The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  *The 1940 election was the first in which scientific polling played a significant role in a presidential race, and the first in which the public (and Luce) took them seriously.

  X

  Time Inc. Goes to War

  The most terrible war in human history was in many ways very good to Time Inc. Its magazines had never been more popular. Time’s circulation exceeded a million copies a week by the end of 1942, and Life’s was approaching four million, making the company, according to Eric Hodgins, “the largest publisher of news on a national scale.” And despite paper shortages that limited the size of the magazines, advertising revenue remained strong. The March of Time newsreels were shown in more than eleven thousand theaters, and the weekly March of Time radio broadcasts had an audience of nearly eight million. Time Inc.’s profits were the highest in the company’s history—over ten million dollars a year even after steep wartime taxes. Its expenses were growing as well. The company’s News Bureau, modest until the late 1930s, now maintained bureaus in almost every major city in the United States. Where it was possible to do so, it opened bureaus around the globe as well: London, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, India, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, Switzerland, and China. The reporting staff—more than a hundred full-time correspondents and many more parttime employees and stringers—was one of the largest of any news organization in the world, and the comprehensiveness of war coverage in the magazines was one of the reasons for their great success. The company generated additional goodwill through its distribution of 750,000 copies of Time and 650,000 copies of Life free to American troops abroad through a special “Air Express Edition,” copies that were passed around to so many servicemen, according to one Time correspondent, that they literally fell apart. More than 60 percent of soldiers and sailors named Life their favorite magazine. Time Inc., through its March of Time division, also produced training films and publications for the military and worked hard in other ways to show its commitment to the war effort.1

  The war also had personal benefits for Luce. His own profile and influence, and even his own popularity, rose significantly. A poll commissioned by the company early in the war found that more than 80 percent of those who had an opinion viewed him favorably. Perhaps more important, the war gave Luce a new sense of purpose. He was, of course, committed to chronicling the conflict and contributing to what he considered America’s inevitable victory. But his larger mission was now to envision a postwar world that would remedy the failures that followed World War I. This war, he believed, must lead the world toward a stable and lasting peace and guide the nation into a position of global leadership. By early 1943 he had already created a Post War Committee within his company, with a full staff of editors and researchers committed to examining “the foreign and domestic post-war problems of the U.S…. post-war relations with Britain and the post-war problems of the Far East.”2

  The key to the great success of Luce’s magazines in wartime was their almost total commitment to chronicling and, when appropriate, celebrating the war. Time, of course, covered the war week by week, battle by battle, and controversy by controversy in its usual disciplined, cocksure manner. Life, on the other hand, turned the war into a great visual story and significantly expanded its pool of photographers and graphic artists to make that possible. It was, it seemed, fulfilling at last its mission as a picture magazine—flooding its pages with powerful images of what was arguably the most important event in history.

  Life’s remarkable popularity in wartime was also a result of the great interest Americans had in the progress of the war, the magazine’s surefooted presentation of exceptional photography, and its effectiveness in tapping into the complicated interests and emotions of its readers. Life’s first issue after Pearl Harbor featured a large, black “WAR” in four-inch letters at the top of the first page, in effect announcing the momentousness of the event. Its 1945 VJ Day coda was the famous Eisentaedt photograph of a sailor embracing a young woman in Times Square, evoking the unrestrained joy of the return of peace. Life sought throughout to convey the “human feel and reality” of the war, and to promote its own view of its importance. Life was also determinedly optimistic. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a “desperate gamble” by Tokyo, the magazine insisted. Finding itself in a “hopeless corner,” Japan was saying in effect: “If this be hara-kiri, make the most of it.” Americans, on the other hand, “took the news, good and bad, with admirable serenity…. Ideologically the nation was united as it had never been at any other military crisis in all history.” Life was simultaneously the scourge of the Axis, the champion of the armed forces, and the cheerleader of the American people. It was also a guide to America’s future. The magazine’s photography, Luce predicted, would help “make the activities of normal life more interesting and dramatic” and would after the war help the nation “overcome a general aspect of cynicism and distrust…. We must show how we rebuild a Western Civilization.”3

  For Time too the war was a transformative event. The magazine more than doubled its circulation between the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the end of the war in 1945. If Life was consistently named America’s most “popular” magazine, opinion surveys almost always named Time the nation’s most “important.” It was, the editors boasted, “the magazine to which something like half the important people in America are turning for help in understanding the promise and the problems of our time.”

  Even its critics appeared to agree, if not about its wisdom then at least about its power. “The moral we draw [from reading Time] is that we had better be acutely aware of what goes on in its pages,” a highly skeptical article in the liberal Catholic magazine America warned in 1944. Otherwise readers might inadvertently find themselves influenced by the “higher sophistry” of the Luce organization. Edmund Wilson offered an ominous warning that the “considerable value” of Time’s summaries of the news masked “the ineptitude and the cynicism of the mentality” behind the reportage. He urged Luce and his colleagues “to try to give some value and point” to what he considered the magazine’s banal opinions. Paul Herzog, chair of the New York State Labor Relations Board, worried about “the power [the Luce] magazines could wield in influencing public opinion for [their] own selfish ends.”

  Luce, of course, strenuously and consistently denied any such intention. But he did not deny the presence of opinions—often strong ones—in his magazines. Time, he once argued, should be “a continuing seminar in how to develop the Good Society in the U.S.,” because America’s success in that effort, “morally and in every other way, is involved, favorably and unfavorably, with man’s fate everywhere.” In presenting the news, he noted in 1944, “there should be well-chosen villains and (much harder) well-chosen heroes.” There was, in short, a narrative running through Time during the war—the obvious narrative of the course of battle and the more subtle one of “how America should or should not seek to influence its world environment.”4

  As much as he was preoccupied by the war, and as much as he feared its possible outcomes, Luce also saw the conflict as a great opportunity to reimagine America and the world, and to use his magazines to chart a glorious future. He bombarded his editors with expressions of high purpose. He complained about the “spotty and haphazard” editing of the magazines and pushed for consistent “brilliance.” He continually reorganized his editorial staffs and, in the spring of 1944, moved Billings from his longtime position as editor of Life to a new position: “Editorial Director of all TIME INC. Publications.” Billings wielded considerable power in his new position, particularly during the long periods in which Luce was away. But Luce was careful to make clear that he retained final authority over all editorial decisions, and his stream of memos to editors continued unabated throughout the war. (So did Billings’s private complaints of Luce’s constant interference.) “Our publications have been outstanding, and often pioneers, in showing to Americans what American life is like,” Luce told his editors in 1943. “We must continue this job
… [and] we must seek a somewhat greater degree of self-conscious criticism and appreciation of life as we find it. And some accent of enthusiasm must be put on what we find right in American mores.” That meant attention to “the family as an institution” and “education … to instill moral notions into the young.” Should “little boys and girls,” he asked, “be taught to be patriotic?” What would be the “technological possibilities of the Future”? How could the magazines do a “much more vigorous job of pointing to the importance of the beautiful”? The war might be the principal task facing the nation, but the war also created an opportunity to reject the “iconoclasm” of the 1920s and the pessimism and despair of the 1930s and instead to embrace remaking America as a nobler and more admirable society. The great story of America in the war years, Luce believed, was not the battlefield but the story of individuals—“of human chances and mischances, of man’s mores, prejudices, foibles, failings, of his extraordinary behavior which completes the picture of man as a living creature.”5

  Luce’s hopeful and slightly sentimental assessment of the nation, and his optimistic view of the war and its aftermath, could not disguise a significant and deliberate change in his magazines. They were becoming ever more opinionated and partisan. Strong views were not new to the Luce publications, of course. But for nearly twenty years the expressions of “prejudice” in the magazines had mostly taken the form of what might be called “attitude.” Although there had been no shortage of opinion in Time in earlier years, there had also rarely been a clear or consistent political message. Luce had been reasonably content with being both outspoken and largely apolitical until the Willkie campaign of 1940, which drew him for the first time deeply into a political cause. In the aftermath of Willkie’s defeat, he worried that he had become inappropriately partisan and insisted that he would draw back. But his resolve did not last for long.

  Luce’s insistence that he, and he alone, must shape the positions of his magazines grew stronger during the months before Pearl Harbor. And once the United States entered the war, his determination to control content reached a new level. “Time Inc. does have policies and is not at all ashamed of having them or of what they are,” he wrote testily after hearing that one of his bureau chiefs had said that there was no “central policy-maker” in the company. “The chief editorial policymaker for Time Inc. is Henry R. Luce—and that is no secret which we attempt to conceal from the outside world.” The reality, of course, was not quite consistent with Luce’s lofty claim. At the same time that he was asserting his dominance, his company was becoming larger and more decentralized; and he was becoming more and more remote from the actual writing and editing of his magazines. Much of his staff disagreed with Luce on many issues; most of them made no effort to shape their stories to match the views of the editor in chief. Luce was often unaware—at least until after publication—of what was going into his magazines.

  His growing inability to control the content of his publications only increased his frustration, and his insistence on the centrality of his own role. There were periodic eruptions, as when Luce gave the managing editor of Time “blistering hell” for an editorial comment with which he disagreed. The editors did not have the right, he insisted, to present “an interpretation at variance with the views of the Editor-in-Chief.” When the publisher of Time reported in 1944 that the magazine’s coverage of the presidential campaign had not revealed a preference for either candidate, Luce responded caustically that “his verdict will be a real comfort to those who think the political convictions of TIME’s Editor should be completely obscured in TIME.” He complained repeatedly of “the embarrassment of continually finding myself to be the little man who wasn’t there.” At other times he strutted his views across memos and letters, railing at “our goddamned neutrality” and insisting that “there is no longer in TIME INC., I trust, even any lingering hangover for the nonsense that TIME became (sometime after its birth) immaculately immune from prejudice and innocent of conviction.”6

  Luce’s growing insistence on turning the magazines into ideologically reliable vehicles led to a series of controversies both within the company and with the larger world. In October 1942 Russell Davenport—whom Luce had asked to write editorials for Life—published what he called an “Open Letter” in which he criticized the British government for its failure to move more quickly to launch a cross-Channel invasion. The reaction in London was savage, not only because of Davenport’s blunt and undiplomatic language but also because some officials in London believed it to be part of an orchestrated effort to affect American strategy. Davenport, of course, was closely associated with both Willkie and Luce, and such an editorial in Life seemed to many English readers to be an attempted power play by these three influential men and their many allies. Some believed, inaccurately, that it was the beginning of an effort by Luce to position himself to run for president.

  Because Franklin Roosevelt also sharply criticized the editorial, the furor in Washington and England became so intense so quickly that within days Luce (who in fact agreed with Davenport and had charged him with writing exactly the kind of opinionated essays that this editorial represented) felt he had to write a kind of “open letter” of his own to mollify his British critics. He distanced himself from the Davenport editorial, which, he insisted, “I did not write, did not cause to be written,” and which he criticized for “not having said what we meant as clearly as we should have.” (The disclaimer was the beginning of a deep and ultimately permanent rift between Luce and Davenport, who had done no more than what Luce had asked of him.) Luce penitently recommitted himself to “Anglo-American cooperation” and insisted that he had no intention of calling for “the break up” of the British Empire (a cause that the British government and press correctly suspected Luce privately supported). His statement cooled the controversy but did not eliminate suspicions about his real motives in running the piece. Nor did it represent any significant retreat from the increasingly polemical quality of his publications.7

  A much greater series of controversies emerged over Time’s coverage of Stalin and the Soviet Union during the war. The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 generated strong criticism of Stalin in the United States and Western Europe, and the Luce magazines were far from alone in denouncing the Soviet regime. In June 1941, however, Germany invaded Russia, making the Soviet Union suddenly an ally of Britain, France, China, and—after December 7—the United States. The attitude of Americans toward Stalin and the USSR quickly and dramatically changed. To many Americans, including many correspondents and editors at Time Inc., Russia was no longer a dark and menacing tyranny but a gallant and courageous ally. For some people Stalin the despot evolved into the genial “Uncle Joe,” a transformation much facilitated by the American media, which played a large role in smoothing over the rough edges of the Soviet Union. A 1943 Hollywood film, Mission to Moscow, portrayed U.S. ambassador to Russia, Joseph Davies, working to strengthen the USSR-U.S. alliance, while minimizing and rationalizing Stalin’s murderous purges. But it was only one of the many efforts to transform a brutal dictatorship into a democratic ally. Even the Luce magazines were remarkably calm about the U.S.-Soviet alliance in the first years of the war—until a brilliant, troubled, eccentric man entered Luce’s life and helped change his own, and his magazines’, view of the world.

  Whittaker Chambers joined the staff of Time Inc. in 1939 as a book reviewer for one hundred dollars a week. “It was the first real job I had ever held,” he wrote in his memoir. “I have always insisted that I was hired because I began a review of a war book with the line: ‘One bomby day in June.’” Except for his uncanny affinity for Time style, he could hardly have been more incompatible with the slick, confident, Ivy League culture of Luce’s company. The son of a graphic artist for the New York World, he grew up in a slovenly house in a modest Long Island suburb and attended public schools, wearing his father’s ill-fitting cast-off clothes. In the fall of 1920 he entered Columbia College, where he enjoyed a brief
success as an undergraduate literary celebrity and became friendly with some of the most brilliant undergraduates of his time (among them the future literary critic Lionel Trilling and the future art critic Meyer Schapiro). But he soon wearied of the college and left without graduating. In 1924 he joined the Communist Party of the United States. Through most of the next fourteen years, he served the Party first as a writer and editor on the Daily Worker and the New Masses, and then, beginning in 1932, as an agent of Soviet military intelligence. For five years he lived in the murky underground of espionage, using assumed names, moving constantly from one address to another, and learning to trust almost no one. In 1937 he left the party—a dangerous step for a former agent. Chambers feared (not without reason) that his former Communist colleagues might assassinate him as they had other defectors, and he took elaborate precautions to obscure his whereabouts and his movements. He also developed a ferocious hatred of Communism and the Soviet Union, a true passion that drove almost everything he said and wrote. Communism, he believed, was a form of fascism—just as repugnant and just as dangerous as Nazism.8

  Chambers had been writing in Time for almost a year before Luce noticed him. But in February 1940 he read Chambers’s review of the John Ford film The Grapes of Wrath. Chambers had hated the Steinbeck novel on which the movie was based. He considered it crude left-wing “agitprop.” But he praised Ford for creating “perhaps the best movie ever made from a so-so book.” The film had, he wrote,

  purged the picture of the editorial rash that blotched the Steinbeck book. Cleared of excrescences, the residue is the great human story which made thousands of people, who damned the novel’s phony conclusions, read it. It is the saga of an authentic U.S. farming family who lose their land. They wander, they suffer, but they endure. They are never quite defeated, and their survival is itself a triumph.