The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  An important event of Luce’s 1941 visit to China was his first meeting with Theodore H. White. The much younger “Teddy” and the famous and powerful “Harry” struck up a close friendship that cooled several years later when White turned against Chiang Kai-shek, a man whom Harry continued to revere.

  One of the many covers Time devoted to Chiang Kai-shek. In this one, he is accompanied by Madame Chiang, as “Man & Woman of the Year” in 1938.

  After a long and frustrating period during which Roosevelt forbade publishers from visiting the war zones, Luce finally made his way to the Pacific front in June 1945. Harry Truman, the new president, overruled Roosevelt’s ban. Luce is shown here on the left, along with Time’s managing editor, Roy Alexander, a Brooklyn Eagle reporter, and General Henry Larsen.

  During the war years, with Clare in Washington as a member of the House of Representatives from Connecticut, Harry began a serious and relatively public affair with Jean Dalrymple, a theatrical publicist and producer four years Luce’s junior. For a time, Luce talked of divorcing Clare and marrying Jean. But after Ann Brokaw’s death, he gradually broke off the relationship.

  Ambassador and Mr. Luce on vacation with Joseph P. Kennedy in 1956. Harry’s unusual costume suggests his general discomfort with leisure.

  Whittaker Chambers joined Time Inc. as a book reviewer, and rose to be the controversial editor of Foreign News, in which he relentlessly denounced the Soviet Union and communism. The Alger Hiss case, which began in 1948 and revealed Chambers’s past life as a Soviet spy, led to his departure from the company.

  Luce took advantage of his connection to the American embassy in Rome by traveling widely in Europe and hosting distinguished visitors. He is shown here escorting Winston Churchill in a 1955 visit.

  Luce’s growing interest in the importance of leisure in American life led him to support the creation of a sports magazine, a project many of his colleagues at first disdained. But because of the energy, commitment, and talent of Sidney James (left), most of Luce’s colleagues soon came to support the project. James, Luce, and Sports Illustrated publisher Harry Phillips pose in 1954 in front of a blown-up cover of the magazine’s first issue, August 16, 1954—a photograph of a baseball game in Milwaukee.

  Luce’s warm relationship with Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of the most rewarding of his life, and the only time he had an intimate friendship with a sitting president. Time was so sympathetic to Eisenhower that both the magazine’s editors and many of its readers sharply criticized the coverage, to no avail.

  Luce was an ardent supporter of the Vietnam War, and in the 1950s a great admirer of Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam. The American Friends of Vietnam, modeled in some ways on earlier organizations supporting Nationalist China, attracted the support of many prominent figures. Luce presides here in 1959 over a meeting of the organization, with Diem seated next to him, waiting to speak.

  In the late 1950s, Luce began a passionate affair with Lord Beaverbrook’s young granddaughter, Lady Jeanne Campbell, which drew him into another painful battle with Clare. Eventually, the affair—which Luce at one time had hoped would lead to marriage—ended.

  Luce’s warm relationship with Eisenhower left him with an intensified interest in other important politicians. He was particularly drawn to John Kennedy, whom he had known through John’s father for years. Kennedy is seen here walking through the Time-Life building in 1960, during his presidential campaign, after an interview with the Time Inc. editors.

  Forty-one years after Luce cofounded Time Inc., he finally handed control of the company over to Hedley Donovan, a former Fortune editor whom Luce himself chose to succeed him. They are shown here during a lavish celebration of the transition in 1964.

  But the unhappiness was not all on one side. Harry, too, was growing resentful of Brit—of his erratic behavior, of his impatience with organization and detail, and of what Luce sensed was his greater charisma and influence within the organization. “This Hadden-Luce yoke is certainly galling,” he wrote Lila late in 1927. “The differences between us are so great—However I don’t see any way out which seem better than struggling through with it…. This letter should be torn up pronto.” Most of all, he resented Hadden’s contemptuous dismissal of Luce’s ideas. Harry disliked Tide, thought it a serious mistake, but did not try to obstruct it. Beginning in mid-1928, however, Luce began developing a plan of his own for a business magazine. He encountered firm opposition from Hadden (even though “bus mag” was the first item on Brit’s own expansion list). Time was still too fragile, Hadden argued, to launch another magazine—a concern that apparently had not occurred to him when he himself launched Tide. Luce might well have concluded that Hadden was balking because he wanted to block Harry from developing a magazine that Brit had not initiated.66

  Before the move to Cleveland, when Hadden had been living at home with his parents, there had been at least some structure to his life. On his own, first in Cleveland and now back in New York, his behavior began to spin out of control. Given his boredom, his restlessness, his apparent depression, and his deep exhaustion, it was not a great surprise to anyone that by late 1928 he was beginning to flag. In December he complained to a friend who had come by to visit, “I’m not well. I don’t know what’s the matter…. I just don’t seem to have any ambition and I feel weak.” He was, one of his colleagues recalled, “just dragging himself to the office. He would come in for most of the week, then phone and say he wasn’t well.” An office assistant warned Luce, “You’d better look after Hadden, or he’ll be dead. He must be really sick.” One day he left the office early claiming he needed rest. He never returned.67

  Unable to recover from a flu, very likely because of his exhaustion, he also developed a strep infection and was hospitalized in Brooklyn. A few years later he could easily have been cured. But in the absence of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, doctors had a limited range of treatment—which mostly consisted of blood transfusions. Luce and others on the Time staff donated blood several times, and Harry visited Brit as often as he could, although doctors, worried about Hadden’s “nervous condition,” barred visitors for many days at a time. Luce sent regular bulletins to the Time staff with reports from the doctors, none of them encouraging. By mid-January, Hadden had grown so weak that he could no longer even write (and had to dictate a will, which he then signed feebly with an X). When Harry talked with him about what was happening at Time, Brit became confused, unable to recall anything about the magazine’s recent successes, and was surprised to learn that Herbert Hoover was now president. He was beginning to tell visitors, Luce among them, that “I won’t get well.” Harry had come to fear that too, and in late January, he wrote Manfred Gottfried and implored him to return to the magazine and take over as editor, explaining, as Gottfried wrote in his diary, that “Brit is ill unto death with streptococcus.” On February 27, 1929, in the middle of the night, six years to the day from the publication of the first issue of Time, Hadden died.68

  Despite the rift that had developed between them, Luce was stunned and distraught. “I don’t know how I’ll get along without him,” he said to colleagues. And how could he have felt otherwise? He and Brit had been friends, rivals, allies, antagonists—but whatever else they were, they had been inseparable and essential partners since they had met at Hotchkiss in 1913. Luce certainly realized that his life would never be the same again.69

  Time marked Hadden’s death with a black-bordered notice in the magazine’s Milestones department—after abandoning an overwrought effort by Hadden’s cousin and Time editor, John S. Martin, to write a major obituary. “Death came last week to Briton Hadden,” the notice began, in classic Hadden style. “Creation of his genius and heir to his qualities, Time attempts neither biography nor eulogy…. To Briton Hadden, success came steadily, satisfaction never.” A week later the magazine departed from its usual format and ran a full page of letters on the back page containing tributes to Hadden. There was another change in format as well. A
t the top of the Time masthead, there was now only one name: Henry R. Luce.70

  *Hadden likely used a translation by Samuel Butler, the most commonly used English text of the early twentieth century.

  *From a Hindu prayer for peace.

  VI

  Empire Building

  What Luce called the “harrowing tragedy” of Brit Hadden’s death may have been the most important event in Harry’s life. It robbed him of a partner and friend with whom he had been inextricably entwined for more than fifteen years, and without whom he would almost certainly not have found himself at the head of a thriving company. It also left him in virtually sole control of Time Inc. Luce had at times yearned for such independence during the last, difficult years of his relationship with Hadden. But now he was frightened that he might not be able to hold the company together. His first concern, therefore, was to keep things as they were—to preserve the system and the editorial product that Hadden had mainly created. He asked John S. Martin, Hadden’s cousin, to take over as managing editor of Time. Martin idolized Brit. Luce certainly knew that in giving him control of the magazine he was committing himself to Hadden’s philosophy and style as the model for at least the immediate future. He confided occasionally to his wife, his sister, his father, and even to his board of directors that he was not certain he could sustain the company alone, that he had relied on Hadden’s energy and imagination even more than he had realized, and that without it he feared the company would flounder. But for the most part Luce kept his anxiety to himself and tried publicly to reassure his colleagues and staff that he could maintain stability and continued success.1

  It did not take long before he began to believe in the image he was struggling to create. The occasionally timorous Luce of the 1920s, who—although never openly admitting it—often saw himself as the slightly junior partner to Hadden and who exuded practical efficiency more than broad vision, slowly became the proud and even imperious leader whose powerful ideas and convictions became his own, and his company’s, missions. Although he returned, in effect, to his customary position as business manager of the company, he never again conceded full editorial control to anyone else. He had many titles at different periods of his career: president, publisher, chairman of the board. But the one title Luce consistently held was Editor-in-Chief.

  In the decades after Hadden’s death, Luce rarely spoke of his former partner. At first, no doubt, he felt the need to establish himself without Brit, to create confidence among his colleagues that he was a worthy leader of Time Inc. His strategy worked. Over time, fewer and fewer people in the company had ever heard of Hadden, and those who remembered him learned to act as if they had forgotten. Luce paid modest tribute to Hadden from time to time. He contributed to the construction of a new building for the Yale Daily News in New Haven, which was named for Brit. He supported Hadden’s cousin, Noel Busch, in the writing of a short biography of Hadden. But mostly, he simply moved on, seeing nothing to gain from dwelling on his former dependence on his longtime friend.

  But what if Hadden had lived? One could imagine several scenarios, none of them remotely similar to Time Inc.’s subsequent history. Harry and Brit, having reached an impasse in their troubled relationship, might have gone their own ways—with Brit most likely retaining Time and Harry breaking away; or with the bored and restless Hadden leaving the company to Luce, who—with Hadden still in the background—would likely have had a much more difficult task in establishing his own authority (given Hadden’s stockholdings). Or they might have stayed together, with Hadden still the editorial leader of the company and Luce still the manager of its business affairs. Had that been the outcome, much would have depended on Brit’s ability to adjust to changing times. His death in 1929 came just before the end of the great prosperity of the 1920s and, for Harry and Brit’s generation, the fading of the age of cynicism and irreverence. Could Hadden have left behind his exuberant iconoclasm? Could Time Inc. have flourished during the Great Depression with Hadden’s raffish, Mencken-like outlook at the helm? Brit represented the disillusioned, skeptical, flippant culture of the “Jazz age.” Luce, on the other hand, was a serious, earnest, questing exception to his generation’s style; and his sense of purpose, even of mission, may have been better suited to the more sober 1930s than Hadden’s ironic temperament might have been. The only certainty, however, was that the history of the company—and of Luce’s life—would have been profoundly different had Hadden survived.

  Among Luce’s first acts as the solitary leader of the company was to acquire Hadden’s stock. Hadden’s hastily composed will left his entire estate to his half brother, Crowell Hadden, with instructions that he use the income to support his mother and stepfather throughout their lifetimes. He also directed that Crowell should “hold my stock in Time Inc. and not sell the same until after the expiration of forty-nine years after my death.”2

  Neither Luce nor Crowell Hadden seemed to take this last command very seriously. No record survives of the negotiations between Luce and the Hadden estate, but there is little to suggest that they were in any way hostile. In hindsight the Hadden family would have done better to keep the stock, which appreciated dramatically over the following decade and more. But no one at the time could have predicted the magnitude of the company’s future success. And so selling seemed to make sense for both parties. Crowell wanted to diversify the estate to provide more security for his family, while at the same time retaining a healthy share of Time stock. Luce wanted to give himself more control over the company and to launch a stock-purchase plan for his employees. Brit had owned a total of 3,361 shares of Time stock, about the same as Luce. In September 1929 the estate sold just over 2,800 of them to a syndicate Luce had created, which consisted of the executive officers of the company. The stock had never traded on the open market, so Luce consulted with several investment bankers for advice on its value. They valued the stock at the astonishing price of $360 a share. (Two years later it passed $1,000 a share.) Luce himself, already the largest stockholder, took out a loan and bought more than 600 additional shares for himself. Roy Larsen bought 550 shares and became—as he remained for many years—the second largest stockholder. The rest went to nine other officers and directors of the company. The Hadden estate received more than a million dollars in return.3

  The importance of the purchase was not so much that Luce increased his own holdings, which were already substantial. The real value to him was that the deal eliminated the Hadden family’s ability to exercise control over the company or to transfer it to someone else. With much of Hadden’s very large share of the stock now dispersed, Luce now stood alone as the controlling stockholder. It was also important to him that ownership of so much of the stock lay within Time Inc.—not just because it reduced the circle of outside investors who might intervene in the company’s affairs but also because it tied his colleagues more firmly to the company and thus gave them an additional incentive to work for its success and profitability. In short, the settlement gave Luce almost unlimited power to shape the future of the company as he wished—a power he used almost immediately to launch a new project that Hadden had tried to thwart.

  Late in 1928, well before Hadden’s death, Luce began planning for a new business magazine. He did so slowly and somewhat secretly because of Hadden’s conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for the idea. Time was at a crucial point of development, Hadden argued, and should not yet have to compete for attention with a new project. Luce privately called Hadden’s objections “specious” and bemoaned the “great spirit of stalling” that enveloped his proposal. But he did not give up. Work on the project took place within a new Experimental Department. Luce created it in part to insulate what he was doing from his censorious partner. He assigned the Time business writer Parker Lloyd-Smith—whom Luce described later as “brilliant” and someone with whom he had recently become “very simpatico”—and a talented researcher, Florence Horn, to work on the new magazine. He placed them in a small, remote room (almost
as if he were trying to hide them). Luce’s relations with Hadden were by now so tense that the two partners often communicated with each other through proxies. Hadden told Harry Davison that he thought Luce’s project “should be abandoned.” Luce replied, also through the board of directors, asking them to postpone a decision until he could explore the possibility further.

  After Hadden’s death Luce put off the project again while he worked to stabilize the shaken company. But the planning continued, and Luce finally brought a formal proposal to the board in May 1929, now claiming that Hadden would have approved of it had he lived. The venture was a gamble, Luce conceded, with perhaps a “50-50 chance” of success. But Time was enjoying “remarkable and unexpected prosperity” and “it would seem querulous to worry.” The board approved, although not without reservations, and Luce began moving toward a late-1929 publication.4

  Hadden and Luce had launched Time by describing it as the world’s first newsmagazine; and while that title was open to dispute (the rival Literary Digest could make some claim to it), their boast was certainly plausible. In its format, style, and outlook, Time was—and for many years remained—a singular magazine. Not until Newsweek began publication in 1930 was there anything like it. Luce and the new business magazine’s other founders insisted that it, too, was a pathbreaking publication—the first to examine business in real depth and with real detachment. “Publishers,” they claimed in a prospectus, “have almost entirely overlooked the Vogue of Business.” It would be the first real “record of Modern Industrial Civilization.”5