Herbert Agar, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a leading member of the Century Group, with his wife.
The Century Group’s most combative journalist-activist was Herbert Agar, who had taken an unofficial leave from the Louisville Courier-Journal, with the blessing of his publisher, to promote the cause of war. The son of a wealthy New York corporate lawyer, Agar had graduated from Columbia and received a Ph.D. in literature from Princeton. During the Great War, he served in the U.S. Navy as an ordinary seaman, and afterward he worked as the London correspondent for the Courier-Journal, then considered one of the best newspapers in the United States.
In the early 1930s, Agar settled in Louisville, becoming a columnist for the Courier-Journal and at the same time a noted poet and historian. At the age of thirty-seven, he won a Pulitzer Prize in history for The People’s Choice, a survey of the U.S. presidency from George Washington to Warren G. Harding. He was also a member of the Fugitives, the famed group of southern poets that included Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate.
In early 1940, Agar was appointed editor of the Courier-Journal. As soon as he took charge, the newspaper became one of a tiny handful of papers in the country demanding that the United States go to war to save Britain. Its position “amounted to an incitement to riot” in militantly isolationist Louisville, which had a large German American population. Mary Bingham, the wife of Courier-Journal owner Barry Bingham, later described Agar as “the most outspoken and the most vile of all interventionists in the world.” (She meant that as a compliment.)
Thanks to Agar’s aggressively pro-war stance, the Binghams, staunch liberals who shared their editor’s interventionist beliefs, were attacked verbally at dinners and cocktail parties and shunned by many acquaintances and friends. Years later, Mary Bingham would say that the months before Pearl Harbor were the worst time of the couple’s lives.
As the Century Group’s most outspoken firebrand, the darkly handsome Agar was openly contemptuous of William Allen White’s more moderate committee. “I think the most unattractive title ever devised was ‘The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies,’ ” he later wrote. “If our country needed defending, why did we not defend her, instead of asking the French and British to do the job?”
At the same time, he took great pride in what the Century Group’s opponents regarded as its extremism. “The isolationists called us warmongers as a term of abuse,” he observed. “We made it a term of defiance. We wanted war with Germany and strove to promote it. We were not content with giving or selling arms to our friends in order that they might die in our defense.”
Agar, said a Century Group colleague, “was our Old Testament prophet. Whenever our mental and spiritual batteries ran down, he recharged them, and whenever our vision grew dim, he restated and clarified our goals with passionate conviction.”
Another Century Group member, Elmer Davis, was much less inflammatory in his interventionism than Agar, but as one of the most popular news commentators on CBS, he had a far greater influence on American public opinion. The only native midwesterner in the Century Group, Davis grew up in Indiana and went to college there. After attending Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, he spent ten years at The New York Times as a reporter and editorial writer. When World War II began, he joined CBS as one of its top news analysts. Until the fall of France, Davis, like William Allen White and his committee, believed that America should do no more than provide aid to the Allies. Now, however, he was convinced that nothing short of active U.S. belligerency would save Britain and the rest of Western civilization.
Joining Davis at CBS was George Fielding Eliot, a retired Army major and the network’s military analyst, and another diehard interventionist. Although an American, Eliot had been raised in Australia and had fought in World War I’s bloody Gallipoli campaign as an officer in the Australian army. Later an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, Eliot was the author of more than a dozen books on military and political matters. In addition to broadcasting for CBS, Eliot also wrote a column for the New York Herald Tribune.
Second only to The New York Times in prestige and influence, the Herald Tribune was known for its lively writing, excellent sports and books sections, extensive foreign coverage, and nationally known columnists, especially Dorothy Thompson and Walter Lippmann. As the voice of the East Coast Republican establishment, the Herald Tribune was a staunch defender of both American free enterprise and an internationalist foreign policy. After the German blitzkrieg in May 1940, its editorial page, as Time reported, “came out and said a thing which only a fortnight before no great paper would have said: ‘… The least costly solution in both life and welfare would be to declare war on Germany at once.’ ”
The author of that provocative statement was Geoffrey Parsons, the Herald Tribune’s editorial page editor and another key Century Group member. The grandson of a dean of the Harvard Law School, Parsons had been a lawyer himself before turning to journalism. A Herald Tribune reporter and editor for more than twenty years, he was credited with helping to steer the paper away from its once diehard conservatism toward a more progressive Republicanism.
Also on the Century Group’s front lines was the Herald Tribune columnist Joseph Alsop, who, at thirty, was the group’s youngest member. Based in Washington, the foppish Alsop was an object of amusement for some of his more hard-bitten journalistic colleagues. A product of Groton and Harvard, he wore expensive handmade suits, entertained lavishly at his Georgetown home, and spoke with an affected quasi-British accent. But, as one acquaintance wrote, “Those who underestimated him as sort of an American Bertie Wooster did so at their peril.”
Blessed with a seemingly unassailable self-confidence and a biting wit, Alsop was a driven reporter and writer who was relentless in pursuit of a story. His close connections with Washington’s top political and social circles were also a great help: his mother was the niece of Theodore Roosevelt and the first cousin and close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Alsop was brought up to call “Cousin Eleanor.” When he first arrived in Washington, “Cousin Eleanor” invited him to the Roosevelt family’s New Year’s Eve celebration at the White House. In years to come, he was also, as a matter of course, summoned to join the Roosevelts for Christmas dinner and other social occasions.
Still, as influential as Alsop and the rest of the Century Group’s journalists would turn out to be, none would have more of an impact on Americans’ views of the war than the group’s most self-conscious and uncomfortable member, the magazine publisher Henry Luce. Unlike the others, Luce was a seminal figure in U.S. journalism. Yet, with his rumpled suits and rough edges, he always felt like an outsider in this clubby, genteel collection of East Coast patricians.
Magazine publisher Henry Luce, a key Century Group member.
On paper, Luce’s establishment credentials were just as impressive as those of his colleagues. He had gone to Hotchkiss, another of the Northeast’s top prep schools, and then to Yale, where he had been tapped by Skull and Bones, the school’s most prestigious secret society. He’d even studied briefly at Oxford. But he hadn’t felt at home at any of these institutions. The son of an American missionary, Luce had been born and raised in China, and he didn’t know how to act around his much wealthier classmates, who laughed at his funny clothes and called him “Chink.” Shy and awkward, he never developed the social graces that seemed to come naturally to those born to money.
What he did have was immense curiosity, driving energy, and a visionary spirit, which led him, at the age of twenty-three, to lay the foundation for a magazine empire that would transform American journalism. With his college classmate Briton Hadden, Luce launched Time, the country’s first weekly newsmagazine, which aimed to explain current events and policy issues in lively, brief, understandable prose. Seven years later, in the midst of the Depression, Luce created the business magazine Fortune. In 1936, he founded Life, a publication devoted to photojournalism that quickly became the most popular magazine
in the United States. In the days before television, Life, with its candid photos of newsmakers and events, offered a window on the country and the world that proved irresistible to millions of Americans. When it was first launched, people throughout the country lined up to buy copies, and at the height of its success, it could be found in virtually every middle-class home.
Luce’s publications—in particular, Life—were far more in touch with the wide sweep of the country than were the outlets of the other media figures in the Century Group. Luce had long made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with the preciousness and exclusivity of Eastern publications like The New Yorker. “New York is not America,” he wrote in 1938, contradicting Robert Sherwood. “Wall Street is not America. Broadway is not America … Park Avenue is not America. The intelligentsia are not America.… Time is edited for the gentleman of Indiana.” Once, when he felt that Time was becoming too Eastern in outlook, Luce told his editorial staffers: “I want more corn in the magazine. Yes, I know you don’t like it, you’re too Ivy League and sophisticated, but I want more corn in it.”
Even before World War II erupted, Luce had been an ardent advocate of U.S. intervention in the crisis in Europe. America, he said, was too powerful and her responsibilities too great to allow her to live “like an infinitely mightier Switzerland discreetly and dangerously in the midst of enemies.” Increasingly frustrated by Roosevelt’s slowness in moving the country to a war footing, he declared to a friend: “The American refusal to be ‘drawn in’ is a kind of failure to realize how deeply we are in, whatever we say or do.”
By the end of 1939, both Time and Life were mobilizing their considerable resources for detailed coverage of the war. After the invasion of Poland, Life devoted a special issue to the burgeoning conflict, depicting in graphic photographs not only Poland’s agony but also the massive strength of Germany’s forces. Later, the magazine focused on Britain’s determined fight to ward off defeat, paying special attention to the courage of its people and the inspiration of its leader, Winston Churchill. Interspersed with Life’s dramatic photos were lengthy, dense essays by such pro-intervention writers as Walter Lippmann, who, in one five-page article, described in frightening detail a scenario in which Germany, after establishing control over all of Europe, was able to impose economic domination on the United States.
HENRY LUCE’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO the Century Group extended far beyond the enormous influence of his magazines. After putting up much of the money for Robert Sherwood’s STOP HITLER NOW ad in early June, he helped finance the group’s early efforts, including bankrolling the opening of a small office in a building on Forty-second Street. (The suite next door, as Francis Pickens Miller, the Century Group’s executive director, soon discovered, was occupied by the German Fellowship Forum, a Nazi front that distributed pro-Hitler propaganda and was a meeting place for German agents. After keeping tabs on who went in and out of the Forum’s office, Miller passed the information on to the FBI.)
While the Century Group’s ultimate objective was American entry into the war, its members knew that the odds of that happening any time soon were virtually nonexistent. During their first dinner meeting, they decided they would initially focus on pressuring Roosevelt and his administration to grant Winston Churchill’s repeated requests for fifty old U.S. destroyers.
Britain’s need for additional warships was undeniably desperate. In its attempts to defend Norway, France, and the Low Countries from Germany’s lightning attacks in the spring of 1940, the Royal Navy had lost almost half of its destroyers. It now had fewer than one hundred ships in British waters and the Atlantic to carry out two monumental tasks: guarding the country’s coasts against an expected German invasion and protecting British merchant shipping from the growing depredations of German submarines and surface raiders. In June, 140 merchant freighters had been sunk, more than double the tonnage lost in May. The loss of more destroyers might well result in the complete severing of British supply lines, which could lead in turn to starvation and collapse.
When Luce and several other Century Group members met with Roosevelt to urge him to transfer the over-age American ships, he told them it was politically impossible, at least for the moment. The group sent back word that “we were going to make it politically possible for him to act,” Herbert Agar remembered. “We felt he was unduly hesitant, but we realized that we had to accept his judgment on that point. To prepare the country, and to reassure Roosevelt, several dramatic steps had to be taken that would appeal to the nation as a whole.”
To help put its plans into effect, the Century Group joined forces with another key player in the Great Debate—Lord Lothian, the British ambassador to the United States. As it happened, he was a Centurion, too.
CHAPTER 11
“THE GREATEST OF ALL OUR AMBASSADORS”
When John Wheeler-Bennett learned in mid-1939 who the next British ambassador to Washington was to be, his first reaction was shocked dismay. The new envoy, he was sure, “could have no possible appeal to the American public and would be suspect in official circles.”
The black marks against Philip Kerr, the 11th marquess of Lothian, were many. A top member of the British aristocracy, he had had no diplomatic training. Even worse, he’d been a Neville Chamberlain ally, an outspoken appeaser of Germany, and a member of the notorious Cliveden Set, a group of prominent, pro-appeasement Britons who frequented the country estate of Nancy Astor, a Virginia-born member of Parliament with whom Lord Lothian was deeply, if platonically, in love.
In the view of Wheeler-Bennett and other British officials, Lothian was the worst possible candidate for the job, coming to America at the worst possible time. His mission seemed doomed to failure—to convince an isolationist America, already highly suspicious of British propaganda, that it was in the country’s best interest to do all it could to aid Britain.
Yet, as Lothian’s critics later admitted, they could not have been more wrong about him. Having recanted his pro-appeasement attitude six months before he arrived in Washington, he proved to be, in the words of one of his most outspoken detractors, Sir Robert Vansittart, “the greatest of all our Ambassadors.” Employing his considerable charm and wit, he was assiduous in wooing the American people, managing to persuade many of them that the fates of his country and theirs were inextricably intertwined and that America might also be lost if Britain were defeated.
Lord Lothian, British ambassador to the United States.
Americans liked Lothian, and he returned the favor. It’s no exaggeration to say he understood this sprawling country and its people as well as or better than any other Briton. As secretary of the Rhodes Trust, the organization that administers the Rhodes Scholarships, he had made fourteen trips to the United States and visited forty-four states between 1924 and 1936. Unlike most British officials, whose knowledge of America was confined to the East Coast, Lothian, as one friend said, was familiar with “how Americans look at the world and what [they think] in the Middle West, South, and on the Pacific Coast, as well as in New York and Washington.”
Unlike many of his countrymen, too, he was enamored by what he saw. He once told an American architect how exhilarated he felt while walking through the skyscraper-studded landscapes of New York, Chicago, and other major U.S. cities. Such architecture, Lothian said, “has caught the modern American spirit of boundless material enterprise, boundless confidence, and boundless energy.” Shortly before he became ambassador, he remarked to reporters: “I always feel fifteen years younger when I land in New York.” When he inherited his title in 1930, one of his biggest concerns was that it might “quite spoil the pleasure I used to have in traveling to the New World. One cannot fail to be unpleasantly conspicuous.”
For Washington, Lothian’s informality and down-to-earth attitude provided a refreshing change from Sir Ronald Lindsay, his chilly, stiff predecessor, who didn’t know many Americans and didn’t much like those he did. Lindsay, although a skilled, highly experienced diplomat, had been a public r
elations disaster: he was disdainful of Washington, which he considered a boring, provincial town, and when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited in 1938, he refused to invite members of Congress to an embassy reception for the royal couple.
From the day he presented his credentials to President Roosevelt, the fifty-seven-year-old Lothian made clear he shared none of Lindsay’s elitist attitudes. With his horn-rimmed glasses, he looked more like a professor than a peer of the realm, and he reinforced that impression by appearing at the White House in a rumpled business suit instead of the traditional top hat, cutaway coat, and striped trousers. After the ceremony, the ambassador stopped to chat with reporters outside the White House, an act that undoubtedly would have appalled Sir Ronald. As he talked, a small black cat suddenly appeared and rubbed against his trousers. Picking it up, he perched it on his shoulder and continued the impromptu press conference. Not surprisingly, flashbulbs exploded, and captivating photos of the ambassador and kitten appeared the next day on newspaper front pages across the country. Describing the incident in a letter to Nancy Astor, Lothian wryly noted: “I am now voted human.”
Throughout his tenure in Washington, he made himself accessible to reporters and talked to them freely. He knew how important the U.S. press was in forming public opinion, but he also genuinely enjoyed the company of journalists, many of whom belonged to his remarkably large and eclectic network of American friends and acquaintances. At British embassy social functions, “one would be as likely to meet the mayor of Kalamazoo as one of the famous dowagers of Washington, and the ambassador would display an evident and genuine interest in talking to either,” recalled John Wheeler-Bennett, who became Lothian’s personal assistant. Around his dining table could be found New Dealers, industrialists, Wall Street bankers, labor leaders, reporters, clergymen, and even isolationist members of Congress.