Nervous America

Porto Ercole, Italy ? "We Americans are unhappy," I read here the other day. "We are not happy about America. We are not happy about ourselves in relation to America. We are nervous?or gloomy?or apathetic."

Henry Luce wrote that in an essay called "The American Century" in the Feb. 17, 1941, edition of Life, the magazine he founded and published. I came across it in the house I'm renting, high above this Italian sea resort, in one of two bound volumes of Life for 1941 and 1942. One of the pleasures of renting someone else's house is having a go at their library. Anyway, Luce was writing in 1941 to explain to Americans why they had to win the war, which they would enter the following December. More importantly, he believed, they had to win the peace. Once the public understood what Luce saw as the war's goals and the consequences of an American peace on Earth, they would be less unhappy, nervous, gloomy and apathetic.

The project was not merely to beat Germany, Italy and Japan, although victory was necessary to achieve Luce's larger objective for America. That is, running the world. Most of the world at the time was in the hands of the British and, to a lesser extent, the French and Dutch Empires. What was required to maintain the postwar order was partnership with the old empires, primarily the British. That would be, as Sir Godfrey Huggins was to call the arrangement between white settlers and black natives in the Central African Federation, a partnership of "the rider and the horse." It lives today in Tony Blair's absolute obedience to American whim. Luce saw it coming: "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."

When Luce wrote, the Council on Foreign Relations was preparing research papers on American needs, in terms of geographic dominance, to survive during the war and after. The Grand Area of American influence, the Council papers concluded, would have to include North and South America, the Caribbean, the British Empire, as well as large portions of the old empires of France, Holland and Belgium. (Shoup and Minter's book, Imperial Brain Trust, goes into the CFR papers in some detail.) Luce would have been of one mind with the authors: "Our only chance now to make it [democracy] work is in terms of a vital international economy and in terms of an international moral order."

Ten months later, after the day that lives in infamy for those who've heard of it, America was in the war to reclaim its empire in the Pacific and on behalf of the British in Europe. In Life on Feb. 16, 1942, Luce wrote another patriarchal essay to mold public opinion. He called it "America's War and America's Peace." He predicted that much of the British Empire would look to America for its defense. "If Singapore falls," he wrote, "and if Australia feels that the defense of the Empire was not nearly good enough, then an outline of another part of the peace is written. And this part says Australia cannot depend primarily on Great Britain for her safety: she must therefore depend primarily on America." (Who you gonna call? Ask the Saudis.)

Looking beyond the war, he saw a period of internationalism "inspired by American leadership." It was not the old imperial dream of annihilating and pacifying the lesser races. (The old empires never called it that, anymore than the ideologues of globalism would call their program one of raping the poor to enrich the rich. Bullshit is still bullshit.) America's postwar world order would be noble. Luce believed that one word expressed "the bright hope?and the agonized desire?of our time. That word is brotherhood?the brotherhood of man. Our task is to win the war and create a family of nations. That family will require an elder brother, strong, brave and, above all, generous. America must be the elder brother of the nations in the brotherhood of man."

So it has proved, all the more so in the new moral crusade that Life, if it existed, would endorse: American business' conquest of the globe. At first, elder brotherhood meant keeping the family in line. If Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Sukarno in Indonesia or Allende in Chile got stroppy, if Nasser in Egypt demanded that the Arabs determine their own future, if peasants in Nicaragua wanted rights, then too bad for them. The postwar moral order dealt with their kind, as it does now with those who dare to protect their economies, their resources, their environments or their labor forces from the noble forces of American global trade. Maybe that's why the Italian cops, usually a docile bunch, had to shoot an unarmed kid in Genoa last month. I should have lent the kids these back issues of Life.