How did we all forget about Clare Boothe Luce?
You’ve likely never heard of Clare Boothe Luce–and that’s a problem
When Clare Boothe Luce converted to Roman Catholicism in 1946, the event was reported on the front page of the New York Times, announced in national radio broadcasts, and shared in countless in priests’ homilies. But chances are, you have never heard the name before. How did one of the twentieth century’s most famous people slip into obscurity — especially when her spouse, the publisher Henry Luce, remains far better known?
During her lifetime, Clare Boothe Luce (1903–1987) was legitimately famous. For one thing, she was a member of the House of Representatives serving a district in Connecticut, one of only seven women in the U.S. Congress at that time. She became known for her principled call for US military intervention in World War II; in 1944, she coined the nickname “GI Joe” in a speech in which she warned that a failure to act decisively would lead too many US soldiers to pointless deaths. A decade earlier, she had made a name for herself in an entirely different field as the author of The Women, the first play performed on Broadway by an all-female cast and soon a major motion picture.
In the meantime, having already ascended the editorial ranks at Vanity Fair in the early 1930s, Clare Luce became a war correspondent for Life magazine. She covered the advance of Nazis across Europe in 1940, presciently warning that Belgium and France were far too complacent about their prospects, and she toured regions of Asia scarred by years of hunger, war, and torture.
She declined to run for reelection to Congress in 1946 but stayed active in American politics. President Dwight Eisenhower appointed her to be the ambassador to Italy and the Vatican in 1953. Here was another first: The first woman to hold a major ambassadorial post in Europe. Not every venture succeeded. A glib remark cost her the opportunity to serve as ambassador to Brazil in 1959. Her final electoral venture was also disappointing. She ran for the US Senate from New York in 1964 on the Conservative Party ticket but withdrew to throw her support behind Barry Goldwater’s campaign for president as a Republican. In later years, however, her decades of expertise in foreign policy earned her a spot on President Ronald Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
I spent the better part of the last ten years learning about Clare Boothe Luce and other famous people whose religious conversions shaped American political life. When I first delved into her enormous archive of papers at the Library of Congress, I was baffled that I knew so little about her or her influence. I am a historian of the United States, and I specialize in histories of women, gender, and religion. Why hadn’t I encountered her more often in the books I read?
When Clare Boothe Luce does appear in histories of mid-twentieth-century US religion and politics, she most often merits a one-line remark or a footnote. In several well-regarded books, she receives a brief mention as yet another famous individual who became a Roman Catholic in the 1940s and 1950s as the United States fought a Cold War against “godless Communism.” But she is most often discussed as a sort of a social appendage to the famous men she knew: her husband, Henry (“Harry”) Luce, who was the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, and Monsignor (later, Bishop) Fulton Sheen, the host of the popular radio program The Catholic Hour and arguably the most famous Catholic priest in the United States of his era.
Why did her baptism and conversion in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in February 1946––the sort of event we rarely see reported today — matter that much to the American public? And why have we largely forgotten all about it?
Answering the first of those two questions drove my research for my most recent book, Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics (UNC Press, 2021). I show in that book how and why Luce presaged a sustained fascination with religious conversion in American politics, one that made the presentation of religious authenticity central to the ways that Americans understood political truth. Other famous religious converts followed Luce onto the national stage: from former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers (who became a Quaker), to entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. (who converted to Judaism), to the heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali (Nation of Islam), and the convicted former Nixon “hatchet man” Charles Colson (born-again Protestantism). When each of these individuals made the case for their own conversion’s political significance, they joined a conversation that Clare Boothe Luce had started.
The answer to the second of these two questions, about Luce’s historical erasure, is both straightforward and startling: the relentless sexism she encountered as a white woman influencing American culture and politics not only pushed her from the national spotlight during her lifetime but sidelined her in subsequent historical accounts.
Luce’s whiteness and her conventional good looks had in many respects aided her career. She knew how to dress fashionably and flatter important men. Her flirtations appear to have been compelling: Her archives contain folder after folder bursting with letters from generals, editors, and politicians who confessed their admiration and desire, recollected moments of intimacy, and wondered if she might find time to respond to their latest missive.
But that image also cost her. After the speech where she coined the idea of “GI Joe,” President Franklin Roosevelt denigrated her foreign policy critique as the rants of “a sharp-tongued glamour-girl of forty,” a snide comment that simultaneously denigrated her remarks as mere blather, infantilized her, and scorned her as a woman past her prime. The DC political press focused on “cat fights” between her and other women in Congress, largely ignoring her substantive contributions.
In July 1946, in her last major speech before Congress, she called on political leaders to establish an Atomic Energy Commission to oversee the development of nuclear power and put a check on the military’s zeal for atomic weaponry. Her research drew from interviews she had conducted with physicists and military experts, and from reading technical papers about atomic warfare.
Male colleagues nevertheless mocked her: John Elliott Rankin, a Democratic representative from Mississippi, derided the speech as “the powder-puff argument of the delightful gentlewoman.”
In January 1946, a few weeks before her conversion to Roman Catholicism (the preparations for which were unknown to the general public), Luce issued a statement that she had decided not to seek another elective office, “for reasons which will soon become evident.” Within an hour, she received phone calls from four newspaper reporters, each asking when her baby was due.
Brainless, over-sexed, or defined by motherhood: Clare Boothe Luce struggled against the misogyny that undermined her ideas and contributions.
That sexist condescension continued at home. Too late, she realized that Harry had supported her conversion for selfish reasons. Deeply committed to an extra-marital affair, he had believed that her conversion would require the annulment of their marriage. He had already divorced his first wife, Lila (who was still living in 1944), in order to marry Clare. In the eyes of the Church, Clare and Harry’s wedding was therefore, presumably, unlawful.
Nothing of the sort occurred; neither Monsignor Sheen, who baptized Clare, nor Francis Cardinal Spellman, who heard her first confession, prodded her to separate from Harry. Desperate to marry his mistress, Harry pleaded with Clare to relent. She refused. In a scathing letter, she complained that he had given her practice in the suffering that was at the core of Catholic devotion: “And how is that for a budding novice in sanctity? On the contrary, it is excellent! Indeed, I am grateful to you.” But the pain of his betrayal had lasting effects.
We should be careful not to reproduce the politics of exclusion that led to Clare Boothe Luce’s marginalization in American domestic politics and foreign policy. Clare Boothe Luce’s involvement in the political and intellectual histories of the time — to domestic anti-Communism, ideas about Catholicism and freedom, and the links between the two — were substantive and enduring.
