Reading Henry Luce's famous editorial today should remind us that the American Century was not inevitable. Remaking the world in America's image, which is what Luce had in mind, required a political will that Americans had yet to muster. They had to overcome their isolationist past and the old values that had supported it, including a deep-seated fear of the state and the conviction that global engagement, particularly war, would create “some form of dictatorship.” They feared a garrison state, a “collectivism,” as Luce put it, that would build on the “vast bureaucracy” growing out of the New Deal, sabotage the Constitution, run up the national debt, bankrupt the treasury, and socialize the economy. For Luce, the isolationist “virus” was especially strong among Republican politicians, who had to reform their ways if the American people were going to “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world” and thus “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence.”

Luce's analysis of the struggle between isolationism and internationalism on the eve of Pearl Harbor, and of the ideological and partisan dimensions of that struggle, is right as far as it goes. But Luce was wrong to see the struggle as “peculiar” to that period, to argue, in effect, that Americans were only then coming to grips with the dangers that war and global engagement could pose to “constitutional democracy.”