From John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and The American Proposition by David Wemhoff
Luce Delivers the American Proposition
Henry Luce, the son of a Presbyterian missionary, put his publishing might at the service of the American empire by touting the idea of America’s “adherence to the moral law” and the “American Holy Alliance with God” in a 500-word document that became known as the “Ridgefield Memorandum,” which committed Time, Inc. to teaching the world about the special relationship between God and America contained in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.[i]
The Presbyterians had a long history of subjugating Catholics. Under King George II, the Presbyterians collaborated with the English in eradicating the Catholic presence from Scotland, particularly the Highlands, and establishing in its place loyalty to Protestantism, English commercial and industrial practices and theory, and the English language. After this early form of social engineering proved successful in the Highlands, it was introduced to the Mediterranean and North America.[ii]
James Madison, author of the US Constitution and in particular the Bill of Rights, which includes the famous First Amendment, was himself a product of Presbyterian schooling. One of his most important tutors was the “Scottish Presbyterian minister Donald Robertson,” of whom Madison later said that “all that I have been in life I owe largely to that man.” Madison also was tutored by Thomas Martin, an Anglican rector and graduate of the Presbyterian College of New Jersey, and John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister who came to be President of the College of New Jersey. Harvard historian Sydney Ahlstrom claimed that “the religious heritage of three-fourths of the American people in 1776” was the Reformed tradition, in other words Calvinism or Presbyterianism, which viewed Catholicism or “popery” as whereby the power of Satan established tyranny, persecution, and “arbitrary government” on earth. [iii]
The Presbyterian animus against the Catholic Church continued unabated into the 20th century, but now it was “American style institutions,” not Calvinism, which they attempted to impose on peoples they encountered, with the Catholics being one of the most important targets. The new campaign of Presbyterian proselytism met enormous success because of the covert nature of how it was imposed. That is, by stealth the American media, which promoted crypto-Presbyterian American values to Catholics who thought of themselves as Americans, worked in tandem with the US Government, which by Summer, 1953 was deeply involved in promoting its Doctrinal Warfare Program. PSB D-33, the top secret government document authorizing Doctrinal Warfare gave the CIA a number of tasks as we have seen, not the least of which included inserting its agents into “foreign associations and organizations with doctrinal potential (newspapers, universities, etc.) to influence their actions and output.” The CIA’s agents were then to “create, when advisable, deviationist movements designed to split organizations promulgating hostile ideologies so long as they would not develop into a threat to U. S. security.” The CIA was also supposed to “Exploit local divergencies, heresies or policy disagreements within opposition systems.”[iv]
Luce’s American Proposition was an integral part of the Doctrinal Warfare that was then being waged against the Catholic Church. Written largely by Murray, the American Proposition promoted ideas compatible with Protestantism, Calvinism, and Presbyterianism in particular, reminiscent of Thomas Paine’s ideology, and perfectly consistent with John Locke’s political philosophy.[v] Flush with America’s victory over fascism and engaged in an equally dire struggle with the Soviet Union, Luce proposed the American Proposition as America’s magic formula which could bring about a prosperous and good society in every country in the world where it was implemented. In proposing the American Proposition, Luce established a moral standard by which every society in the world was to be evaluated. It is no coincidence that Luce delivered his American Proposition speech in Rome because Luce, with Murray’s help, wanted to use the Catholic Church to disseminate his message to “free” societies so that these societies refashion themselves in America’s image, turning the Church thereby into a missionary for America and not for Christ.
The American Proposition
Luce gave his address on November 29, 1953 at the opening of the academic year at Dominican Felix Morlion’s Pro Deo University. John Courtney Murray wrote the speech. In an October 28 letter to Life editor Jack Jessup, Luce wrote “I send you herewith an essay by Rev. John Courtney Murray, SJ. I think you will agree it is superb. John, very kindly and very rashly, offered to write a `rough draft of my Roman speech on the basis of a few notes which I had discussed with him. This is the result. You will note that I have borrowed from him wholesale.”[vi]
Luce was so happy with Murray’s essay he wanted to share it with the world and, most especially, with the American people. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that something important ought to be done about Murray’s essay. Perhaps it ought to be run in FORTUNE as a two-part piece…. It is important to tell foreigners about the American Proposition but obviously we believe it is first of all important that Americans should constantly review their Proposition….” Luce thought it could even be expanded by Murray and published in a special edition of “FORTUNE or even in LIFE for perhaps the July 4, 1954 issue, though there would have to be “a number of changes of emphasis and allusions…for an American audience”[vii] because “this particular essay is directed in some details to a European Catholic audience. I don’t know enough to agree with Murray on the high estate of political philosophy in the high Middle Ages – in other words, I don’t agree. I do however agree with the operative effect of the natural law doctrine.”[viii]
Luce told Jessup he was sending a “first draft of my attempt to present the philosophical basis of the American Proposition to the Papal School of Political and Social Studies….My `lead,’ the Gettysburg Speech, and the pap about the Founding Fathers is prompted by my hunch that most of my audience, however distinguished, is not well-acquainted with the `facts’ of American history. If they have perhaps heard of the Gettysburg Speech, they have never heard it.” Luce continued “Over here one feels that the integrity of the American Proposition better make itself felt soon.”[ix]
After Willi Schlamm, a Time Inc. contributor and advisor, sent comments on the speech, Luce responded in a November 1, 1953 letter, which explained that “the main thing I felt about that, was that `they’ probably were not well-acquainted with `what every American school boy knows.’ That’s why, as you’ll see, I open with the Gettysburg speech and talk about the Supreme Court and the Founding Fathers and give them the national hymn.” However, Luce knew he had to do more, and that is where Murray came in. “I wanted to balance this with reasonably `professional philosophic talk – especially, e.g., about `natural law’ – so as to show a certain philosophic identity between the American Proposition and traditional Western political philosophy. At this point Father Murray’s paper arrived, and I lifted heavily from it.”[x]
“You may have seen the Monstrous Document I put together for Harry,” Murray wrote to Clare on the same day. “He sent me a most complementary cable, which I greatly appreciated. I only hope that the thing was of some use to him. As with most things I do, it got sort of out of hand and went on and on.” Murray then revealed his involvement in the push for academic freedom in universities and ended the letter with “much love…many blessings…yours always” and a word on how he spent two nights and a day at “dear old 450” (the Luce’s New York apartment) where he was “Pretty lonesome, I must say. Missed you terribly. The bottle of Scotch I found in your bar was a very poor substitute!”[xi]
Billings read the talk and commented on it in his diary of November 16:
A mild summer day [Monday]….Office. Haircut at my desk. Luce is making a speech at the Vatican on `The American Proposition’. His draft checked by Wardell, passed over my desk and I took 30 minutes off to read it. All of Luce’s old familiar themes about God and the Constitution and natural law etc – but very well done – simple and eloquent. I passed it along to him in Rome, with a note praising his speech. (Still he does not write me – and I doubt if flattery will work, either).[xii]
Billings sent Luce his comments on the same day he made is diary entry, wondering whether citing the “Unitarian John Adams properly representing the serious `Christian’ as contrasted with Jefferson’s Deism.” As to the speech itself, Billings wrote, “it was just about the finest thing you have done. It is simple, logical and eloquent. From past experience, I knew all the themes you had used to weave it together, but in the end the result was a new and brilliant tapestry of thought.” As to the Catholics, Billings thought it “eminently fair – almost too fair, Wardell seems to think.” All in all, the talk would “do much to help that vague something called `understanding of America.’”[xiii] “Wardell” referred to Elsa Wardell who provided Luce with additional information in the form of additional classical philosophers the American Founders read. She sent him the names of Younger Pliny, Plutarch, Livy, Tacitus, Demosthenes and Seneca for use in his talk.[xiv]
On November 29, 1953 in Rome, at the Pro Deo University, an institution started by Dominican Felix Morlion who received backing and support from American elites and the CIA, Henry Luce injected The American Proposition, a doctrinal weapon that he developed along with John Courtney Murray, SJ, into the veins of the Catholic Church. Before a crowd of thousands of expectant dignitaries, clerics, academics, and students, Luce delivered his address entitled “The American Proposition” on the opening of the academic year. Morlion described the scene:
It was at the inauguration ceremony of the Academic year 1953…of our university. As usual there was an international panel: His Excellency De Gasperi treating an European proposition and Ambassador Montalvo treating a Latin-American proposition. The great surprise was: The American proposition expected to be very pragmatical [sic], was sown by Mr. Henry Luce to be the most universal. The four thousand persons present discovered that American Democracy has a solid, perennial philosophy, profoundly united with the principles of living faith in God common to all authentic religious denominations. This time nobody said “Americans are different.”[xv]
Luce began by admitting he was not Catholic and that America was a religion: “In the form of worship in which I was brought up, it is customary for the minister to read a passage from the Holy Scriptures and to select from it a `text.’ I should like to read to you today an item of our National Scriptures which nearly every American boy and girl has learned by heart.”[xvi] Luce then proceeded to read from Lincoln’s November, 1863 Gettysburg address, in which Lincoln stated the famous lines “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Luce emphasized that “The United States is a nation which depends for its existence on a proposition and that this is the unique and distinguishing fact about the United States.”[xvii] America and its political entity, the United States, were founded on an ideology.
Union in America was achieved through the Constitution of the United States, which is preserved by “Supreme Court of the United States,” a body which Luce described as “almost sacred” because it is the “Keeper of the Ark of the Covenant.” The “American Proposition is the Constitution interpreted in the light of certain first principles.” While the Constitution dealt with the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government it provided “valuable notions of government written into this text and some profounder concepts written between the lines and beneath them.” These are a “government of limited powers,” the separation of powers, and the idea of a federation.[xviii]
The “first principles” that “inform the Constitution” are contained in the Declaration of Independence. The first is the idea that “We hold these truths to be self-evident”, though, of course, Luce “put aside the question whether the enumerated truths are really self-evident or not.” The identification of certain truths was also something open for discussion, but the key point according to Luce was “there are truths” and “we hold them.”[xix]
The next principle was “the sovereignty of God over nations as well as over individual man.” Closely allied to this is the idea that “there is one only source of Authority and that is God, Who is both ultimate and immanent.” God is “fundamental to the American Proposition both in the sense of historical interpretation and in the sense of intellectual coherence and in the sense of dynamic present reality.”[xx] Luce mentioned “George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison. Forty or fifty men in all… [who]were the most remarkable group of men who ever came together anywhere to make or re-make a government or a nation.” According to Luce, “their specialty was political philosophy,” in the cause of which they “literally ransacked the pages of antiquity” studying Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Gaius. The Founders were also “serious Christians…. They subscribed, most of them, to the Apostles Creed.” Others were deists. John Adams represented the “serious Christian” while Thomas Jefferson was a Deist, but they could agree that “God reigned and, directly or indirectly, ruled.”[xxi]
The Founders were therefore “conscious heirs of a political tradition….the tradition of natural law.” America kept alive the natural law tradition because in “reaction to the rise of absolutism, Protestant Christianity tended to substitute for natural law the revealed law of God as found in the Scriptures.” Fifty years after the creation of the American Constitution, Professor Gabriel taught that the “basic postulate of the American democratic faith affirmed that God, the Creator of Man, has also created a moral law for his government and has endowed him with a conscience with which to apprehend it.” Luce quoted the Third Council of Catholic Bishops that met in Baltimore in 1887 as Catholic approval of the American socio-political system: “`We consider the establishment of or country’s independence, the shaping of its liberties and laws, as a work of special Providence, its framers building better than they knew, the Almighty’s hand guiding them’.”[xxii]
Then Luce shifted gears and started talking about freedom. After mentioning a group of Blacks who came to sing the National Anthem at the American Embassy in Rome, he said “Freedom is holy, sacred.” At the same time, and in consonance with the idea alluded to earlier in the talk that the “self-evident truths” are not so self-evident, Luce said. “There is a multitude of corollaries! In fact we may say that the whole of American life consists in a more or less conscious – and argumentative –working out of the corollaries of the American Proposition.”[xxiii]
According to Luce, “in the American Proposition there is no vacuum. For Law pervades all.” Law is not only a prohibition but a command to act in America. This was consistent with the idea of political freedom which required “virtuous citizens” and a “dynamic sense of responsibility for achieving the good, not only in personal life but… as good citizen.” Religion, irrespective of the kind, provided an “indispensable support” for the “body politic.” Further, “Freedom of religion in the American constitutional sense, is not the freedom to exclude religion from public life.… It means the freedom to make society religious.” Government works with the people by way of “formal or legal alliance” through “governmental policy.”[xxiv]
Luce proceeded to speak in “concrete detail of many, many large areas of American life” which he described as the “voluntary organized social action.” He mentioned the effort of private groups to eradicate tuberculosis, and he said this demonstrated the Americans’ sense of “personal civic responsibility” because it showed that government, which was “essentially inefficient,” was not needed to achieve the good. Luce mentioned that Catholic education was “primarily an expression of supernatural faith” as well as an “heroic example of American voluntary organized action.” American business life was also a “form of voluntary social action” and the “American Corporation today is a very self-conscious, socially responsible entity.”[xxv]
Building up to the climax of his talk, Luce explained that the “function of the virtuous citizen applies to the relations between America and the world” and that good relations between the US and the rest of the world can only be established “in large part by the virtuous citizen and his purposeful voluntary associations. This follows from the very nature of the American Proposition.” Americans were “missionaries, tourists, businessmen, teachers” and “strongly felt and often explored their rights and duties as citizens of the world.” Americans expected only one thing from their government: “to remove the obstacles that governments have in these last bloody decades been increasingly erecting between people and people – obstacles to their free movement, information, trade, and human contact,” because Americans believed that “the first function of government as they see it is not to score points of power but to open doors through which the citizen in all his multiform voluntary capacities, can go about his work in the world God gave to him and to all his fellow-creatures.”[xxvi] All Americans share “common principles, aspirations, and ideals” and the “unity of this community is strong enough to support much pluralism in religious beliefs, political opinions, and local customs.” The American way of life could not be exported, but the:
intelligent American can legitimately long for a world in which all men will think his political thoughts and talk his political language…. The language expresses the thoughts of humanity itself when it reflects on the natural and rational structure and processes of political and economic life. I mean the language of unalienable rights, constitutionalism, and the rule of law as the moral basis of government, consent and popular participation in rule and therefore limited government, separation of powers, free election, minority rights in the face of majority decision, an organic organization of the economic order with a view to its self-government under the minimum of governmental interference, a dispersal of economic power, a high degree of public prosperity achieved mainly by the principle of voluntary cooperation, etc. These are words current in America; but they are translatable into any language.
Luce again stressed supposed American ties to tradition: “Insofar as the American way of life rests upon these principles, understood in their Western traditional sense, it is exportable, but only because it is, or ought to be, indigenous everywhere.”[xxvii]
The enemy of these ideals was Soviet Communism, which Luce mentioned as one of the two great powers on earth. This enemy had to be fought not just by a “contest of arms. More importantly it was a duel of ideas. Hence, the `complete social process’ undertaken against our Enemy must involve more than military preparedness.” What was needed was imbuing society with a “more positive function – this is a good American first principle. To sustain true religion, to promote education, to advance social justice, to contribute to public prosperity, to insure equal justice for all, and more than anything else, to protect fundamental human rights and freedom – these too are the functions of society. They are functions of international society….” An international juridical community could only function under the reign of law, and that was America’s long-term goal. Essential to this idea of the rule of law was the idea that “the writ of natural law may run in all countries in the form of respect for human rights.”[xxviii]
After the talk was given, Luce directed copies of the text be given to the pro-Deo International University of Social Studies. Pro Deo then taught the American Proposition to its students and they in turn went throughout the world spreading American ideas and ideals. All of this occurred with the apparent approval of the Catholic Church. The American prelates certainly approved of Pro Deo as did the Dominican order and Msgr. Giovanni Montini, later known as Pope Paul VI. The American Proposition justified the American socio-political philosophy as good in principle. The basis of this philosophy was an adherence by societal authorities to a vague, ambiguous, and ill-defined natural law. The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were elevated to the level of sacred documents, and freedom, whatever that meant, was the guiding light of American activities. The American Proposition was quintessential American psychological warfare and it served to advance the US Government’s Doctrinal Warfare Program. Once target societies accepted the American Proposition as true, and American socio-political philosophy as good in principle, then that society underwent a re-organization or re-engineering that marginalized spiritual values and permitted the elevation of materialism. This was made possible by the relegation of religion to a private concern and its prohibition from informing the policies of the state. The legal principles of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the US Constitution implemented and protected this philosophy. At this point, then the powerful come to rule society, and the most powerful in American, and similar societies, are the monied elites. Acceptance of the American Proposition led to the creation of the proper social and political environment for American capital and investment to enter societies around the globe.
Luce had additional copies of his speech sent to Murray and C D Jackson. Luce’s assistant Kelly Laute was impressed, calling it “a very fine speech indeed, and I was very much impressed by his delivery of it. So restrained yet so forceful – a very different style from what we generally get over her and all the more interesting and revealing to my half-Latin, half-Nordic mentality.”[xxix]
On March 4, 1963, at a party celebrating the birthday of Time, Inc., Luce said in no uncertain terms his publications existed to spread The American Proposition by shaping a certain understanding or view of history. By explaining “what Time believes,” and “what Time stands for,” Luce provided the “inside story of Time,” noting that the magazine “may often seem to be arbitrary…whimsical, even as they used to say, flippant. And yet through all the huge tapestry of 20th century history which Time has woven, there is a clear pattern of belief, a pattern which has become clearer and stronger with the years. Time believes.”[xxx] The lack of object in the final sentence bespoke a philosophical problem not a grammatical lapse. A few minutes farther into his speech Luce tried again:
What, then, does Time now believe?… The whole of the American Proposition has been epitomized by Fortune in this formula: `The American Proposition consists of a word, a tendency and a method. The word is liberty. The tendency is equality. The method is constitutionalism.’ That is the core and essence of what Time believes. How well has Time served the American Proposition? And one way to answer that question is to ask another: How well is the United States living up to its historic faith? I give you my answer quickly: since Time’s last birthday party, our twentieth [1943], in the midst of the first truly global war, the United States has been doing well, very well.[xxxi]
Luce used Time as a powerful tool to spread the American Proposition around the globe and to convince the Americans, including many Catholics, that America with its Liberal, Enlightenment, Age of Reason foundations was the ideal form of social organization. In a speech to the Army War College, C.D. Jackson praised the American Proposition and Pro Deo University’s delivery of it, as the philosophical platform from which the CIA and Time, Inc. launched its psychological warfare campaign. It was an “effective new educational activity” and “one of the few that is working and his [sic] immense potentialities. It is helping to infuse the concept of the American Proposition through young, fervent Latin American disciples instead of relying exclusively on officials from this country.”[xxxii]
[i] Swanberg, Luce and His Empire, 503-507.
[ii] Geoffrey Plank, Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the Rise of the British Empire. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 113, 115, 157, 165, 182, 184
[iii] Mark David Hall, Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 27-28, 30, 52-53.
[iv] Annex “B” to PSB D-33 June 29, 1953, “U.S. Doctrinal Program”, Psychological Strategy Board, declassified December 19, 2013.
[v] Hall, Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic, 24, 26.
[vi] Henry R. Luce to Jack Jessup, Letter dated October 28, 1953, Henry R. Luce Papers Box 75 Folder 10, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
[vii] Luce to Jessup Letter dated October 28, 1953.
[viii] Luce to Jessup Letter dated October 28, 1953.
[ix] Luce to Jessup Letter dated October 28, 1953.
[x] Henry R. Luce to Willi Schlamm, Letter dated November 1, 1953, Henry R. Luce Papers Box 75 Folder 10, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
[xi] John Courtney Murray to Clare Boothe Luce, Letter dated November 1, 1953, Clare Boothe Luce Papers Box 795 Folder 10, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
[xii] John Shaw Billings, Diary Entry for November 16, 1953, John Shaw Billings Papers Diaries Vol. 36, 259, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.
[xiii] John Shaw Billings to Henry R. Luce, Letter dated November 16, 1953, Henry R. Luce Papers Box 75 Folder 10, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C..
[xiv]Elsa Wardell to Henry R. Luce, undated note, Henry R. Luce Papers Box 75 Folder 10, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
[xv] “Address delivered by Rev. Felix A. Morlion OP President of the International Unviersity of Social Studies Pro Deo, Rome at the ceremony honoring of Henry Luce, Editor in chief of Time, Life, Fortune in New York, May 22, 1957,” Henry R. Luce Papers Box 52 Folder 7, Library of Congress, Washingotn, D.C.
[xvi] Henry R. Luce, “The American Proposition,” Henry R. Luce Papers Box 75 Folder 10, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
[xvii] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xviii] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xix] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xx] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xxi] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xxii] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xxiii] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xxiv] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xxv] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xxvi] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xxvii] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xxviii] Luce, “The American Proposition.”
[xxix] Kelly Laute to Allen Grover, Letter dated November 30, 1953, Henry R. Luce Papers Box 75 Folder 10, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
[xxx] Henry Luce, “A Definition of Time,” The Ideas of Henry Luce ed. Jessup, 81.
[xxxi] Luce, “A Definition of Time,” The Ideas of Henry Luce ed. Jessup, 83-84.
[xxxii] CD Jackson Papers Box 90 Folder “Pro Deo 1962,” Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.
Endnotes for Chapter 41