The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  They soon began an extended if at first somewhat guarded correspondence, to which Harry was by far the more frequent contributor. Unaccustomed to the rituals of courtship, Harry apparently made various social blunders, for which he periodically wrote long, erudite apologies. He was frequently on the defensive against what he called Lila’s “powers of psycho-analysis” and her complaints that he was not sufficiently open about his “inner feelings.” He once sent her a cartoon from Punch, which he evidently considered appropriate to their relationship; titled “Psycho-Analysis, or The New Game of Laying Bare One’s Inmost Soul,” it portrayed a young couple in evening clothes sitting on a sofa—the woman looking searchingly at her partner waiting for some emotional revelation, the young man sitting rigid, his hands on his knees, his eyes wide with terror. At one point, in Paris, Harry left flowers for Lila at her hotel, with a penitent note: “In the hope that violets are sufficiently impersonal.” But the petulance and the apologies were themselves something of a teasing ritual between two young people deeply attracted to each other without knowing each other very well. In the spring Lila—with her mother along as chaperone—came to Oxford as his guest for polo matches and a dance at Magdalen College. (“The shock of coming down to earth has been too exhausting,” he wrote her in London a day or two after she left Oxford.) He made no mention of her in his letters home.55

  Harry’s year at Oxford—and more significantly the extensive European traveling he did during the course of it—made a very different impression on him than had his earlier European journey in 1913. Then, as a young boy traveling alone and living penuriously, he had marveled at the artistic splendor and rich history of the first Western countries he had seen since his childhood trip to America. Now, as a young man—traveling on the Continent as often as he could during the long vacations between the Oxford terms, moving portentously through embassies and aristocratic homes in the company of wealthy friends—he judged everything in comparison with the United States, and (except for England itself, for which he had developed a typical upper-class American admiration) found almost every place wanting in contrast. Rome, he noted, was still striking for its storied magnificence, but it was also notable for the squalor of its politics—wholly “bourgeois,” having “nothing whatever to do with society, which consists of decayed nobility.” Rome’s splendor was in the past, he concluded, and “one realizes that magnificence is now of America. May it prove to be a moral and spiritual magnificence.” For the rest of his life Harry was an avid overseas traveler, and his year abroad after Yale remained, in a way, a prototype for the kind of journeys he would later routinely make—in the careful planning for maximum comfort; in the expectation of lavish attention from diplomats and local elites; and in the energetic pursuit of new sights and experiences. He also displayed a newly dismissive contempt for the “filthy,” “crooked,” and “backward” cultures he encountered, which he judged by rigid Western standards as objects for improvement and elevation.56

  Through it all he was pondering his future, in ways that revealed a wavering from his earlier firm resolve to enter journalism. He was, he insisted, still committed to entering “public life,” perhaps as a journalist but also perhaps as a writer or a politician. (He was even then beginning to write essays designed for publication in such American magazines as Harper’s and the Atlantic and was sending them timidly across the Atlantic under a pseudonym, so that rejections—which he consistently received—would not damage his reputation.) But having spent so much time with much more affluent friends and their families, he was naturally becoming more aware of the significance of wealth. To his parents he was apologetic about his growing interest in what he called, only half jokingly, “dirty sordid money,” but he did not back away from his determination to make some. He would, he said, consider spending the next ten years working in business (most likely manufacturing) “until I can get to the point where money will mean nothing to me.” And he was already in correspondence with Mrs. McCormick—old, ailing, but still very fond of Harry—about the possibility of a job in the family firm, International Harvester, when he returned from Europe—a possibility, given its source, that he came to consider a virtual certainty.57

  His last weeks at Oxford—weeks when degree candidates were absorbed with exams but during which the departing Harry had no responsibilities—were a time of idyllic leisure, interspersed with attendance at crew races, polo matches, and other Oxonian social events. “Everything goes along monotonously happy. I am playing tennis every afternoon…. Doing practically no serious work but read as the spirit moves me.” He might, he said, begin work at Harvester on August 1 or—if his social life in America replicated the life he had built in England—“loaf all of August” and begin in September. Brit Hadden, he reported as he prepared to sail, might move to Chicago as well, “which will be mighty lucky for me. We would share digs, etc. That lad is really quite tremendous.”58

  IV

  “The Paper”

  Brit Hadden did not move to Chicago that year. He returned to New York after a summer of traveling and went to work for the prestigious New York World, a job he got by marching into the editor’s office and stating that he needed experience at a good newspaper to prepare himself for starting his own. But Luce was not really much interested in what Hadden was doing in any case. He had other plans, centered on the promise of a job and, perhaps more important, the promise of romance.

  The job at International Harvester proved chimerical. Shortly after his arrival in Chicago, in the midst of the severe recession of 1921, he went to the office of Mrs. McCormick’s son Harold, the president of the company. According to Luce’s own later accounts, one of the McCormick executives told him that, given Mrs. McCormick’s interest, he could have a job if he wanted one, but that someone currently on the payroll would have to be fired to make room for him. “Of course I don’t want you to fire anyone,” Harry remembered replying. The story is certainly plausible. But it is also consistent with Luce’s earlier explanations of thwarted ambitions—most notably his failure to win the chairmanship of the Yale Daily News, which he also claimed to have selflessly abandoned in the interests of others.1

  Luce soon found another, less lucrative job, on the Chicago Daily News. The News was, in the eyes of the city’s prosperous middle class, the “respectable” paper in town—without the egomaniacal flamboyance of Col. Robert McCormick’s Tribune or the Hearstian populism of the Herald-Examiner. But the Daily News was hardly the sober guardian of standards that its defenders liked to believe—as Luce soon discovered when he was assigned to work as an assistant to the popular columnist Ben Hecht, who later became a successful playwright and screenwriter. He was perhaps best known for the play, and later film, The Front Page, which he wrote with Charles MacArthur—a classic, if romanticized, portrayal of life in a Chicago newsroom.

  Hecht was only four years older than Luce, but he had already developed the crusty style of a grizzled newspaperman. His column, “A Thousand and One Afternoons,” consisted of colorful and often sentimental stories about ordinary Chicagoans. And while Hecht did not invent the stories—there was always a real event at the core of his column—he had no inhibitions about embroidering and enhancing reality. Luce’s job was to find a nugget of truth, an offbeat story or event, on which Hecht could base his flights of fancy. The relationship was apparently not a successful one, and it lasted little more than a month. Hecht was condescending toward his assistant. Luce was privately contemptuous of the column he was helping Hecht create. After a few weeks they parted ways.2

  Years later Hecht claimed to have fired Luce for incompetence. But Luce did not leave the paper when he left the column, which casts some doubt on Hecht’s self-serving account. Luce joined the general news staff (moving, he later claimed, because both Hecht and his editor decided he was too talented to be Hecht’s legman). He worked for a while as a junior reporter, scouring police stations, the courts, and the streets for news. His occasional stories were not invented
or embroidered, but they were sometimes as idiosyncratic as Hecht’s column had been. Among his published pieces were an account of a millionaire tossing money to a crowd in front of his hotel, a description of a Russian pianist giving a concert from a rowboat in Lincoln Park, a story about a religious group that had declared playing baseball a crime. He remained frustrated by what he considered the triviality of his assignments and by his lack of greater progress at the paper. “I haven’t shown any brilliance,” he wrote desolately to his parents (describing what he called his “fatuous existence”), “yet apparently the work has been satisfactory.” Even that did not last very long, however. The Daily News was no more immune to the postwar recession than was International Harvester, and it began laying off employees in the fall of 1921. Luce, among the most recently hired, was one of the first to go. “It was a pretty bad blow,” he confessed to his mother, but he took some comfort from the assurances he received from his editors that his work had been “thoroughly satisfactory” and that they would gladly hire him again if they could. “I don’t suppose it really means I have failed,” he concluded, “but just that I haven’t been anything out of the ordinary.”3

  Once more without a job, he “went back to the conclusion I had come to in England”—that he should find a position in business and ensure his financial security. But the bleak recession winter was not a good time to be looking for work anywhere. He wrote Harold McCormick again asking about the possibility of a place at International Harvester, but there were still no jobs. He made the rounds of other Chicago businesses but found only more discouragement. As he always did when he sensed defeat, he tried to distance himself from his failure and took refuge in “philosophy.” He was, he insisted, not really interested in “worldly things,” and he was determined to wait before committing himself to any specific future. He expressed pity for Harold McCormick, whose path in life had been predetermined and who thus had “never had a chance.” And he insisted, perhaps somewhat too emphatically, that “I regret nothing.” He also took comfort in what he considered his great achievements at Yale. “What has been can never be destroyed. It is treasure laid up in heaven, and perhaps all I shall ever be able to claim there. And I am determined that no action of mine in the future shall cast a shadow upon the brightness of the past.” By the end of the year he was considering moving back to Manhattan, where his parents were living temporarily. But there was, he told his mother, “something that may keep me away from New York”: That “something” was Lila Hotz.4

  Harry and Lila’s infatuation with each other had been sustained primarily by letters until they found themselves together in Chicago. In the nine months between their first meeting in Rome and their reunion in Chicago, they had spent a total of little more than a week in each other’s company. Now that they were in the same city, they had their first chance to spend extended time together—although it was carefully bounded by the proprieties of Chicago society and the strict chaperon-age to which, even at age twenty, Lila was still mostly subject. For Harry the relationship was dazzling not just because of his feelings for Lila, but because of the glamorous social world to which it gave him entrée. Lila’s family was wealthy, well connected, and socially prominent, and Harry found himself drawn into a swirl of parties, balls, dinners, and other events in the busy Chicago and Lake Forest social scenes. Modestly subsidized by the now-ailing Mrs. McCormick, he acquired some expensive clothes, hats, and even a slightly foppish walking stick. For a short time he sported a fashionable mustache. (Returning once to the Daily News building in the evening to retrieve a book he had left behind—dressed for Lake Forest, walking stick in hand—he entered an elevator with the editor in chief, Henry Justin Smith, who looked him over and said sardonically, “Ah, Luce, a journalist I see.”)5

  Sometime in October, having previously said almost nothing to his parents about Lila, he wrote his mother a “personal line” on a subject he thought would be “of some interest to you.” He was seeing “the young woman,” he said, “about every other day, with the result that I am in no condition to have the custody of my own person and am totally irresponsible for any of my actions.” This was his first serious relationship, and he did not yet trust himself to succeed at it, particularly given his own penury and his fear (which turned out to be justified) that Lila’s mother would oppose their relationship because she believed Harry to have inadequate social or financial standing. And so he tried to prepare himself, as he often did, for disappointment. “I don’t dare look ahead,” he told his mother (after cautioning her not to say anything about Lila to his father, whose disapproval he still feared above all else). “I suppose the crash is bound to come, but it’s just too awful to think of. At present, everything is ok, in fact, magnificent, because, as I say, I just don’t think.”6

  As their relationship deepened, Harry and Lila managed to find more time to themselves—on weekends, when they spent afternoons alone in the garden or in a sitting room at Lila’s home, or occasionally in the evenings, when they went alone to a restaurant or club for dinner. At some point that fall they proclaimed their love for each other, and Harry asked Lila to marry him. She was not ready to accept. She still had some “reservations” about their relationship, she told him, but had “great trust” in his ability to “work things out.” Harry claimed to be puzzled. “I did not absorb a very accurate understanding of these reservations,” he wrote her. “I hope you will explain them more formally.” But he almost certainly sensed that they were related to his straitened economic circumstances, which still made him seem an inappropriate match to Lila’s socially ambitious family (and perhaps to Lila herself). Speculating in a letter to Lila about the continuing uncertainty in their relationship, he suggested coldly that perhaps “it was unfortunate that I should have allowed myself to become interested in you since you would never marry such an impecunious nobody, even if I should succeed in making myself fairly agreeable, which apparently I have not altogether done.” But at other moments he expressed real pain. “Do you think I wanted to fall in love with you or anybody?” he asked, recalling his earlier and now abandoned determination to lead a single life. “Don’t you know how I tried to kid myself out of it? … Can’t you imagine how … I almost cheered when first it occurred to me that perhaps $1,000,000 stood between us, and how I almost praised God for such a thoroughly practical, sensible world? And—don’t you see?”7

  One reason being laid off at the News came as such a blow to him was the threat it posed to his hopes of marrying Lila. It was also because the sense of professional failure it produced in him was in such contrast to the intoxicating social world he was simultaneously inhabiting. He yearned for the wealth that he saw around him. “How I should love to have an ancestral home where I could bring you,” he confessed. “I have never wanted this kind of thing before.” He even began to regret, even slightly to resent, his father’s choice in going to China and “giving up all that America offered.” This was, he said, “the only bitterness my heart has felt, that I have not the things I should love to give you.”8

  At this dark moment, with Luce wrestling with his desire for Lila and his fear of failure, lifelines suddenly appeared. He accepted a verbal offer of a job with a machine-manufacturing firm in New York, despite Lila’s unhappiness about his leaving Chicago. He no doubt concluded that he would have a better chance of winning her if he was employed in New York than unemployed in Chicago. But before he could begin the new job, Brit Hadden wrote him to relay an offer to the two of them to go to work on the Baltimore News, part of a chain of newspapers owned by the legendary Frank Munsey, the longtime publisher of the popular Munsey’s Magazine. The jobs had been arranged for them by their Yale classmate and fellow Skull and Bones member Walter Millis, who was already working there. They would be paid forty dollars a week (far more than either of them had made at their previous newspapers), he wrote excitedly to Lila, and they would “circulate in all departments of the newspaper, with practically a guarantee that inside of a yea
r we will be minor officers at $4,000 a year. They are crazy to get us.” They would also have a chance, Hadden reminded Luce, to work on what they both were now calling “the paper,” the magazine they still dreamed of starting. Luce wavered at first about taking the Baltimore job, but Hadden—“furious at me” for not being as enthusiastic as Brit was—finally persuaded him that it was a “good gamble,” and he accepted the position. Hadden had already quit his dreary job at the World, where he had been toiling on such stories as “Sugar Bowl Made Lump on Her Head,” and “Cuts Wife Silk Hose for Use as Socks.” He had spent previous months working on a tramp steamer. Like Luce, he was ready for a challenge.9

  Suddenly filled again with self-confidence, Luce wrote his former editor at the Daily News that he was leaving “the grand army of the unemployed” for a job he made clear was considerably better than the one he had lost. He was, he said with mock regret, ignoring Smith’s advice to “get out of newspapers.” “What makes it worse,” he cockily added, “is that two of us are showing signs of pernicious insanity and will probably undertake a new publishing venture in a few months.” In a tentative postscript, however, he revealed his lingering professional anxiety: “I suppose I am not under any obligation to explain to Mr. F. Munsey’s representatives that I was ‘fired’ from the News. If you think I am, will you please let me know?”10

  Luce spent no longer in Baltimore than he had in Chicago. Except for his separation from Lila, however, it was a much happier experience. The work at the Baltimore News was in fact not very challenging. He and Hadden were the junior reporters on the staff, and they were again covering the least-appealing stories. But because he was once again working with friends, and because the Baltimore paper, unlike the Chicago one, was proud to have “college men” on the staff, he was much better treated and felt much more confident than he had been at the Daily News. “I did a totally unique story, rather impossible, but elicited favorable comment,” he wrote shortly after his arrival. “Interest shown in us is the main point.” A few days later he reported, “Nothing that either of us has written has been rejected…. We seem to be quite the pets of the office.” Luce and Hadden quickly developed a reputation as “star men” in writing features and (ironically, given Harry’s experience in Chicago) were asked to “try our hand at working up a ‘Ben Hecht’ series.”11