkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “personal unofficial envoy,” who “stuck close to Winston Churchill” as he set about discerning “tactfully and discreetly, from every possible source, the nature of Britain’s post-war aims.” Making a far greater impression on the locals was the ebullient Wendell Willkie. Defeated by FDR for the presidency the previous November, Willkie had embarked for London on a fact-finding trip that became a “triumphant invasion of England” and “a personal triumph of fabulous proportions.” Offering words of “cheer and encouragement,” Willkie visited pubs, rode double-decker buses, surveyed the damage done by the Blitz, and joined George VI for tea. The American left “no doubt that he was 100% for Britain and the cause for which it fought.” As an immediate consequence, his standing “in the eyes of millions of friends of freedom on both shores of the sea” skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, in France, the Vichy government of Marshal Philippe Pétain was maneuvering vainly to preserve some shred of autonomy even as it collaborated with Adolf Hitler. Berlin was demanding that France hand over its fleet and a base at Bizerte, along the coast of Tunisia. The French navy rejected the former, the French army the latter, “but neither refusal had teeth in it.” The Nazis seemed likely to have their way. Evidence of just how supine the French had become came from the Near East. Touring the region as a “special observer” for President Roosevelt, Colonel William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan had finished consulting with officials in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Turkey and was headed next to French-controlled Syria. In Ankara, Donovan was about to board his Damascus-bound train “when a secretary of the French Embassy rushed up with a cable from Vichy cancelling his visa.”

Battlefield developments in North Africa offered a modest glimmer of hope. There, British and Australian troops under the command of General Archibald Wavell had captured Bardia in eastern Libya, and with it over forty thousand Italian prisoners. Immense stores of equipment fell into British hands. With Italian forces in headlong retreat, their commander, General Rodolfo Graziani, told local residents as he decamped, “You stay here. The British are coming but they are gentlemen. They will treat you kindly.”

For Finns, war had ended altogether. By valiantly defending itself against a 1939 Soviet invasion, Finland “had secured its position as America’s favorite nation on the continent of Europe.” Popular esteem did not translate into substantive assistance, however, as Washington refused a request for aid because “Finland is under suspicion of letting food trickle through to Germany.” Meanwhile, much closer to home, Cuban President Fulgencio Batista had unearthed and foiled another coup attempt. Suspending the constitution and banishing the principal coup plotters—the chiefs of Cuba’s army, navy, and national police—to Miami, Batista declared, “Democracy has been saved.”

All of these reports, gathered from “the newsfronts of the world,” appeared—along with much else—in the issue of Life magazine bearing the cover date February 17, 1941.1 The brainchild of Henry R. Luce, Life had first seen the light of day just slightly more than four years earlier. With sales and subscriptions far exceeding initial projections, it had already proven a smashing success. Arguably the most influential popular periodical in American history, Life owed its existence to Luce’s long-standing ambition to create a high-quality “picture magazine.” Yet the magazine’s prospectus, drafted well before the publication of volume I, number 1, suggests a grander purpose: “To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events,” employing photography not simply to record a moment but to explain, interpret, and influence.2

Life was the latest franchise in Time Inc., the journalistic juggernaut that had vaulted Luce while still a young man to a position of wealth and power. Yet for Luce, Time Inc.’s self-described editor in chief, power implied obligation. Raised in China as the son of missionaries, he retained throughout his life a missionary inclination, determined to have a hand in great deeds. This determination found expression in various enthusiasms, the promotion of Wendell Willkie’s political prospects prominent among them. Yet by 1941, one cause took precedence over all others: supporting Great Britain in its lonely struggle against Nazi Germany.

Like Willkie, Luce was 100 percent for Britain. At the time, many of his countrymen were not so sure. The course of events in Europe had divided U.S. public opinion—some Americans favored all-out assistance to Britain, while others were intent on keeping the United States out of war. In early 1941, with Roosevelt proceeding by half steps—offering the British help but stopping short of outright intervention—Luce sought to force the issue. He had grown impatient with Washington’s shilly-shallying. He wanted the United States all in.

The result, a lengthy editorial appearing in that same issue of Life, went far beyond simply advocating greater U.S. support for Great Britain, however. It called instead for the United States to assume unequivocally and permanently the mantle of global leadership. Easily the most famous essay ever to appear under Luce’s own byline, it carried the evocative title “The American Century.”

The Summons

Luce began his essay by putting his fellow citizens on the couch and assuming the role of national shrink. His diagnosis: a case of rampant malaise was afflicting the country. “We Americans are unhappy,” he wrote. “We are nervous—or gloomy—or apathetic.” When they looked to the future, the people of the United States were “filled with foreboding.”

For Luce, the contrast between Americans and Britons was striking. Fighting for their very existence, the people of Great Britain “are profoundly calm. There seems to be a complete absence of nervousness.” With the onset of war, “all the neuroses of modern life had vanished from England.”

Why were Americans feeling so out of sorts? The role that the United States had come to play in the ongoing European war—involved yet less than fully committed—offered a clue. The times called for action, yet Americans persisted in dithering. Everywhere, the good, the vulnerable, and the innocent looked expectantly to the United States for aid and assistance. Yet the inhabitants of “the most powerful and most vital nation in the world” remained on the sidelines or responded at most with half measures.

To Luce, the moment had arrived for the United States to answer history’s call. As he put it, “the complete opportunity of leadership is ours.” Americans simply needed to seize that opportunity, guiding others toward salvation. “What we want will be okay with them.” Yet Americans stubbornly and knowingly seemed intent on dodging their obligations. Here lay the taproot of the nation’s current maladies.

The “cure” was self-evident. Luce summoned his countrymen “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity … 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.” In an immediate sense, duty required the United States to ally itself with Great Britain as a full-fledged belligerent in the European war. Yet this amounted to hardly more than a necessary first step. Duty implied a mission of transforming the entire global order. In the course of performing that duty, Luce fully expected the United States to transform—and perfect—itself.

Implicit in Luce’s diagnosis was this premise: America itself could no longer provide the wherewithal enabling Americans to realize their aspirations. “Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny,” he observed in passing. When it came to cultivating freedom, a landscape extending from sea to shining sea no longer sufficed. A pioneering people needed new frontiers to conquer.

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Luce opined, had tried “to make American democracy work successfully on a narrow, materialistic and nationalistic basis” and had failed abysmally. Roosevelt had fallen short, as Luce saw it, because he had not aimed high enough. To define America’s purposes in national or material terms was to sell democracy short. “Our only chance now to make it work is in terms of a vital international economy and in terms of an international moral order.”

Fortunately, perhaps even providentially, the world itself was changing in ways that appeared to accommodate America’s requirement for a larger canvas upon which to work. Revolutionary changes were afoot and “for the first time in history” the prospect of “one world, fundamentally indivisible” was presenting itself. No nation was better positioned to determine the character of this new world than the United States. As “the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization—above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity”—Americans already embodied what an indivisible global society might eventually become.

“American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products”—according to Luce, “the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg recognizes in common”—already constituted the basis for “an immense American internationalism.” Yet this was only the beginning. Luce insisted that any American internationalism worthy of the name would necessarily incorporate the nation’s distinctive ideals as well. “It must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, [and] our Constitution.… It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people and for the people.”

By rising to this challenge, Luce hoped the United States might become “the Good Samaritan of the entire world.” As Good Samaritan, “really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive,” America would share with others its “technical and artistic skills” and accept its “manifest duty” to feed the hungry everywhere. Rather than merely serving as “the sanctuary of the ideals of civilization,” the United States would become “the powerhouse from which [those] ideals spread throughout the world,” thereby accomplishing “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.”

This described what Luce foresaw as the probable achievements of “the first great American Century,” a cause in which he urged Life’s readers to enlist with “joy and gladness and vigor and enthusiasm.”

Visions of Abundance

Apart from Luce’s attention-grabbing essay, the contents of his magazine that week offered little to support the editor in chief’s analysis or his prescription. To judge by Life’s own depiction of the country’s mood, apathy and unhappiness were notable by their absence. Instead, optimism prevailed. American life was pretty good and getting better all the time.

So the front cover—by no means atypical for Life—featured a winsome, bare-shouldered Hollywood starlet. On the back was a full-page ad for Coca-Cola, touting “the pause that refreshes.” The overall content of the pages in between was sunny and upbeat.

This predominantly cheery perspective was hardly surprising. After all, Life had captured the popular imagination not by trafficking in gloom and doom but by paying tribute to an idealized version of the American past, enthusing over the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs, keeping its readers abreast of fads, diversions, and cultural trends, and, above all, celebrating a middle-class, middlebrow formula for personal happiness.

Although Life editorials usually appeared near the front of the magazine, “The American Century” began on page 61, sandwiched between a feature on women’s fashion (“Shoe Fair Features Casual Styles Inspired by U.S. Navy and Cowboys”) and a profile of Betty Carstairs, oil heiress, adventuress, and speedboat racer. Known for “her mannish clothes and her tattooed arms,” Carstairs had acquired a nine-mile-long island near the Bahamas, which she ruled like a private fiefdom. Life devoted six pages of text and photos to explaining how Carstairs had become “a living legend as the misanthropic Queen of Whale Cay.”

Elsewhere the contents emphasized not distemper but a sense of things headed in the right direction. References to the economic crisis of the previous decade were nowhere to be found. The world beyond America’s borders might seem stormy, but at home an atmosphere of hopeful normalcy—and fun—prevailed.

On Broadway, a new season had begun and showed signs of real promise. Among the hit musicals that had already opened were Pal Joey, with “gay, sly ditties” by Richard Rodgers and Moss Hart; Panama Hattie, featuring “sex, sumptuous sets, [and] Cole Porter songs”; and Cabin in the Sky, with Ethel Waters heading “an all-Negro cast.” Leading the roster of notable comedies were My Sister Eileen and Arsenic and Old Lace. Other shows starred such favorites as Ethel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Gertrude Lawrence, Al Jolson, and Ed Wynn. Broadway offerings included only a single war-related play, Elmer Rice’s Flight to the West, which Life judged a disappointment, “despite some excellent anti-Nazi speeches.”

On the opposite coast, “a fancy shindig that offered everything the U.S. fan ever envisaged in the way of a Hollywood party” drew Life’s attention. “Guests came in opulent costumes,” while “champagne burbled in high tidal abundance.” Although the purpose of the gathering was unclear, “virtually everybody who was anybody was there,” Life’s photographer verifying the presence of Dorothy Lamour, Rosalind Russell, Randolph Scott, Rudy Vallee, and Walter Pidgeon, among other glamorous film figures.

There was more: an article on iceboating; an appreciation of Mahonri Young, acclaimed by Life as “the George Bellows of realistic American sculpture”; the unveiling of a massive relief map of the United States, sixty-three feet across and fifteen years in the making; plus a report on the latest findings on ant research, reveling in the ability of these tiny creatures to “solve complex problems.”

Meanwhile, coeds at the University of Maryland—“acutely conscious of the necessity of being popular”—helped Life demonstrate the latest dos and don’ts of “campus etiquet” [sic]. Tidbits of advi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• 1. Life at the Dawn of the American Century
• 2. The Origins and Uses of American Hyperpower
• 3. Consuming the American Century
• 4. The Problem of Color and Democracy
• 5. Pragmatic Realism versus the American Century
• 6. Toward Transnationalism
• 7. From the American Century to Globalization
• 8. Illusions of an American Century
• 9. The Heavenly City of Business
• 10. Not So Different After All
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index