The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  The covers themselves were only symbols of Time’s deeper commitment to the role of powerful people in history. The opening passage of every issue was an account of the president’s week, no matter how trivial his activities. Receiving tickets to a World Series game that the president had no intention of attending was as newsworthy as signing legislation. Accepting the honorary presidency of the Camp Fire Girls attracted as much attention as his consideration of American membership in the World Court. The trivia of a president’s vacation—leasing a country house, getting “caught in a sodden, drenching shower” during a walk, celebrating a son’s birthday—could occupy columns of text. Presidents were also, almost by definition, men of great virtue. Warren Harding, although “not a superman” like Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, was “important and successful as the embodiment of the American ideal of humility exalted by homely virtues into the highest eminence.” Coolidge, too, was a man of “genuine humility” and “flinty integrity,” who had developed a deep “kinship with his people.” Herbert Hoover, even at his lowest moments, was “a high-minded, able, industrious, conscientious individual who is devoted to his country, to the art of Government, to children,” with “unbounded faith in himself.” Only when Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House did Time begin to abandon its reverential tone.47

  Like many Americans the Time editors were fascinated by Mussolini and by his apparent success in bringing order and stability to the usually chaotic politics of Italy. He was, the magazine noted, the “all-powerful,” “virile, vigorous” “autocrat of all the Italians,” a “miniature Napoleon.” The fascination was often indistinguishable from admiration—something Time also shared with many Americans, including many fellow journalists, in the 1920s. Mussolini, Time wrote, was a man with “remarkable self control, rare judgement, and an efficient application of his ideas to the solving of existing problems.” He was a person “of high moral integrity with a magnetic personality.” Looking back over 1925, Time concluded that there was “no doubt” that Mussolini had “worked wonders for Italy in the last year,” and that he deserved “unstinted praise and congratulations.” Time was, however, far from the most admiring journalistic chronicler of Mussolini. The Hearst papers were highly sympathetic (“He is a marvelous man,” Hearst himself said after being flattered by Mussolini in an interview). The long-serving New York Times Rome correspondent, Anne O’Hare McCormick, consistently idealized him. The Saturday Evening Post ran idolatrous stories throughout the 1920s. Time gradually darkened its view of Mussolini in the late 1920s and beyond, as his regime grew more brutal and militaristic, but the magazine was never as appropriately critical in those years as were at least a few other journals, among them Hadden’s former employer the New York World.48

  While Mussolini frequently seduced the editors of Time, Stalin had no such effect. To be sure, Stalin was of great interest to Time, as all great and powerful men were. But in most cases the magazine had great difficulty concealing its contempt. Time’s view of the Soviet Union itself—unencumbered by almost anyone’s firsthand experience of Russia—was clouded in orientalist mystery. It was a “weird and mystic land, whose soul is steeped in the mysterious, the fire of whose eyes is sometimes fanatical, and whose life breath has been impregnated with flesh-creeping legends.” Stalin himself was a reflection of the darkness and mystery that characterized his nation: a man shrouded by a “taciturnity without beginning, without end.” The editors of Time, again like most Americans, understood him as the principal exponent of a radicalism they both detested and feared. Although the great “red scare” of 1919–20 was a largely discredited memory by the mid-1920s, hatred of bolshevism (as opposed to exaggerated fears of internal subversion) remained intense, even feverish. Soviet Russia was, Time noted, the self-proclaimed “graveyard of capitalism.” It was the enemy of Christianity, conducting an “anti-Religion crusade.” And it was a revolutionary power, whose “frankly avowed purpose is to foment in every land ‘The World Revolution of the World Proletariat.’” “Dictator Stalin,” as Time routinely called him, was a “coldblooded man of deeds” with a “mask of oriental ruthlessness.”49

  The tenor of Time’s coverage of the world outside the United States was reasonably consistent with the attitudes of Luce and Hadden. But it reflected even more the views of one man: Laird Goldsborough, the talented and controversial Foreign News editor from 1925 to 1938. Goldsborough—five years younger than Luce and Hadden—came to Time almost immediately after his graduation from Yale, and he quickly solidified his power within the editorial staff through his virtuosity in writing the Foreign News section—almost entirely by himself—punctually and cleanly every week. In the pressurized world of the Time newsroom, causing no problems was a tremendous asset. Very early in his tenure, he became one of the few members of the staff whose copy Hadden, Luce, and later managing editors rarely edited in more than minor ways. And if Goldsborough frequently expressed views that were more vigorous or extreme than Hadden and Luce might have liked, they usually accepted that as the price of his skill and efficiency. (In any case Goldsborough’s views were infrequently very far from their own.)

  Goldsborough was a strange, almost romantic figure. Partially disabled from childhood as a result of an accident, he walked with an elegant, gold-headed cane that was almost a part of his personality. His partial deafness added to his image of intimidating aloofness. He was an ardent admirer of Europe—its traditions, its culture, its aristocracy. He was skeptical of the modernist trends of his time. He was supremely confident in his own strongly held attitudes and opinions. He had a taste for luxury, and in later years, during his extensive travels in Europe, he strained even Time’s legendarily generous expense accounts.50

  His deep conservatism, both cultural and political, intensified his loathing of bolshevism, which shaped almost everything he wrote. His admiration for Mussolini, sometimes lavish, sometimes grudging, was primarily a result of his hatred of communism and Stalin, to which Italian fascism and Mussolini seemed a preferable if perhaps flawed alternatives. In the 1930s few American journalists were more hostile to the Republican cause in the Spanish civil war than was Goldsborough, who, not entirely inaccurately, associated it with communism. And few were more friendly to Franco, whom—like Mussolini—he viewed as a bulwark against bolshevism. Although Goldsborough expressed only contempt for Hitler, he failed to recognize the extent to which the Nazi regime endangered the world, and never showed much concern about the deteriorating condition of German Jews. He was not usually overtly anti-Semitic, but he clearly shared the belief of many Americans and Europeans that there was a special connection between Jews and radicals. In the mid-1930s he gave particularly virulent voice to this assumption in his attacks on French premier Léon Blum, who headed the nation’s first Popular Front government. Blum was a man of the Left but not himself a communist. According to Goldsborough, however, Blum’s “emphatic Jewishness makes the No. 1 French socialist thoroughly at home in Moscow.” He consistently referred to him as “Jew Blum” and claimed that he was “fired with religious fanaticism” (by which Goldsborough meant the combination of what he claimed was Blum’s ardent Jewishness and his hatred of fascism).51

  On at least one issue, however, Time was well ahead of many contemporaries: its interest in the question of race. Time was not a crusader for racial equality, to be sure, and it had its share of offhanded racial slurs. (Among the many absurd new words Hadden invented, and probably the most offensive, was “blackamoron,” to describe an African American criminal or villain.) But frequently during the 1920s, and indeed throughout most of its long history, Time used its opinionated style to draw attention to racial injustice. In an era in which African Americans were routinely described demeaningly and condescendingly, Time self-consciously chose to treat them with respect. They often used the title “Mr.” and “Mrs.” when referring to black men and women, a practice rare in most American newspapers and virtually unknown in the South. This did not escape the notice
of many white Southern readers, who protested angrily to no avail. (“Would Mr. Henderson himself care to be styled plain ‘Henderson,’” Hadden replied curtly to a letter from a white Southerner complaining about the “glorification of the Negro.” In fact Time rarely used the title “Mr.” for white subjects either, which led Luce to comment years later that Hadden was being “a little devilish.”) With uncharacteristic sobriety, Time reported in its first issue on a demonstration in Washington: “In dignified and quiet language, two thousand Negro women of the Phillis Wheatley Y. W. C. A. protested against a proposal to erect at the Capitol a statue to ‘The Black Mammy of the South.’” 52

  In Time’s early years, the most compelling racial issue for black Americans was lynching, frequent in the 1920s and into the 1930s, but largely ignored by many of the major organs of journalism. Time consistently reported lynchings in harsh and telling detail. “James Scott is dead,” the magazine noted at the end of a lurid account of a lynching in Missouri. “He was put to death by the premeditated violence of yokels who believe in their gross way that they were maintaining the honor of the race that bred them. What they did, some people call murder; others, lynching.” For many years Time was among the very few white publications that kept a running tally of lynchings each year.53

  Hadden, a man of many prejudices, may have focused on lynchings and other egregious acts of racism more because of his contempt for the white “yokels” responsible for them than because of any real identification with the cause of racial justice. Luce, although himself no crusader on this issue, was somewhat more cosmopolitan both in background (given his youth in China) and his outlook, and his record over many decades of reporting and commenting on race was evidence that his commitment to this issue, although limited in many ways, was nevertheless sincere.54

  More important than Time’s many idiosyncrasies—its language, its opinions, its attitudes, its youthful impetuosity—was its format: Because above all else Time was, and wanted to be, a practical digest of the news. From its first imaginings in the dreams of Hadden and Luce at Yale, to the choice of its name as a symbol of its purpose, to its founding as an institution that synthesized reporting done by others, the magazine considered its principal purpose to give busy people an efficient and thorough account of the world’s news in a brief, readable, and organized way. Time advertised itself in many forms, but nothing was more consistent than its promise to save people valuable time while keeping them well informed. One striking example was a foldout postcard distributed to potential subscribers in 1925 that presented what it called a “play in three acts.” It featured a character named “Busy Man,” sitting disconsolately in his living room surrounded by discarded newspapers: “I bought this mass of printed matter to find out what is going on in the world,” he complains, “but it’s no use! I am not abreast of the news in anything outside of my business.” His wife, “Busy Woman,” agrees. A knock on the door signals the arrival of a third character, “TIME,” who presents to them “a new idea in journalism. In my twenty-six pages is every fact of significance in all those newspapers and periodicals on your floor.”55

  Hadden and Luce came to the conclusion that saving busy people time could be a successful and lucrative enterprise almost instinctively—without market research (which remained a very primitive science in the 1920s) or any other kind of systematic evidence. But even had they been able to use the more sophisticated marketing tools of a later era, they would likely have reached the same conclusion; for Time magazine was almost perfectly designed to respond to several of the most important social changes of its era. Among those changes were the increasing pace of modern life, the growing nationalization of commerce, and the need of middle-class people to know much more about the nation and the world. At the same time there was growing pressure on many professional people to devote more hours to their jobs. Finding opportunities to educate themselves even minimally about what was happening outside their own communities was becoming difficult, particularly since the volume of information that people believed they needed to know—and the vast variety of publications that attempted to convey that information to them—had become nearly overwhelming. The success of Time was, to a large extent, a result of its editors’ understanding of how eager many Americans were for something that would identify and organize for them the important information of their day.56

  Time was not alone in recognizing the growing demand for digests of information and knowledge aimed at the new middle class. Harvard University had helped launch this trend shortly before World War I with its successful “Harvard Classics,” which claimed to provide readers with an efficient condensation of great literature and thought throughout history. Purportedly assembled by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot himself, the “five-foot shelf of books” promised a “reading course unparalleled in comprehensiveness and authority.” A supplementary volume guided readers through the volumes in a way that the editors claimed would allow them to educate themselves in fifteen minutes a day. In 1922, only a year before the first issue of Time appeared, DeWitt and Lila Wallace launched the Reader’s Digest, which offered condensed information from many sources—books, newspapers, and other magazines, carefully edited and packaged for readers who did not have the time or inclination to read widely or thoroughly. (Unlike Time the Reader’s Digest paid most of the publications from which it drew its material and usually attributed its stories to their original sources. Also unlike Time, it did not synthesize from multiple sources and made no claim to originality in what it published.) By the mid-1930s the Digest’s circulation was over one million, still well over Time’s.

  Time was also a response to the nationalization of American culture—and eventually a contributor to that nationalization. The era following World War I saw a rapid standardization in the way many Americans lived, worked, and understood the world. In Sinclair Lewis’s famous 1922 novel Babbitt, the central character, George F. Babbitt, points to this change in a speech to the Real Estate Board of Zenith (the mythical city, apparently modeled on Cincinnati, in which the novel takes place):

  I tell you Zenith and her sister-cities are producing a new type of civilization. There are many resemblances between Zenith and these other burgs, and I’m darn glad of it! The extraordinary, growing, and sane standardization of stores, offices, streets, hotels, clothes, and newspapers throughout the United States shows how strong and enduring a type is ours.

  To Babbitt this was the great accomplishment of middle-class culture (and to Lewis, one of its great failures). It represented the creation of a common, national, middle-class worldview; a reorientation of interest among middle-class people away from their local communities and toward national issues, events, and institutions. It represented as well a new kind of consumerism, born of prosperity and urbanization, reflecting the more secular, pleasure-seeking culture of the modern middle class—what a Time advertising circular called “a younger generation accustomed to things of beauty and convenience.” The standardization of culture for such people was a result of many things, among them commercial radio (born in 1920) and movies (elevated in importance in the 1920s by the great urban movie palaces and, beginning in 1927, sound). But Time played a modest role as well. With the exception of the national wire services, whose stories were filtered through local newspaper editors with their own interests and tastes, Time—which even in its early, frail years had subscribers in every state—was for a while the only genuinely national news organ. No newspaper had a reach very far beyond its own city. Radio news in the 1920s consisted of an announcer reading headlines a few times a day. Newsreels were not yet prominent. Even with its relatively modest circulation in the 1920s, Time established itself as an important force in journalism if for no other reason than that it reached men and women in all parts of the country and promised to rescue them from isolation and provincialism and prepare them for the cosmopolitan world. “Can you afford to be labelled as a man from Main Street?” an early advertising leaflet asked potentia
l Time subscribers. “Can you afford to be a man from Main Street? Civilization moves forward on a thousand fronts,—business, art, politics, science, religion. You have only to ignore it, and you slip back again centuries in time. But can you afford to live in the dark ages?”57