Why the American Century?

In February 1941, Henry Luce famously proclaimed that the United States could and should dominate the remainder of the century--the nation deserved no less than to dictate the course of world history. In recent years, such an assertion would raise a storm of protest, yet Zunz's (Making America Corporate) wide-ranging research documents how complicated the case truly is. Zunz starts with Luce, who, he reminds us, was speaking for a liberal internationalism that represented myriad voices and was, at that moment, aimed at bringing the U.S. into WWII. Separating the idea of the ""American century"" from the ""Pax Americana,"" Zunz argues that Americans started the century with ""two large but unfinished projects"": the creation of a continent-wide industrial economy and the expansion of democratic institutions within their own population. Zunz follows an impressive number of American paths towards these goals: scientists learned to harmonize science and industry; social scientists channeled their interest in analyses of culture as a whole into government policy; economists encouraged consumerism as a road to social stability; and the population in general was taught to think of itself as a pluralist entity rather than in particular sections. These were the goals that the U.S. then exported (most notably to Japan), but the ""enlarged scale of their operations"" abroad also furthered both projects at home. While occasionally dry, the book takes sweeping, thought-provoking account of the failures and successes of those who created the century's American model. (Nov.)