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Fear of a Nonwhite Planet: Clare Boothe Luce, Race, and American Foreign Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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Extract

Clare Boothe Luce was arguably one of the most well-known and controversial women in midcentury America. Journalist and playwright, Connecticut Republican congresswoman and New York socialite, she was also the first American woman to be assigned to a major diplomatic post, as she was the U.S. ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956.

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Research Article
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

Notes

I thank the Italian Fulbright Commission and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University for the fellowship support that enabled me to undertake the research for this essay. I am grateful to Greg Robinson for his invaluable suggestions and encouragement and to Tim Borstelmann, Mario Del Pero, and Blanche Wiesen Cook for their comments on earlier drafts. I also want to thank the staff of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division for their assistance.

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4. Ibid., 40–43.

5. For a convincing discussion of the potential and limits of the boom in whiteness studies, see Kolchin, Peter, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89 (06 2002): 154–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7. On the Century Club, see Chadwin, Mark L., The Hawks of World War II (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1968), 19, 6573Google Scholar. See also vanden Heuvel, William, “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: A Man of the Century,” an address to the monthly meeting of the Century Association,April 4, 2002,Google Scholar available at http://www.feri.org/news/news_detail.cfm?QID=954. The literature on the diplomatic, strategic, and ideological aspects of the Anglo-American “rapprochement” on the eve of World War II is too vast to be summarized here. An interesting and synthetic analysis is provided by Thorne, Christopher in “The Near and the Far: Aspects of Anglo-American Relations, 1919–1945,” in Border Crossings: Studies in International History (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar.

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9. Luce, Henry, “England Revisited,” in Papers, David Longwell, box 29, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia UniversityGoogle Scholar.

10. Shadegg, , Clare Boothe Luce, 82Google Scholar; and Swanberg, W. A., Luce and His Empire (New York: Scribner's, 1969), 182Google Scholar.

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14. Union Now speeches, September 11, 1940, and January 22, 1941, in Clare Booth Luce Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division (hereafter cited as CBLP), Speech File, box 668 f. 8 and 669 f. 2.

15. Jespersen, T. Christopher, American Images of China, 1931–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), xvxxGoogle Scholar.

16. Dower, , War Without Mercy, 94146Google Scholar. On the role of Japan as a racial and geopolitical threat to white supremacy in world affairs, see Home, Gerald, “Race from Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of ‘White Supremacy,’Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (1999): 437–61Google Scholar.

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18. Jespersen, , American Images, 5354Google Scholar; and Thorne, , Allies of a Kind, 563Google Scholar. Her activity was not limited to public speeches; in a letter to the New York Times columnist Anne O'Hare McCormick, she urged her to pay more attention to Asia as opposed to Europe (Clare Boothe Luce to Anne O'Hare McCormick, May 15, 1946, in Anne O'Hare McCormick Papers, correspondence, box 4, New York Public Library, New York City). The China lobby included, among others, William Bullitt and Representative Walter Judd.

19. Morris, Jukes, Rage for Fame, 430–31Google Scholar. On Homer Lea as a geopolitical thinker, see, among others, Sloan, G. R., Geopolitics in U.S. Strategic Policy, 1890–1987 (Brighton, U.K.: Wheatsheaf, 1988), 9395Google Scholar.

20. Sloan, , Geopolitics in U.S. Strategic Policy, 94Google Scholar

21. Lea, Homer, The Valor of Ignorance (New York: Harper, 1909), 45, 58Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., 128, 129, 132. For a broader discussion of American visions of other peoples and anti-immigrant sentiments, see, among others, Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), chs. 4, 5, and 6Google Scholar.

23. On the widespread interest in and popularization of geopolitics during World War II, see Sharp, Joanne, Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), chs. 2 and 3Google Scholar; and Schulten, Susan, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), ch. 9Google Scholar.

24. Dower, , War Without Mercy, 157–58, 336, 344Google Scholar; Morris, Jukes, Rage for Fame, 440–41Google Scholar; and Luce, Clare Boothe, “Ever Hear of Homer Lea?” Saturday Evening Post, 03 7 and 14, 1942Google Scholar.

25. Luce, Clare Boothe, “A Luce Forecast for a Luce Century,” CBLP, Family and Personal Papers-Luce Family, b. 20, f. 4, 8Google Scholar

26. Borstelmann, , Cold War, 30Google Scholar. A useful “state of the art” essay on the often vague idea of “the establishment” is that by Roberts, Priscilla, “‘All the Right People’: The Historiography of the American Foreign Policy Establishment,” Journal of American Studies 26, no. 3 (1992): 409–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. Luce, , “Luce Forecast,” 3Google Scholar. On Anglo-Saxonism in the U.S. Foreign Service, see Schulzinger, Robert, The Making of the Diplomatic Mind: The Training, Outlook, and Style of United States Foreign Service officers, 1908–1931 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), chs. 1 and 6Google Scholar; and Weil, Martin, A Pretty Good Club: The Founding Fathers of U.S. Foreign Service (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978)Google Scholar.

28. Luce, , “Luce Forecast,” 910, 11Google Scholar.

29. See Hunt, (Ideology, 152)Google Scholar on geopolitics as a “new formulation undergirding the old ideology [of U.S. foreign policy] during and after World War II.”

30. Luce, , “Luce Forecast,” 19, 23, 2425Google Scholar.

31. Ibid., 24, 26.

32. Ibid., 9, 22–23, 31.

33. A Plea for Racial Unity,” Opportunity 20, 12 12, 1942, 355Google Scholar.

34. Quoted in Borstelmann, , Cold War, 60Google Scholar.

35. Speech at the Institute of Art and Sciences, Columbia University, July 6, 1943, quoted in Shadegg, , Clare Boothe Luce, 178Google Scholar.

36. Speech at the House of Representatives, October 8, 1945, CBLP, Speech File, box 678, p. 5.

37. Ibid., 13.

38. “The Negro True Friend: The Republican Party,” 1942, and “The New Deal Skin Game,” 1944, CBLP, Speech File, box 677.

39. “Plea for Racial Unity,” 355–56.

40. For a useful overview, see Ribuffo, Leo, “Religion and American Policy: The Story of a Complex Relationship,” National Interest 52 (Summer 1998): 3651Google Scholar.

41. See her account of her conversion to Catholicism in “The ‘Real Reason’,” McCall's, 02, 03, 04 1947Google Scholar. On the conversion to Catholicism in 20thcentury United States and Britain, see Allitt, Patrick, Catholic Coverts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

42. “The Catholic Woman in the Modern World,” CBLP, Speech Files, box 682, folder 15, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

43. “Saving the White Man's Soul,” CBLP, Speech File, box 683, p. 33.

44. Ibid., 21.

45. Ibid., 36.

46. Ibid., 42.

47. Reid, Maree-Anne, “‘Kiss the Boys Goodbye’: Clare Boothe's Luce Appointment as United States Ambassador to Italy,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 16, no. 2 (1997): 4567Google Scholar.

48. The best account of Clare Luce's activity as ambassador to Italy is that by Del Pero, Mario, L'Alleato scomodo: Gli USA e la DC negli anni del centrismo (1948–1955) [The Inconvenient Ally: The United States and the Christian Democrats in the Years of Centrism (1948–1955)] (Rome: Carocci, 2001)Google Scholar. See also Del Pero, , “American Pressures and Their Containment in Italy During the Ambassadorship of Clare Boothe Luce, 1953–1956,” Diplomatic History 28 (06 2004): 407–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. Del Pero, , “Anticomunismo d'assalto: Lettere di Indro Montanelli all'ambasciatrice in Italia Clare Boothe Luce” [Storming Anti-Communism: Letters of Indro Montanelli to American Ambassador in Italy Clare Boothe Luce], Italia Contemporanea 212 (09 1998): 633–46Google Scholar. Several letters from Clare Luce to Indro Montanelli confirm that the ambassador counted on Montanelli as one of her confidential sources about Italian politics, especially during her first year in Rome (see Indro Montanelli Papers, Maria Corti Manuscript library, University of Pavia).

50. Quoted in Schmitz, David, Thank God They're on Our Side: The United States and Right-wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 41Google Scholar.

51. Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5662Google Scholar.

52. Del Pero, “Anticomunismo d'assalto.”

53. Gilderhus, Mark T., “An Emerging Synthesis? U.S.-Latin American Relations Since the Second World War,” in America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941, ed. Hogan, Michael J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 438–39Google Scholar.

54. Quoted in Schmitz, , Thank God, 30Google Scholar.

55. Mariano, Marco, “Gender and International History: Public and Private in Anne O'Hare McCormick's Journalism (1921–1954),” in Public and Private in American History: State, Family, Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Baritono, Raffaella, Frezza, Daria, Lorini, Alessandra, Vaudagna, Maurizio, and Vezzosi, Elisabetta (Turin: Otto, 2003)Google Scholar.

56. Interview with Clare Boothe Luce by John Luter, January 11, 1968, transcript, 46–50, Columbia Oral History Project, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City. In fact, the impact of U.S.-sponsored anticommunist measures in Italy was quite limited.

57. Diggins, John P., Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), ch. 1Google Scholar; and Schmitz, , Thank God, chs. 1 and 3Google Scholar.

58. Hunt, Ideology; Home, “Race from Power”; and Stephanson, Anders, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. 157–75Google Scholar.