The "American Century" was an idea that the founder of Time, Life, and Fortune preached to two generations of Americans, using the persuasive powers of his propaganda empire. Herzstein (history, U. of South Carolina) examines Luce's political ideas and their influence as the century which he named comes to an end and the 100th anniversary of Luce's birth approaches. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

How Henry R. Luce used his famous magazines to advance his interventionist agenda.

Henry Robinson Luce (1898-1967) founded ¿Time,¿ ¿Life,¿ and ¿Sports Illustrated.¿ Born in China to missionary parents, Luce was a kind of lay preacher, eager to mold the American mind and advance his ideological program of intervention, capitalism, democracy, and Christian activism. A passionate anti-Communist interventionist, he convinced Americans that the U.S. had perversely ¿lost¿ China to the Communists. A fervent advocate of the Vietnam intervention, Luce, author of the ¿American Century,¿ edited incoming correspondents¿ cables so that the magazines might conform to his ideas. For the first time, we see how Luce accomplished this. ¿A gripping portrait of a great but tragic figure in American history.¿ Illustrations and maps.

In Time, Life, and Fortune, Henry Luce invented three entirely new forms of journalism. They changed our country, largely for the better, and made Luce a very wealthy man. But his patriotic zeal and his obsessions with China, Communism, and Republican Party politics led him to ignore and distort inconvenient facts to make his case, irreparably tarnishing his legacy. His stunning successes, and his self-inflicted wounds, hold lessons for every leader. He invented the modern news magazine and named it Time, revolutionized the coverage of business with a publication he called Fortune, captured the world in pictures and christened it Life. His publications were read by fully a quarter of the U.S. population, and his ideas about journalism and the significance of American values left an indelible imprint on the history of the United States and the world. He was Henry Robinson Luce. Luce was America’s most powerful mass communicator for more than 40 years. Yet, he was an odd, contradictory man with few real friends and talents that were both more and less than they seemed. His private life was largely a failure, and his missionary zeal was never quite realized. New Word City, publishers of digital originals, contributes 10 percent of its profits to literacy causes.