The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Harry’s letters from Europe, where he spent the next six weeks traveling, reveal a young man who was already accustomed to being on his own—and who compensated for his loneliness with relentless, methodical sightseeing and disciplined efforts at self-education. They also reveal an increasingly visible characteristic of his personality: a voracious appetite for knowledge and experience, a consuming curiosity, a determination, it sometimes seemed, to see and know everything. During his few days in Paris, he crisscrossed the city on foot visiting sight after sight—the Louvre, the relatively new Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Montmartre—before leaving for Lausanne, where his mother and siblings were to arrive a few weeks later. But the pleasant, quiet city quickly made him restless. “The days are at times long without a companion,” he wrote of his time in Switzerland. He adopted a regimen that he thought would help him deal with the tedium. “Now that my English lesson books have come the inter-eating hours will doubtless pass quickly enough,” he assured his father. But his time in Lausanne was brief, because he had already planned (with his father’s help) a monthlong trip through Italy, which he would take entirely on his own. “Guidebook in hand and camera on my little finger, I go out to make investigations,” he wrote from Rome, which he visited with the same frugal efficiency he had displayed in London and Paris. He stayed in a small, inexpensive hotel and spent several days trying to move into a smaller, even less expensive room—partly to preserve his very limited budget but also because his lodgings were of so little interest to him. He was utterly preoccupied with sightseeing. He moved methodically through the city, as if checking off the obligatory attractions. “In the seven days I have been here,” he boasted, “I have seen all the principle [sic] sites. The only things that are ever visited & that I will not have seen, are a few miscellaneous & uninteresting churches (comparatively) & a few galleries that are absolutely eclipsed by Florence’s exhibition—& to Florence I am bound!”6

  Harry traveled this way because he believed that systematic investigation was more likely to deepen his knowledge than casual or impulsive methods, and he apparently derived real satisfaction from his deliberate sightseeing style. “I believe that I have carried away with me some parts of Rome that can never be taken from me,” he wrote happily as he prepared to leave the city. “Whether I wish or no the remembrances and impressions of that great city will always hold their place in my memory & that tenaciously.” His father heartily approved. “Once one has arrived at a place,” he advised, “it is worth while seeing it well.” “Not many fathers,” he added, would have permitted a son to travel alone at this age, but Harry “had never failed me yet.”7

  In Florence, Harry was befriended by a professor of German—“an exceedingly nice man”—from Wells College in Aurora, New York, whom he met while touring the Baptistery. “We have hit it off and have agreed to continue our wanderings as much in conjunction as possible. We leave for Venice Monday 6:20 a.m. & are deliciously indefinite how long we shall stay there,” he wrote, adding that “my newfound friend … insisted on presenting me with tickets [to a film].” For whatever reason, the relationship does not appear to have lasted very long. A few weeks later, after a whirlwind tour (again alone) of Bologna, Milan, Turin, and Genoa, he was back in Lausanne, reunited with his mother, Emmavail, Elisabeth, and Sheldon—and already thinking ahead to his journey to America.8

  As if to confirm his passage to maturity, he bought his first adult clothes in Switzerland—long trousers, cuffs, and stiff shirts, the standard uniform for young middle-class men in America. He complained about the “daily torture,” but he wore the uncomfortable new outfit diligently until he got used to it. In the meantime he embarked on a new round of sightseeing in Switzerland and studied ferociously for the Hotchkiss admissions exams. In August, he joined Harold Burt, an English friend from Chefoo, for a two-week trip of “concentrated sightseeing” down the Rhine to Strasbourg and then to Brussels—before finally going to Hamburg to meet his father, who had returned to Europe a few weeks earlier. Several days later father and son boarded a ship for America.9

  It must have been clear to his parents, and perhaps also to Harry himself, how profoundly their relationship to their son had already changed in the months since he had left China. Harry still loved his family and enjoyed his time with them; his relationships with his parents and siblings remained the most important in his life. With his father in particular he still had an unusually close and warm relationship. But his home—wherever it was—was clearly no longer with them. He was now a visitor in their lives, dropping in for a few days or weeks as they themselves moved restlessly around the world. Their time together was affectionate and intense. “You are 14, & I am 44,” the older Harry wrote his son after they spent a few days together in Europe that summer. “I don’t feel that difference, & I hope you don’t. This is because motive and outlook are similar, & the fact is a great joy to me.” But such times were almost always brief, with Harry or his parents leaving after a short while for other obligations or other adventures. During their months together in Europe, there had been few moments when the entire family was in one place. And there would be very few such moments at any subsequent point in Harry’s life. “Of course, I long for a house, where I could gather you all, especially at the dear Christmas time,” his mother wrote him from Germany, “but that seems to be withheld, and it is a hard thing for us all to bear.” Emmavail once complained, “We seem not to belong anywhere,” and her mother agreed that “it seems to be our fate to be in a continual state of uncertainty.”10

  But such laments were rare from any member of the family, and rarest of all from Harry. This was the common lot of missionary families, and their members learned to accept it as a necessary price of their unusual and, they believed, privileged lives. “I know that God will take care of it all, and will give us our hearts’ desires in just so far as they are in harmony with His will for us,” Elisabeth wrote her son. “It is a strange life we are leading,” his father echoed, “but I do feel that God is leading us and blessing us.” Harry simply forged ahead, spending time with his family when he could, but focusing intently on what he liked to call the “task at hand” when he could not. He adjusted to his new independent life with little apparent difficulty and with no evidence of the loneliness and homesickness about which he had so often complained at Chefoo, even though he was now far more alone than he had been then. Instead he eagerly embraced the “great adventure” of pursuing experience and knowledge. It was a willed replacement—in many ways, it turned out, a permanent one—for the intimate personal attachments that had once anchored his life.11

  Harry arrived in New York in mid-September 1913 and got his first glimpse of “the great city” that would be the center of so much of his life. He was soon alone again, for his father was called away on fundraising business shortly after their arrival. But Harry was undaunted. As he had done in Paris and Rome, he traveled from one end of Manhattan to another, trying to see as much as he could in the few days he had. On a bus trip up Fifth Avenue, he passed the city’s already famous skyscrapers as well as the “‘big bugs’ roosts”—the lavish hotels and mansions surrounding Central Park. A few days later he was in Lakeville, Connecticut, singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” in front of a gymnasium filled with jeering boys who were initiating him into the life of the Hotchkiss School.12

  Hotchkiss was founded in 1892 through the awkward intersection of two very different people. One was Timothy Dwight, the august president of Yale, who in the 1890s was busily trying to transform his institution—once a small, insular college—into an academically serious university. And like the presidents of other universities experiencing similar transformations, Dwight feared that the nation’s public schools were failing to produce students that met Yale’s newly heightened standards. As a result he had begun to consider founding a new private school that would prepare young men for Yale. As luck would have it, he discovered a wealthy and somewhat eccentric widow—Maria Hotchkiss—who was loo
king ineffectually for a way to memorialize her recently deceased husband (a successful industrialist and the inventor of the machine gun). Dwight persuaded her to finance the construction of a private high school for boys in her hometown, Lakeville, Connecticut. It became one of a wave of such institutions—known now as “preparatory” schools—that opened their doors around the same time and for the same purposes. Among them were Lawrenceville, Groton, Taft, Choate, Middlesex, Deerfield, and Kent, all created with the encouragement, and sometimes the active involvement, of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and other elite universities. Older private schools, such as Exeter, Andover, and St. Paul’s, greatly expanded in these same years.

  The creation of these schools served not only the needs of the universities that promoted them but also the desires of the newly wealthy families of the industrial age. Prep schools were among a broad range of developments—including the growth of affluent suburbs, country clubs, summer resorts, lavish Protestant churches, and elite men’s clubs—that marked the emergence of a distinct, national upper class. Not all the boys at Hotchkiss, not even all the nonscholarship boys, came from the new aristocracy. But most were at least from prosperous, solidly middle-class backgrounds. The school represented, therefore, both the ideals and the social customs of the upper class and the aspirations of many middle-class families to rise in the world.13

  That was one reason why relations between Mrs. Hotchkiss and the school that bore her family’s name were tense from beginning to end. She wanted an institution that would serve the needs of poor children from the community; Yale wanted one that would train the sons of wealthy families for the university. They reached an uneasy compromise by setting tuition at six hundred dollars a year for the vast majority of boys—a sum far beyond the reach of all but the relatively affluent—while establishing a handful of scholarships for less wealthy students from the area. But Maria Hotchkiss remained unreconciled, and her support of the school ended at its founding. It flourished without her, since it soon was able to rely on the many enormously wealthy families whose sons it educated.14

  Hotchkiss was twenty years old when Harry (now 15) arrived, and the school had by then significantly reduced its always scant interest in recruiting poor boys from Lakeville. But it retained its scholarships and parceled at least some of them out to students whose backgrounds, if not their finances, seemed compatible with the character of its socially eminent student body. Harry—the son of a Yale-educated missionary and a graduate of a British boarding school—fit the profile well. Even so, the distinction between scholarship boys and everyone else was carefully and very publicly maintained. Harry’s early weeks at Hotchkiss became his first lessons in the American class system. He lived apart from the rest of the students, in a boardinghouse in the village, about a mile away from campus, where he shared a room with a nineteen-and-a-half-year-old farm boy from Kansas, who was also a scholarship student. The dormitories—complete with maid and laundry service—were reserved for the tuition-paying boys. He rose every morning at six and caught a ride on a delivery cart into campus, where he first cleaned and dusted the chapel before having to “scoot” into the dining hall for a rushed breakfast followed by waiting on the tables of the paying students.15

  Even so, Harry had no doubt which side of the class divide he wished, and expected, to inhabit. He got along with the other scholarship boys, but he did not really identify with them. He was a far better student than most of them (and in fact spent considerable time tutoring his roommate and others). But he did not accept their sense of being outsiders. “I will like to get away from the round of serving on table and to eat once again, not as hog, but as human!” he wrote as his first Thanksgiving vacation approached. “These scholarship fellows here are all fundamentally fine, but they lack certain qualities—especially noticeable at table—that one misses!” The “greatest burden of the scholarship,” he noted on another occasion, “is the school fellows I have to associate with. Many of them are still boorish, showing the trade of the farm or perhaps Brooklyn!” (The school apparently agreed. One teacher told him that “the Faculty was very dissatisfied with the calibre of the new scholarship boys—‘Present company excepted,’ he remarked!—and that therefore they were going to make an endeavour to advertise [Hotchkiss scholarships] … among a better grade of boys.”) The other students, in contrast, were “are all fine, nice fellows,” and he yearned to be one of them. In one letter to his family, he pondered his chances of being chosen to serve refreshments at an upper-class dance—an honor reserved for the popular and socially eminent people Harry called “pets.” “I can only hope that they allow me in on that feed,” he wrote, with a tinge of self-pity, “tho I might not add any lustre to the social glimmer of the evening & early morning!”16

  But it was not only his ambiguous position in the school’s rigid class structure that set him apart. It was also a certain social awkwardness, a product in part of his conspicuous foreignness. He dressed differently, wearing jackets and trousers made for him inexpensively in China and Europe that looked dated and slightly shabby compared with the elegant American wardrobes of some of his wealthy classmates. He spoke differently, not only because of his continuing (if somewhat improved) stammer, but also because of his unfamiliarity with American idiom. His speech sometimes seemed formal, even slightly stilted, not because he intended it to but because he had never learned the relaxed, slang-heavy diction of American adolescents. He had little knowledge of American popular culture; he did not understand his schoolmates’ jokes; and perhaps most damaging of all in a boys’ school, he knew little about American sports at an institution where (according to a Hotchkiss graduate writing to Harry) the “big men” were athletes, their “friendship coveted by anyone [they] care to associate with.” (“I did not know a single rule of football when I came here,” Harry wrote ruefully to his parents in October.) He went out briefly for the football team and later considered trying out for baseball, but he gave them both up quickly and chose instead to play tennis and to inform himself about the sports he did not know by covering games for the school newspaper. In addition to everything else he and his fellow students were obliged to learn, Harry had the task of learning how to be American.17

  Despite all the ways in which Harry felt like an outsider at Hotchkiss, he loved the school from the beginning—loved it with an almost uncritical enthusiasm that was nearly as intense as his implacable bitterness toward Chefoo had been. “Hotchkiss is fine!” he wrote his sisters after his first days in Lakeville. “I have been forced to pinch myself several times to assure myself of normal senses.” For a time at least he forgave the school almost everything: the humiliating hazing of new boys by the seniors (“they gave us real solid advice & warm welcome,” he wrote, once the ritual was over); the harsh regimen of the scholarship students (they held a “high position” in the school, he insisted, because they had such important responsibilities); the demeaning rules for new students (although they could not speak to seniors, or even look at them, unless spoken to first, Harry simply anticipated the day when he would be the beneficiary rather than the victim of the customs). He even tolerated his hated nickname, “Chink,” attached to him in his first weeks at Hotchkiss when the older boys learned he had listed his hometown as Wei Hsien, China. (He “must have sneaked in thru Mexico or Canada,” the Hotchkiss Lit wrote in a humorous retrospective on the class of 1916.) He expressed admiration for the school’s stern and pompous headmaster, Huber Gray Buehler, whom he would later come to loathe. “Mr. Buehler is commonly called ‘the King’ & is a very fine man,” he wrote after their first meeting. “I met him first in the corridor, received according to his manner a very formal & dignified welcome.”18

  What Harry lacked in social or athletic distinction, however, he made up for in academic and literary achievement. He emerged almost immediately as one of the most gifted students in the school—an especially impressive triumph since he had missed an entire year of formal education during his prolonged
journey from China to America, while most of his classmates had spent a first year at Hotchkiss. But Chefoo had prepared him well, he grudgingly admitted. “I find that the easiest part of my life here will be my studies,” he wrote a few weeks into his first term, a view he never had occasion to change. He had no great difficulty excelling, and he ranked first in his class (“First Scholar”) in all but a few terms during his three years at the school. “I am awfully proud of the way you have faced your first term’s work in this land,” his father wrote on hearing news of his marks. “It is a great joy and comfort to me to know that I have a son who can be trusted absolutely to do the right thing just so far as he has light.” Such praise only increased Harry’s determination to achieve and succeed.19

  The curriculum at Hotchkiss was unusually narrow, even by the standards of its time. Harry took a scattering of courses in English, algebra, and Bible studies, but the vast majority of his academic work was in languages. Walter Buell, his father’s old teacher from Scranton—a formal, aloof man with whom Harry never became close—kept a close eye on the new boy and decided early that he had great potential. He persuaded Harry to begin studying ancient Greek—one of the more demanding language courses in the school. Harry was soon immersed in the strange, beautiful language, taking two Greek courses a term (along with Latin, French, and German), and, characteristically, already looking ahead to the public distinctions his newfound talents could bring him. Yale offered a prize to the entering student who could demonstrate the greatest proficiency in Greek, and Harry determined early that he would try to win it.20