The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Harry was an avid, if only modestly talented, poet at Hotchkiss. Many of his poems for the Lit were purely descriptive—for example, his sentimental account of life in Shantung, a poem he liked so much he tried in vain to have it published in a national literary magazine. Other poems expressed his emerging view of his place in the world. In one of them, “Mankind,” he wrote of the tension between two human impulses: the “doubt and fear” that leads individuals into safe, small lives in “huddling valleys,” and the drive to ascend to something greater, to “the billowy wind-swept hills” from which one can see the world more broadly. He left no doubt that he had resolved that tension for himself: “Ah! Let me climb my little hill, / And make achievement own my will. / Let all the lowland mark me high, / And praise me once before I die.”2

  Harry prefaced his poem with a quotation from “Henry W. Luce”: “Too often we fear the greater vision.” It was an appropriate inscription, because the shape of Harry’s aspirations owed much to those of his father—a similarly driven man who had committed himself to a kind of life that, in his own youth, had attracted many ambitious men hoping for greatness and glory. The elder Harry was deeply spiritual. But he also coveted the worldly rewards associated with his missionary calling and agonized over his frequently thwarted ambitions. He never achieved his dream of being elected to the presidency of Shantung Christian University. Once it moved to the new campus at Tsinan that his fund-raising had made possible, his hopes were thwarted by rivalries between the British and American missionaries and between Presbyterians and Baptists. But his hopes were also dashed by the very intensity of his own ambition and the abrupt, confrontational style he sometimes adopted when his own plans and visions faced opposition. He recognized this flaw in himself (“I have been hyper-critical and antagonistic where it was not vitally necessary…. I have possibly ‘felt’ too deeply often more than the occasion called for”). And he was perceptive enough to see in his son some of the same tendencies and to warn him against them. (“It is the kind and unselfish man who attracts…. People like to be agreed with.”) Rev. Luce’s own ambitions did not subside, however, and for the rest of his own active life he strove for advancement within his world and suffered from the animosities his aggressive personality sometimes aroused.3

  Harry agonized over his father’s disappointments, but he gave no evidence of absorbing their cautionary lessons. The problems in Tsinan and Beijing, he always insisted, were a result of the pettiness and selfishness of others, not of any flaw in his father’s own behavior. (“I fear me there is trouble in the State of Denmark,” he wrote in response to his father’s penitent description of his own flaws. “Perhaps the cause of Christian missions has enlisted more rotten eggs than its heroes can make up for!”) For a time he at least claimed to want to follow the missionary path himself, perhaps to vindicate his father’s struggles through his own future triumphs. “I know that [the missionary life] is the most honourable calling in the world,” he wrote his father from Hotchkiss. And while he confessed to be pondering other paths for himself, he continued to insist that he was not “aiming at rather paltry ambition for the chances are 99 to 1 that I become a prof (!) in S.C.U. I have now no greater ambition than to be of use in the Foreign Field.”4

  But despite his very real admiration for the career his father had chosen, Harry was already charting another course for himself, one no less ambitious and, in his view at least, no less likely to provide him with an opportunity to add value to the world. “I am just about coming to that stage,” he wrote shortly before leaving Hotchkiss, “when the world of fact and of ideas is intensely interesting. And I hope that I may attain one thing: ‘to wear life as a mantle.’ Until one can do that, I believe no man can really be said to live.” The best route to “the world of facts and ideas,” he was rapidly coming to believe, was journalism. He had already decided to enter the arduous competition for a place on the Yale Daily News. But even more significantly, he had arranged—entirely on his own—to spend the summer working for a small newspaper in central Massachusetts, the Springfield Republican, “perhaps the most famous paper in the country for its size.” It had an impressive history, edited in the nineteenth century by Samuel Bowles, a founder of the Republican Party, a strong antislavery advocate, and a leading liberal of his time. The twentieth-century Republican, small as it was, aspired to sustain its illustrious history. The paper had hired him to work in its business office, which would, he said, “offer limitless possibilities for experience, and that, as varied as possible, is what I’m after.” But he hoped over time “to creep into the reportorial department somehow.”5

  The summer began poorly. Springfield was a place “where I really don’t know any one,” Harry lamented, and he was sometimes almost paralyzed by loneliness. He took a room in the YMCA and spent most evenings there by himself, reading, writing letters to his family, and fighting “severe attacks of the ‘blues.’” At the Republican he was assigned to the subscription desk alongside two other young men who, unlike him, depended on the jobs for their livings and feared he would take their places. The work was menial and repetitive (“a great deal of entering, checking, noting, billing, etc. etc.,—which makes it quite overpoweringly complicated for a beginner”), precisely the kind of work on which Harry had always had difficulty concentrating, as his run-ins with Buehler at Hotchkiss had demonstrated. Even so, he tried to make a virtue out of the experience. “Now red-tape is all right for men like Dickens to harangue against,” he wrote his parents, “but a certain amount of it is very necessary,—and woe betide the poor ass that so much as tangles the silken cord by one small strand.” As the days and weeks wore on, however, his lack of fitness for clerical work became ever clearer. “I don’t seem to be progressing at all well in my office work. I keep on making ‘error’ after ‘error,’” he noted after his first six weeks on the job. The work was a “grind,” he complained, “babyish” and “boring.” And the indulgence of his supervisors, who consistently took responsibility for his mistakes, only deepened his unhappiness.6

  Eventually, however, Harry found himself drawn into the larger work of the newspaper, and his spirits rose accordingly. He did no actual reporting, but he began accompanying reporters as they worked on their stories, and was recruited at times to help rewrite copy. “I am learning lots of things, that one takes for granted that everybody knows, but which, I guess, very few do know,” he told his parents. “I never saw a cell before. I never spoke to a prisoner. I never saw a brave tear-stained mother come to bail out her son, held on sure charge of forgery. These things reveal the Christ who said, ‘I came not to the righteous.’” He was awestruck by the reporters who befriended him, envious of their free-and-easy way with strangers (a talent he himself would never master), and mesmerized by their self-serving descriptions of their profession. He was particularly impressed by one of the Republican’s “star reporters,” who had traveled with Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson and who, Harry recounted, “broke away from his taciturn self the other day, and said ‘Damn it all, anyway, even if I do say it, there’s not a game on the face of the earth that requires more manhood of every kind than the reporting game. There’s hardly a firm in this city, respectable or otherwise, that I don’t know a good deal about. And not one of them takes the physical, intellectual or nervous energy that a man simply must put into the reporting business, if he doesn’t want to quit at it.’” Once in a while Harry even managed to write small “notices” of his own and slip them by the city editor. He excitedly cut them out and sent them home to China.7

  By the end of the summer he was filled with admiration for the people he had met at the Republican, and filled also with pride at his own performance there. “Have had fine experience,” he reported as he prepared to leave Springfield. “Feel like I could run a paper!!!” And he was more than ever attracted now to the world of journalism. “I believe that I can be of greatest service in journalistic work,” he wrote his parents late in August, “and can by that way come near
est to the heart of the world…. Having made this absolute statement at last—have I met with your approval?” By the time he received their guardedly positive response, he was a student at Yale.8

  The Yale Harry encountered in the fall of 1916 was a very different place from the college his father had entered twenty-eight years earlier. For one thing it was more secular. The evangelical fervor that had inspired the Student Volunteer Movement and that had made conspicuous piety a common and respected characteristic of college life in the 1880s was now spent. Religion had become a routine but far from fervent part of student culture. Harry’s own faith was almost certainly stronger than that of most of his classmates, but he usually gave scant evidence of it. “All this publicity of Christianity, this carrying Christ around in public like a circus side-show, is highly repulsive to me,” he wrote after a first meeting at Dwight Hall, a campus religion center. “And young men that talk too much about the man Jesus—I wonder, do they know of what they talk, or are they only religiously drunk?” The “fervid Xianity [Christianity]” of the meeting, he added, “has completely alienated my friend Brit Hadden from its holy halls.”9

  Yale was also a very different place academically from what it had been a generation before. Like colleges and universities across the nation, it had transformed itself in response to the burgeoning of new scholarly interests, which were, in turn, arising out of the rapid social and economic development of the United States. No longer were American colleges simply finishing schools for gentlemen, educating them in the classics, theology, and languages. They were becoming training grounds for the professions and the new economy. They were offering instruction in the social sciences and the natural sciences alongside the traditional disciplines. Faculties were organizing into “departments,” and many universities, Yale among them, were now offering graduate degrees. Although traditional requirements remained, there were now also many new choices open to undergraduates—including the choice of concentrating in an area of knowledge of particular interest or value to the individual student.

  For all the changes, however, Yale remained a small and fairly provincial college, drawing students mainly from the social and economic elites of the Northeast and the industrial Midwest. And despite the modernity of much of its new curriculum, the character of student life was much as it had been in the 1880s. The great badges of achievement were not academic honors. As at Hotchkiss, success at Yale came from such things as playing varsity football, heeling the Daily News, winning election to the board of the literary magazine, and gaining admission to the prestigious clubs and senior societies that dominated the social life of the campus. Owen Johnson’s classic novel, Stover at Yale, published in 1912, provided a mostly accurate picture of life in New Haven in 1916. From the moment they arrived, ambitious students were encouraged to succeed by “working for Yale” and striving for the distinctions that campus activities offered. “You may think the world begins outside of college,” an upperclassman explained to Dink Stover his first night on campus. “It doesn’t; it begins right here,” in the struggle to get in with “the real crowd,” to become “one of the big men in the class.” “The immediate goal was to be regarded as a success by your friends … to be known as the big men,” recalled Henry Seidel Canby, who had graduated from Yale a few years before Harry arrived and later served briefly as an instructor in English there before becoming a distinguished magazine editor. These were things Harry already knew, having come from a school almost all of whose graduates went on to Yale. He also knew what Stover had to be taught: that the most important badge of success at Yale was election to one of the elite senior societies—and above all to the most prestigious of them, Skull and Bones.10

  Harry wanted to combine serious academic work with the many nonacademic temptations of the university. And as at Hotchkiss, he was determined to excel at everything. But the balance of his interests had subtly changed. His first priority—which he had articulated many months earlier while still in Lakeville—was to heel the News and win election to its board. But because heeling the News was an exceptionally intense and time-consuming experience (the heelers “slept never more than four hours a night … and were rusticated or sent to the infirmary by the dozens,” Canby recalled), he worried about its possible impact on his academic work. “It certainly is very hard to decide just what one ought to do,” he wrote his parents months before his arrival in New Haven. “Theoretically, if it came down to an issue between Phi Beta Kappa and the News, I would take the former.” That was what he knew his parents wanted to hear. Even in writing them, however, he could not leave it at that. “But if, practically, a key and a News charm were laid before me now, I am afraid my hand would almost unconsciously grasp the latter.” The “best policy,” he decided, was to concentrate on the News in his freshman year, “then to go after Phi Beta K and the Lit Board in sophomore and junior years.” He had elaborate rationalizations for his choice: “Success will mean prestige and chance for influence,” he predicted, as well as money (since members of the News board shared in the paper’s modest profits). And since his goal was a life in journalism, “I do not see how it can help helping me.”11

  By the time he got to New Haven the rationalizations and negotiations were behind him, and he was ready to jump into the fray. “Already the race is on,” he wrote after his first few days on campus, before classes or any other activities had begun. “The goals must soon, or never, be chosen, and the quest begun.” Almost single-mindedly he set out to conquer the News. Several of his friends from Hotchkiss were doing the same, but from the beginning he knew his greatest competition would come from Brit Hadden, both because of Hadden’s prodigious talent and because Brit was at least as determined as Harry was. News heelers earned points for writing stories, offering story ideas, selling advertising, and doing chores around the paper. Harry and Brit (both of whom had experienced a similar heeling process at Hotchkiss, modeled on Yale’s) spent almost every spare moment in the News building, as if fearful that any absence would give their competitors an edge. Brit often got out of bed in the middle of the night to put a reporting “scoop” in the News box, so that it would be the first thing the editors would find in the morning. Harry often stayed in the building until late at night helping with the writing and editing, even cleaning up.12

  Harry was awed at times by the intensity of the News competition. He had entered it with extraordinary apprehension (“All I ask is strength and ability to stick out to the end!”), and he moved through it almost as if in a dream. His moods swung up and down with every minor achievement and every small setback. At one moment he despaired of making the paper at all, the next he predicted he would finish the competition in first place. In the fever of his ambition, he was already calculating not just what would happen in his freshman year but who would be elected chairman of the News almost three years later. Heeling, he said in a moment of optimism, “is a very holy and wonderful piece of complicated machinery,” which “serves very well.” In lower moments he complained that his competitors were taking unfair advantage of a fallible system. “This heeling business is awful,” he wrote at one point, “and you can’t imagine how depressing it is.” Most of all he obsessively calculated where he stood in the competition—now fourth, then second, later third, from time to time first—all these predictions based on nothing but his own uninformed and subjective judgments.13

  Finally, in March, the great announcement came: Harry was one of four first-year students elected to the News. He had come in third, behind Brit and one other Hotchkiss classmate. But for the moment, at least, he seemed not to care about anything but his appointment. “Successful,” he wrote his parents in a one-word telegram to China, and they of course understood immediately what it meant. (“It is too splendid for words!” his mother wrote back.) For the next few weeks Harry basked in the glow of his triumph. “The bright sun and wind of a March afternoon sweep leisurely through my room,” he wrote a few days after the election. “No more, as on other M
ondays, the blind mad rush of heeling, not again as in that last Monday, the intolerable suspense; but now assurance, quiet leisure, duty and pleasure.” He was, for once, almost smugly self-satisfied—the raging ambition that made him so chronically and methodically hyperactive through most of his life suddenly, if briefly, quelled: “My position in college, in so far as I can make it is made. I have come to Rome, and succeeded in the Roman circus. Now there is for me free rein to enjoy over three years of philosophy, history, and poetry. So I hope to be able to say at the end of this college course with Johnson: ‘The days of thought were the goodly days.’” 14