The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Luce was less happy with, and far less protective of, Fortune in the late 1940s. That was in part because Fortune was, for the first time in years, losing money. He spent months conferring quietly with a few senior colleagues on Fortune’s finances and on what could be done to strengthen them, and he pressured its managing editor, Ralph Paine, to explain why things were going so poorly. Luce dispatched Billings to investigate, and Billings came back with a blunt report, which he summarized: “the edit budget $10,000 over; Paine’s memo on why he needs 25 writers; 17 people in art dept … the high-priced writers, my doubts as to the value of the Survey, a lack of ‘liveliness’ which may be due to sound but aging and unlively writers and editors.” Planning for the future was, Billings noted after a meeting with Luce, “pretty discouraging because the editorial people were so mediocre…. [Luce] held his head in his hands in deep despair…. ‘What’s the use of my giving orders for a new Fortune if there isn’t anybody to carry them out?’” 24

  But despite his discouragement, Luce announced in February 1948 that he was “‘rethinking FORTUNE’ … ‘radical thinking’ … that takes little for granted, re-examines suppositions and habits.” A month later he produced a twenty-five-page memo describing the “new” Fortune—a memo hastily written and only slightly affected by the many suggestions he received from Billings and others. (“An irritating document,” Billings wrote in his diary after sneaking a look at a late draft, “philosophically involved, dark and murky, as Luce groped for new ideas. Why does he have to overcomplicate everything?”) Fortune, Luce grandiosely announced, would become “a magazine with a mission. That mission is to assist in the successful development of American Business Enterprise at home and abroad.” Although Fortune had long ago abandoned its reputation as a magazine that wrote from many different political and ideological perspectives, it had never openly committed itself to taking the side of business as an editorial policy. What Luce was proposing was a magazine devoted to highlighting the success stories of American capitalism—“great stories” providing “wonderful accounts of vitally interesting segments of the whole business scene.”25

  At the center of the “new Fortune” would be a long report in each issue on “Thirty Days of American Business Enterprise … a story full of active verbs … written by a super-journalist.” Despite Luce’s ebullience about his proposed innovations, the message to Fortune was at bottom a harsh and censorious one. “Fortune [would] no longer [be] concerned, uniquely, with Civilization-as-a-whole…. Fortune will not be making itself responsible for everything everywhere.” (Or as Billings put it in his own recommendations to Luce, “El Greco ain’t business.”) Instead Fortune would focus almost entirely and almost always positively on “American Business Enterprise,” aided by advisory boards composed of prominent business leaders. (Paine opposed the advisory-board proposal and threatened to resign until Luce backed away from it.) An unstated but critical part of this plan was that the new Fortune would have a smaller and less expensive staff. It was, Billings wrote, “a notice of dismissal” for most of the Fortune writers and editors.26

  Within a year Fortune was a fundamentally different magazine—narrower in focus, more strongly committed ideologically to what some called the “March of Business,” much reduced in personnel, and considerably more successful in attracting advertising and new subscribers from the business world. But despite Luce’s directives, it did not become a business mouthpiece, in part because his eagerness to attract talent and celebrity to his magazines was as strong as his desire to promote his own views. Over the next decade Fortune welcomed serious and not always affirmative commentary on capitalism from major intellectuals: Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lawrence Lessing, William H. Whyte, and other eminent social scientists with academic backgrounds and, in some cases, academic futures. They continued to publish articles in Fortune that represented some of the most challenging and often contrarian views of capitalism to be found in journalism.27

  The overhaul of Fortune was the most radical change to come out of the “rethinking” project, but to Luce the most important target was Life. He had many concerns. The magazine was still immensely profitable, but there were signs of softening in both circulation and advertising. The most obvious explanation for these problems was the unstable economy of the postwar years. But Luce chose to blame the content of the magazine itself—and not entirely without reason. Daniel Longwell, the pioneering creative force behind the founding of Life, had at long last succeeded Billings as editor of the magazine. Longwell himself had insisted long ago that he would not be a good managing editor, and his actual job performance proved him right. More than once he told Luce he felt he should step down. For all his talent, he was weak and insecure as a leader and frightened of almost everyone. His always-visible tendency to stammer and mutter became much more frequent once he was promoted. Luce, despite his own history of stammering, ungenerously called it “the way a deaf man does to avoid unpleasant topics.”28

  But Luce was not just concerned about Longwell, or even about the quality of the editing. He had a larger goal in mind. He wanted Life to become less a picture magazine and more a vehicle for confronting what he considered the great challenges facing the world. Life had often contained serious material in the past, both textual and visual, especially during the war; but it had always considered itself at least as much entertainment as journalism. That was one of the secrets of its great success, even though Luce never conceded that point, and his colleagues rarely dared to raise it. Just as Fortune was now to be the voice of American business, Life was to be the voice of the new postwar world—and to a large degree, the postwar world as Luce hoped the United States would reshape it. “My mind is literally overpowered, paralyzed, by the nightmare of a tidal wave of knowledge by which, it seems, Life can and will engulf me,” Luce wrote in 1948. But he did not wish to turn back that tide. Instead he intruded more and more into the editing of the magazine to ensure that readers were exposed to the great ideas that Luce believed they must absorb. Robert Elson, a long-serving Time Inc. editor, wrote in his in-house history of the company (after Luce’s death) that “what had once been a young, ebullient, free-wheeling staff seemed bowed down by responsibility for the education of its vast audience while too frequently forgetting that Life was also supposed to be entertaining.”29

  The rethinking of Life had actually begun not with Luce but with Longwell, who in 1944 wrote a memo complaining that the magazine had lost its youth—not just the youth of the magazine but of the people who ran it. Life, he argued, “should be a young man’s magazine…. We’ve reached a high but dead level of competence…. Our first and primary duty as editors is to make the magazine reflect its title.” This was in Longwell’s first year as editor. By 1946, however, he had begun to bow out and turn the weekly editing over to his talented colleagues Joseph Thorndike and Ed Thompson, both of whom understood that they were in a competition to succeed him. By then the number of people trying to rethink Life was growing almost exponentially. The magazine had what Billings called “a jittery uncertainty” and lacked “a smooth even flow of purpose.” But equally troubling to him was the parade of intruders trying to “fix” the magazine, people who were “directly, or indirectly, pulling and hauling at the … editor—Larsen, Heiskell, Longwell, Billings, Luce…. If one man were editing straightaway for the next couple of years, there would be less feeling of fuzzy command.” But that was not to be. In October 1946, Luce made Thorndike the editor. Three years later Thorndike resigned, frustrated by Luce’s continual intrusion and what he considered the undermining of his authority. He was succeeded by Ed Thompson, who also encountered frequent interventions by Luce and others but nevertheless remained in the job until 1961.30

  In the fall of 1948 Luce sent a memo to the Life editors that was, among his many such memos, distinctive for its elaborate metaphors. He referred to an English film about the love affair between British bird lovers and a small bird known as the tawny pipit. That love
affair—that elevation of an ordinary, unimportant bird into an object of extraordinary fascination—was, Luce argued, the key to a successful magazine. “As long as the English were on top of the world, their imaginations were on top of themselves…. Everything they saw, everything they learned, was absorbed in their imaginations.” The moral of this strangely contrived parable was that “if you want to make … anything … interesting, it must be loved by the writer and the editor.” In other, more conventional memos, he made his views much clearer—that the magazine should express its love of what Luce believed was America’s great moment, its unprecedented opportunity to be the new Britain, to reshape the world. In 1948, in response to a proposal for a “Western Culture” project, Luce grandiosely insisted that the series should aspire “to add up to a coherent interpretation of history…. The drama of Western Culture culminates in the creation of the United States of America. And this interpretation invites all Americans to take stock of American civilization at the moment of history when the U.S. has become the heir and chief guardian against the whole body of Western Civilization against the forces of reactionary neo-barbarism.”31

  But Luce did not stop with Western civilization. Life, he soon argued, must become something like a textbook for men and women in need of instruction (whether they knew it or not). They should be presented with “convictions as to the nature of man and the purpose of human life.” To support that goal, he proposed “a combination of an introduction to, and summary of, Freshman Psychology A.” Life should also, he argued, take on the social sciences “and show, by encyclopedic selection, what is the basic material and method of each of the disciplines.” It should develop a concern “for the Non-European world … getting Americans acquainted with the many, many, many different peoples and customs and politics.” And the magazine would, he insisted, develop a higher level of taste: “There is in picture journalism a special peril of bad taste; we will have no bad taste in Life.”32

  Above all he had decided that the most important element of the kind of journalism he was advocating was “faith.” Faith, Luce said, was “what a man does actually believe in as shown by what he does and how he lives…. Like democracy itself, and inescapably with democracy, journalism must fight its way through to a better and brighter world—or at least perish honorably in the attempt.” Life—which had begun to show people interesting photographs, to revel in the curious and the entertaining, and to attract eager readers to such trivial but entertaining features as Life Goes to a Party—that lively, inventive, and never-too-serious magazine was now to become a chronicle of the West’s (and America’s) march to democratic greatness.33

  As was usually the case, Luce did not entirely get his way. Life continued to publish photographs and essays that were pure entertainment, and the magazine moved through the late 1940s and 1950s with continued popularity and success. But if Luce did not transform Life, he did alter it. Life was increasingly devoted to more serious material—often long, sometimes tedious, always worthy. Luce could rarely resist contributions from major world figures, no matter how dull their writing. His editors shuddered when he returned from trips abroad, fearful that he had brought with him yet another ponderous article from a king or minister or celebrity.

  The most famous example of Life’s new role—and almost certainly its most prominent—was its publication of excerpts from the writings of Winston Churchill. This was a large and important innovation for Life, which had rarely before published material from books and certainly never so massive a series of texts as Luce wanted from Churchill. The courtship was long and complicated. Churchill’s chief, and perhaps only, interest in the relationship was financial. No longer prime minister, he had to maintain his lavish lifestyle on his own. The combination of his own modest fortune and high British taxes left him feeling insecure and impoverished. Life, to Churchill, was a great revenue stream. Luce’s interest, by contrast, was only indirectly financial. His principal motive was his belief that capturing the work of such a great figure would elevate Life to an even higher level of eminence in American publishing. Churchill was one of the great figures of his time and, Luce, as always with great figures he admired, wanted to be associated with him.

  The relationship between Churchill and Luce began in 1945, when Walter Graebner, the London bureau chief for Time Inc., heard from Randolph Churchill that his father was interested in having some of his paintings reproduced in Life. Longwell and Thorndike were not enthusiastic about the idea, but Luce saw an opportunity to draw Churchill into a deeper association with the magazine. He paid Churchill twenty thousand dollars to reproduce sixteen pictures in the magazine—pictures that were more pleasant curiosities than significant art. A few months later Graebner accepted an invitation to Churchill’s home and was read a series of secret speeches Churchill had made to Parliament during the war. Perhaps, he suggested, Life would like to publish several of them—for seventy-five thousand dollars. Luce paid fifty thousand dollars, even though he was bored by the speeches. Churchill accepted the fee. “Let’s hope a wide public feels differently,” he confided to Billings of the speeches. “It can be worth the space plus the money if, in some sense, Churchill becomes ‘our author.’” What Luce really wanted was to publish excerpts from Churchill’s promised but still unwritten memoirs. And he spared no effort or expense to acquire them.34

  Over the next several years Life showered favors and money on Churchill. When Churchill complained that he could not afford a vacation because he could not take British currency out of the country, Life paid for long visits to Morocco, Florida, and other warm climates where he could paint and, Luce hoped, write. Luce gave lavish and fawning dinners for Churchill when he was in New York, and he traveled to England periodically to flatter and encourage him. It did not take long for Churchill to sign a contract. In the spring of 1947 Luce agreed to allow Life and the New York Times to share publication of the memoirs for the then-staggering sum of $1.15 million—$750,000 from Life and $400,000 from the Times. “But,” Billings wondered, “will Churchill really buckle down and write top-notch stuff or will he just string a lot of murky official papers together?”35

  Luce assured his colleagues that he would not interfere with the delicate task of editing Churchill’s work, but he could not help himself. He began bombarding Churchill with suggestions on how to tell the history of the war. In particular he tried to persuade Churchill to share and write about Luce’s own contempt for Roosevelt. “He played a most two-faced and ineffective part in the efforts to prevent the so-unneccesary [sic] war,” Luce wrote, and thus betrayed his country and the world. He also prodded Churchill about what he called the failure at Yalta, which he also blamed on Roosevelt. Churchill read Luce’s letters but never replied.36

  Churchill ultimately did write the book, and more quickly than he had once predicted, even if in a way that made Graebner and Luce nervous. “Churchill does most of his work in bed,” Graebner reported. “He keeps six secretaries busy…. One secretary drives with him to and from the country, as Mr. Churchill uses this time to dictate. ‘I can do about 1,000 words while motoring to Chartwell—never less than 800,’ says Churchill.” Longwell and a young Life editor, Jay Gold, were dispatched to help edit the first volume, which dealt with the prewar years. It was voluminous, sprawling, and often turgid. Luce himself jumped into the editing process and wrote Churchill about problems of the “architectural structure” of the book. Churchill insisted that the incoherence of the manuscript reflected the incoherence of the policies pursued by nations in those years. But he was not a stubborn writer, and he gradually allowed the two editors to reshape his material to fit the magazine.

  Publication of the excerpts began in the spring of 1948. They were not popular with Life’s readers and had what Andrew Heiskell called “a devastating effect on newsstand sales.” Churchill wrote at great length, occasionally brilliantly, often tediously, and sometimes almost incoherently. Even the most rigorous editing could not make the material consistently in
teresting. He also padded the memoirs with official documents and produced six volumes, not just the five promised in the contract. (He asked for more money, and Luce—after scaling down his extravagant demands—augmented his fee.) But despite the many ways in which the publication of the memoirs proved disappointing, Luce was not deterred. Not only did he continue to publish excerpts from the memoirs into the mid-1950s, but he also bought the serial rights to Churchill’s next major work, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He published as well a multipart memoir by the Duke of Windsor (the former king), which was even less interesting to the editors and to most readers than the Churchill materials. But if Life was going to be the serious and influential magazine he wanted it to be, Luce reasoned, how could he fail to publish the work, however dull, of such eminent figures in history?37

  The serialization of Churchill’s work was in many ways the launching point for making magazine journalism a vehicle for book promotion. Not long after Life published Churchill’s books, other magazines began working to excerpt books from many other prominent figures from the war years: generals, monarchs, politicians, diplomats. Rarely did any magazine attract large readerships for these pedigreed texts, but the prestige of being able to boast of such distinguished authors soon became as irresistible to other editors as it was to Luce—and an increasingly competitive venture.

  • • •

  Because the rethinking project stopped well short of Luce’s hopes, he began to think of new vehicles to help him tackle the great ideas he yearned to express. Luce had long dreamed of publishing a magazine of opinion. Time Inc.’s decision to end its brief association with the Saturday Review in the 1920s had long been a source of regret to him. Almost thirty years later he was still in search of a way to be a more important player in the battle for ideas. The most influential opinion magazines in the 1940s—the New Republic, the Nation, and others—were mostly liberal periodicals dominated by people committed to the New Deal. Luce never said so, but it was clear that he hoped to create a magazine that would offer a different and more conservative view of the world. The most important force in driving the project, however, was a new figure in Luce’s life—Willi Schlamm, an Austrian émigré and a disillusioned Communist moving rapidly to the Right. (He would eventually end up as a mainstay of The National Review.)38