Henry Luce, who founded Fortune in 1929 and its sister publication Life seven years later, used the pages of the latter in February 1941 to issue one of the most consequential editorial arguments in American journalism. He called it “The American Century.”
The promise of a “more abundant life,” Luce wrote, of “adequate production for all mankind,” is characteristically an American promise. The United States, he wrote, had both the power and the obligation to shape the coming era in its image—to export its prosperity, its institutions, and its economic model to a world that would be better for receiving them.
