Look around America. Begin with New York City. Observe the filth and decay, the turbulence and misery evoking a Third World capital, the homeless sleeping in the streets, the haze of drugs, the racial hate, the crime, the fear. Look at other large American cities, most of which have some of New York in them. And then recall the phrase the American Century.
Turn it over in your mind. Consider the sense of American wealth and power, almost of omnipotence, that it implied. The effect is ironic, even heartbreaking.
Is this still a country that can lead? A country that can give others its ideals of freedom and justice, its formula for creating wealth, its generosity? Was the American Century always an illusion? And, if it was real, is it over?
It is nearly 50 years since Henry Luce published his essay "The American Century" in LIFE. It was a passionate argument for intervention in World War II and a summons to global leadership, an appeal for America to do its duty toward itself and toward mankind. The 20th century, wrote Luce, must be, "to a significant degree, an American Century."
Since the publication of that essay -- or editorial or sermon -- the phrase has echoed down the decades. It was often questioned, ridiculed, attacked. When the Soviet Union emerged as a nuclear power, when communism spread across the map, when the U.S. was ignominiously defeated in Vietnam, many people decided that it could not really be the American Century, after all. But it was. The remaining decade is not likely to change that.
In technology, the U.S. led most major developments, from the jet plane to the computer. It pioneered the move from the industrial to the information society. It did a lion's share of theoretical work in the sciences. For better or worse, it built -- and used -- the atom bomb, forever changing the calculus of war and peace. It took man to the moon. It played the major role in proving capitalism, widely seen as doomed in the century's first half, to be a vital and successful system. Above all, it decisively helped defeat the two great totalitarian enemies of freedom -- Nazism and communism.
Communism might have collapsed of its own fatal flaws anyway. We will obviously never know for sure. But the process was vitally influenced by the U.S.-led revival of Europe and Japan after World War II, by U.S. containment efforts that made the cost of Soviet adventurism prohibitive, by the solidity of NATO, by the drive for human rights and by the example of U.S. -- and Western -- economic success. Even Soviet officials acknowledge the effect of American pressure, including the arms buildup.
So the question is not whether this was the American Century but: Will the next century again be American?
To many, the mere question seems fantastic. There are widespread announcements of the End of the American Century, the title of a thoughtful recent book. It is one of many. Declinism has become a growth industry, for familiar reasons: the relative erosion of American economic power, the rise of Japan and the European Community as serious trade rivals, the transformation of the U.S. into a debtor nation, the disastrous shortcomings of American education, the seeming sclerosis and corruption of the U.S. political system -- and on and on.