Others were encouraging and at least generous enough to lend their names to two earnest young men trying to get started, although they too could sometimes shake Luce’s and Hadden’s confidence. They paid a frustrating visit to Robert Underwood Johnson, former U.S. ambassador to Italy, whom Luce described as insufferably pompous, talking interminably about himself, unwilling to listen to their plans for the magazine, but ultimately agreeing to endorse the project nevertheless. Luce visited Cyrus Curtis—the famously successful publisher of the Saturday Evening Post. Curtis was aloof and condescending, unwilling to lend his name to the magazine, but he ultimately offered vaguely encouraging advice. Such were the perils of courting the rich and famous. Privately annoyed, Hadden and Luce were publicly polite and deferential. And they eventually won over a remarkable group of people. They attracted endorsements from academics: the presidents of Yale, Princeton, Williams, and Johns Hopkins, and the dean of Columbia College; the editor of the Literary Review (their old Yale instructor Henry Seidel Canby), the editor of the Springfield Republican (where Harry had worked during the summer after Hotchkiss), the editor of the New York World (where Brit had worked for a year after college), and Edward Bok, publisher of the Ladies’ Home Journal and other magazines, author of a renowned autobiography, now retired from business and “posing as the Medici of Philadelphia.” The editors of the Hartford Courant, the Century Magazine, and Harper’s also provided endorsements—but not, significantly, anyone at the New York Times, and not their former boss Frank Munsey. Walter Lippmann lent his support (“No American,” Luce said at the time, “has written more brilliantly during the last ten years on politics and government”). There were theologians (among them the Catholic archbishop of Baltimore, the dean of Riverside Church in New York, the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, the Presbyterian minister and diplomat Henry Van Dyke); financiers, secondary government officials, and a few people who were simply generically eminent—among them Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., son of the former president. The list of names was a centerpiece of the magazine’s first advertising circular, sent to five hundred thousand people in the spring of 1922.27
Raising the money was far more difficult. Luce and Hadden drew up a budget that required them to find one hundred thousand dollars in order to put out their first issue, after which, they believed, circulation and advertising revenue (and additional investors attracted by their presumed success) would keep them going. They started with nothing. Renting a tiny office in a converted town house on East Seventeenth Street with money borrowed from Hadden’s parents, living abstemiously at home, deferring salaries for themselves and for most of their tiny staff, they began by seeking funds from friends and their friends’ families, confident that they could quickly find ten wealthy acquaintances, each of whom would invest ten thousand dollars. But it was a frustratingly slow process, and the confidence Luce had expressed at the beginning (“we will … spend a week or 10 days amassing the necessary capital”) quickly evaporated. “Every day,” Luce wrote in May 1922, “we see one or more ‘rich young men’ with the idea of getting them to come in with us on a proposition in which we expect to give them a pittance and take all the rest ourselves.” (Their plan was to offer investors “preferred” stock, while retaining for themselves almost all the “common” stock, the only stock that conferred voting rights.) “On the face of it,” he confessed, “this is not the easiest job imaginable.” His mood was not helped by a meeting with a “smart young vice president down at Bankers Trust,” who “as much as called us a bunch of crooks” and insisted that their entire financial plan was unrealistic, verging on fraudulent. (In fact, their financial plan, although slightly unorthodox, was in no way illegal.) “This is an awful month,” he moaned. “If we fail, our name is simple M-u-d mud.”28
The frustrating process fueled Harry’s envy, bordering on resentment, of his contemporaries who had inherited great wealth—and particularly of those who refused to part with any of it to help his own cause. He took sardonic note of the lavish homes, the expensive cars, the polo matches, the smug self-satisfaction of the rich young men he visited. (He made the mistake of expressing his disdain in one of his late-night letters to Lila, a young woman entirely committed to the world of wealth, only to receive a sharp rebuke from her. Harry quickly backtracked: “Far from being opposed to ancestors and aristocracy, I am heartily in favor of them…. Far from looking askance at inherited wealth, I only wish to heaven that I had nothing to do on earth but to inherit wealth.”) And working so closely with Hadden, he also occasionally—and uncharacteristically—echoed some of Brit’s class-bound prejudices as well. “Bratch and I are going to Philly to-morrow to see Gimbel (Jew store),” he wrote in early June. A few days later he reported a “raid upon ‘Charlie’ Rosenbloom—the Jewboy we missed, stupidly, at Pittsburg [sic].”29
At meeting after meeting they encountered friendly but guarded receptions, which usually ended with expressions of goodwill but no willingness to invest. Even those who did agree to buy shares usually did so in small increments—five hundred dollars here, a thousand there. (“Of course, any loose change I have is yours,” one of their wealthy Yale friends said, somewhat condescendingly, when they asked him for support.) “It’s an awful strain on the nerves,” Luce wrote, “because one has to believe and believe and believe.” In reality the fund-raising was going badly only when measured by their own unrealistically optimistic projections. By early June, only a few weeks after they had begun searching in earnest for investors, they had raised twenty thousand dollars. “Not bad,” Harry confessed in a hopeful moment. In mid-June they received a five-thousand-dollar pledge—one of their largest so far—from their Yale friend Shorty Knox, a wealthy, polo-playing “S-v-g-” (“Savage,” the Skull and Bones epithet for a member of a rival Yale senior society). A few days later another Yale friend invited Harry to lunch and, unsolicited, offered one thousand dollars. Even so it was hard to maintain their confidence and optimism in the face of the “terrible grind and slow results.” “People are naturally very scarey,” he admitted, “about entrusting their hard earned cash to youngsters.” It was not, he confessed, “the easiest thing ever attempted by three unknown musqueteers.” It was harder still because he could not turn to his most reliable supporter, Nettie McCormick, who was now gravely ill. Harry, in desperation, wrote to his father, who was himself traveling the country in search of money, asking (in vain) for five hundred dollars for the magazine and for help in identifying other investors. He even guiltily hinted that he would not be displeased if his father asked Mrs. McCormick for help on his behalf. (There is no evidence to suggest that his father did any of these things.) “If I had only $1,000, I would put it all in,” he said. “So much so, that right now, at least, I wish I hadn’t gone to Oxford—although fundamentally, I suppose, the Oxford year is indirectly invested in the paper as it is.” Even decades later Luce looked back on “that business of raising the money” as “about the toughest, hardest, most discouraging work that I’ve experienced.”30
In the midst of this grueling process they received a surprising inquiry from the Independent—a once-distinguished journal of opinion, closely associated with Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, which was now floundering. The owners proposed that Luce and Hadden abandon their plans for a new magazine and take over the Independent instead. It would, they argued, be easier to raise money for an established publication than for a new one. “Of course, it is hard to resist the chance of stepping at our age into control of what has been a pretty famous and powerful publication,” Luce conceded. But after considering the Independent’s grim financial circumstances, they declined the offer. (The magazine declared bankruptcy a little over a year later.) Their own prospects did not seem much brighter than the Independent’s, but, Harry explained, “the best thing seems to be to keep lugging until we’re licked and we can stand a lot of licking yet. So carry on in hope is our motto.” By late July they had made modest progress—“38,000 in hand;” but that was stil
l far from the one hundred thousand dollars they believed they needed. They were, Harry said, “laying many traps, wires, and fences, and are not without hope of achieving our purpose.” But “not without hope” was far from the confidence they had once expressed, and both Hadden and Luce were spending many long nights worrying about failure.31
Suddenly, in August, their fortunes changed. At the suggestion of a friend, Harry rode up to the Yale Club for a meeting with a recent graduate, William Hale Harkness, class of 1922, and his wealthy mother, Mrs. William L. Harkness, hoping at best for a $5,000 investment. To his astonishment Mrs. Harkness pledged $20,000 to the magazine, and her son $5,000 more, which—when combined with other small investments they had recently accumulated—brought their total up to $65,000. Another $10,000 came quickly from two other members of the Harkness family. “That means,” an exultant Luce wrote, “that by the end of September at latest we will be capitalized. So the end of a very long and arduous and trying job is now at least within crying distance.” And while the last $25,000 proved even more difficult to raise than the first, they managed to push their total up to nearly $87,000 by late October, at which point they decided to move ahead. A few weeks later—as carpenters banged away in the new and larger offices they had rented at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-third Street—they filed the papers that would create their new company.32
It had been hard during the long months of collecting endorsements and money to focus on the magazine itself. But Luce and Hadden did work steadily, amid all their other efforts, at building a staff, refining and elaborating their plans, and—not least—finding a name.
Hadden and Luce always claimed that they had never intended to stick with “Facts,” the working title for many months of what they were half-mockingly calling between themselves “the world’s greatest magazine.” In the spring of 1922 they began to experiment with alternatives. For a while, they were attracted to “What’s What,” and they briefly considered such others as “Destiny,” “Chance,” and the “Synthetic Review.” But one spring morning Luce came into the office to propose another name. He had, he later said, been riding home on the subway the night before, exhausted and glassy eyed, mindlessly reading the advertising cards above the car windows. For some reason he focused on an announcement—“Time for a Change,” or something like it, he later recalled—and he became convinced that “Time” was the right title. Hadden immediately agreed, and they never reconsidered. “Time” was attractive to them because it captured something of the dual purpose of their enterprise—to chronicle the passage of time and to save readers precious time. “Take Time—It’s Brief,” was one of the early slogans they attached to their announcements of the new publication; “Time Will Tell” and “Time Is Valuable” were others. They also attached a pretentious Latin phrase (De omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis—“About all things knowable and some others”). “Time” was not a particularly original title. Newspapers all over the world called themselves the Times, and there had been an English magazine in the late nineteenth century named “Time,” which Luce and Hadden soon discovered and whose logo they used as the basis of the distinctive lettering in the title of their own magazine. They experimented with various subtitles, using such words as “chronicle” and “digest” and “weekly newspaper;” but they finally settled on a term of their own invention: “news-magazine.” (The hyphen disappeared in the late 1920s.) It reflected Hadden’s delight in creating new compound words and phrases.33
At first they worked virtually alone. Culbert Sudler, their Yale classmate and close friend, joined the staff early on and seemed briefly to be a third and almost equal partner. (He even lived for a time with the Luce family in Morningside Heights.) He was energetic, enthusiastic, and good at using his contacts to identify potential investors. But he was never able fully to commit himself to the venture, partly because of pressure from his family to find a more secure job, and partly because he simply could not keep up with Harry and Brit. “Cully is unfortunately not equal to the ‘present crisis,’ as has been shown during the past two weeks,” Harry wrote during one of the many discouraging moments of their first months in New York. In August, Sudler left to take a publishing job with Doubleday Page. Later, Luce and Hadden tried to recruit their friend Walter Millis, who had remained behind at the Baltimore News when they moved to New York. Millis, Luce believed, “had the best mind in Yale 1920” and was destined to be their “star writer.” But he, too, wavered at the prospect of committing himself to so uncertain a venture; and after changing his mind several times, decided finally to stay in Baltimore after the newspaper offered him a raise—“an affair doing him very little credit,” Harry complained angrily. “His defection simply means that more still depends upon the Bratch & me.”34
Gradually they moved beyond the circle of their Yale contemporaries—but not far beyond. The early staff of the magazine was drawn entirely from their own generation; almost none of their significant colleagues was older than they were. And it was also drawn almost entirely from their own social world—recent graduates of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, and Columbia, all of them, unsurprisingly, white male Protestants. “We didn’t hardly know anybody else,” Luce plaintively explained years later. For the most part Hadden and Luce did not question, or even really notice, what was in fact one of the most distinctive characteristics of their enterprise—its striking homogeneity. It seemed even less remarkable to them that the staff was virtually all male. They hired a few young women as secretaries (“stenos,” they called them), and Luce, at least, flirted at times with bringing in talented social acquaintances to do substantive work on the magazine—on the assumption that such women were likely bored and in need of something interesting to do. He wrote Lila at one point to see if one of her Chicago friends, then living in New York, might be interested in writing the music column for the magazine. And he once asked Lila herself if she would like to help with the religion section. Nothing came of either idea. Hadden and Luce had lived virtually their entire previous lives in all-male institutions—Chefoo (for Harry), Hotchkiss, Yale, the army, newspaper staffs. It rarely occurred to them, or to most other male professionals of their time, to question the absence of women from their offices.35
Their first important recruit after Sudler was Manfred Gottfried, an aspiring novelist, who had heard about the Luce-Hadden venture through the rumor mill at Yale, where he was a senior. He showed up one day in February at the office on East Seventeenth Street to find Harry and Brit alone in the room, sitting at matching, end-to-end desks under the window, an iron kettle between them to catch cigarette butts. Luce spoke energetically about their plans and grilled Gottfried about his modest experiences. Hadden, who was oddly shy with strangers, remained unsettlingly silent. A few days later Harry traveled up to New Haven to offer Gottfried the job, even if in a typically distracted way. He asked Gottfried to accompany him to see a tailor. Talking all the way, Luce finally made his proposal standing pantless in a shop stall while his trousers were being pressed. Gottfried (who soon became known within the office as “Gott” and who remained with the magazine for decades) immediately accepted and began work in October, several weeks before his salary was scheduled to begin. Eager and capable, he did everything from writing copy to fetching coffee. He even persuaded his father to invest one thousand dollars in the magazine.36
Not long after that they met Roy Larsen, a 1921 Harvard graduate and former business manager of the university’s literary magazine, the Advocate. He was trying to find a place in publishing in New York. Predictably his youth and limited experience did not open up very many important positions for him. His Harvard classmate John Cowles, son of the publisher of the Des Moines Register, offered him an attractive, low-level job in his father’s company. But before he could take it, Time stepped in. Luce and Hadden could provide far more senior positions within their nascent organization than someone of Larsen’s age could have expected anywhere else, and they took his undergraduate achievements more seri
ously than other employers would have done. They pursued Larsen aggressively, perhaps because they recognized something in him they badly needed. He was competent, certainly, but he also exuded an air of solidity, maturity, and competitive tenacity (“a grim but smiling terrier,” a colleague once described him) that, for all their self-confidence, they feared they still partly lacked. In a company staffed entirely by people in their early twenties, Larsen (although a year younger than Luce and Hadden) seemed the most securely adult. He turned down the job of advertising manager, but Harry and Brit went back to him and finally persuaded him to take charge of circulation, a job more to his liking. They even offered him a salary of forty dollars a week, more than they were paying themselves. In return they got a talented and energetic partner, who struggled to build a subscription base for a magazine no one had heard of and few understood, and who—next to Luce and his successors as editor in chief—would become the most important figure in the company until his death in 1979. Using multiple mailing lists and enthusiastically written circulars, Larsen managed to build up a base of about eight thousand subscribers before the first issue appeared—a disappointingly small number to Luce and Hadden, although even they occasionally had to confess that it was “not so bad for a group of whippersnappers.”37
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century Page 14
