The prospect of an affluent future provided a point of unity between New Dealers and conservatives, business and labor. And the promise of prosperity to some extent united two of the most celebrated blueprints for the postwar world. One was The American Century, publisher Henry Luce’s 1941 effort to mobilize the American people both for the coming war and for an era of postwar world leadership. Americans, Luce’s book insisted, must embrace the role history had thrust upon them as the “dominant power in the world.” They must seize the opportunity to share with “all peoples” their “magnificent industrial products” and the “great American ideals,” foremost among which stood “love of freedom.” After the war, American power and American values would underpin a previously unimaginable prosperity—“the abundant life,” Luce called it—produced by “free economic enterprise.”
The idea of an American mission to spread democracy and freedom goes back to the Revolution. But traditionally, it had envisioned the country as an example, not an active agent imposing the American model throughout the globe. Luce’s essay anticipated important aspects of the postwar world. But its bombastic rhetoric and a title easily interpreted as a call for an American imperialism aroused immediate opposition among liberals and the left. Henry Wallace offered their response in “The Price of Free World Victory,” an address delivered in May 1942 to the Free World Association.
Wallace, secretary of agriculture during the 1930s and one of the more liberal New Dealers, had replaced Vice President John Nance Gamer as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1940. In contrast to Luce’s American Century, a world of business dominance no less than of American power, Wallace predicted that the war would usher in a “century of the common man.” The “march of freedom,” said Wallace, would continue in the postwar world. That world, however, would be marked by international cooperation, not any single power’s rule. Governments acting to “humanize” capitalism and redistribute economic resources would eliminate hunger, illiteracy, and poverty.
Unlike the lathe operator on the previous page, the woman operating industrial machinery on the cover of the September 1942 issue of McCall’s magazine remains glamorous, with makeup in place and hair unruffled.
Despite the new independence enjoyed by millions of women, propaganda posters during World War II emphasized the male-dominated family as an essential element of American freedom.
Luce and Wallace both spoke the language of freedom. Luce offered a confident vision of worldwide free enterprise, while Wallace anticipated a global New Deal. But they had one thing in common—a new conception of America’s role in the world, tied to continued international involvement, the promise of economic abundance, and the idea that the American experience should serve as a model for all other nations. Neither took into account the ideas that other countries might have developed as to how to proceed once the war had ended.