Theater: A Passion for Ideas and Order

The main business of journalism, Henry Robinson Luce once said, "is with the phenomenon, the event, the concrete, here and now . . . But unless we pay attention to the great truths, new and old, we will not do justice to reporting the phenomena." Perhaps more than any journalist of his generation, Harry Luce—who died three years ago last week at the age of 68—was a man in love with ideas. He was not a prophet or philosopher but an editor and publisher constantly engaged with the temporal problems of current journalism. But as longtime LIFE Editor John K. Jessup notes in the perceptive introduction to The Ideas of Henry Luce (Atheneum; $12.50), "his feeling for the continuity of history and for abstract ideas made him eager to impose order on the chaos of the world's daily happenings."

The themes that preoccupied Luce were varied: the need for an aristocracy (of worth, not wealth), the providential course of U.S. history, the civilizing viability of Christian thought, the duty and responsibility of the U.S. in "the American Century." Luce's occasionally forensic manner and his brand of intellectual passion are rarely found today. But the questions he asked—and many of his answers—are still pertinent to the country he loved with an unabashi patriotism. Herewith a limited sampling of Editor Luce's thoughts, drawn from the Jessup volume.

THE PRESS (1937): The department-store theory of publishing, the give-the-public-what-it-wants theory, is the prevailing theory of publishing today. The first and principal danger of the Press-that-gives-the-people-what-they-want is that there is no significant restraint on vulgarity, sensationalism and even incitement to criminality. The second danger, which is perhaps even more insidiously deleterious to the public taste and morals, is the fact that there is in this situation an enormous financial incentive to publish twaddle—yards and yards of mediocrity, acres of bad fiction and triviality, square miles of journalistic tripe.

LIBERALISM (1953): "Liberal is what everybody would like to be." Yes, of course, and why? Very simple; because we are all Americans. Even the reactionaries today call themselves the "true" liberals. If there's anything wrong with America today, it could be summed up in one symptom: that Americans don't quite know what it is to be m liberal—joyously, thankfully, proudly liberal. For America is the supreme embodiment of the Great Liberal Tradition and if, for as much as one generation, America forgets d what it is to be liberal, then America will no longer be herself, but just one more stupid, IF fear-ridden empire ready to be carted to the natural-history museum of human failure.

AMERICA AS A WORLD POWER (1941): America cannot be responsible for the good behavior of the entire world. But America is responsible, to herself as well as to history, for the world environment in which she lives. If America's environment is unfavorable to the growth of American life, then America has nobody to blame so deeply as she must blame herself.