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In 1941 Henry Luce wrote an article for LIFE called "The American Century," which was partly meant to urge Americans into the war and partly to put forth the apparently Hegelian proposition that the Idea had at last touched these shores. Luce's article, a grand-gesture declaration of American pre-eminence in the world, was as dangerous as it was magnanimous, since it could easily be read (and was) as the rationale for the ensuing blunders of more recent American foreign policy. But the basis of the piece bespoke what most Americans and many others in the world acknowledged, whether or not they liked Luce's formulation. "We have some things in this country which are infinitely precious and especially American," wrote Luce, "a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence."
It is a cultural truism that by the time a major idea is expressed, it has long been thought but unexpressed. Many years before 1941 the 20th century could have been aptly labeled American. This would not necessarily have had to do with American predominance or even with American significance, since before its entry into the first World War, the nation had been largely preoccupied with its own development. Still, the fundamental idea that America represented corresponded to the values of the times. America was not merely free; it was freed, unshackled. The image was that of something previously held in check, an explosive force of a country that moved about in random particles of energy yet at the same time gained power and prospered. To be free was to be modern; to be modern was to take chances. The American century was to be the century of unleashing, of breaking away, at first from the 19th century (as Freud, Proust, Einstein and others had done), and eventually from any constraints at all.
Fearing such an impulse as "mere anarchy," W.B. Yeats foresaw a Second Coming not long before 1923, in which the world would be devoured by a "rough beast." Yet the impulse was not necessarily anarchic, although things could turn out that way. It was the dream of self-fulfillment. As a goal, self-fulfillment was hardly the 20th century's invention. The European Romantics of the early 1800s had loudly proclaimed the primacy of the individual, the glories of revolution and similar disruptive ideas that have carried forward, with a few halts and alterations, from their time to ours. But in the 19th century there were still too many tugs in antimodern directions, too many elements of life either stifling or civilizing, depending on one's viewpoint, to allow mere anarchy. Form and ceremony were not yet dead. War itself seemed to serve as a civilizing institution, the illusion still holding that war was an ennobling experience, that destruction was good for the soul.
The first World War put away such claims, but hardly put away war itself. One of the deep oddities of the period after World War I, in fact, is that while everyone had come to know and state openly that the delights of war were, as Wilfred