Modern Living: A PARTICULAR KIND OF JOURNALISM

HENRY ROBINSON LUCE, the cofounder of TIME, probably had less personal publicity than any other American of comparable influence; he was widely unknown, and what was known about him was often wrong. Luce was particularly nettled by Wolcott Gibbs’ brilliant parody profile in The New Yorker (“Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind”). Once, after Luce had visited a college class in contemporary biography, he exploded: “And who do you suppose the class was discussing? Me! And what do you suppose they were using as their text? That goddam article in The New Yorker! Is this thing going to be engraved on my tombstone?”

Perhaps to provide a better “text” about himself, but also to contribute a chapter to the history of American journalism, Luce commissioned a history of Time Inc. In 1964, three years before he died, he charged the author “to be candid, truthful, and to suppress nothing relevant or essential to the narrative.” The result is TIME INC. The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 (Atheneum; $10). Can the account of a company be intimate? It seems like a contradiction in terms, but readers may decide that this book is indeed reasonably intimate.

The writer is Robert T. Elson, for 25 years a correspondent and editor for TIME, FORTUNE and LIFE, who has had access to all company archives and to the memories of almost all of the people involved. What emerges is in part a portrait of Luce’s working life, with a few reflections of his private life. More than that, what emerges is the art, craft and business of a particular kind of journalism. Elson opens his account at a point when TIME was a brash, almost absurdly ambitious experiment. He closes it when the magazine, now the eldest in a family that included FORTUNE, LIFE, The March of Time and other enterprises, had become important enough to earn a public rebuke from the President of the U.S.—and to offer him, shortly thereafter, its rather solemn support in war. The second volume will carry the story up to the 1960s.

Currents of the Times. Elson constantly describes the play of ideas that took place among the principals, often in office memoranda. Luce and his associates wrote a great many of these—indeed it seems remarkable that they had any time left over to get out the magazines. In these memos they struggled with each other, tried to convince each other, often about procedural matters (Who is responsible for accuracy?) but, more often, about the main political and intellectual currents of the times.

Elson’s book points up the interesting origins of the two founders. Henry Luce: son of a devout Presbyterian missionary, born in China, his fondest memories of Fourth of July celebrations when the Americans clasped hands in the “hush of eventide” and sang My Country, ‘Tis of Thee. He never could forget “a shameful, futile, endless two hours one Saturday afternoon when I rolled around the unspeakably dirty floor of the main schoolroom with a little British bastard who had insulted my country.” Such experiences, he later felt, gave him a “too romantic, too idealistic view of America … I had no experience of evil in terms of Americans.” Briton Hadden: born in Brooklyn to a prosperous banking family, wanted to become a professional baseball player but wasn’t that good; mischievous, mercurial and iconoclastic. After they met, and competed, at both Hotchkiss and Yale, they performed the extraordinary feat of raising $85,675 to launch their magazine. It was Hadden who developed TIME style, in its early incarnation an extraordinary idiom, at once economical, vivid, infuriating and occasionally poetic. While Luce managed the business end, Hadden edited, with a carefully annotated translation of Homer’s Iliad by his side; in the back cover he had listed hundreds of its energetic verbs and compound adjectives—forerunners of TIME’S “beetle-browed,” “buzzard-bald,” etc. He also encouraged backward-running sentences (“A ghastly ghoul prowled around a cemetery not far from Paris. Into family chapels went he, robbery of the dead intent upon”). When Hadden, only 31, died of a streptococcus infection in 1929, the magazine published a Milestones item about him which ended in a typical TIME sentence: “To Briton Hadden success came steadily, satisfaction never.”

Under Hadden’s rule, TIME had been extraordinarily carefree and sometimes irresponsible — a state of affairs, writes Elson, which “present-day TIME editors and writers can envy.” Hadden delighted in journalistic pranks. He peopled the Letters column with invented characters, most notably the puritanical lady who kept objecting to the Prince of Wales’ loose living, inciting other letter writers to object to her narrow views. Since readers have sometimes discerned in TIME a special mixture of seriousness (not to say portentousness) and levity, it was easily assumed that the first quality stemmed from Luce and the second from Hadden. As Elson shows, that explanation is too simple. Luce had his share of irreverence, which he encouraged or at least permitted in his magazines; Hadden, on the other hand, was deeply serious beneath his frivolous exterior. They were both earnest about the need to inform America.

When TIME was already a fairly important magazine, Luce did not consider it beneath his dignity to appear at a businessmen’s lunch and stage a quiz game to demonstrate the importance of accurate information. Later he was to write that the “invention” involved in TIME lay not in its brevity or in its principle of organizing the news but in its emphasis on the “instructive role of journalism.” Still later, in early 1939, when he was displeased with the magazine, he complained: “Somehow it does not give the feel of being desperately, whimsically, absurdly, cockeyedly, whole-souledly determined to inform, to inform, to inform.” Hadden undoubtedly would have agreed.* Luce never confused his love of information with “objectivity,” a quality he considered unattainable and undesirable. He did want his magazines to be fair, and he predicted that TIME would be powerful provided that it never used its power for “partisan, personal or ulterior purposes.” He encouraged TIME’S way of declaring things flatly on its own authority and of practicing extremely personal journalism. Gradually, Luce urged TIME to ease up on physical descriptions, but the staff fought a tenacious rear-guard action. When readers objected to King Alexander of Yugoslavia’s regularly being described as “dentist-like,” TIME argued doggedly in print that he “has about him an air, not quite clinical, of cleanly meticulousness commonly found in dentists. He also on occasion wears a white coat.”

Within “group journalism” (a phrase he sometimes used but did not approve of), Luce gave his staff an extraordinary degree of independence. “As an editor,” writes Elson, “he did not like to lay down guidelines and rules; he understood that creative writers and editors worked better if given wide latitude. He was often disappointed in their work, but he accepted the risk as part of the price of aggressive journalism.”

FORTUNE was started by Luce in 1930, at the beginning of the Depression. In its early years, it was a hotbed of contentious comment. “We made the discovery,” said Luce, “that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.” One of the major contributors to FORTUNE was a poet, Archibald MacLeish. “My essential education as an American began on FORTUNE,” he said later. The magazine subjected U.S. business to the kind of critical scrutiny it had never undergone before. FORTUNE tended to be liberal; TIME was widely suspected of being rightist. TIME, indeed, harbored at least one genuine reactionary. Described by Luce as a man with the viewpoint of an “18th century gentleman,” Laird Goldsborough served for 13 years as Foreign News editor. Devoted to property and royalty, he took Mussolini’s side in the Ethiopian war During the Spanish Civil War, he characterized the Loyalists in TIME as a regime of “Socialists, Communists and rattlebrained Liberals that had emptied the jails of cutthroats to defend itself.”

Mugwump and Liberal. This was too much for FORTUNE’S liberals. Wrote a thoroughly angered MacLeish in a memo: “I feel that TIME has never presented the war in Spain for what it was—an inexcusable and unjustifiable act of aggression by reactionary forces against a popular government.” Retorted a disdainful Goldsborough: “On the side of Franco are men of property, men of God and men of the sword. In so describing them, I presume that I condemn them to particularly nether depths, but what position do you suppose these sort of men (irrespective of nationality) occupy in the minds of 700,000 readers of TIME?”

And so the interoffice battles raged, with Luce generally taking a middle course—he saw himself as liberal and mug wump, opposed to fascism as well as left-wing radicalism. Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, managing editor of FORTUNE, general manager of Time Inc. and later publisher of TIME, also quarreled with Luce politically, but more often about publishing matters. In 1938 Hitler was chosen to be TIME’S Man of the Year (the criterion, as always, was news impact not moral worth). Since no adequate color photograph was available, TIME had to settle for a rather innocuous picture of Hitler in khaki. Brooding over this, Ingersoll replaced it at the last minute with a lithograph of Hitler playing a devil’s organ from which hung his naked victims. Luce was displeased at such heavy-handed propaganda, but told Ingersoll : “Spilt milk—let’s not discuss it.”

Soon after, however, Ingersoll as well as Goldsborough left the company. MacLeish had already resigned—taking a parting shot, albeit friendly, at Luce: “It’s very hard to be as successful as you have been and still keep your belief in the desperate necessity for fundamental change. I think you have been an honorable journalist. You would have been happier in a fight, though.”

Actually, a fight was indeed coming, and vast changes. Luce used his publications wholeheartedly to support the Allied cause (if TIME and LIFE failed to sell the U.S. on the idea of material aid, he cabled his editors from Europe shortly after Hitler invaded Belgium, “it probably won’t matter much what these estimable publications say in years to come”). He saw that World War II marked the end of an uncertain, isolationist period in U.S. life—he called it a shameful period—and realized that it also marked the beginning of global U.S. influence, which he welcomed in a famous LIFE editorial entitled “The American Century.”

Willkie Wrangle. One of the ways Luce meant to realize the American vision was to elect Wendell Willkie President in 1940. Though neither he nor his publications formally endorsed Willkie, all of them gave Willkie substantial aid and comfort. All, that is, except TIME. T. S. Matthews, then TIME’S NATIONAL AFFAIRS editor, made repeated fun of Willkie’s campaign. “Spreading rapidly through professional ranks was the belief that maybe Willkie was only a fatter, louder Alf Landon. He still drew curious crowds. As one sad Old Guardsman pontificated to another: dead whales on flat cars also attract crowds.”

Luce dashed off an enraged memo complaining that TIM was treating the election like a “rather minor circus episode.” But Matthews ignored him. Finally, Managing Editor Manfred Gottfried told Luce either to edit the section himself or to stay away. “Luce announced that he would exile himself,” writes Elson, “but he continued to fulminate from a distance.” Matthews offered to resign as NATIONAL AFFAIRS editor, but Luce asked him to stay on. Later, he became managing editor.

In discussing plans for this book, Luce told Elson that he wanted the volume to end on December 7th, 1941, that “day of wrath.” Luce saw that day as a turning point for the nation, which was about to face the triumphs and trials of a world power, and for his publishing enterprise, which was to grow far beyond anything anticipated at the founding of TIME—the magazine that Luce used to call, rather proudly, “a rewrite sheet.”

*There was other criticism. An irreverent TIME writer named Edward Kennedy imagined how the magazine would cover the Second Coming. Among the less blasphemous stanzas:

There’s a rumor that the world is almost over,

The Redeemer’s Second Coming is proclaimed.

As Catastrophe we’ll do it, and Researchers should see to it

That their Research shall be able, potent, famed. . .

Tell Production to take Hoover off the cover,

We will run the Angel Gabriel instead.

And the caption, TIME-like, witty, will be ‘Welcome to our city,

But we’ll make the border black instead of red.