done this to our thinking. Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment. But it required a disastrous, internecine war to bring this question of human freedom to a crisis, and the process of striking the shackles from the slave was accomplished in a single hour. We are finding under the pressures of this present conflict that long-standing barriers and prejudices are breaking down. The defense of our democracy against the forces that threaten it from without has made some of its failures to function at home glaringly apparent.”
Willkie maintained that there could be no return to the “normalcy” of the prewar era. Normalcy, he argued, had not served America well, historically or in the current fight. “Our very proclamations of what we are fighting for have rendered our own inequities self-evident,” he said. “When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored. If we want to talk about freedom, we must mean freedom for others as well as ourselves, and we must mean freedom for everyone inside our frontiers as well as outside.”
This was the language of radical hope, of a belief that immense sacrifice could generate immense progress. Yet, despite his best efforts, Willkie had no real hope of advancing this agenda within a Republican Party that rejected his 1944 presidential candidacy unceremoniously and unequivocally. Rather, the last great hope that the postwar era might “begin the world over again” rested with another man: the vice president of the United States.
So it was that Henry Wallace opened the fight against American fascism.
“You Drew Blood from the Cave Dwellers”
Wrestling with Demagogueryand the Wealthy Men WhoFinance Authoritarianism
Those who write the peace must think of the whole world. There can be no privileged peoples. We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis. And we cannot perpetuate economic warfare without planting the seeds of military warfare. We must use our power at the peace table to build an economic peace that is charitable and enduring.
—Henry Wallace, “The Price of Free World Victory,” speech given in New York before the Free World Association, May 8, 1942
[Henry Wallace] is a human being who has become a statesman … driving into the minds of the American people certain truths made clear as no other statesman in this period has done.
—Eleanor Roosevelt, “Henry Wallace’s Democracy,” New Republic, August 7, 1944
What began as a battle between one Henry and another evolved into the most revealing American debate of the World War II era. One Henry, magazine publisher Henry Luce, was in the words of his able biographer Robert E. Herzstein, “the most influential private citizen in America of his day.” He used his bully pulpits, Time and Life magazines, to make himself, in the words of historian of journalism James Baughman, “America’s single most powerful and innovative mass communicator.” In this capacity, he advanced the agenda of empire-building capitalism favored by the class warriors of the Grand Old Party. The other Henry, Vice President Henry Wallace, was the second most influential public citizen of his day. Their clash began in early 1941, as the United States was being drawn into World War II. It would define the battle lines of American politics across the decades, to 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
