“The United States,” he wrote, “was dedicated to a proposition. That was something unique in the history of nations…. The proposition, of which Lincoln spoke, was that ‘all men are created equal.’ … What is necessary to understand here is that the American Proposition contains, indeed is founded on, truths or hypotheses which are unqualifiedly universal…. It was and is the American task to take the lead in creating a new form of world order.” These were ideas he had been struggling to express during much of his life: in his first political efforts during his years at Yale, in the famous essay in Life, “The American Century,” and in his search for a “national purpose.” In the last months of his life he was struggling with them still.39
Luce’s casual attitude toward his health represented a denial of a number of dangerous events in his medical past: gall-bladder surgery; hypertension; his 1958 heart attack; prostate troubles; osteoarthritis in his shoulder, arm, and neck; and a brief attack of arrhythmia in 1964. Each illness produced fear and anxiety. Each recovery produced relief and increased confidence in his ability to outlive his problems.40
On February 23, 1967, Luce flew back to Phoenix from California with Clare, who had just made a highly critical speech about the United Nations, somewhat softened by Harry’s last-minute intervention. The next morning he slept late, uncharacteristically, and could not hold his food down once he had eaten. He continued to vomit through the day. Doctors were in and out of the house, but Luce insisted he was not seriously ill. He remained at home that night. The following day he felt no better, and at noon he was taken by ambulance to the hospital. “I seem to be unusually sleepy,” he told his doctor. Clare, in the meantime, went on with her day. “I had a dinner party to go to that night,” she recalled a few years later, “but I grew very uneasy and left about 9 p.m., went home, and called the hospital. He got on the phone at once; he said not to worry—he was all right and watching television. (‘Perry Mason’—which is why I go on watching the darn thing.)” He was up and down late into the night, and at about three o’clock in the morning he went into the bathroom. A nurse heard him yell, “Oh God!” By the time the doctors rushed to his room, he was unconscious. Fifteen minutes later, he was dead—the victim of a massive heart attack. It was February 28, 1967, thirty-eight years to the day from the death of Brit Hadden, and forty-four years almost to the day since he had sat in the shabby little office he shared with Brit in downtown New York, holding the first issue of Time magazine and having “this sort of surprising feeling that it was pretty good.”
*It was eerily similar to a lament about his blighted life that he had written to Lila decades earlier.
Epilogue
The news of Luce’s death spread rapidly across the vast world of Time Inc. Requests flew out from New York for stories about him, and correspondents from all over the globe flooded the headquarters with anecdotes and remembrances. When Brit Hadden died in 1929, the grief-stricken staff could not even bring itself to write an obituary and inserted instead a small announcement in Time’s Milestones section. For Luce, the company violated a forty-four-year tradition of never putting the image of a deceased figure on the cover of Time. At the urging of his son Henry Luce III and spurred on by the company’s new leaders who feared alienating the Luce loyalists still among them, Hedley Donovan agreed to put Luce’s image on the cover—a simple pencil drawing (adapted from an Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph) on a plain white background. (Newsweek superimposed an image of a similar Time cover—using the actual Eisenstaedt photograph—on its own cover the same week.) His picture appeared in newspapers all over the country and much of the world (including in Rome, where one paper reported that “Clare Boothe Luce’s Husband Has Died”).1
Luce’s funeral took place in the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, where he had attended services for many years. His pastor and friend, David H. C. Read, conducted the service for eight hundred people at the church—and an additional twelve hundred Time Inc. employees who gathered in the reception area and the auditorium of the Time-Life Building, where they watched the service on a closed-circuit broadcast. Later that week, at a private ceremony, he was buried on the grounds of his onetime and seldom-visited home in Mepkin, South Carolina, by then a Trappist monastery. His grave was next to that of Ann Brokaw, Clare’s daughter.2
In his will, Luce left most of his personal property to Clare—the Phoenix and Hawaii houses, their apartment in New York, the paintings she once complained that she did not own. He left the rest to other family members: a property in Morris County, New Jersey, which went to his son, Hank; another in Haverford, Pennsylvania, that Luce had bought for his sister and brother-in-law, which was left to Emmavail. He forgave all debts owed to him by his children. The most important part of his estate, of course, was his more than one million shares of stock in Time Inc. He left 55,000 shares to the Henry Luce Foundation, to which he had already contributed a much larger amount that together totaled approximately half of his holdings. He left 180,000 shares to Clare, in trust. His two sons each received over 71,000 shares. At the time, each share was worth slightly over $100.3
On the day of Luce’s funeral, Time Inc. reported its first-quarter performance. There were record earnings of over $3,000,000, but the officers and the board worried about the softening of the economy and the declining health of some of the company’s magazines. Their greatest concern was Life, which had never recovered from the fall in advertising that had begun in the late 1950s. The magazine continued to flourish editorially, and its readership remained enormous—indeed, for a time, it grew. But things had changed. Luce’s idea of turning Life into a magazine of “national purpose” in the mid- and late 1960s, a period of almost unprecedented conflict and polarization, proved to be futile. The unstated compact between Life and its readers—that the magazine would celebrate American prosperity and consensus—was impossible to preserve in a rapidly changing and increasingly diverse society. Life could have survived and even embraced the changing culture, which provided at least as many compelling images (and important writing) as in its earlier decades. The real problem was its finances, which continued to go slowly downhill. Despite its vast circulation, advertisers were finding Life too expensive, especially when compared with television, which attracted many more viewers than the magazine did at a not much greater price—part of a broad shift in publishing that doomed many general interest magazines. Life struggled on, with many great editorial moments and with continued hope (and denial) into the early 1970s. But on December 8, 1972, Time Inc. announced that it was terminating what had been perhaps the most popular magazine in American history.
“We persevered as long as we could see any realistic prospects,” Hedley Donovan, Luce’s beleaguered successor, said glumly of the decision. The Time story on Life’s demise cited a prescient statement by Luce in the heady first years of the magazine in the late 1930s: “The other magazines, like TIME and FORTUNE, are enduring; they have a permanence about them. LIFE might only last 20 years…. Every issue of LIFE is like bringing out a new show on Broadway.” The Time editors added: “Even the long runs have to close some Saturday night.” Life’s last issue was dated December 29. At the bottom of the cover, in small print, the magazine said “Good bye.”4
Time Inc. soldiered on and, for the most part, flourished. Only two years after the demise of Life, the company launched People, its first new magazine in twenty years, inspired by the long-standing People section in Time and which became a tremendous financial success, the first of many new Time Inc. magazines (more than a hundred by the end of the twentieth century). Few of them reflected Luce’s belief that quality, sophistication, and a broad general readership should be the hallmarks of his publications. Luce had resisted expansion and diversification during his lifetime, but no such inhibitions impeded the company’s growth after his death. The 1990 merger with Warner entertainment created what became now Time Warner, one of the three largest media companies in the United States. It now included film, music, cab
le television, and many other areas. In late 2000 Time Warner was acquired by America Online, the enormously successful Internet access company. It proved to be an ill-fated merger, but Time Warner survived the fiasco and remained a powerful and successful company, although the magazine division that had launched the company was weakening fast in the digital world of the twenty-first century. Luce’s remaining magazines—Time, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated—were all experiencing significant revenue declines and editorial cutbacks. The magazines that were flourishing were mostly newer, narrowly focused periodicals, no longer attempting to attract a broad middle-class readership, but trying instead to identify subjects that would attract smaller but more intensely committed interest groups.
Henry Luce, who once expressed doubts about the lucrative Time-Life Books series because he feared he would not be able to read and approve them all, would likely have been bewildered by the vastness of what Time Inc. later became—a company that no single man could any longer control in the way Luce had attempted, and had often succeeded, in doing. But in his own time, Luce was certainly among the most powerful media figures in America, and perhaps the world. His influence was in part the result of the enormous popularity of his consistently entertaining magazines, although other media were equally profitable and at least equally popular, especially after the advent of television. But what made Luce truly different from most other major media barons was his willingness to control the contents of his magazines. “To a remarkable extent,” Alden Whitman wrote in the New York Times obituary, “the judgments and opinions that were printed reflected the focus of Mr. Luce’s own views.” He was, the Times added, “a man of missionary zeal and limitless curiosity” who “deeply influenced American journalism.”5
Luce’s willingness to make political judgments, to support politicians he admired (almost always Republicans), and to denounce government policies he disliked contributed to the intensity of his critics. Many of the denunciations of the Luce magazines—from presidents, statesmen, and other media chieftains—were a result of ordinary political disagreement or aesthetic distaste. Some criticized the company’s venality. “Time’s business is to promote Time Inc. as a corporate empire,” Andrew Kopkind, the former Time correspondent turned radical journalist, wrote shortly after Luce’s death. “Like all imperial systems, it is self-justifying; worlds must be conquered because they are there…. The basic urge is to its own expansion.”6
But for others, most prominently the members of the liberal-left intelligentsia, Luce was someone not just to disdain, but also to fear. His magazine empire, many intellectuals came to believe, was a powerful vehicle of propaganda, capable of narrowing the horizons of readers while at the same time manipulating and mobilizing them. To many such intellectuals of the postwar era, the great danger facing democracy was the easily deluded middle class, which they believed could easily fall under the influence of a powerful and persuasive media. Ominous examples of this power, they argued, were the propaganda that fascist and Communist regimes used to delude and control their own populations; or the McCarthy-like American demagogues whose manipulation of the media had led Americans into believing in what McCarthy himself called the “conspiracy so immense” of Communist subversion. This was the fear that inspired the historian Richard Hofstadter to write his famous 1964 essay on “the paranoid style,” in which he argued that demagoguery and propaganda directed at many narrowly informed people caused them to lose faith in democracy and to become convinced that they were victims of conspiracies. The social scientist Theodor Adorno warned of the specter of totalitarianism and denounced the tame middle class that embraced mass culture and rejected the skepticism and independence that a democratic society required. To such critics, Luce and his magazines were a kind of anesthesia, drawing readers into an imaginary world of consensus and homogeneity and numbing them to the active inquiry that citizens needed to understand their world.7
Fueling that fear was Luce’s great success in reaching a broad middle-class constituency and in creating an intimate relationship with many of his readers. That was perhaps ironic, since Luce himself was a fundamentally shy, lonely, and somewhat awkward man with few true friends. And yet like many other hugely successful politicians, entertainers, and others who were privately reclusive, he had the ability to connect publicly with millions of strangers. Luce’s critics, and occasionally Luce himself, believed that his access to a large public gave him real power to control public opinion.
But in fact, and often to his own great frustration, Luce was almost never able to exercise as much power as he wished and as his adversaries believed he had. He hated Franklin Roosevelt and opposed most of what he did. But his opposition to Roosevelt—most visible in his passionate and at times reckless support of the failed presidential candidacy of Wendell Willkie in 1940—had almost no impact on Roosevelt’s policies or on his political successes. Luce railed for years about America’s failure to support Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalist China, but he could never overcome America’s public and political unwillingness to challenge the Communist regime. Luce had close relationships at times with Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, but rarely did any of them take his advice or adjust policies to avoid his magazines’ criticism. On the contrary, Luce more often adjusted his own views to sustain his relationship with people he considered important. There was much in the Luce magazines that was irritating and even infuriating to many readers, but there was little in them that could manipulate readers into abandoning their own political or cultural independence. His magazines were mostly reflections of the middle-class world, not often shapers of it. And despite their claims of disgust, even many of Luce’s most ardent critics continued to read the magazines, often with as much pleasure as annoyance. Some of them wrote for Life and Fortune even while denouncing Luce in other venues.
Where Luce was most influential was in promoting ideas that were already emerging among a broad segment of the American population—most notably in the early 1940s, when Luce wrote his famous “American Century” essay and worked energetically to persuade Americans of what was already an indisputable truth—that the United States was now the most powerful and important nation in the world, that it no longer lived in the shadow of Europe. To Luce, that meant that America had a responsibility to reshape the world, a belief many other Americans shared. He may have articulated this vision more effectively (and more grandiosely) than most Americans, but the ideas he expressed were not new to him. Many of them reflected earlier essays in Life by Walter Lippmann, and even Roosevelt’s recently enunciated Four Freedoms.
Luce’s intellectual life may have been rigid and polemical on issues that were of great importance to him. But on other issues, he was as skeptical, inquiring, and independent as the most hostile of his critics. He bitterly opposed many liberal initiatives, but on the whole he supported the growth of government power and embraced many of the great changes of his time—the growth of the welfare state, civil rights for minorities, and, at least tentatively, the emergence of feminism and gender equality. He understood the broad transformation of the capitalist economy in the postwar years, supported unions to ensure that the profits were not reserved to a few, and applauded what he considered “modern” industrial leaders who believed in progressive corporate responsibility. He was a mostly loyal Republican, but not an uncritical supporter of the party’s right wing—always a moderate or liberal trying to draw the party into the mainstream. When it failed to do so, as in 1964 when Barry Goldwater ran for president, he repudiated the party’s ticket. Luce always described himself as a liberal—not a liberal of the Left, but a liberal in his openness to new ideas and his embrace of progressive change.
Luce did not change the world. His most important legacy remains his role in the creation of new forms of information and communications at a moment in history when media were rapidly expanding. His magazines were always the most important of his achievements. They reached unprecedented numbers of Americans in the 1920s and 1930s and
helped transform the way many people experienced news and culture. His expansion into radio and film, even though relatively shortlived, helped legitimize these emerging media as serious sources of news themselves. Like all powerful media, Luce’s innovations had their day and then slowly lost their centrality as newer forms of communication took their place. And while his company survives still, far larger and wealthier than it was in Luce’s lifetime, little remains of the goals and principles he established for it.
Time magazine’s cover story on the death of Luce was titled “End of a Pilgrimage.” It began with one of Luce’s most pompous statements: “As a journalist, I am in command of a small sector in the very front trenches of this battle for freedom.”8 But the great and almost always futile crusades that Luce embraced are not his principal legacy. A simpler and more appropriate remembrance of his formidable life appeared almost two decades after his death, when Time added a new line to its masthead:
FOUNDERS,
BRITON HADDEN 1898–1929
HENRY R. LUCE 1898–1967.
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century Page 63
