Clare Boothe Luce

Playwright

• Born: April 10, 1903
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: October 9, 1987
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

American journalist and politician

Luce’s wide-ranging career included journalism, playwriting, and politics. She cofounded Life magazine, served in the U.S. Congress, and was appointed ambassador to Italy, becoming the first woman to represent the United States in a major foreign embassy. Also, she is said to have inspired the development of the postwar Marshall Plan to aid Europe but has not received due recognition for her contributions.

Areas of achievement Journalism, literature, government and politics

Early Life

Clare Boothe Luce (klehr booth lews) was born in New York City. Her mother, Ann Clare Snyder Boothe, was the daughter of Bavarian Roman Catholic immigrants and was a former chorus girl. Her father, William F. Boothe, was a Baptist minister’s son who played the violin and worked as an executive for the Boothe Piano Company. Young Clare was related to the theatrical Booth family, Edwin and John Wilkes Booth. After the Abraham Lincoln assassination, however, some family members changed the spelling of their name to camouflage the relationship.

When Luce was eight, her father abandoned his family and business to become a musician. Luce’s mother worked to provide her only child with the kind of education normally given to children of much wealthier families. She lived with friends, put Luce to work as a child actor, and invested in the stock market. Unwilling to let Luce attend public schools, Ann Boothe sent her daughter to private schools when she could afford it. She supplemented her daughter’s intermittent formal education with homeschooling and with trips abroad, and instilled in her a lifelong love for books. Luce graduated from Castle School in Tarrytown in 1919.

After her graduation, Luce went to Manhattan, where she stayed in a boardinghouse and worked in a candy factory. Having taken the pseudonym Joyce Fair as a child actor, Luce took the name Jacqueline Tanner as a factory worker. An attack of appendicitis forced her to return to her mother’s home for surgery. After Mrs. Boothe married a wealthy physician, Albert E. Austin, Luce lived with her mother and stepfather in Sound Beach, Connecticut. In 1919, she left the United States to visit Europe with her parents. On the return voyage, Luce met Alva Erskine Belmont, a wealthy Manhattan socialite who helped to fund the woman suffrage movement in the United States, who introduced her to millionaire George Brokaw. In 1923, Luce and Brokaw were married; she was twenty, and he was forty-three.

Life’s Work

Luce’s high-fashion Manhattan marriage ended in 1929 when she sued Brokaw for divorce, claiming mental cruelty. The generous divorce settlement enabled her to move into a fashionable Beekman Place penthouse with three servants and a governess for her daughter. It also enabled her to begin a new life that was to include remarkable success in publishing, playwriting, politics, and diplomacy.

Following her divorce, Boothe went to work in New York’s publishing industry. By 1933, she was managing editor of Vanity Fair. She also began writing on her own, and after only a year as a Vanity Fair editor, resigned to devote her full attention to writing plays. A rapid and prolific writer, Boothe had her first major success with The Women, which opened on Broadway on December 26, 1936. Although it was much more successful than her first play, Abide with Me, it was not considered great theater by critics. The author herself assessed it modestly, but audiences enjoyed the satire, which features a cast of thirty-eight women. Two motion picture versions and a television special were made of the play, which has been produced throughout the world. Described as a satire about men without a single man in the cast, it also satirizes the pretensions of bored, wealthy women.

Luce had become a highly successful independent woman by 1935, the year she married Henry R. Luce, cofounder of Time magazine. Together, the couple collaborated in developing Life, soon to become one of the world’s most popular magazines. Her work in the publishing business prompted her to stay well informed about political developments throughout World War II. Although she had been a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats, by 1940 she was ready for new leadership in the White House. She decided to support the Republican Party’s candidate, Wendell Willkie, making some forty speeches and appearances on his behalf. Although her candidate lost, Luce had gained important experience as a political activist.

In 1941 and 1942, Luce traveled as a Life magazine correspondent to China, the Philippines, Egypt, and the Far East. Her description and analysis of the war in Europe, Europe in Spring (1940), appealed to Republican party leaders, who convinced her to run for Congress in 1942 from Connecticut’s Second District, a seat held previously by her late stepfather, Albert Austin. She won the nomination easily but had to work hard to oust the Democratic incumbent, using criticism of Roosevelt’s handling of the war as her campaign theme.

Although Luce entered Congress with a reputation for being rich, beautiful, and clever, she relied on intelligence and hard work to get things done. Like all new lawmakers, she learned about the importance of compromise. She wanted a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee but settled for the Committee on Military Affairs.

In a celebrated 1943 speech, “American and the Postwar Air World,” Luce criticized the Roosevelt administration’s foreign policies, referring to them as “globaloney.” The press focused on her cleverly coined word, but failed to discuss her analysis of America’s ongoing air policy. It was a pattern that concerned Luce. Journalists tended to emphasize her minor comments, but ignored her major themes. Media coverage of her views was further complicated by her failure to comply consistently with Republican Party platforms. She was independent and unpredictable characteristics not always appreciated by politicians or journalists.

Luce’s policy interests included both foreign and domestic issues. She proposed gender equality in the armed services, affordable housing for veterans, independence for India, and an end to restrictions on immigration from China. She voted against the 1943 antilabor Smith-Connally Act and was instrumental in developing Senator J. William Fulbright’s Resolution of 1943 calling for creation of “international machinery” to establish and maintain a just and lasting peace. That line of reasoning contributed to creation of international agencies such as the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Although Luce opposed isolationism and favored American participation in international organizations, she criticized politicians who expressed sentimental principles instead of developing specific foreign policy goals and objectives. She was particularly critical of the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration that had been issued by President Roosevelt and British prime minister Churchill in 1941. The two leaders proclaimed their commitment to “Four Freedoms”: freedom from fear and want, and freedom of speech and religion. Luce called the proclamation wartime propaganda, not real foreign policy.

After winning a close election race in 1944, Luce toured Europe with a congressional delegation. The devastation she saw there bolstered her opposition to America’s wartime foreign policy, which she considered incoherent and inconsistent. As the war ended, Luce continued her criticism of the Democratic administration, warning against Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe and condemning Roosevelt for his participation in the Yalta Conference. America’s foreign policy, in her opinion, was to “drift and improvise.”

By 1944, Luce had given Republican leaders ample evidence that she could develop and present ideas forcefully, both in writing and in speeches. They selected her to deliver the keynote address at the Republican National Convention, the first woman of either party to be so honored.

Luce’s extensive legislative output during her second term included proposals to rewrite immigration quotas, to help veterans get civil service jobs, to study profit sharing for workers to reduce strikes, to permit physicians tax breaks for charity work, to ban racial discrimination in the workplace, to promote scientific research, and to require popular election of U.S. representatives to the United Nations.

In 1945, Luce wrote to Congressman Everett Dirksen describing a plan for helping Europe recover from the war. She did not believe her staff had the expertise to write sufficiently comprehensive legislation, and so she called on Dirksen to do so. Dirksen did, but no immediate action was taken. In 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed an almost identical approach to the problem. Although historians have traced the origins of the Marshall Plan to several men, they have generally overlooked Luce’s early insight into that foreign policy situation.

In spite of her accomplishments and her interest in a wide range of political issues, Luce did not particularly enjoy the legislative process. In 1946, she decided not to pursue reelection. She continued working for the Republican Party, however, and was particularly forceful in expressing her concern that America’s former ally, the Soviet Union, had become a threat to world peace.

In 1952, Luce campaigned for Dwight D. Eisenhower and was offered a position as secretary of labor in his presidential cabinet. She declined that offer but accepted an appointment as ambassador to Italy, becoming the first woman to represent the United States in a major foreign embassy. She handled the difficult job successfully until 1957. In 1959, Eisenhower asked her to take a position as ambassador to Brazil. She accepted, but when the confirmation process turned into a heated attack on her anti-Roosevelt stance during World War II, she withdrew her name.

Because of her friendship with the Kennedy family, Luce kept a low profile during the 1960 campaign, but in 1964 she worked for Republican Barry Goldwater’s candidacy. She moved to Hawaii during the 1970’s, then returned to the East Coast to serve on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations. She died in 1987, the holder of numerous awards and honors for her contributions to political and cultural life in the United States.

Significance

Luce was intelligent, talented, and hardworking, succeeding in an unusually wide range of endeavors. The term “multivalent” probably describes her best as a person with unusually diverse abilities and ambitions. For American women who want a role model who inspires them to set high goals and to pursue them vigorously, Luce is a good choice. The Women will endure as part of America’s cultural history. The very different story of Luce herself as writer, politician, and diplomat will also endure as a reflection of America’s cultural and political development during the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Harriman, Margaret Case. Take Them up Tenderly: A Collection of Profiles. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944. A cleverly written sketch of Luce as congresswoman and playwright. A witty, subjective profile rather than an objective analysis of Luce’s life and accomplishments.

Luce, Clare Boothe. Europe in the Spring. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. In this analysis of prewar conditions in Europe, Luce describes the factors that made war virtually inevitable. A popular book.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Women. New York: Random House, 1937. Popular among audiences, this play depicts upper-class women at their worst. It satirizes relationships between women and those between women and men.

Lyons, Joseph. Clare Boothe Luce. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Written as part of the American Women of Achievement series, this biography is written for juvenile readers. Provides a good introduction to Luce’s accomplishments as ambassador, legislator, dramatist, and journalist.

Morris, Sylvia Jukes. Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce. New York: Random House, 1997. In this biography Morris chronicles the early years of Luce’s life, including her career-climbing as a journalist, playwright, and congresswoman.

Shadegg, Stephen. Clare Boothe Luce: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. Based on his friendship with Luce, his correspondence with her, and on documents from her files, Shadegg presents a sympathetic yet well-written account of her personal and political life.

Sheed, Wilfrid. Clare Boothe Luce. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982. Sheed’s biography, written with the cooperation of Luce, is notable for its informality and popular appeal. As Sheed himself notes in his preface to the book, many people have deified or demonized Luce, and his own portrait strives for a somewhat objective tone in dealing with the various facets of Luce’s personality.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: March 3, 1923: Luce Founds Time Magazine; October, 1932: Wright Founds the Taliesin Fellowship; November 23, 1936: Luce Launches Life Magazine.