Clare Boothe Luce

A Register of Her Papers in the Library of Congress

Prepared by Nan Thompson Ernst with the assistance of Joseph K. Brooks, Paul Colton, Patricia Craig, Michael W. Giese, Patrick Holyfield, Lisa Madison, Margaret Martin, Brian McGuire, Scott McLemee, Susie H. Moody, John Monagle, Andrew M. Passett, Thelma Queen, Sara Schoo and Robert A. Vietrogoski

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

Washington, D.C.

2003

Contact information: http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/mss/address.html

Finding aid encoded by Library of Congress
Manuscript Division, 2003

Finding aid URL: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms003044

Latest revision: 2008 July

Table of Contents

Collection Summary

Selected Search Terms

Names:

Subjects:

Occupations:

Administrative Information

Provenance:

Processing History:

Transfers:

Copyright Status:

Restrictions:

Security Classified Documents:

Microfilm:

Preferred Citation:

Biographical Note

Scope and Content Note

Organization of the Papers

Description of Series

Container List

Collection Summary

Selected Search Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the Library's online catalog. They are grouped by name of person or organization, by subject or location, and by occupation and listed alphabetically therein.

Administrative Information

The papers of Clare Boothe Luce, author, editor, playwright, journalist, member of Congress, and diplomat, were donated to the Library of Congress beginning in 1956, with additional deposits, gifts, and bequests made by Luce from 1957 to 1989. A gift of one item was made by Henry Luce III in 2000.

Portions of the Clare Boothe Luce Papers spanning the years 1930-1951 have been available for research with the donor's permission since 1957. Additional material covering the period 1951-1968 was arranged as a separate segment and made available with the donor's permission in 1958 and again in 1970. The current arrangement of the Luce Papers is a 1992 revision of the previous segments and includes material received since 1971. Subsequent changes and additions, including the opening of a portion closed until 1997, were made 1997-2000, and the finding aid as a whole was revised in 2003.

Items have been transferred from the Manuscript Division to other custodial divisions of the Library. Some photographs, pen and ink drawings of political cartoons, and theatrical posters have been transferred to the Prints and Photographs Division. Motion picture films and sound and video recordings have been transferred to the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. All transfers are identified in these divisions as part of the Clare Boothe Luce Papers.

Copyright in the unpublished writings of Clare Boothe Luce in boxes 1-728 is dedicated to the public. Copyright in the unpublished material in boxes 729-796 is governed by the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17, U.S.C.). Consult a reference librarian in the Manuscript Division for further information.

Restrictions apply governing the use, photoduplication, or publication of items in this collection. Consult a reference librarian in the Manuscript Division for information concerning these restrictions.

Government regulations control the use of security classified items in this collection. Manuscript Division staff can furnish information concerning access to and use of classified material.

A microfilm edition of part of these papers is available on forty-one reels. Consult a reference librarian in the Manuscript Division concerning availability of the microfilm for purchase or interlibrary loan.

Researchers wishing to cite this collection should include the following information: Container or reel number, Clare Boothe Luce Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Biographical Note

Scope and Content Note

The papers of Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) span the years 1862-1988, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1930-1987. The collection covers all facets of Luce's career and personal relationships and includes family and personal papers, correspondence, and secretarial, literary, and speech files. Public service files contain congressional and ambassadorial papers and records of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Subject files reflect Luce's involvement in political, civic, social, philanthropic, and religious organizations. Closed and restricted material have been placed in separate series. Scrapbooks are available only in a microfilm edition.

Clare Boothe Luce was a public official and social critic who expressed her views in private correspondence; fiction and plays; political and social commentary; newspaper, magazine, and editorial work; and on the lecture circuit. She was conscious of having achieved success in the male-dominated fields of politics and publishing and became an advocate for expanded public roles for women. International relations was her principal political emphasis. Religion became another concern after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1946.

Luce collected family and other personal papers with the intention of writing memoirs, a venture she never completed. Her family collection includes three mid-nineteenth century diaries of her grandfather, John W. T. Boothe, a Baptist minister from Maryland. She survived her parents, brother, daughter, and husband Henry Luce and saved many of their papers. Henry Luce's papers include correspondence with Clare Boothe Luce, general and "V.I.P." correspondence, scrapbooks, speeches, Time-Life memoranda, a will, and writings. Other material in the Family and Personal Papers series relates to Henry Luce as well. Much of the family correspondence is addressed jointly to both Luces. In addition, personal and real property was often held in common. The art files, for example, contain business and provenance records which include correspondence with notable artists such as surrealists Philip Curtis and Frida Kahlo. Henry Luce also collected Asian antiques. Clare Luce's own amateur works in painting, mosaic, and needlepoint are also documented in the art file. These records together with appointment books, entertainment files, and financial and property records document the couple's personal interests and activities.

Although correspondence comprising the bulk of Clare Boothe Luce's papers is found in every series, it is concentrated in the Correspondence series containing letters of a general and personal nature. Luce spoke and wrote on controversial topics to a mass audience and received a great deal of mail in response, especially during presidential campaigns and following her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1946. She also corresponded with friends and colleagues on politics, religion, and literary or artistic undertakings. Correspondents include Bernard M. Baruch, William Benton (1900-1973), William F. Buckley, Carlos Chávez, May-ling Soong Chiang, Gerald Heard, John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), Joseph P. Kennedy (1888-1969), John Davis Lodge, Joseph W. Martin (1884-1968), John Courtney Murray, Fulton J. Sheen, Spyros Skouras, Clarence K. Streit, Mark Sullivan (1874-1952), Arthur H. Vandenberg, and Darryl Francis Zanuck.

Luce employed a secretarial staff to assist with her literary and public service endeavors and to make arrangements for travel, social activities, and household management. Communications between Luce and her secretaries and their communications with others on Luce's behalf are organized chronologically in the Secretarial File.

The Literary File documents Luce's career as a journalist and playwright. She became an editor at Vanity Fair magazine in 1930 as Clare Boothe Brokaw and corresponded with many leading writers, journalists, artists, and politicians. Vanity Fair correspondence, suggestions for articles, reports, and staff memoranda are included in the business records of the Literary File. The business records also include correspondence with agents, editors, publishers, attorneys, accountants, theatrical directors, and producers about work in progress or proposed work. Production records are available for Luce's plays, The Women (1936), Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938), and Margin for Error (1939). There are no working drafts of The Women, only one scene description and other notes. The acting script for the 1936 Philadelphia tryout of The Women has been preserved, however, as have scripts for many of the international productions of the play.

Luce published numerous articles and editorials in various magazines and newspapers. She wrote extensively in the late 1940s and early 1950s on religious themes. Her conversion is detailed in a 1947 McCall's magazine series, "The Real Reason." She also compiled and edited a book of essays by famous Roman Catholics, Saints for Now (New York and London, 1952). She experimented with LSD under the tutelage of Gerald Heard and Sidney Cohen (1910- ) and scuba-diving, which she described as the "Heaven Below" in a series of Sports Illustrated articles.

Luce gave speeches and appeared at campaign rallies for Republican presidential candidate Wendell L. Willkie in New York and Connecticut. She was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for two terms, serving from 1943 until 1947. Her congressional files consist largely of correspondence relating to speeches and statements related to World War II, economic and labor issues, the administration of price controls, and the Equal Rights Amendment. Material concerning her battlefront tours with the House Committee on Military Affairs is located in the Office File subseries. Her 1945 correspondence concerns issues related to the end of World War II, such as the problems of demobilization and proposals for peacetime conscription or universal military service. By volume, the greatest issue in the 1946 correspondence is the shortage of women's stockings. William Hager, vice president of Hager & Brothers of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, directed interested citizens to contact Congresswoman Luce. Letters came to her office from across the country stating that the stocking situation was desperate and asking that the government reinstate orders compelling the producers of rayon yarn to sell to hosiery manufacturers. In 1945-1946, Luce employed the services of public relations consultant Edward L. Bernays, who advised her on sensitive issues such as the controversy that arose when the Daughters of the American Revolution, of which Luce was a member, refused to admit African Americans to Constitution Hall.

Luce declined to run for a third congressional term. Though she never held elective office again, she was appointed to several public service positions by Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. Luce served as ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956. Papers from this period include correspondence, much of it in Italian, from political leaders, dignitaries, and Italian citizens; briefing and press reports; records relating to missions, investigations, and projects undertaken by the embassy; interoffice memoranda and other State Department documents; and entertainment and other files concerning the operation of Villa Taverna, the official residence of the American ambassador in Rome. Papers concerning the Trieste crisis include narrative accounts and reports. Eisenhower nominated Luce as ambassador to Brazil in 1959, but she withdrew before taking office when her public remarks about Senator Wayne Morse during her confirmation hearings aroused considerable controversy. The nomination is documented in reports, memoranda, and political cartoons. Later files relate to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

The Speech File includes congressional campaign speeches and remarks on legislation and other governmental actions. Luce spoke in behalf of Republican candidates after joining the party in 1940, gave religious testimony, and opposed communism in the 1950s and 1960s. She wrote most of her own speeches, though at times she solicited advice from policy experts and editorial advice from her husband.

The Subject File series also reflects Luce's involvement in politics and public policy, journalism and publishing, philanthropy and religion, and civic and social interests. Luce's early political activities are documented in folders concerning her involvement in the New National party movement of 1932 and her 1934 appointment to the National Recovery Administration's Code Authority for the Motion Picture Industry. Later files document her nomination at the Connecticut Republican convention for the senatorial race in 1952 and her proposed nomination by the New York Conservative party for the Senate in 1964. Luce's involvement in public policy institutions, especially during the 1980s, included the American Enterprise Institute, American Security Council, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Committee on the Present Danger, Council of American Ambassadors, Heritage Foundation, International Rescue Committee, United States Strategic Institute, and the World Strategy Network.

Republican party and presidential campaign records and additional papers concern the presidential administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan. Her work with the board of editors for the Encyclopedia Britannica and a copy of the 1942 judicial decision in Corcoran vs. Time with reference to her 1931 proposal at Vanity Fair to create a photographic magazine called Life document some of her involvements in journalism and publishing. Subject files also relate to her religious conversion and the founding and operation of a Cistercian-Trappist monastery at Mepkin Plantation in South Carolina on property donated by the Luces in 1949.

Restricted material is filed in separate series. The larger series, closed until 1997, contains papers related to every series in the collection organized in a parallel arrangement to the open series. A smaller series of papers, restricted until 2013, contains Family and Personal Papers and Correspondence.

Organization of the Papers

The collection is arranged in sixteen series:

• Family and Personal Papers, 1862-1988, n.d.
• Correspondence, 1914-1988, n.d.
• Secretarial File, 1933-1988
• Literary File, 1919-1987, n.d.
• Congressional Papers, 1942-1947, n.d.
• Ambassador to Italy, 1953-1961, n.d.
• Ambassador to Brazil, 1959
• President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, 1974-1987, n.d.
• Speech File, 1932-1987, n.d.
• Subject File, 1931-1987, n.d.
• Scrapbooks, 1917-1963
• Formerly Closed, 1914-1986, n.d.
• Restricted, 1914-1969, n.d.
• Classified, 1944-1983, n.d.
• Top Secret, 1953-1954, n.d.
• Oversize, 1937-1983

Description of Series

Container List