It was the drag end of a dreary, routine day. In the House chamber, up rose Connecticut's freshman Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce to make her maiden speech. Ordinarily, in such circumstances, a new member would talk to empty seats; this time more than a third of the House remained to listen. Forty minutes later the speech was over; and an international rumpus was just beginning.
Democrats had expected a plea for aid to China; Republican Clare Luce picked a topic of perhaps greater importance: Who will rule the postwar airways? (TIME, Feb. 15). In this new sphere, air-minded Clare Luce sprung an old American phobia: that a shrewd and calculating John Bull is going to hornswoggle a naive and idealistic Uncle Sam unless somebody watches out.
Said she: "On the very day the shooting stops, the British naturally desire to be in a position to put muscles and. flesh on their international airways system. And perhaps even fat in some places—with Lend-Lease planes. . . . Our farsighted British cousins . . . have seen that the masters of the air will be the masters of the planet, for as aviation dominates all military effort today, so it will dominate and influence all peacetime effort tomorrow." (Into the Congressional Record she put long passages from House of Commons speeches demanding that British interests be guarded.)
House members pricked up their ears. But Playwright Luce was just warming up. She sailed into the as-yet-vague concept of "freedom of the air," and its chief proponent, Vice President Henry Wallace. Said she: "Mr. Wallace ... has a wholly disarming way of being intermittently inspiring and spasmodically sound. ... He does a great deal of global thinking. But much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still 'globaloney.' . . ." Republicans chuckled.
More soberly, Clare Luce added: "I do not mean by civil air supremacy that this country should monopolize the air traffic of the world. We are strong, and not only can we afford to be generous for the peace of the world, we must be. . .. To paraphrase the words of our gallant ally, Winston Churchill ... we were not elected by our constituents to preside over the liquidation of America's best interests, either at home or abroad. The sky's the limit of those interests. The time is now."
Next day, everybody was talking at once. Parts of the old Isolationist press were delighted. Said Eleanor ("Cissy") Patterson's Washington Times Herald, on page 1: "Clare Boothe Luce, long considered one of our most ardent internationalists, yesterday came home to roost." Delighted also was the stoutly international, Anglophile New York Herald Tribune, which saw in the speech no Isolationist overtones at all.