The Press: ANNIVERSARY

Fifteen years ago this week the first issue of TIME was mailed to 9,000 subscribers. This week over 700,000 families will read this 782nd issue of TIME—and by their request some 375,000 of their friends as well. Bound with the issue, as a special supplement, is a facsimile copy of Vol. 1 No. 1.

The Editors of TIME believe in the U. S. tradition of celebrating a birthday by doing a good day’s work. Thus the 782nd issue of TIME, like the first, is dedicated solely to an attempt to keep intelligent people well informed. But even working editors cannot be wholly unconscious of anniversaries, and TIME’S have chosen to celebrate by printing their first story about themselves. To get it on paper, the Editors asked one of their oldest members to turn historian.

What he has written has not been edited by his associates and, un-TIME-like, it makes no claim to being disinterested.

Fifteen Years

In the last week of February 1923, a handful of young men, none more than three years out of college, were frantically putting together the first issue of the first newsmagazine. A few days earlier someone had remembered that a magazine must have a cover, and an artist had been commissioned to design one. He submitted only a rough sketch. On both sides of a portrait there was to be an elaborate arrangement of sundials, hourglasses, other time-symbols. To suggest the general idea, the artist had sketched in some “spinach.” Uncertain about the symbols, the editors decided to use the spinach as a stopgap. Except for minor alterations and the addition of a red border in 1927, TIME’S cover has remained unchanged.

Within the magazine, changes have been plentiful. Since photographs were a major expense, the first issue had only eleven cuts, five of them pencil sketches. In the seventh issue the department of “Finance” became “Business & Finance.” “Crime” became a subdivision of “National Affairs” (1925); “Aeronautics” part of a new department, “Transport” (1934). So many people objected to having words put into their mouths (although the facts reported were true) that “Imaginary Interviews” was eliminated in 1924; two years later “People” replaced it. Two departments in the first issue, “Point with Pride” and “View with Alarm,” were the nearest TIME ever came to having an editorial page. Inconsistent with a disinterested editorial policy, both were abandoned in 1926.

In 1923 the U. S. was still emerging from the propaganda-filled atmosphere of War days, young TIME was a breath of untainted fresh air. Even the first issues, curious as they are to look back on, brought an influx of letters from readers who—surprisingly to the editors—said they were already devoted to TIME. They harped on the fact that they read it from “cover to cover” (see p. 4). One of the first to use the phrase was Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin. Among the other early enthusiasts famous enough to turn young editors’ heads were Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Van Dyke, Newton D. Baker, Mrs. Elizabeth Marbury, Thomas Edison, Archbishop Michael J. Curley, Bernard Baruch, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Joseph Hergesheimer, Henry Ford, Elbert H. Gary, Herbert B. Swope.

In the first issue only five stories were over one column in length (Calvin Coolidge ever after referred to TIME stories as “eye-tems”), and although it was published in a busy week when Congress was winding up a session, spot news of the week received scant mention. Gradually TIME style developed. Gradually more and more news, with its background and significance, was put into TIME. As money was earned it was spent to improve the quality of the magazine. The editorial cost of producing an issue of TIME is today just about 50 times as great as 15 years ago. In fact the expert color photographs used nowadays on TIME’S cover often cost more than the entire editorial department in the first issue.

Editorial Wilderness. The two young editors who produced the first issue of TIME were fortunately armed with valor and a good journalistic idea, for they plunged into an editorial wilderness. Whereas TIME now draws on the services of 400 of its own correspondents all over the world; is a member (one of the biggest clients) of both Associated Press and

United Press; has a score of expert researchers; employs another score of specialists to operate a “morgue” containing 12,000 reference books, and where 1,400,000 reports and articles are filed under 110,000 headings; in 1923 TIME’S news source was a big bundle of newspapers dropped at the office door morning and evening. Whereas TIME today has a staff of 20-odd full-time associate and contributing editor-writers. TIME’S editors 15 years ago had a staff of three or four full-time associates (two of whom frequently wrote 50 to 70% of the magazine) and about ten contributors of occasional pieces. In order to get out the magazine at all every one had to work seven days a week. On Sundays pencils flourished with particular vigor so that the staff could keep warm, since there was no heat in the building.

The evening that the first issue went to press (and many press nights thereafter), the entire full-time staff got into a taxicab, carrying the entire editorial reference library (Who’s Who, World Almanac, Congressional Directory} and drove to the printers on Manhattan’s 11th Avenue.

There, bending over inky tables, amid torn newspapers, fried egg sandwiches, smudged proof sheets and pint milk bottles full of coffee, they read morning papers for late news items and about dawn put TIME to bed.

A few weeks after the first issue, TIME moved from its cubicles in the office of an advertising firm (just around the corner from Fifth Avenue and Manhattan’s Public Library) to larger quarters on the second floor of an East-side loft building (No. 239 East 39th Street), which prior to Prohibition had been a brewery. Here on Sundays there was heat but it was sometimes hard to gain admittance. One contributor, bringing his weekly contribution and unable to get in, resorted to drastic means. He picked up a rotten turnip in the street, gave a heave, and it landed amid a shower of glass on the editor’s desk.

These quarters the editors shared with the newborn Saturday Review of Literature. Partitions between the two offices did not reach to the ceiling and sometimes TIME’S editors were disturbed by jovial Christopher Morley coming to call on the Saturday Review’s editors (Dr. Henry Seidel Canby, Amy Loveman, William Rose Benét), bringing his welcome in the form of a bottle of whiskey which he opened by pounding on a desk until its cork came out.

Here TIME’S three chief writers shared a long narrow cell barely big enough for three desks end to end. The editor sat at a desk in a large room surrounded by smaller desks for typists and half-a-dozen college girls (at one time from Smith, at others from Mt. Holyoke, Vassar, Wellesley)—the beginnings of a research staff.

There, in a sort of perpetual frenzy, writers’ stories were edited, torn apart, checked and made over.

Even then, despite its small staff, TIME kept its readers abreast of the news, if not ahead of it. During the first six months TIME’S cover subjects included not only the figures of 1923 (Uncle Joe Cannon, Warren Harding, Eleanor Duse, King Fuad, Hugo Stinnes, Andrew Mellon, E. M. House) but some who belong very much to 1938: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mustafa Kamâl Attatürk, Burton K. Wheeler, Benito Mussolini, John L. Lewis.

Not always did subscribers agree with TIME’S cover selections. Many questioned the importance of Benito Mussolini, John Lewis, Franklin Roosevelt.

Financial Desert. Although advised that TIME could not properly be launched with less than $1,000,000 capital, Editors Luce and Hadden started with only $85,000. This they obtained by selling preferred and a little common stock in TIME Inc.* to citizens who had more faith that a newsmagazine would be a public service than that it would be a financial success.

At one uncomfortable moment toward the end of TIME’S second year (when circulation reached 80,760), cash in the till shrank to $5,000, enough for only a few days’ operations. That, however, was due mainly to a shortage of working capital in a growing concern. It passed and a few weeks later the preferred shareholders subscribed to another stock issue doubling the company’s original capital.

Slowly but surely the magazine gained readers and advertisers. Yet when TIME was nearly three years old (circulation: 105,530), Editor Luce spent two hours one evening walking around Manhattan’s Bryant Park with an old friend debating whether he and Editor Hadden could afford to raise their own salaries to $50 a week (their writers already were paid more). He decided they would be justified in doing it. But so ingrained was the habit of plowing back profits into the improvement of the magazine that not until 1929 (circulation: 243,400) could enough money be spared to pay the first dividend on the preferred stock. None was paid on common stock until 1930. By then TIME’S loyal family of readers numbered 307,-528—187 of whom had paid $60 apiece for lifetime subscriptions (no longer sold).

Thunder & Lightning. Henry Robinson Luce and Briton Hadden were great & good friends who had been to Hotchkiss School and Yale together, had been editors of their undergraduate papers, had been cub newspapermen. While reporters on the late Frank Munsey’s Baltimore News, they conceived the newsmagazine idea and set out to found TIME.

Their pre-publication office was a room in an ancient two-story frame house on Manhattan’s East 18th Street. Between their desks stood a large iron kettle—about the size and shape used by African cannibals for the boiling of missionaries.

They used it for discarded cigaret butts while they were occupied in writing the first TIME stories and drafting a circular with which they obtained the original subscribers.

After TIME began publishing they took turns editing and managing business affairs, each for a several months’ period.

Young Editor Luce, tall, spare, blond, had a staccato voice, a staccato personality, an extraordinary power of concentration.

Anxious to extract every ounce of juice from every story, he would summon young writers before him, subject them to a fire of questions: “Who?” “What did he do?” “What do you mean? . . .” “Why?”

Temperamentally, Harry Luce was TIME’S lightning; Brit Hadden its thunder. Young Editor Hadden, black-haired, bushy-browed and so nervous that he never sat still, always scowled at copy, generally from beneath a green eyeshade. Vexed by a stupid blunder* he would growl out loud, sometimes stamp his feet. Pleased by an apt phrase, he would vent a guffaw that apprised TIME’S writers that a new phrase had been canonized in TIME style. Disdainful of “gumchewers,” he always chewed gum. Contemptuous of dead literature, he constantly held up Homer† as an example to TIME’S staff. Impatient of slow waiters, he disrupted many a staid restaurant by waving a napkin over his head to get attention. Generous, he would never lend a friend less than $5, said he was ashamed to ask for the return of a smaller sum.

Death came, as it must to all men, to Briton Hadden in 1929. Ill for two months with a streptococcus infection, he died on February 27—six years almost to the hour after he and Henry Luce had sent to press the first issue of the first newsmagazine.

He died of the same disease (endocarditis) as Lord Northcliffe, famed British publisher for whom he had a lifelong admiration. As a memorial to Briton Hadden, Editor Luce and his many other friends erected a handsome Gothic building on the Yale campus to house the Yale Daily News, of which he had been editor eight years before.

Some time before Editor Hadden’s death, Editor Luce had been exploring new types of business stories—to improve TIME’S “Business & Finance” section. He found a field so vast and fertile it could produce many stories not appropriate for TIME’S limited space. Hence, in 1930, FORTUNE was founded. Again, a few years later, several years of experiment in improving TIME’S and FORTUNE’S illustrations led to the conclusion that pictures could lend point to words and words to pictures but one had to be dominant.

Hence, in 1936, LIFE.

These two by-products of TIME might well have swamped Editor-Publisher Luce had he not, soon after Hadden’s death, deputized the business management to Roy E. Larsen, TIME’S first circulation manager.* To free himself, when necessary, from routine editorial duties, he also created the post of managing editor and gave it to John S. Martin, a contributing editor of TIME’S first issue. Later, the various TIME Inc. publications were made autonomous and given publishers to look after their individual affairs. Two former managing editors of FORTUNE, Ralph McA.

Ingersoll and Eric Hodgins, became respectively the publishers of TIME and FORTUNE; Roy E. Larsen became publisher of LIFE. For himself Luce still cherishes, as he and Brit Hadden did from the beginning, no title or occupation more than that of Editor of TIME.

How It Works, The difference between the editorial mechanisms which produced the first and the 782nd issues of TIME is the difference between a minipiano and a grand piano. It has many more keys but it is still the same kind of machine.

Before starting a week TIME now gives its staff a two-day rest, during which a backlog of news is allowed to pile up. The week proper begins with long hours of conferences in which writers, researchers, and various specialists, in successive groups of three to 15, examine, weigh, discuss news developments with the managing editors. Requests for more information and verification of facts are wired, telephoned, cabled. Meantime, an immense volume of news—20,000 words an hour—continues to gush in. New conferences are held, old decisions revised, new research begun, stories written, torn apart, rewritten.

¶ It is called group journalism.

¶ As the week wears on, a rumble like distant thunder comes from three soundproofed rooms where nine teletype machines (automatic typewriters) keep up a never-ending thump, thump, thump. Seven machines supply the incoming raw material: press dispatches from A.P. & U.P., telegrams from TIME correspondents.

Two machines send out the finished product: copy to TIME’S printers in Chicago.† Thump, thump, thump, a telegraph machine starts printing on a continuous roll of paper: PASADENA, CALIF. TIME PTY ANSWER YOUR QUERY EBENEZER SMITH’S MIDDLE NAME NOT MAITLAND BUT MORTIMER.

Five minutes later the Music researcher is in the teletype room with a memorandum for the printers. “MUSIC MUST CORRECTION. PICKLED PIG’S FEET. PARA 3, SENTENCE BEGINNING ONE DAY WHEN HE WAS STILL A STEVEDORE, CHANGE EBENEZER MAITLAND SMITH TO EBENEZER MORTIMER SMITH.”

In a managing editor’s office a telephone rings. Editor Luce points out the peculiar significance of a resolution passed by an Episcopalian convention in Denver. The M. E. flips a switch on the dictograph before him and makes sure that the Religion editor has not missed the point. The telephone rings again. A TIME correspondent in Washington says that a new Supreme Court Justice is going to be appointed next day. It will be Casper Zinkowitz. The M. E. is unconvinced, but the correspondent insists, gives his sources, explains the details. “All right.” Bang goes the M. E.’s telephone. The National Affairs editor, the head of the correspondents, the picture editor are each notified. In ten minutes a telegram is on its way to Casper Zinkowitz’ hometown, the picture editor is giving instructions to a photographer by long distance. Next morning the National Affairs editor will find on his desk a report of interviews with Zinkowitz’ former law partner and boyhood friends. Meanwhile duplicate photographs of the justice-to-be are flying air mail to the printers in Chicago and editor in Manhattan.

As the press deadline approaches, the doors of the teletype rooms get left open, the thumping gets louder. A United Press machine, pounding out scores of the amateur golf championship, suddenly falls silent. Ding ding, ding, ding ding, rings a bell and the machine begins to thump again: BULLETIN PARIS—THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES TONIGHT UNEXPECTEDLY VOTED NO CONFIDENCE IN THE CABINET OF PREMIER BOUILLABAISSE.

Thump, thump, the machine resumes its golf scores, an attendant tears off the bulletin and rushes it to an M. E. The M. E. flips a switch for the Foreign News editor:

“Drop everything. The French Cabinet is out. We’ll kill the Yugoslav story to make room.”

“Swell,” answers a hollow voice from the dictograph. “I’ve been waiting for it.”

“Brrr” goes the box. Picture Editor:

“Do you want the French cabinet?”

M. E.: “No! Get me the opposition. . . .”

Foreign News researcher comes in: “If we don’t run the Yugoslav story their consul general will be brokenhearted.

He’s worked all week to gather facts for it. . . .”

M. E.: “Can’t be helped.”

The telephone jangles. Editor Luce:

“Anything happening?”

M. E.: “Bouillabaisse is out.”

Editor Luce: “Hey! I want to be in on that; I’ll be right down.”

Ding, ding, ding, rings the bell. Thump, thump, thump, starts the machine: PARIS—PREMIER BOUILLABAISSE AND HIS CABINET DROVE THIS EVENING IN A POURING RAIN TO THE ELYSEE PALACE TO PRESENT THEIR RESIGNATIONS TO PRESIDENT. . . .

The raw material of history keeps pouring in.

* Members of TIME’S working staff and their immediate families retained control with a majority of the common stock. They still do.

* Such as the omission of the heading “Congress” which should have appeared at the top of column 1, page 2 of the first issue (see supplement).

† Gumchewers are referred to, Homer quoted, both on page 23 of the first issue of TIME (sec supplement).

* Who promptly turned editor, in devising first the radio and then the motion picture MARCH OF TIME.

† As early as 1925 TIME faced the problem of printing in a centrally located point to provide rapid distribution to all parts of the U. S. It moved to Cleveland for a year and a half, then faced the further facts that: 1) it needed a still more centrally located distribution point, 2) despite geography, the solar plexus of the U. S. newsystem was in Manhattan. So in 1927, and 1928, TIME moved in both directions, landed with its printing and circulation activities in Chicago, its editorial offices in Manhattan.