The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Through much of the 1950s and the early 1960s, Luce’s view of the world was disproportionately driven by his vision of American abundance and American social and cultural progress. And those views in turn helped drive the contents of his magazines, especially Life. This was not a radical shift for Life, which had always devoted considerable energy to promoting wealth, progress, and American lifestyles. But the 1950s and the early 1960s intensified its fascination with the flourishing economy and with the way the middle class lived. Just as Life in the 1940s had been the great chronicler of the war, it became in the 1950s the great chronicler of prosperity and consensus. As early as December 1945, the magazine happily proclaimed the return of “normalcy.” Prosperity, of course, had been far from a norm even for middle-class Americans for most of the past fifteen years, and it remained far from the norm for many Americans even in the 1950s and 1960s. Nearly a third of Americans lived below the government poverty line in the first decade after the war. But Life was insistent that Americans were putting “their minds and energies to work” and were going back to “football games, automobile trips, family reunions and all the pleasant trivia of the American way of life.”5

  By 1954 the idea of abundance was a consistent subject for Life. On the one hand the magazine expressed wonder at, and some concern about, the great bounty Americans had created. “How does one prepare for an Age of Plenty?” the magazine asked in its Thanksgiving issue. “How can one feel thankful for too much?” A year later Life was still worrying: “Is abundance a good enough thing by itself for Americans to take pride in?” Mostly, however, Life celebrated the nation’s wealth. In the magazine’s own assessment of the state of the union (published shortly before the president’s annual message), it claimed that Eisenhower’s “reports get better every year;” and it cited “three major economic blessings which had previously seemed politically incompatible: rising wages, lower taxes and stable prices.” A Life cover story later in 1956, “Peak Year for Big Jobs,” announced an unprecedented $33 billion investment that was “reshaping the continent…. Even on a continent accustomed to huge projects,” it was “more than ever before” and was “providing for the future.” Life regularly trumpeted new milestones in American prosperity. “History’s biggest stock issue” (the first public offering of the Ford Motor Company); “a remarkable recovery” for the “U.S. construction industry,” which was filling “skylines with a spectacular array of bold new building shapes;” an unprecedented $250 million investment by Chrysler in a redesign of its 1955 models (“longer, lower, sportier … with a lot of horsepower”). “Last week,” the magazine reported in July 1955 in a story on houseware manufacturers, “at a time when the country had more money to spend than ever before; the trend seemed to be running toward two pots for every chicken, fish, egg and carrot … a dramatic example of overall U. S. prosperity.”6

  The Time Inc. magazines even began to celebrate labor unions. Luce had long been mostly critical of unions, and the company was fighting off efforts to unionize of some of its own employees during much of the 1950s. But Luce was impressed with Walter Reuther’s leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which he insisted marked a major turning point in labor history. Everything about the union movement, he decided, was suddenly “new.” The UAW had reached a new agreement with the automobile industry on a new “guaranteed wage” for workers while abandoning some of the more radical proposals the CIO had once promoted. “New Affluence, Unity for Labor,” Life announced in a 1955 cover story. A “new era of peace” had emerged out of the labor wars of the 1930s and 1940s with the reuniting of the AFL and CIO in 1955. Life even profiled men it had once reviled: the “new kind of unionists,” labor’s newly responsible “wealth of leadership.”7

  Abundance was the key not just to business and wages but also to technology; and because Luce was suddenly fascinated by technological progress, Life reveled in the achievements of American scientists and engineers. “The advances have come with an overwhelming rush,” Life reported in a “major series on the frontiers of our achievement,” momentously titled “Man’s New World: How He Lives in It.” Americans had “been learning at a phenomenal rate,” benefiting from government subsidies and from research at university and corporate laboratories. Among the great discoveries was atomic power, “man’s great hope of harnessing fusion.” By 1955, Life announced, the atomic industry was “big business,” having developed methods for powering submarines with nuclear energy and creating electricity for consumers in atomic-power plants—the foundation “for a new industrial age.” Equally dazzling was the birth of what Life called “the jet age,” with its promise of faster travel for citizens and its opportunities for improved military capacities in warfare. Life devoted an entire issue in 1955 to the “Air Age,” which argued that “the need and the will to master the world’s air has brought changes which are reshaping our economy, our cities and our global relationships.” But the progress so far, Life predicted, was paltry compared with the “true wonders” of the air age “not yet at hand” but “imminent.” Life reveled as well in the great medical discoveries of the 1950s: the discovery of the Salk and then the Sabin vaccines that effectively eliminated polio; an advance in the treatment of cancer that “seem[ed] close to bringing under control” this “dread enemy;” improvements in X-ray technology; new techniques in heart surgery; and new and more sophisticated weapons to fight bacterial infections and viruses.8

  Life’s fascination with technology reached its highest point in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the magazine became, in effect, the “official” chronicler of the manned space program. To Life, as to many Americans, nothing personified the linkage between scientific progress and the greatness of America’s mission more than the goal of exploring outer space; and nothing excited Americans more than the idea of humans themselves doing the exploration. Almost as soon as the first seven Mercury astronauts were named (and overnight became extraordinary celebrities), Life moved in to buy exclusive rights to their stories for a total of five hundred thousand dollars. In the two-page advertisement announcing Life’s significant coup, the editors could hardly contain their excitement. “The Astronauts’ own stories will appear only in Life,” they wrote. “The lives that these seven men—and their wives—will lead between now and the day that one of them becomes the first American to orbit into outer space will in itself be one of the most absorbing, dramatic human stories of our time.” Luce himself played no direct role in his company’s commitment to the astronauts, but over time he too was drawn into their extraordinary magnetism and even began referring to them as “my boys.”9

  But to Luce, and thus to Life, the best evidence of America in this new “age of abundance” was the middle-class home. One of the most important and most inspiring successes of the postwar years, he believed, was the rapid growth in home ownership, facilitated by the proliferation of suburbs and generous federal support. Partly in response to his enthusiasm, Life launched a series titled “Modern Living,” which focused almost entirely on the character of American homes. There were lavish features on opulent or innovative houses—a “push-button paradise” in Palm Springs, built by a wealthy manufacturer who called it a “mechanical dream house,” with swimming pool, tennis court, nine-hole putting green, and a “human Lazy Susan” of seven outdoor couches that revolved “slowly under the sun.” In other articles Life showcased the great variety of American home designs—a “cross-country roundup” of homes that illustrated regional styles—“rough timber and Texas Cordova stone” in the Southwest, “Scandinavian flavor” in the Midwest, redwood furniture in California, all of them crossing over and becoming national in their reach. There were stories on “pretty underpinnings for modern furniture,” a “bathroom built for two,” “stylish mixing of decor,” the “return of elegance” in home decor, “opulence in plain rooms,” and a “buyer’s guide for antiques.” A three-part series on housing in 1958 illustrated suburban growth across the country and focused on “idea
s for better houses.” Later Life chose “six outstanding homes” as examples of “the country’s most livable houses in varying price ranges.” Perhaps the most bizarre article in “Modern Living” was a 1955 feature, “H-Bomb Hideaway,” which showed a newly designed bomb shelter inhabited by a smiling middle-class family of five, surrounded by canned foods. They were photographed in the three-thousand-dollar “luxury model” and were playing games, reading books, and sewing—a vision of doomsday domesticity almost indistinguishable from Life’s many other portrayals of suburban living.10

  “Nobody Is Mad with Nobody,” Life happily reported in its July 4, 1955, issue. America was “up to its ears in domestic tranquility.” The country was “embroiled in no war, impeded by no major strikes, blessed with almost full employment,” and “delighted with itself.” As if to provide evidence of this remarkable moment, there were photographs of “delighted Vermonters at the Rutland fairground,” a field of high wheat in the Midwest captioned “Abundant Again,” a Junior Chamber of Commerce parade in Atlanta, a suburban den with multiple televisions, a convertible painted with dots to match the owners’ Dalmatian, and a taffy-pulling competition in Peabody, Massachusetts. “Spirits and Industry Are Expansive,” Life announced in another article featuring photographs of new cars, a performance by a symphony orchestra, and an automobile plant expansion in Flint, Michigan. In the 1950s, even more than in the past, Life was promoting what historians and intellectuals were beginning to call the “consensus,” the belief that almost all Americans shared a broad set of ideals and aspirations. Those shared aspirations, Life seemed to be saying, were affluence, consumerism, and middle-class values and lifestyles. The magazine celebrated overt—if mostly contentless—patriotism, stable nuclear families, and male “breadwinners.” It made occasional gestures to women’s work outside the home, as in the 1956 article “My Wife Works and I Like It,” which noted the role working women played in improving the family’s lifestyle. But much more common were celebrations of female domesticity. When Life veered away from the middle class, it often focused on affirmative stories of immigrants embracing the “American way of life,” or on marginal Americans entering the middle-class mainstream through hard work or philanthropy.11

  The change in American life that had the biggest material impact on Time Inc. was the rapid growth of leisure and entertainment. Working hours for many Americans had been reduced; family incomes had risen. Fortune published an ambitious series in 1953–54 on “The Changing American Market,” and among its conclusions was that there had been a dramatic growth in leisure since the end of World War II and a booming search for entertainment. Or, as Fortune put it, there was “$30 Billion for Fun.” Life was an energetic chronicler of the growth of leisure activities, just as it was of other aspects of abundance. It gave lavish coverage to the opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in 1955. It was fascinated by the emergence of Las Vegas as a magnet for gambling and sybaritic entertainment. But perhaps most of all, Life took note of the growing interest in sport and outdoor life. It began to run more major articles than in the past on skiing, duck hunting, Little League baseball, wilderness hiking and camping, horseracing, water sports, and even bowling. It celebrated the sports ordinary people played and the outdoor activities they pursued. But it also celebrated the sports people watched—in stadiums, in arenas, and on television.12

  By the spring of 1953 Luce was once again in what Billings called “an empire-building mood,” which usually meant launching a new magazine. And even though Luce had never been very much interested in sports or wilderness activities himself, he began to imagine a “sporting magazine” that would capture what he believed was a growing market for leisure, and thus for sports. There was brief talk of buying up such existing magazines as Outdoor Life or Popular Science. But what Luce really wanted was “our own Sports Weekly.” Some of his colleagues were aghast at the idea, convinced that a sports magazine would degrade the Time Inc. brand by focusing on trivial and consumer-driven activities. Others worried that the costs would be prohibitive and that the audience would be too narrow. “Time Inc. is not a ‘sporting’ outfit,” Billings wrote contemptuously in his diary, noting that he was “really against a Sports Magazine” and saw it “only as a Luce whim.” (Luce’s deputy, Allen Grover, rarely disagreed openly with his boss—and did not do so on this issue—but he quietly agreed with Billings.) Other colleagues were similarly dubious about the project, and many of them told Luce bluntly that he was making a dangerous error. He was not impervious to these criticisms, and at times he wavered in his commitment. “I still don’t see any real deep conviction about the magazine among its sponsors,” Billings noted several months into the planning. But Luce did not give up.13

  He enlisted the Life reporter Ernest Havemann, an avid sports fan, to supervise the planning of what was tentatively named “Sport.” But almost immediately the two men were at odds. In one of the first substantive meetings on the new magazine, Havemann proposed a magazine written mostly by Time Inc. staff, just like the company’s other publications. Luce strongly disagreed and insisted that outside writers should be the principal source of stories. This was partly because he wanted serious writers, and not sports fans, to shape the magazine; he feared that full-time sports writers would simply replicate the language to which sports fans were accustomed—“a style of writing at once labyrinthine and rococo,” one newspaper editor predicted. But Luce’s preference for outside writers was also partly because of his belief that using freelancers would be less expensive than building a staff, and Luce hoped to produce this magazine relatively cheaply. A few weeks into the planning Havemann wrote a bombshell memo, distributed widely among those working on the new magazine, in which he announced that he now believed that the project “was wrong and impractical” and that “he wanted out right away as head of the experimental department.” His undisclosed “research” had convinced him that there was no real market for a general magazine on sports. People interested in baseball would not want to read about golf. People who liked tennis would not want to read about football. The potential audience was too fragmented to create a large-enough base to support “Sport.” In the absence of Luce (who was in Rome with Clare), Billings enlisted Larsen to help him find a way out of the impasse Havemann had created. Both men shared Havemann’s skepticism, but they dared not give up until Luce himself did.14

  Their solution was to enlist Sidney James, a Life editor with no particular background or knowledge of sports, to take over the project. He was a man of boundless energy and what Luce later described as vast “nerve and enthusiasm.” James breezily rejected the knotty problems of what he called “semantics and theory” that had plagued the project in its first months: the debates over whether the magazine should be directed at a mass audience (1,000,000 circulation or more) or, as Larsen tentatively suggested, a relatively small audience (around 350,000) that would, like The New Yorker, attract the affluent and elite readership that advertisers valued; and the debates over whether the magazine should cover sports alone or make itself into a magazine devoted to a larger conception of leisure and entertainment. James decided instantly that he liked the idea of a “100% sports weekly, either mass or class,” but he decided too that he should be elastic in what “sports” meant. More important, he started immediately to lay out pages and collect articles. He even coined what became one of the magazine’s most important promotional slogans: “The wonderful world of sport!” In less than a month he was ready to show layouts and covers to Billings and Larsen, who became sudden converts to the project. “I was duly impressed and exuded [sic],” Billings wrote. “Considering he … got it all up in about three weeks, it seemed pretty wonderful.”15

  Luce returned from Italy a few weeks later. He looked at what James had produced with something close to incredulity. When Life was in development, there were many weeks, even months, of deep unhappiness with the project; Luce had not been entirely satisfied even when the first issue of Life went to pr
ess. But James, without even having produced a complete dummy, had made Luce an immediate and passionate supporter of the magazine. The best evidence of that was that Luce himself began to spend hours, even days, in the “experimental department” where the magazine was being developed. “Sometimes it seemed that we saw more of Luce than we did of our wives,” one member of James’s staff later said. “Some of us were assigned to escort him to sports events and explain the action and identify the players.” Over long lunches, Billings recorded, Luce “got on the why and wherefore of such a magazine—what’s its purpose? To make money? Sure. But here’s a big segment of human activity, anti-intellectual if you will, which Luce proposes to report in the intelligent adult style, also because it’s never been done before.” Luce’s most resonant and bewildering statement, at least to some of his colleagues, was, “I hope we can have a civilizing influence.” All of this seemed familiar to the many editors and writers who had worked with Luce in creating Fortune and Life—his high sense of purpose, his search for meaning, his long philosophical speculations. But this time something was missing: the Lucean brilliance that had always justified his frustrating meanderings. Luce was no less enthusiastic than he had been in the past. But whether because the subject remained alien to him, or because he was too long removed from the work of magazine production, he was no longer the driving force behind the new project. “Luce looked at spreads—this in, this out,” Billings described work on an early dummy. “But then he’d get stuck and go silent for five and ten minutes for lack of a good idea. His inspiration is running low and he is no longer the creative genius of magazine journalism.” Luce gradually reduced the amount of time he spent with the magazine, which left James to continue on his pragmatic path. Uncharacteristically Luce declined to write the prospectus for the magazine. James wrote it instead, and Luce—without much editing or questioning—announced that “it’s very good, all in the right direction.”16