The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  Despite the claims of Luce and his colleagues that Life was of almost universal appeal—that people from all classes, regions, religions, races, and backgrounds were drawn to the magazine—they always understood that their readership was largely middle class. If they had any doubts, their own research confirmed it. In fact, the larger the circulation became, the more dominant the middle class was within it. A survey in 1950 (one of the first serious and reliable analyses of the readership conducted by Alfred Politz Research) revealed that more than a third of Life’s readers were in the wealthiest 20 percent of the population, and that well under 10 percent were in the lowest. Readership declined on each step down the economic ladder. There was a similar correlation between education and interest in Life. Nearly 40 percent of Life’s readers had at least some college education (at a time when few Americans had ever attended college), while only 7 percent of readers came from the large population cohort that had no more than a fourth-grade education. Life’s readers were far more urban than rural, far more Northern than Southern, and considerably more young than old. (The second largest age group of Life readers consisted of ten- to nineteen-year-olds.) Politz was an independent survey researcher who conducted his “Audience” studies on commission from Time Inc., which published them internally. Further such studies later in the decade showed no significant change in the profile of the readership.58

  “Life for me was like the American flag,” the photographer John Loengard wrote after many years of work on the magazine. It was, the novelist William Brinkley wrote in 1961, “one of the most important elements in The American Civilization.” Carl Mydans, in his memoir of his own career taking photographs for Life, recalled: “We had an insatiable desire to search out every facet of American life, photograph it and hold it up proudly, to a pleased and astonished readership…. America had an impact on us each week we made an impact on America.” But not everyone, not even everyone who worked on the magazine, believed that Life was in fact presenting a true picture of the world it portrayed. There was a slow but steady exodus of photographers and writers who felt stifled by Life’s amiable positiveness. (Among the founders of the important photography agency, Magnum, created in 1947, were many disillusioned refugees from Life.) “I didn’t have to spend long at Life to face the facts,” the photographer John Morris recalled of his early, alienating days at the magazine. “We were entertainers as much as journalists. Photographers worked from ‘scripts,’ and stories were ‘acts.’” Whether they liked it or not, however, few doubted that Life exercised considerable cultural authority. It aspired to create a persuasive portrait of the nation’s life as the American people experienced it; it succeeded in producing a powerful image of the middle class, an image that fit the assumptions of the magazine’s creators and that affirmed and enriched the way in which most of its readership already understood their world. Large elements of society were either missing from the pages of Life or were portrayed in ways that made them compatible with the magazine’s (and most of the readership’s) outlook. In an era blighted by Depression, prejudice, social turmoil, and the shadow of war, Life offered the comforting image of a nation united behind a shared, if contrived, vision of the “American dream.”59

  *Ingersoll—and his biographer, Roy Hoopes—make a strong claim that he was the principal creative force driving Life forward. There is no evidence to support this view. Although Ingersoll certainly played a significant role in Life’s creation once the decision to publish was made, he was never wholly behind the magazine and even two years after its launch continued to complain about how it had damaged the other magazines. “It might have been sounder business for Time’s proprietors to have minded their knitting and used their wits to move Time forward to an unquestioned Number One position in the magazine world,” he said grumpily a few years later.

  IX

  Man of the World

  By the time of Luce’s fortieth birthday in April 1938, he had been a wealthy and powerful man for nearly a decade. He was no longer the anxious striver, the brash young man who, against all odds, had—with Brit Hadden—created the brilliant and precocious success of Time. He now more often appeared to be a reserved, aloof figure, fully aware of his importance and unafraid to assert it. His relationships within his company were becoming increasingly distant. His colleagues noted that he socialized with them far less than he once had; that he even began to ride up to his office in an otherwise empty elevator—not something he ever ordered or acknowledged but a kind of isolation that everyone in the company understood and observed. His contact with his staff consisted largely of sudden and often unwelcome interventions in their work and long, abstract memos about the purpose of his magazines. “He is no longer the shy simple fellow I first knew,” Billings observed. He had become “the great philosopher…. My complaint is that Luce is so busy being a Great Personage that he has forgotten the source of his greatness—the magazines we put out for him.” Luce had not forgotten about his magazines, as Billings soon learned. But they were no longer the only, and sometimes not even the principal, focus of his attention.1

  The change in Luce—his gradual transformation from hardworking editor to self-conscious “great man”—was the subject of much speculation among his colleagues and friends. Some argued that it was a result of the enormous success of Life magazine, which had pushed him clearly into the forefront of the publishing world. Others were certain that it was his marriage to Clare, whose thirst for fame and glamour (not to mention her competitive relationship with her husband) drove Harry to adopt a new persona compatible with her sense of entitlement and power. But by far the biggest influence on Luce in the late 1930s and 1940s was the advent of World War II, which drew him into the world of politics and statesmanship and significantly transformed his sense of his own importance. He was no longer just a successful editor and publisher. He was a man of the world, a person of influence and, perhaps most of all, a person of ideas—ideas that he believed were important to the future.

  Prior to 1939 Luce’s interest in politics and world affairs had been generally fleeting. He seldom made overt political statements in public, and he was reticent about expressing his own views openly in his magazines. In fact he tolerated, at times almost encouraged, views that he himself did not share. For years he permitted Time’s foreign editor, Laird Goldsborough, to cover the European crises of the 1930s by lionizing Mussolini and shrugging off the threat of Hitler. Goldsborough was a good writer and an efficient editor, and that was enough for Luce. Similarly, for several years, he had not much interfered with the Popular Front sensibilities that Ralph Ingersoll and others helped bring to Fortune. The approach of war, however, strengthened and redirected the powerful sense of mission that had defined his life since childhood. Never fully content with personal and professional success alone, he saw in the great world conflict a defining moment in history—and also in his own life.2

  Luce was not immediately committed to American participation in the war in Europe when it began in September 1939, but he was wholly committed to the destruction of the Axis and to an important American role in achieving that goal. “The American refusal to be ‘drawn in,’” he wrote to a friend in Paris, “is a kind of failure to realize how deeply we are in, whatever we say or do.” The Sino-Japanese War, the threat to France and Britain, the looming enigma of the Soviet Union—all pushed him for the first time into an active role in trying to shape American foreign policy. Gone was his laissez-faire attitude toward the contents of his magazines. They, like him, were now soldiers in a cause, and Luce set out to train them in the proper presentation of the crisis. That required regaining control of his magazines.3

  The departure of Ralph Ingersoll in 1939 was one step in that effort. Ingersoll, who had acquired considerable authority over the editorial policies of the company, left of his own accord to start the newspaper P.M., but he must have been aware of his deteriorating position within Time Inc., a position confirmed by the relief with which Luce, and many of his
colleagues, greeted his decision to leave. The disillusionment with Ingersoll was partly because his arrogance and abrasiveness had made him unpopular with virtually all his colleagues. (“What a conceited egoist!” Billings noted after a farewell conversation with Ingersoll. “He’s been a snake-in-the-grass in the organization for years.”) But to Luce and Billings both, the main problem was that Ingersoll’s politics were too often at odds with their own. “The old Time is now gone forever,” Billings had lamented shortly before the shake-up. “Ingersoll has revolutionized and sovietized things.”4

  More significant than Ingersoll’s departure was the fall of Goldsborough. Throughout the 1930s he had written about European fascism as if it were at worst a minor irritant that did not much threaten the United States. (In 1935, in the midst of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, Goldsborough wrote about a modest Mussolini overture to improve relations with France, and insisted it made him a “prime candidate” for the Nobel Peace Prize.) Where once Luce had tolerated Goldsborough’s essentially isolationist views, he now found them unacceptable. Goldsborough “has just has not grown up with the times,” he confided to Billings, “and he sees Europe as it was in 1930.” By mid-1939 Luce had begun to marginalize Goldsborough, sending him on long trips overseas and assigning the editorship of Foreign Affairs to others. By late 1940 Goldsborough was gone—exiled briefly to a new and meaningless job as “assistant” to Luce before a forced if lucrative retirement in 1941. “His fall will be a hard one,” Billings accurately predicted. (After ten years of lonely obscurity Goldsborough jumped to his death in 1950—carrying his omnipresent gold-headed cane with him—from a window in the Rockefeller Center offices where he had once been a titan.)5

  The weakness of Time Inc.’s global vision in the 1930s had been a product of both attitude and uncertainty. The magazines’ cultural and literary style had remained rooted in Time’s early, slightly cynical brashness and its tendency to take nothing too seriously. These traits were increasingly incompatible with the serious and ominous state of the world of the late 1930s. Luce and his colleagues were also, for a time, uncertain about their position on the rise of dictatorships and the advent of war. Torn between the extremes of Goldsborough’s quasi-fascist leanings and the Popular Front inclinations of others, the magazines struggled, and generally failed, to produce a coherent position on the looming crisis. But by the end of 1939, with Ingersoll gone and Goldsborough shunted aside, and with fighting under way in Europe and widening in China, Time Inc. had begun to recast itself as the chronicler of the great global catastrophe—a recasting launched through a series of dinners Luce held with his senior editors in 1939 in an effort to “reintroduce” himself to his own staff. The Fortune writer Charles Wertenbaker later described those dinners in his novel The Death of Kings, which included a thinly disguised profile of Luce. His employees sat mesmerized, Wertenbaker wrote of the only slightly fictionalized publisher portrayed in the book, awed by “the purity of his belief.” Others who attended the dinners noticed a new tone of authoritativeness, rooted in Luce’s increasing certainty about his own positions. “Is TIME utterly unbiased, impartial, objective?” he asked. “No, TIME is prejudiced” in favor of “individual liberty” and American leadership in the world. At the dinners and elsewhere he laid out his new vision for the magazines: “Time cannot escape the fact that it is the bellwether of the most successful journalistic group in the world,” he wrote in one of several memos outlining the company’s future course. “At last it is clear to me what FORTUNE’s No. 1 Job in this crisis is,” he announced a few months later. “The No. 1 Job is to straighten out U. S. Businessmen (and “Liberals”) on the great matter of appeasement.” He had similar conversations with his colleagues on Time and Life, advocating a new goal: a “journalism of information with a purpose.” Having thought about the “great changes in the world,” he wrote in November 1939, he had acquired “a deeper conviction that … in our execution of The Newsmagazine Idea we shall indeed ‘justify journalism’ in our time.”6

  Luce’s sudden and deep conviction in 1939 was a departure from his and his magazine’s outlook even a year before. Through much of the 1930s, the Time Inc. editors and writers eagerly covered the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish civil war, the growing arsenal of the German military, and the halting American steps toward rearmament. But covering war was not the same as taking a position in the emerging global conflict. During most of the decade, Luce and his magazines were largely indifferent to who was winning or losing the conflicts in Europe and Asia. Time Inc.’s coverage was clinical and detached, expressing little sense that the conflicts had very much to do with the United States.7

  Time, for example, chronicled the Japanese invasion of China through much of the 1930s as a dispute between two tyrannies: Japanese warlords fighting Chinese dictators. The magazine routinely referred to Chiang Kai-shek, later one of Luce’s—and thus Time’s—great heroes, as “Dictator Chiang,” and even treated the brief kidnapping of Chiang by a militant Chinese nationalist in 1937 not as a crime or a tragedy, but as an example of China’s disarray. The magazine took a similarly detached view of Mussolini. “The years have dignified and tempered Benito Mussolini,” the magazine declared in 1936 in the aftermath of Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, “and he has dignified and tempered the Italian people” while speaking with “Augustan calm.” Even Hitler, whom the magazines generally scorned, received gentle treatment on occasion. Time described the 1936 Nuremberg rallies benignly as “the greatest show and heartiest picnic on earth,” admired Hitler’s “magnetism,” and uncritically reported the good news about Germany’s economy that the führer had touted in his speeches. In August 1938 Time greeted Hitler’s mobilization of a million soldiers with sunny indifference: “Last week Europe was in a mood to let Adolf Hitler exercise his boys and put on a show.” And a few weeks later the magazine responded to the September 1938 Munich accord in which Britain and France ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, as a welcome example of settling a major conflict “by talking instead of shooting first.” Indeed, the enforced surrender of Czechoslovakia, Time claimed, may have “set a precedent which might flower into a great influence for peace.”8

  In Life a story on a 1938 Hitler visit to Rome noted that “democratic observers relaxed” in the face of evidence that neither Germany nor Italy were likely to cooperate in any future wars. The magazine’s grim 1938 reports of the Spanish civil war and the Sino-Japanese war made no judgments about the justice of anyone’s cause and instead cited the fighting as a reason for the United States to insulate itself from the global crisis. “The love of peace has no meaning or no stamina unless it is based on a knowledge of war’s terrors,” Life wrote in a caption below a Robert Capa picture of corpses on a plain near Teruel in Spain. Fortune, in the meantime, treated the growing crisis only glancingly and with exceptional detachment—worrying about the impact of global instability on business, expressing more contempt for Britain’s democratic weakness than for German tyranny, and displaying a cheerful confidence that war would be averted. In its September 1939 issue, published only days before the beginning of World War II, Fortune’s only mention of international news was a brief upbeat story about the improvement in France’s finances.9

  The events of 1939 abruptly changed the attitude of Luce himself and of his magazines. The once-benign interpretation of Munich quickly turned into a savage attack on appeasement. Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, which Time had largely shrugged off in September 1938, now became the conclusive evidence of Hitler’s incorrigible ambitions. “The treaty-breaking, lie-telling German Dictator … threw away all pretence of being anything but a Conqueror,” the magazine noted in March 1939. A month later, when Mussolini invaded Albania, the editors responded furiously both to the Italian aggression and to the spinelessness of Britain and France: “There are in Europe two madmen who are disturbing the entire world—Hitler and Mussolini. There are in Europe two damn fools who sleep—
Chamberlain and Daladier.” At about the same time the magazines began their (and Luce’s) long love affair with Winston Churchill, who became “a symbol of British democracy … of the kind that totalitarian governments cannot endure.” One of the decisive moments in Luce’s full commitment to war was the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, a “nightmare” that created “a mighty cordon of non-democracy stretching one-third around the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific” and that united the world’s two leading “revolutionary tyrannies.” By the time Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, formally beginning what Time had already labeled World War II (thus cementing the conflict’s enduring name), the magazines were already mobilizing themselves for a full-throated defense of democracy and a determination to defeat tyranny.10