The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Fortune’s very different portrait of Swift deliberately reflected the broad, “modern” changes in meatpacking that Sinclair had helped create. The choice of Swift as the first article in the first issue of Fortune was also designed more broadly to contrast the character of modern industries from the unregulated, inefficient factories of a generation earlier. And it was also a deliberate effort to draw a contrast between the hostile muckraking of the Progressive Era and the more professionalized journalism of Luce’s world. Fortune’s Swift was no longer a “jungle” but a model of modern, progressive technology:

  Here is a mechanical saw which grinds through the shoulder; there is a draw knife like a curved adz which scoops out the loin. Hundreds of white-sleeved arms swing back and forth. Hundreds of funnels gulp the morsels the knives flip aside. Some gulp lean trimmings; these will make sausage. Some gulp fats; these will make lard. Down one chute go the hams … down another go the shoulders.

  In its clean, modern, clinical language, Lloyd-Smith seemed purposely to contrast his description with the censorious, emotional language of The Jungle.19

  Fortune continued to feature striking examples of industrial design and productive efficiency throughout the 1930s: a story about the creation of an “ideal factory … in which the employees would work under optimum conditions as regards their five senses;” an article on the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, praising “this new, artistic generation … fixed not on the past … but strictly on the present…. modern aestheticism must embrace the machine with all its innuendos;” a utopian essay on functionalism in home design (“Machines for Living”) by Lewis Mumford; a dramatic full-page Margaret Bourke-White photograph of the Chrysler Building under construction as it awaited its “sheathing in Nirosta Steel.” In an unsigned editorial in May 1933, Fortune attacked the antimodern claims of H. L. Mencken that the machine age was destroying the “sense of the continent” and its literature. In an era of aviation and industrial transformation, the Fortune editorial replied, “the sense of America, the sense of the continent revives. And as always in the civilization of industrialism it revives not by a return to an earlier and simpler life but by a further complication.”

  Fortune’s enthusiasm for the machine-age aesthetic was also visible in its fascination with serious artists who chose modern industrialism as their subjects. One example was a full-page painting by Charles Sheeler of the Ford Plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Sheeler was renowned for his use of industrial scenes as timeless art, and the magazine embraced the ideology behind his style. “An artist, observing a factory, usually finds in it some symbol of industrial grandeur, oppression, or monotony,” the caption explained. “Charles Sheeler, whose calm and meticulous Fordscape appears on this page, has another approach. He looks at the Ford plant as it is; enjoys its patterns, shades, and movements; and its careless deductions.” Another was a 1931 article on a lesser-known artist, the sculptor Max Kalish, who came to Fortune’s attention because of his focus on “linemen and steel workers and iron forgers and electric workers.” His sculpture was a “reproach” to much American art. For it proved “that there exists in America the material for a primary and unspoiled [industrial] art.” Fortune, in short, was part of the broad effort of its age (and now of Luce) to legitimize modernism, to reward those who contributed to the rationalization of industry and commerce, and to celebrate the sleek new aesthetic that accompanied it.20

  One of the few stories Luce himself actually reported and wrote in the first year of the magazine was an especially powerful example of his fascination with the machine age. He had accompanied Bourke-White to South Bend, Indiana, in early 1930 to chronicle the life of an important industrial city. A year earlier the sociologists Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd had published Middletown—a classic study of the supposedly typical community of Muncie, Indiana, in the 1920s. It was almost certainly a model for Luce’s story of neighboring South Bend. “We shall seek to discover,” Luce wrote in language similar to that of the Lynds,

  both how much and what kind of industrial productivity is required these days for the human reproductivity of South Bend. To understand the life which calls forth the babies in South Bend is to understand why all the babies in all the United States are born. For South Bend is the perfect microcosm, the living example, the photographable average.

  But Luce’s real purpose was not dispassionate investigation. The article was, rather, a celebration of the power of the machine age, enhanced by Bourke-White’s muscular photographs. “Cosmic, titanic, great, majestic…. Enter now the clang of steel, the roar of furnaces, the toots of financiers, and the honks of salesmen, the great Modern or Automotive Age,” Luce wrote almost breathlessly. “What now is South Bend, what now is the perfect microcosm of the golden age of the Industrial Era?”21

  Fortune’s approach to business fluctuated over time, reflecting the changing character of the economy, the shifting ideas of the staff, the new politics of the Depression years, and the inclinations of Luce himself (whose views were ultimately decisive). He was, of course, himself a successful businessman, but his admiration for his peers was not unqualified. Time Inc. had succeeded, Luce believed, because it was innovative, flexible, and as self-consciously modern as the gleaming Chrysler Building in New York City into which it would soon move. The companies and corporate executives Luce admired were those similarly committed to a modern, progressive approach to business. The industrial world, he believed, was moving into a new era—no longer the province of ruthless and reckless robber barons, but increasingly a world dominated by rational, well-educated executives who were transforming modern corporations. Fortune would reveal and celebrate this new world. Herbert Hoover had once typified the kind of progressive leader Luce generally admired. Luce became disillusioned with him because of the president’s apparent abandonment of the progressive spirit of the “new age.” Evidence of his disdain was a harsh essay in Fortune in September 1932, whose title was drawn from an infamous statement by Hoover—“No One Has Starved”—with the scathing subtitle, “which isn’t true.”22

  The Swift story was the first of a genre that would come to characterize almost every issue of Fortune: portraits of corporations and industries. Such articles were not always admiring. The editors sometimes chose companies they considered “behind the times” and compared them unfavorably with the modern model that Luce admired. A June 1930 article on the notoriously unstable cotton textile industry, for example, was unsparing in its description of the industry’s failings: “The country’s fourth largest industry is at the mercy of two forces—labor and a woman’s vanity. Together they keep it without leadership and without stability.” But far more often in Fortune’s first years, the stories focused on the progressive power of American capitalism. The great General Motors Corporation, famous for the efficient new organization that its president, Alfred P. Sloan, had imposed on it in the early 1920s, was a Fortune favorite: “Having ambition where the ordinary man has discontent,” the magazine wrote in April 1930, “their only common characteristic is energy. Not bigger wheels but faster.” In profiling AT&T, the world’s largest corporation, Fortune noted that “its primary allegiance belongs to the people who buy its service instead of the people who buy its stock.” (The company’s CEO, much revered by Fortune, was fond of saying that the “captains of industry” must now be replaced by “statesmen of industry.”) Luce was especially impressed with the companies that were moving aggressively to restructure themselves to survive the Great Depression, for example, the financial company Transamerica, which recognized that “the era of easy trading profits had come to its end” and had instead “reorganized itself with an eye to the new world.” To Luce such stories of American innovation and success were a challenge to the eroding reputation of business in the first years of the Great Depression.23

  Fortune’s modestly restrained enthusiasm for corporations and business leaders did not protect it from the scorn of those who believed that the Depression had torn away the ma
sk of capitalism and destroyed the credibility of the corporate world. “Fortune says, Long live the tycoon!” the Nation wrote dismissively in 1931, charging that “glorified success stories about tycoons and their profit-producing enterprises are consciously designed to encourage the purchase of securities in these undertakings.” But Luce was far from a cheerleader for “tycoons.” He believed that business leaders, and those who celebrated the business world, were woefully ignorant of the new shape of industry. They had an obligation to accept “the radical principle … that all business is invested in the public interest.” Looking back on the early years of Fortune more than a decade later, Luce recalled his sense that there was “something particularly improper in people strutting around on the basis of their (or their husband’s) business status, yet refusing to admit a drawing-room bowing acquaintance with the realities of industry and commerce.” Fortune’s “crusading point,” he bluntly insisted, “was in effect this: ‘God damn you, Mrs. Richbitch, we won’t have you chittering archly and snobbishly about Bethlehem Common [stock] unless you damn well have a look at the open hearths and slagpiles—yes, and the workers’ houses of Bethlehem, Pa.’” 24

  The undercurrent of skepticism about capitalism among many of his editors and writers, and at times in Luce himself, was only scarcely visible in the first few years of Fortune’s life. But it gradually became more pronounced through a combination of chance and circumstance. By the summer of 1930, Luce had become concerned that Parker Lloyd-Smith—whose creative and literary brilliance he continued to admire—was not succeeding at the day-to-day management of the magazine, which had become erratic, even at times chaotic. Fortune, Luce concluded, needed a reliable associate editor. He settled on Ralph Ingersoll, the managing editor of The New Yorker, who was renowned for his organized efficiency. Lloyd-Smith was offended at first, but he soon found Ingersoll a cooperative and even indispensable partner. A little over a year after Ingersoll’s arrival, however, Lloyd-Smith jumped naked to his death from the small hotel room where he lived alone. The startling and unexplained suicide thrust Ingersoll into the managing editorship of the magazine. He was less charismatic and less likable than Lloyd-Smith had been, but far more efficient; and with Luce’s support he set out to reorganize the staff so as to deepen the magazine’s engagement with the economy generally.

  By the end of 1931 hope for a quick recovery from the Depression was fading. And beginning in 1933 the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt and the energy and occasional radicalism of the New Deal—combined with the increasing influence of the Left generally in American culture—made criticism of business, and of capitalism itself, far more pervasive than in all but a few periods of American life. It also became a part of the character of Fortune. Ingersoll was certainly not a radical, and he was far too protective of his own career to put very much distance between himself and Luce. But Ingersoll tolerated and at times even actively encouraged the left-leaning inclinations of much of his staff. Luce inadvertently hastened the move to the left by urging Ingersoll to reorganize the editorial process in 1933 in a way that gave writers even more control over their work than they had in the past. Ingersoll, who considered Fortune as much a “writer’s” magazine as The New Yorker, eagerly agreed. He was especially deferential to the poet and essayist Archibald MacLeish, who was trying to make Fortune into both a more intellectual and a more critical magazine than it had been at first. “Where the old Fortune … was to have concerned itself with business for business’ sake,” MacLeish later wrote, “the new Fortune would report the world of business as an expression—a peculiarly enlightening expression—of the Republic, of the changing world.” The magazine was never as overtly partisan as journals of opinion such as the Nation or The New Republic, but in the mid-1930s it was often strikingly iconoclastic in its approach to the capitalist world it had set out at first to celebrate.25

  The Fortune writer Eric Hodgins (who later became managing editor of the magazine) described it as “the most brilliant magazine staff ever to exist in America.” Whether or not that was true, it was certainly one of the most adventurous. Few of the writers had any previous experience in either business or journalism. (It was, Luce said, “easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.”) They were hired for their literary skills, their intelligence, and their connections to one another, just as the original Time writers had generally come not from journalism but from successful academic lives in universities like Harvard and Yale. Luce hired Dwight Macdonald because another Time Inc. writer, Wilder Hobson, had known him at Yale. MacLeish had a previous relationship with Luce, also in part through their shared ties to Yale and Hotchkiss. James Agee came to Fortune through the efforts of his friend Macdonald. Russell Davenport, an aspiring poet who began his long career at Time Inc. as a Fortune writer, knew Luce through Skull and Bones, and his presence also opened the door for his brother, John. They were a close-knit group, and they chose to interpret “business” as anything related to the economy, which opened up most of the world to them—especially in light of the freedom Luce seemed to have given them. Not many writers embraced what the Fortune writer John Chamberlain later called his own “antibusiness radicalism,” but there was a political affinity among many of the Fortune staff (not least among the female researchers, whose influence was profound if largely unacknowledged) for some of the great causes of the Left. They joined together to raise money for the antifascist forces in the Spanish civil war. Many of them were “ardent liberals,” Macdonald later wrote, and identified openly with the most progressive initiatives of the New Deal. “Almost invariably,” Ingersoll recalled, “wherever we touched on labor problems, we came out more sympathetic with labor than with management.”26

  Unsurprisingly these political inclinations found their way into the magazine—not consistently, but often enough to alarm some of Fortune’s powerful advertisers, subscribers, and friends. Eric Hodgins’s 1934 article “Arms and the Men” created a sensation with its strident indictment of European arms merchants, whose “axioms,” he wrote, are “(a) prolong war, (b) disturb peace…. Every time a burst shell fragment finds it way into the brain, the heart, or the intestines of a man in the front line … much of the profit, finds its way into the pocket of the armament maker.” (Ingersoll boasted to Luce that the story “will make FORTUNE internationally famous for the rest of its life.”) MacLeish published a devastating three-part portrait of the notorious industrialist Ivar Kreuger, who committed suicide amid revelations of—to use the title of MacLeish’s third article—“A $250,000,000 swindle.” MacLeish also wrote a powerful essay (later republished by Time Inc. as a book) on “Jews in America,” linking the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany to anti-Semitism in America. Particularly startling was a September 1934 article, unsigned but written by Dwight Macdonald, on the American Communist Party, which, without defending or endorsing Communism, challenged the deep antipathy most Americans felt toward it:

  The Reds may be “trouble makers,” and “fomenters of rebellion,” but they can make trouble and riots only when the capitalist system has done gross injustice to some social group. By leading the oppressed classes and making their grievances articulate, the Communists force the capitalist system to adjust its more glaring inequalities.

  And despite Luce’s own early and growing doubts about the New Deal, Fortune openly celebrated Roosevelt’s apparent success, including a ringing endorsement of the ultimately failed National Recovery Administration:

  If it is [NRA director Hugh Johnson’s] purpose to transplant the practice of democracy from the political field … to the industrial field … the result may be not only the salvation of American industry but the rejuvenation of the now decayed and outmoded ideal of democracy itself.27

  Even one of the magazine’s most ostensibly neutral features—Luce’s idea for what became the much-heralded “Fortune Survey,” which mobilized the new techniques of public-opinion research and presented a portrait of popular views of
economic and other issues—often seemed to skew its questions to support the New Deal and other progressive causes. The first surveys, for example, asked for opinions about wealth distribution, public services versus taxation, income and estate taxes, the dignity of labor, and the responsibility of government to assure every man a job. The polling sample—gathered by the pioneering pollster Elmo Roper—was not Fortune readers but the general public. The results, predictably, reflected the left-leaning attitudes of the electorate in this highly charged time of upheaval.28

  But it was not always easy to hold liberal or radical views while writing for a business magazine that, for all its flirtations with the Left, remained committed to the ethos of the capitalist world. They soon began to run up against the limits of radicalism Luce was willing to tolerate. Two of the most talented writers at Fortune were also the most disaffected. Both Agee and Macdonald had come to Fortune because they needed the money. Like almost everyone on the editorial staff, they wrote the standard company and industry stories. But they were always a poor fit with the magazine’s culture, even in its most iconoclastic years. Agee described the spectrum of his feelings about Fortune as ranging from “a hard masochistic liking to direct nausea.” Macdonald later claimed that he wrote for Fortune “with no special interest in the subject” or in his published stories, which were “impossible for me to reread or even remember writing, a month later…. Never did I think of myself as a member of the team, a loyal, dedicated Fortunian.” Both began to chafe at what they considered the increasingly formulaic culture of the magazine.

  Agee, taking advantage of Fortune’s growing interest in dysfunctional industries and regions, proposed a study of Southern sharecroppers, and in 1936 traveled to Alabama with the photographer Walker Evans to chronicle the lives of three families of white tenant farmers. The result was a remarkable series of photographs by Evans and a massive text by Agee—a sprawling, discursive expression of his own emotional response to the lives of the families he had visited. It reflected his simultaneously radical and antiprogressive belief in the “divinity of man,” and it argued that neither journalism nor politics could adequately convey the richness of individual lives. Fortune unsurprisingly declined to publish the enormous, idiosyncratic manuscript, and Agee spent the next four years trying to find a publisher for it. (It finally came out in 1940 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and received scant, unenthusiastic critical attention. It sold about six hundred copies before being remaindered and forgotten—only to be revived in the 1960s and proclaimed a literary classic.)29