The story as Harry told it is revealing whether or not it is wholly accurate. It seems clear, first, that having lost the News competition, he had at least flirted with the compensatory idea of taking over another, if slightly less prestigious, campus publication—just as he had edited the Lit at Hotchkiss while Hadden edited the newspaper. It is also clear that, as with the News, it was important to him to be able to claim that he had in fact prevailed but had declined the position out of some combination of principle and self-interest. Most of all, however, the story demonstrates Harry’s desire to portray himself as a person of stature and authority, admired by his peers if at times resented by them for his talents, able quietly to curb their own excesses and steer them in the right direction. He had quelled a rebellion against Hadden at the News, he claimed, to ensure a smooth transition. He had turned down the chairmanship at the Lit to avoid a damaging controversy, and had dictated the choice of a responsible alternative. In this way he turned his liabilities into strengths, his failures into triumphs.
In spite of the elements of self-deception that lurk in these descriptions, Harry was in many ways unsparing in his assessment of himself. He knew that despite his prodigious intellectual talents, despite his formidable abilities as a writer and editor, he was somehow lacking in social skills—able to attract the respect but not usually the genuine affection of those around him. It was a failing that was particularly visible to him because it stood in such contrast to the great strength of his friend and rival. Hadden was a much less gifted scholar than Harry and perhaps no more talented as a journalist, but he used his charismatic affability to win genuinely loyal friends and admirers. Harry was often intimidating in his unrelenting gravity. Brit, by contrast, was relaxed, even somewhat flippant, gently derisive of those who seemed to him too serious. “Watch out, Harry, or you’ll drop the college,” Hadden once shouted mockingly at Luce, who was walking with grim purpose across a Yale quad. Harry was aware of this difference and at times was almost morbid in his descriptions of his tangled relations with his peers. In the anguished aftermath of the News election, for example, he described his relationships with Hadden in painfully cautious language: “I have the greatest admiration and affection for Brit, which in some measure at least, is reciprocated.”29
That these two close friends and colleagues were also very different from one another was not lost on their friends and classmates. They were almost constantly together, and they were also often at odds. “You never knew whether they were ready to fight or agree,” one of their classmates later recalled. Dwight Macdonald, who observed Hadden and Luce as a young Time Inc. writer in the late 1920s, described in retrospect the contrasts in their great friendship and rivalry:
Luce/Hadden: moral/amoral, pious/worldly, respectable/raffish, bourgeois/bohemian, introvert/extrovert, somber/convivial, reliable/unpredictable, slow/quick, dog/cat, tame/wild, efficient/ brilliant, decent/charming, Puritanical/hedonistic, naive/cynical, Victorian/ 18th Century.
Almost all of these comparisons, in Macdonald’s view at least, favored Hadden. Having been on the losing end of most of their competitions, and knowing how much more successful Brit was in making friends and securing allies, Harry almost surely sensed, but never admitted, that he was to some extent the junior partner of their collaborations. But no one could doubt the bond between them, a closeness greater than either man ever experienced with anyone else outside his own family.30
Harry sometimes gave himself less credit than he deserved in his own comparisons between himself and Hadden (and many of his other friends). He was especially different from them in his rejection of the cynicism and detachment that would become hallmarks of his generation’s intellectual elite, which were already visible in the culture of the Yale of his time. Harry was unapologetically a man of conviction, principle, and faith; and while he understood the social cost of his seriousness and tried at times to mute it, he was far too preoccupied with the moral basis of his actions to disguise his real self for very long. Running through his own commentary on his triumphs and setbacks, his elation and his disappointments, is a consistent return to the question he had learned from his father always to ask himself: What “higher purpose” was he serving?
In the early months of 1918 that was a relatively easy question to answer—supporting and promoting the war. For by then, with the United States fully engaged in combat, it was no longer possible for Yale—or virtually any other institution in America—to sustain its casual, genteel approach to preparing for combat. War fervor was reaching a high pitch throughout the United States, driven in part by energetic government propaganda and in part by spontaneous popular commitment to the conflict. That many Americans—socialists, pacifists, members of various ethnic groups, and others—continued to oppose the nation’s intervention in the war only drove supporters to greater levels of fervor. Seldom in American history had patriotism been so deliberately and effectively inflamed—and Harry, who had always been inclined to support the idea of an American mission in the world, eagerly embraced the passions of war.
A few months earlier he and Brit had been obscure sophomores, slogging away on the lower ranks of the News staff. Now, suddenly, they were in charge of the newspaper. And despite whatever tensions survived from their bruising battle for the chairmanship, they worked well together and turned the News into a powerful voice for intensifying the university’s—and, they hoped, the nation’s—engagement with the war. Among their innovations was a new section of the paper devoted to national and international news, which Hadden and Luce hoped would remind their readers of the great events of which they were a small part. But most of their stories and editorials were aimed at Yale matters. Harry, for example, exhorted Yale students to buy war bonds, not just as a way to contribute to the government’s coffers but “as a vigorous test of a man’s idealism.” He challenged the campus to turn a “search-light” on all its activities “and confess just what of its parts is justified as ‘war industry’ and just which of its parts are not so justified.” “We in college are attempting to our utmost capacity in our own lives,” he wrote, “to put the military first.” Yale, he insisted, was “at last ready to go to any extreme, ready to make any efficacious sacrifice in pursuit of our object.” It was rebuilding itself “on the only foundation upon which we many now worthily build … intelligent and consecrated and intensive patriotism.”31
Most of all he and Hadden defended and promoted the Yale officer-training units of which they and most of their classmates were a part. Outsiders might consider the all-Yale military unit—still training dutifully between classes in New Haven while so many others were already enlisted and in combat—a “pampered” or “effete” corps smacking of the “redolent plutocrat,” Harry wrote defensively; but it was nothing of the sort. “We have committed ourselves to a definite course of action. We have set our faces in the light. We have undertaken the quest.” When the navy offered some of the Yale trainees an opportunity to join a battleship cruise during Easter vacation, Harry cited it as “only one more illustration of the remarkable esteem in which the Yale Unit is held by the Navy Department.”32
Despite the increased intensity of military training on campus, the academic calendar continued to govern. The Yale ROTC unit closed down for a month in June 1918, and its members, Harry among them, dispersed for vacation. Harry joined his family—temporarily back from China—in New Jersey. It was an anxious few weeks, because his sister Elisabeth—and eventually his mother and his other siblings—were stricken by the deadly influenza epidemic of 1918–19 that, before it was done, killed more Americans than died in World War I (and more American soldiers than died in combat). The Luce family was fortunate. Everyone recovered, and Harry avoided the disease altogether. In mid-July he was back at Yale for more training. And a few weeks later he and seven other members of his ROTC troop (including Hadden) were shipped off to Camp Jackson, South Carolina—a mammoth army training base with a capacity for one hundred thousand men. The Yale tr
ainees were now themselves assigned to train new recruits as artillerymen.33
As “student officers” charged with preparing fresh recruits for battle, Harry and Brit came into prolonged contact for the first time with Americans from outside their own relatively insular social world—young men with limited education from the rural backwaters of the South, many of them away from their home counties for the first time in their lives. These “hillbillies,” as the Yale men called them, often knew nothing about the war. “All they knew,” Harry recalled years later, “was that Uncle Sam had somehow been insulted.” And so the officers, who were no older than their troops, not only had to train their men to operate artillery but also to give them lectures several times a week explaining the reasons for the war. “They were on the edge of their chairs,” Harry liked to remember, and they displayed an impressive “eagerness to do the right thing.” They did not even bridle when Harry explained to them the uses of a toothbrush, something many of them had never seen before.
The few months Harry and Brit spent at Camp Jackson occupy an important place in the considerable corporate mythology of Time Inc. Various official and quasi-official histories of the company claim that Luce and Hadden, struck by the eagerness of provincial people for knowledge of the world, decided at Camp Jackson to start a magazine or newspaper that would help educate the uninformed. They allegedly took long walks together during idle hours and began to imagine the new kind of journalism that would eventually transform the soldiers’ lives. That Luce and Hadden talked about a magazine at Camp Jackson is almost certainly true, but nothing in Harry’s writings at the time, or in his subsequent reminiscences, supports the claim that the people under their command had any impact on the way they thought about the venture. Nor did the subsequent history of his magazines, none of which targeted the kind of people he had encountered at Camp Jackson. Luce’s own accounts at the time say nothing about the magazine but describe how he plunged wholeheartedly into the world of the army—viewing it as he had viewed school and college, as an opportunity for achievement and distinction.34
Harry reported to his parents on his performance on military tests—math, geometry, languages—as if he were describing a semester at Hotchkiss. He searched eagerly for signs that the Yale unit was excelling. “The seven Yale men assigned here, even if I do say it, do pretty well on their job,” he wrote after his first weeks in camp. “Consequently we have little difficulty in making the best showing of any of the twelve batteries…. Several high officers have said that the progress made by this organization in the first twelve day period bests any they have seen. Consequently we are all very much elated.” The great dream of all the Yale men was to receive formal commissions, a dream thwarted at first by the requirement that all officers had to be at least twenty-one; none of Harry’s group was older than twenty. But a few weeks after their arrival in South Carolina the army lowered the age limit, and the Yale contingent was marched en masse (along with a great many other student officers) to a swearing-in ceremony. “You can scarcely [imagine what this] means to me and all the others,” he told his parents shortly before the event. “It will be the consummation of a great deal of hitherto unrecognized work. We have been college boys training! People that didn’t know probably laughed at our safe and sound uniforms. But, boy—if this goes through, and a third of the Yale R.O.T.C. is commissioned, it will make ’em sit up and take notice.” Harry and his friends immediately went into town and ordered custom-made officers’ uniforms from a local tailor.35
Harry complained occasionally about the rigors of camp life. When the officer trainees who had not received commissions were sent home, he described them as “lucky dogs.” On the whole, though, he embraced the military ethic with uncritical enthusiasm and strove to adapt himself to its demands. “In the army,” wrote the person who had spent a year and a half of the war living comfortably on the Yale campus when he was not away on vacation, “we thoroughly despise any young man who is able bodied, and who by his own choice gets into any kind of uniform but the line uniform. Even men who are doing the sine qua non jobs of the quartermaster department etc. etc. get a slant-eyed look. And as for any young man in a YMCA uniform,—well, of course, we are gentlemen enough not to smile.” Nothing now was more important than the war, which Harry—like many others—considered a battle for the survival of civilization and the defeat of German barbarism. Colleges “no longer exist,” he said, and “the one greatest thing to do now is to fight, with all the life one has, that the continuity of history toward the truth and the right of things shall be maintained. Everything else is subservient, or, if it does not serve this purpose, is simply to be annulled for the time being.” His ambition now was “to have my next birthday in France, wearing silver (1st Lieutenant!).”36
But Harry and the other Yale men did not go to France. For the next month or so they were shuttled back and forth from one camp to another, undergoing additional training themselves or helping to train others. “Words cannot begin to picture my disgust with the idea,” Luce complained. “Here’s a case where one has to ‘grin and bear it’ without there being anything to bear it for,—no principles at stake, no glory to achieve!” His frustration was all the greater because it was becoming clear that “peace is unquestionably at hand.” There was, he said, “not one of us that isn’t sorry he hasn’t seen France, not a one that wouldn’t almost sell his soul to go there tomorrow.” By late October, with the prospects of making it to the front becoming dimmer by the day, almost everyone in the Yale officer corps was becoming restless and bored, suddenly seeing the “infinitesimal details” of the artilleryman’s life not as a prelude to glory but as the tedious, mechanical process it actually was.37
The armistice found Harry, Brit, and the others in Louisville, en route to another training assignment. They spent three days staying in a downtown hotel, eating in restaurants, smoking cigars, reading, idling, and thinking about the future. Harry found it difficult to disengage all at once from the new military ambitions the war had inspired in him. He thought about entering an officers’ training program and winning a promotion before being discharged, and he even toyed briefly with becoming an officer in the regular army after the war. But in the end he left the military almost as quickly as he could (“I have absolutely lost all military ambitions,” he wrote at the time), less than a month after the armistice.38
He went immediately to New York, where he spent much of the Christmas holidays planning feverishly for his return to Yale. The competition for most of the positions in campus organizations was now over, but Harry had other unfulfilled ambitions: to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa and, most of all, to be tapped for the most prestigious of the Yale senior societies, Skull and Bones. He set out to accomplish them both in the remaining semester of his junior year.39
The Yale to which he returned in January 1919 was, he once lamented, “a very poor place in which to get educated.” That was in part because the university had not recovered from its wartime disruptions. Many faculty members had yet to return from military service; the campus was crowded with returning veterans, some of whom had been away for two, even three years, and others—like Harry—for only a few months. But Harry was also commenting on what he considered, despite Yale’s many efforts at modernization, a narrow and inadequate curriculum. Henry Seidel Canby later described it as “the college of the catalogue…. One of the most irrational and confusing educational institutions the world has ever seen … [whose] handicap was the lack of a real education.” “I suppose it is natural,” Harry once commented, “that by junior year one begins to realize that the importance of American college life lies in its possibilities for friendship.” He expressed high regard for the celebrated honors course he took with the historian Max Farrand. On the whole, however, he did his academic work dutifully, without great excitement, complaining occasionally about the “monotony” but determined to excel nevertheless. Late in the semester he was rewarded with election to Phi Beta Kappa.40
Nothing, however, was remotely as important to him by now as “going Bones,” the one mark of success that almost everyone at Yale recognized—the one sure sign of having, in Owen Johnson’s words, “won out at the end.” The chairmanship of the News might have meant more to him a year before, but once he had failed to win that prize the possibility of Skull and Bones came to seem all the more important—and thus, as with all his other goals, a subject of almost obsessive contemplation and calculation. Everything he did, he assumed, would be watched by those who would judge his worthiness. When he flirted with taking the chairmanship of the literary magazine, he conferred with a member of the faculty about the possible implications of such a move on his prospects for Skull and Bones. His enthusiasm for the contest diminished considerably when the professor warned him that the Lit chairmanship would likely disqualify him from consideration, that the post was considered too remote from the “grand old Yale” of the senior societies to impress the Bones men.
At the Yale prom in February 1919, the great social event of the year, Harry—still without any significant experience with women—was accompanied by his sister Emmavail and preoccupied about the impression he would make. “The Prom affair, you know, is where social aristocracy does its best to rule,” he wrote his mother, “and it’s all an outsider can do to maintain his status quo.” But even maintaining his status quo as a respected but not socially eminent member of his class required great vigilance. As a result he carefully scrutinized the invitations he received and the names on his dance card, trying to judge what they said about his standing and what they would convey about his taste. He was incensed when one of the campus fraternities failed to invite him to its preprom tea (even though all seven of the others did); and for the prom itself, he took care to see that he would be seen dancing only with prestigious guests. “My Prom dance card is absolutely ‘O.K.,’” he tried to assure himself. “There are about three undesirables on the program, but I have secured the services of stags to ‘cut in’ before the undesirables get very far.” His preoccupation with Skull and Bones seemed to have blinded him to his own unkindness.41
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century Page 10
