Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

“The American Century” is the title that the magazine publisher Henry R. Luce bestowed on the past century, even before it had run half its course. In an editorial appearing in the February 17, 1941 issue of Life , the weekly that Luce invented, he expressed a vision that – perhaps even more than the reverberant term he devised – merits consideration as a way of understanding what the United States has meant in the framework of world history. When his editorial appeared, Nazi Germany had already conquered much of Europe; and its oppressed peoples might well have wondered how and when an unprecedented tyranny might ever be defeated. Allied with the Third Reich was another totalitarian power, the Soviet Union, leaving only Great Britain to resist the Nazi juggernaut. In Asia the most populous nations on the planet were also beleaguered – whether in the convulsions of civil war (China) or under imperialist rule (India). At such a moment, the United States was not merely isolationist; it also looked isolated. Officially neutral, this republic of slightly under 134 million people was still recovering from the most severe crisis that its capitalist economy had ever suffered. What was about to happen in 1941 were turning points that neither Luce nor anyone else could have been expected to foresee: the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which would turn the largest nation on earth into ... log in or subscribe to read full text