What Would Henry Luce Make of the Digital Age?

Henry Luce, co-founder of TIME and long the head of Time Inc., was an unlikely revolutionary. He was the son of a Presbyterian missionary in China, a product of élite boarding schools, a Skull and Bonesman at Yale, an ardent Republican throughout most of his life. He became one of the wealthiest men in the U.S., and he lived accordingly. He disliked most of the New Deal and loathed Franklin Roosevelt. His famous 1941 essay in LIFE, “The American Century,” was a call to reshape the world on the American model. He was a passionate champion of the U.S.’s unpopular wars in Korea and Vietnam.

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What made Luce a revolutionary figure in American life was not his politics or his religion or his missionary zeal. It was his success in creating a new era of communications that had an enormous impact on the culture of the 20th century. At the precocious age of 24, Luce and his brilliant classmate, friend, partner and rival Briton Hadden created the first newsmagazine (a word they invented). TIME was truly something new — a concise summary of the news of the world, published weekly and marketed throughout the U.S. and later around the world. It was not to everyone’s taste, with its deliberately idiosyncratic language and its sometimes arch opinions. But for its hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of readers, TIME was among the first publications to make the news of the world available to them. TIME became a kind of glue, providing professionals and other (mostly middle-class) people with a common, reliable and concise guide to the type of information that was now more important to them than ever before. In Sinclair Lewis’ 1922 novel Babbitt, the title character speaks triumphantly of the “sane standardization of stores, offices, streets, hotels, and newspapers throughout the United States.” To Lewis this standardization was a mark of society’s arid consumerism, but to most middle-class Americans, such changes represented progress; to Luce they became the process by which a market for a national newsmagazine could be created.

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Hadden died prematurely, in 1929, a few days after his 31st birthday. Luce moved forward with his own vision without looking back. In 1930, during the early months of the Great Depression, he launched the first truly serious business magazine — FORTUNE, a dazzlingly beautiful monthly designed to examine business and capitalism in a way that would provide knowledge about the economy that he believed most Americans, not just businessmen, should have. FORTUNE was a lively, literate, serious and pathbreaking magazine in a field that had previously been largely celebratory. Six years later, Luce produced the first issue of LIFE, perhaps the most popular magazine ever published in the U.S. In the new age of photography, it was not the first “picture magazine.” But LIFE was by far the most creative and successful, offering a visual representation of its time and revealing, as Luce wrote in his famous prospectus, “the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud … strange things — machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon … things hidden behind walls and within rooms; things dangerous to come to.”

(See LIFE Magazine’s classic pictures.)

Luce launched other innovations, like The March of Time, the first newsreel to offer documentary features, which won an Academy Award. There was a weekly national radio program drawn from TIME. And in 1954, the first serious sports magazine — SPORTS ILLUSTRATED — began publishing. Like FORTUNE, it relied on good writers (among them William Faulkner, A.J. Liebling, Wallace Stegner, Budd Schulberg and John Steinbeck). Luce insisted that it should elevate the world of sports from being “just a game” to a metaphor for the human condition. The Time Inc. publications were extraordinarily expensive to publish, but he believed that spending more money for greater quality was the best strategy for success. As one of his associates put it, Luce and his team moved ahead in “an atmosphere of complete and serene confidence” to grasp “the chance of a lifetime.”

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From the mid-1930s through the late ’50s, Time Inc. was probably the largest news organization in the world, with bureaus on every continent. It claimed to reach more than 20 million people each week, and even more during World War II, which the Time Inc. magazines reported on at least as intensely as any other organization. The company’s success was partly a result of shrewd management. But it was also a result of Luce, who had looked into the future and seen an increasingly integrated nation bound together by railroads, highways, radio, movies and the rise of a national corporate culture. As a result, Americans would need a vast amount of information and an efficient way of accessing it. Luce embraced that future and created vehicles that served the needs of his rapidly changing times. He had few rivals in the breadth and influence of his empire — William Randolph Hearst, the great newspaper mogul of his time; or William Paley, the founder of CBS; or Lord Beaverbrook, the publisher of newspapers in Britain and beyond; or, more recently, Rupert Murdoch.

(See TIME’s World War II covers.)

By the time Luce retired in 1964, three years before his death, his empire was beginning to show its age. Time Inc. was still thriving, but it was rivaled by television and countless newer magazines. His colleagues prodded him to move into television and branch out into other areas. But Luce, no longer the restless pioneer, tried instead to protect what he had already created — though after his death, his company did indeed expand into electronic media, developing HBO and becoming a major force in cable TV. LIFE, however, had ceased to be profitable by the late 1950s and stopped being published as a weekly in 1972, five years after Luce’s death. TIME, FORTUNE and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED have survived and reinvented themselves as the publishing world has changed. But like all magazines and newspapers, they face tremendous challenges.

What would the young, ambitious, innovative Luce have thought about the opportunities that might await him in our own challenging time? Much of what he cared about in his era might seem to him irretrievably lost. For decades, he had worked to portray (and shape) America as a united, common culture. Despite differences in class, race or region, Americans, he believed, shared a basic set of values that transcended diversity. “Nobody is mad with nobody,” a LIFE article brightly announced in the 1950s, at perhaps the height of the belief that there was a broadly shared vision of the U.S. In our own fractured and fractious time, such an assumption would find few adherents. But Luce’s project of the 1950s and ’60s — promoting a vision of a coherent national purpose — is not irrelevant today, despite radical changes in the character of American life.

In other ways, Luce might feel at home now. He was comfortable with diversity. He was an early supporter of racial justice. He was not alarmed by immigration. He welcomed progress and was fascinated by the cultural and technological changes around him. And he believed that all Americans could be educated through the dissemination of knowledge — a project widely embraced today.

(See pictures of TIME’s Wall Street covers.)

One of the most powerful results of the digital age has been the creation of a vast body of new knowledge and information — so vast as to be almost impossible to absorb. A related result has been the fragmenting of that information into discrete communities of knowledge that often reflect individuals’ prior beliefs and preferences. Luce, I believe, would resist those trends, just as he resisted similar ones decades ago, and would seek ways to use the tools of technology to broaden, not fragment, a national culture.

Luce was, above all, in search of vehicles of change. He had no fear of the new, and he welcomed it throughout most of his life — modern art (which he once had loathed), modern technology, modern design and modern business (he was always attracted to the most creative and progressive business leaders and considered himself one of them). For all his political conservatism, he was a man in search of the future.

In our time, he would face both the seemingly intractable problem of making money from digital information and enormous competition from thousands of individuals and organizations trying to respond to those new challenges. But Luce — for all his flaws — was an innovator, a visionary and a man of vast and daunting self-confidence. Were he to live in our time, trying once again to revolutionize the spread of knowledge, he might find his talents much in demand.

Brinkley is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University and author of The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (Knopf; 2010)

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