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magazine in February 1941 he was “dismayed” to find breezy photojournalism suddenly give way to five pages of solid text.1 He had perhaps just skimmed an article on a shoe fair in Chicago or glanced at an ad for Virginia, a “punch-packed love story of the new North and the modern South.”2 And now he was confronted by “The American Century,” an extended editorial by Life publisher Henry R. Luce. Luce’s closely-argued text repurposed well-worn tropes of American exceptionalism—including calls to “manifest” duty and an internationalism “of the people, by the people and for the people”—to urge the United States to plunge into the war then raging in Europe, to assert its rightful place as world leader, and to remake the world order in its own image.3 As Clarkson read on his initial dismay quickly turned to “delight,” and he was left wondering how many other “imaginations” had been similarly “inflamed” by Luce’s intoxicating vision.
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