Henry Luce died on February 28, 1967, but the mention of his name still manages to ignite passions all over the United States—and the world. One is hard put to find another man outside of politics so much surrounded by controversy. In the pantheon of American businessmen and conservatives, Luce's portrait hangs high: about as high, one imagines, as it hangs in the rogues' gallery of most American intellectuals and liberals. As founder and general impresario of the world's largest publishing empire, Luce's power, though probably immeasureable, was obviously great—so great as to make it almost impossible to sustain a neutral attitude toward him. Many people would agree with the remarks of Gardner Cowles, editorial chairman of Cowles Communications and Look magazine, on the occasion of Luce's death: “Henry Luce was a true journalistic genius. There has been no one in journalism for whom I had more admiration and respect. His influence will be felt for generations.” Others share the opinion of Norman Mailer, who some years ago insulted an editor of Time by suggesting that anyone who worked for a mind so exquisitely and subtly totalitarian as Henry Luce's was not likely to have any ideas of his own.
Since Luce was a figure of indisputable magnitude in American life, his death generated editorials and biographical sketches in all the major papers, including the obligatory full-page V.I.P. obituary in the New York Times, and cover stories in both Newsweek and his own Time magazine. Journalistically, it was an event calculated to numb the senses. As occurs increasingly in these days of so-called “widespread communications,” the more one read, the more one's picture of the man blurred, the more one's sense of his remarkable career seemed to fade. It was as if someone had set out to prove that he who lives by journalism shall eventually be obscured by journalism.
As a model of this kind of obfuscation, Time's cover story on Luce is difficult to surpass. At the death of their Editorial Chairman, as Luce styled himself in his last years at Time Inc., one expected the editors to haul out their very best obituary prose and lay a gracious wreath of it at the graveside. But they outdid themselves and produced a full-blown work of landscape architecture. When they had finished, no one—Henry Luce perhaps least of all—would have recognized the terrain. The Luce of the Time cover story emerged as “courtly” and “compassionate,” with the “magisterial presence of a Koussevitsky” and blue eyes that could “twinkle as merrily as Mr. Pickwick's.” He was a “contemporary intellectual” and a “wise general,” whose “infinite idealism,” along with his “conscience and commitment,” led him to extol “the Roman ideal of virtue as dedication to social and civic duty.” Presumably, it was the composite of these qualities which made his publications a “valued and trusted voice of America throughout the free world.” “He ran the course,” one might say—Time's editors, alas, did say—“He kept the faith.”
Henry Luce's own self-appraisal was more nearly accurate, more candid, and therefore more admirable. “I am,” he once said, “a Protestant, a Republican, and a free-enterpriser, which means I am biased in favor of God, Eisenhower, and the stockholders of Time Inc.—and if anyone who objects doesn't know this by now, why the hell are they still spending 35 cents for the magazine.” Not that this statement tells the whole story of Henry Luce either. He was a complex human being, difficult as that fact sometimes is to remember, and thus cannot simply be reduced to his beliefs, nor made to fit the streamlined simplicities of a Time cover story.
Oddly enough, for one who had made room for himself at the top so early—he was a self-made millionaire at the age of thirty—and who managed to stay at the top so long, Luce showed remarkably little in the way of personal presence. His few public appearances were inevitably disappointing; his official utterances lacked the vibrancy and flashiness associated with the language of his magazines; his writings, when not altogether banal, were dull and often pompous; and he looked rather more like a well-to-do jeweler or the owner of a Buick agency than what he was: a man of enormous, even towering, stature in the field of magazine publishing.
Then, too, there was Luce's reputed shyness, which, if one thinks of Northcliffe, Beaverbrook, or Hearst, is very much at odds with the traditional style of the Press Lord. He was not given to wide self-advertisement. In fact, very little has been written about Henry Luce as a personality. There has been no biography of him, authorized or unauthorized. Wolcott Gibbs's devastating New Yorker profile hardly qualifies as such, being memorable primarily as a parody of old Time-style. Such knowledge as we have of his personality comes mainly from the biographies, novels, or memoirs of people connected with him in one way or another. To a degree unusual in a man of his position, he appears to have been more content to wield the spotlight than to bask in it.
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The bare facts of Luce's biography are well known, to be sure; they form one of the more substantial chapters in the onward-and-upward annals of American business. Briefly, they are as follows. Henry Luce was born in 1898 to missionary parents at the Presbyterian mission-compound in Tengchow, China. In preparation for the Hotchkiss School in America, he spent one year at the Cheefoo School in China, where birching, caning, and fagging in the English style were in vogue. At Hotchkiss, where he first met Briton Hadden, his future partner, he edited the school's Literary Monthly and prepared for Yale. At Yale, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Skull & Bones, he contributed stories, poems, and essays to the Literary Magazine; he also became editor of the Yale Daily News, Hadden being chairman of the board. After a brief stint in the army (no overseas duty), he returned to Yale and graduated. Subsequently, he spent a year at Oxford reading history, worked as a legman for the late Ben Hecht on the Chicago News, and then joined Hadden on the Baltimore News. In 1922, both men quit their jobs on the paper to bring to fruition their longstanding idea of a weekly news magazine, which they thought of calling Facts. After the struggle to raise funds, the first issue of the new publication, now of course known as Time, appeared on March 3, 1923. The magazine ran in the red until 1927, but thereafter both circulation and profits continued to rise. The idea had caught on; the partners had it made.
So much for the beginnings. In 1929, Briton Hadden died of a streptococcus infection, leaving Luce in control of Time. Under Luce, Time begat Fortune, the two begat Life, and other offspring—Architectural Forum, “The March of Time,” House and Home, Sports Illustrated, Time-Life Books, etc.—followed in fairly orderly progression. As his fortune and influence grew, Luce became a kind of black eminence. Although it was rumored that he was somewhat disappointed at not being asked to serve in the Eisenhower administration, he apparently felt confident enough of his power to require no formal certification of it through political office. Instead, he settled comfortably into the role of friend to Presidents and Prime Ministers, adviser to statesmen and bishops; praised and revered in some quarters, hated and feared in others, he became a genuine force in American life.
But the question remains—a force for what?
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II
Henry Luce's long career divides into three main spheres of activity: there was Luce the businessman; Luce the ideologist, or propagandist, for a specific set of ideas and ideals; and Luce the editor-journalist. Luce the businessman is the least controversial. After all, a popular maxim among businessmen is that “You can't argue with success.” Although one might think that there is nothing quite so worthwhile arguing with, the saying nevertheless has a certain inner logic to it. What it actually means, of course, is that you cannot argue with the statistics of success, with the ineluctable finality of the profit-and-loss statement. By his own confession, the businessman's ethic is an intensely practical one, concerned with consequences rather than methods and principles. To quote another favorite business maxim, this one with a slight Yiddish lilt to it, “It's what you got left over that counts!” By this standard, the businessman's sole standard, Luce was a genius.
At his death, what Henry Luce had left over was considerable—a small empire, in fact. Here are a few of the raw statistics:
- During the week of Luce's death, Time Inc.'s four major magazines—Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated—and their international editions together printed 14,331,458 copies.
- Time Inc.'s revenue for 1966 was $503 million, its net earnings $37.3 million. The current market value of the corporation's 6.9 million shares was $690 million, of which Luce himself, as the largest single stockholder, owned 16.2 per cent at a market value of $109,862,500.
- Time Inc.'s diversification program was of a model kind. According to the New York Times, the staggering rate of the appreciation of its market value “is a measure of the success and profitability of the company's magazines, its expansion into other businesses, such as book publishing, radio and television broadcasting, pulp and paper manufacturing, and a variety of other interests, including developments in the graphic arts, information storage and retrieval, and marketing information.”
- And all the above started with the relatively piddling beginning capital of $86,000 which Luce and Briton Hadden managed to borrow in 1922.
There is no doubt that Luce was the business genius of the two young founders of the enterprise, even though one of the small intramural controversies at Time Inc. has to do with the exact nature of each of their contributions. One story has it that since both Luce and Briton Hadden were journalists by training, they planned to alternate annually in the jobs of editor and business manager, and that initially they flipped a coin to determine who would serve as first editor. The coin may well have been tossed, but it is clear from Noel Busch's biography of Briton Hadden1 that the latter worked exclusively as managing editor during Time's first three years while Luce, apart from writing the Religion Department, confined himself to being the magazine's full-time business manager. If Hadden was even one-tenth the editorial genius Busch makes him out to have been, then it is yet another testament to Luce's business acumen that he kept the financial management of Time in his own hands and left the “creative” side largely to Hadden.
The young Henry Luce strikes one as a somewhat drab, prematurely middle-aged man when compared to Briton Hadden. The latter was peculiarly a child of the American 20's. Like Scott Fitzgerald, he was an athlete manqué; like Harold Ross, he was a bit of a philistine; like H. L. Mencken, he cultivated and parlayed his eccentricities into a legend. While the conception and original prospectus for Time was the joint product of the two partners, the magazine's early editorial form and contents would appear to have been largely Hadden's work. Moreover, he invented the notorious Timestyle, with its double-barreled adjectives and inverted syntax. Unquestionably, he brought great zest and zaniness to his work. He was not, for example, above writing fake letters to the editors to stir up false controversy, or—with Luce's approval—of putting the name “Peter Matthews” (after the two apostles) on the masthead as a blind for the editor of the Religion Department.
On the business side, however, Luce was in firm command. In order to save the costs of telegraphing copy to the printer in Cleveland, cut down office expenses, and centralize distribution, Luce moved Time's headquarters to Cleveland in 1925. (Later, of course, they were moved back to New York.) Financially, that move put the magazine over the hump and eventually into the black. To be sure, Hadden, a Brooklyn boy, almost went out of his mind in the Middle West, so uncongenial did he find the region's pace and people. Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt had been published only three years before, and one of Hadden's few delights was Babbitt-spotting on the streets of Cleveland. Interestingly enough, the Middle West caused Luce no pain. Not only was he rather comfortable among the Babbitts; there is reason to believe that he was turning into something of a high-level Babbitt himself. “I have no use for a man who lies in bed after nine o'clock in the morning,” he is supposed to have said. “In Cleveland,” Noel Busch writes, “the Luces occupied a conventional suburban house, moved in country-club circles, and took a lively and enthusiastic part in the life of the community.”
After Hadden's death, Luce continued for some time to concentrate on business affairs. At the beginning of the Depression in 1930, he launched Fortune, a magazine dedicated to the thesis that “business is obviously the greatest single denominator of interest among the active leading citizens of the U.S.A. . . . the distinctive expression of the American genius.” Another side to Luce's interest in business, one perhaps more interesting than the pronouncements of any prospectus, is revealed in the fact that the original name for Fortune—dropped, one imagines, because it was simply too naked—was Power.
In 1932, Luce bought a trade publication called Architectural Forum, and brought it into the growing Time Inc. empire.2 At the time, he was fascinated by architecture, and he was growing wealthy enough to indulge his interests. In fact, he could soon afford to indulge other people's interests; in 1935, at the insistence of Mrs. Clare Boothe Brokaw, who was to become the second Mrs. Luce, he bought Life, the old humor magazine, and entered the field of photo-journalism. The early Life was Luce's only serious business failure—the failure consisting of having underestimated the magazine's immediate and immense popularity. Between its first issue in 1936, and 1939, the year the magazine began to show a profit, circulation far outdistanced advertising revenues, and it cost Luce roughly $5 million to keep Life, in the words of Time's editors, “from dying of success.” Meanwhile, the rest of Time Inc. just kept on growing. In 1939, with Life now out of the red, Luce announced a reorganization of his corporation; from now on, each of his publications would have its own editor and publisher. He himself took on the title of Editorial Director, declaring he had had “plenty of fun (and profit) as an entrepreneur,” but was now ready to slip back into the role of journalist.
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III
Before turning to Luce the journalist-editor, however, it is necessary to discuss the ideological baggage he brought to that career. Luce the ideologist, in turn, is closely connected to Luce the businessman, for it is evident that without his business success Henry Luce woud have had neither the platform nor, probably, the confidence necessary to the ideologist. It seems that nothing does so much to bolster the ideological instinct of Americans as success in business, especially among magazine publishers.
“America's great achievement,” Henry Luce once said, “has been business.” A sense of self-significance, largely derived from his own success in business (America's highest endeavor, after all), was unmistakable in Luce, and most openly manifested itself in his high regard for a free enterprise economy. The six points of “Editorial Bias” in the original prospectus for Time included: “(2) A general distrust of the present tendency toward increasing interference by government.” This, to be sure, is little more than a safe shibboleth of the 20's, but Luce retained his personal belief in the point throughout his life. After John F. Kennedy lunched with Luce and the editors of Time and Life in New York, the late President (according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in A Thousand Days) remarked:
I like Luce. He is like a cricket, always chirping away. After all, he made a lot of money through his own individual enterprise so he naturally thinks that individual enterprise can do everything. I don't mind people like that. They have earned the right to talk that way. After all, that's the atmosphere in which I grew up. My father is the same way. But what I can't stand are all the people around Luce who automatically agree with everything he has to say.
If success in business brought out the ideological instinct in Henry Luce, his strong religious impulse served to deepen it. He was, of course, the son of missionaries; he grew up in the atmosphere of a mission; and he attended Yale at a time when that university was characterized, according to Santayana, by a kind of muscular Christianity and undirected moral enthusiasm.3 Such a background helps to explain Luce's lifelong habit of quoting Scripture. In Witness, Whittaker Chambers, for years an employee of Time Inc., recalls that before his ordeal at the Hiss-Chambers trial he was fortified by Luce with a quotation from the Gospel of St. John.
In 1965, Luce personally reviewed Teilhard de Chardin's The Future of Man in the pages of Life, and found that author's mystical Christianity to be congenial to his own views. Those views were so unshakable that they were immune to the impact of modern theological debates, which Luce appears to have followed with great interest. On the “God is Dead” controversy, for example, he struck a characteristically peremptory tone in a letter to a friend: “The real question about God is, of course, ‘whose God?’ After all the argumentation is done, I believe that God revealed in the Scriptures is, quite simply, God; and therefore, not only living, but the creator and source of all life.” Speaking to his assembled employees, he once remarked that the evolution of the modern journalist—a figure Malcolm Muggeridge has likened to a piano player in a brothel—began with the medieval troubadours. “Be ye troubadours of the Lord,” he thereupon invoked his staff. There can be little question but that for Luce, journalism was at least in part a form of missionary work.
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The qualities of the business ideologue and the missionary are nicely combined in an essay Luce wrote just before America's entry into World War II. Entitled “The American Century” and published in February 1941, that essay also provides some strong clues as to the place of America in Henry Luce's personal cosmology. Born an American, but having spent the first fifteen years of his life in China without once setting foot in this country, Luce had every opportunity to construct a fantasy-image of the United States. His attitude toward the nation resembles that of a convert to his new-found religion; his interest in America was almost proprietary and his patriotism bordered on the chauvinistic. “I was never disillusioned with or by America,” he once wrote, “but I was from my earliest manhood dissatisfied with America. America was not being as great and as good as I knew she could be, as I believed with every nerve and fiber God Himself had intended her to be.”
Never one for small talk, Luce was fond of thinking in grandiose terms. Although “The American Century” is ostensibly devoted to the issue of whether American foreign policy in the early 40's should be isolationist or interventionist, the essay soon turns to the subject of America's destiny. Luce was an interventionist, but the reasons for his position are curious. Surprisingly enough, the specter of Hitler has no real prominence in his essay; at no time does Luce broach the possibility that America might have limited aims in the war, such as helping to destroy Nazism. According to Luce, the purpose of the war is “to defend and even to promote, encourage, and incite so-called democratic principles throughout the world.” Not that there weren't sufficient problems at home—though in Luce's mind all of these seemed to reduce themselves to the name Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
We start into this war with huge government debt, a vast bureaucracy, and a whole generation of young people trained to look to the government as the source of all life. The party in power is the one which for long years has been most sympathetic to all manner of socialist doctrine and collectivist trends. The President of the United States has continually reached for more and more power, and he owes his continuation in office today largely to the coming of the war. Thus, the fear that the United States will be driven to a national socialism, as a result of cataclysmic circumstances and contrary to the will of the American people, is an entirely justifiable fear.
Nevertheless, the argument of “The American Century” continues, the important point to grasp about World War II is “simply that the complete opportunity of leadership is ours.” Noting that Americans have seemed unable to accommodate themselves spiritually and practically to the fact that their nation is the most powerful in the 20th-century world, Luce writes that “they have failed to play their part as a world power—a failure which has had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind. And the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” (Italics mine, J.E.) Even though, “Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt we ourselves have failed to make democracy work successfully,” it is evident that “Our only chance now to make it work is in terms of a vital international economy and in terms of an international moral order.”
Toward the end of the essay, Luce points to four areas in which the vision of the American Century can be realized. The first is economic: “It is for America and for America alone to determine whether a system of free economic enterprise—an economic order compatible with freedom and progress—shall not prevail in this century.” The second is technological: “Closely akin to the purely economic area and yet quite different from it, there is the picture of an America which will send out through the world its technical and artistic skills.” Thirdly, there is the purely Christian ideal of the Good Samaritan: “It is the manifest duty of this country to undertake to feed all the people of the world who as a result of this worldwide collapse of civilization are hungry and destitute—all of them, that is, whom we can from time to time reach consistently with a very tough attitude toward all hostile governments.” (Italics mine, J.E.) Finally, there is that loose equipage of convictions known as “Americanism”: “But all this is not enough. All this will fail and none of it will happen unless our vision of America as a world power includes a passionate devotion to great American ideals.”
What “The American Century” proposes, then, is a program for a more perfect world—on Henry Luce's terms. Has anyone, I wonder, felt the shock of recognition? Although written twenty-six years ago, this program, moral pretensions and all, constitutes the essence of current American foreign policy—a fact perhaps more widely recognized around the world than in the United States. What it holds out, quite simply, is the promise of American technological and economic resources to any nation which will roughly approximate our economic system, share our political attitudes, and adopt our ideology.
Luce was apparently able to reconcile his optimistic conception of America's role in the world with his profound adherence to Presbyterianism, according to which man is a lowly sinner to whom worldly success can be of no avail. Infusing all his activities with religious fervor, he seemed to be the very embodiment of what Max Weber called the Protestant ethic. It is fascinating, but ultimately futile, to speculate about the inner turmoil that may have attended his outward serenity. We may leave it at the following comment by T. S. Matthews, who was with Time for twenty-four years, six of them as principal editor:
As a fervently patriotic American he had an almost religious faith in competition and a striving belief that it was a man's duty, like his country's, to win. He must have been daily (and nightly) torn by the struggle with these apocalyptic beasts [his religion and his patriotism], these irreconcilable and mutally hostile convictions. Although his devotion to the Presbyterian creed was not always apparent during office hours, and was certainly not allowed to shackle his progress as a press tycoon, it was there, it was a part of him, and it made both himself and his success more interesting. I finally decided that what most drew me to Luce and made me feel that we had something in common—and has kept me fond of him even when I didn't like him—was his guilty conscience.
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IV
Shortly after the publication of “The American Century,” Quincy Howe, the radio commentator and journalist, called Luce “the most influential editor in the United States.” Here are Howe's reasons, such as they are, for this high estimate:
Because Henry Luce is primarily a great editor, his genius lies more in anticipating public trends than in actually leading the public one way or the other. For the great editor is an advance sounding board of public opinion rather than the crusader who molds public opinion. The great editor does not create a trend; he anticipates it. The importance of Mr. Luce's article does not lie in the fact that it is going to persuade a reluctant public to share its author's convictions. Its importance lies in the fact that Mr. Luce has that sixth sense—of which he himself may be quite unaware—of thinking a few weeks ahead of the public. There, rather than in his gift for writing, for publicity, for organization, lies the secret of his success.
Before going any further, I had better say that I am in almost total disagreement with Mr. Howe's definition of greatness in an editor. Spotting trends in public opinion, is, it seems to me, only a small part of the editorial task; what is more important, what defines a magazine editor's excellence, is how he deals with a given trend. The great editor's real ability, I should say, lies in extracting and clarifying the true issues embedded in the amorphous welling of mass public opinion; in introducing new and useful ideas to his readers; and in directing public opinion toward rational thought and action, or even in the service of a cause.
If one applies these standards rather than Quincy Howe's, can one still consider Henry Luce a great editor? The answer to this question involves a close look at Luce's magazines, especially Time, to determine whether they have guided public opinion or merely reflected it. In taking such a look one must be prepared to question what Dwight Macdonald has described as one of the enduring tenets of the liberal myth, the conviction that the main trouble with our press is that it is a mere mouthpiece for the reactionary views of its owners. It is, of course, true that Luce qualifies beautifully as a reactionary; most of his ideas were terribly dated, and there is no evidence that he ever changed his mind about anything fundamental. And yet his magazines—especially Time, the crown jewel in his empire—have not grown more reactionary as they have grown older and more powerful. If anything, it has been the other way around. If Time can be said to have had an ideological line all through the years, that line, upon investigation, turns out to have been neither so straight nor so firm as one might have imagined. There have, in fact, been multiple lines—a labyrinth, a veritable maze of lines.
It is, however, beyond doubt that Time has always been strongly opinionated. The biases of the magazine are sometimes excused on the ground that Luce never advanced any pretenses as to its objectivity. This is true, but only in part. While the original prospectus for Time claimed the “the editors recognize that complete neutrality on public questions and important news is probably as undesirable as it is impossible . . .,” it also stated, “No article will be written to prove any special case.”
No one can deny that Time frequently pleaded a “special case” in line with Luce's convictions. Time, as T. S. Matthews said, was not only Luce's invention but his property. As business head of the corporation, he had the final say on every important business decision; and his role as editorial director was an analogous one. When Luce announced his retirement in 1964, he declared that editorial decisions would now be made by others. Yet Herbert R. Mayes, a personal friend and a former president of the McCall Corporation, records the following exchange with Luce:
“But if the editors now decide to support candidate A for President, and you are for candidate B, which candidate will the magazine support?”
“That's simple,” Mr. Luce responded after a long interval of a tenth of a second. “They will support candidate B.”
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Up to the day of his death, then, Henry Luce exercised a pervasive influence over Time. This is not to say that he dictated his personal line on every item that appeared in the magazine, from a review of a biography of Marcel Proust to the latest Jerry Lewis movie (though one may well wonder how many peripheral items were written to please the Boss). But every substantive stand that Time ever took was, above all, the stand of Henry Luce. In a way that applies to few other recent publishers, Luce turned his magazines into his personal diaries.
To be sure, not all of Luce's opinions were of equal intensity. But when he held a strong conviction in one area it tended to affect strongly his views in other spheres. He evidently embraced the Arab proverb, “The enemy of my friend is my enemy and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This tendency is vividly illustrated by Luce's strong approval of Dwight Eisenhower and Time's coverage of the 1952 Presidential election campaign.
There is reason to believe that Luce bore Stevenson no very great malice until the latter was chosen to oppose Eisenhower in 1952. In a Time cover story on Stevenson before he had become a Presidential candidate, he is cited as a governor dedicated to “a more hopeful and dynamic proposition: that the U.S. is not a static pattern but an experiment, among other things—in good government.” Once a candidate, however, he became prey to the furies of Lucean journalism.4 Thus, after the 1952 Democratic convention the readers of Time were informed that Stevenson had “never so much as slapped the wrist of the Cook County Democratic organization, the most corrupt and powerful of existing big-city machines.” In a later cover story on Richard Nixon—“a good-looking, dark-haired young man, with a manner both aggressive and modest . . . a fine TV manner, an attractive family, a good war record, deep sincerity and religious faith, a Horatio Alger-like career,” etc.—one discovers that Stevenson's English is “more polished than plain.” In the September 1, 1952 issue of Time Eisenhower is depicted as offering “the kind of shrewd analysis . . which the U.S. seldom hears from its officials . . .,” while Stevenson is up in Wisconsin, spending “hours loafing.” Cover stories on Eisenhower carried caption lines such as “E pluribus unum” and (a quote) “Free government is the political expression of a deeply felt religious faith”; a Stevenson cover, however, posed the question: “Does he speak for the American people?” The answer, needless to say, was by and large: No.
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The bias of the '52 campaign coverage extended all the way down to photography. Ben H. Bagdikian points out that in the thirteen issues published during the campaign, Time printed twenty-one photographs of Eisenhower, all generally attractive: shaking hands, smiling that winning smile, looking altogether earnest and mellow and wise. But during the same period there appeared only thirteen photographs of Stevenson; two of them were thirty years old, and of the remainder four showed him in such unfelicitous poses as eating, drinking, and frowning. (This, incidentally, lends credence to the rumor that when going out on an assignment Time photographers ask only one question of the editors: “Good guy or bad guy?”)
Luce's Republicanism even affected Time's depictions of the American mood, which generally turned out to be more serene under Republican than Democratic administrations. In the issue of March 10, 1952, here is how Americans are described as paying their taxes under the Truman administration:
This week, once again, the American taxpayer . . . was working over his income tax return. He did not do the job happily. . . . The blow, in full and crushing measure, now lands each March 15 on the chin of a fellow named John Q.
But by April 18, 1955, under the Eisenhower administration, taxpayers seem to have become not only accustomed to, but almost joyous about, their lot:
. . . 60 million Americans have by this week signed their 1954 income tax forms. . . . They did this, wonderful to tell, without riots or protest. . . . It has become more and more unfashionable to criticize the income tax level.
The same kind of bias, though more subtly expressed, can be found in the following two descriptions of airport scenes. Given the fact that they are ostensibly describing the same rather commonplace act of debarking from a plane, they could hardly be more different in tone:
As the plane landed, the familiar bony face, the hawk nose, the mustache, the Homburg, were framed in a cabin window. The plane, the President's Independence, rolled to a stop at the Military Air Transport Service terminal in Washington, and the most controversial [a word simply meaning “unpopular” in Time language] figure in international politics [Dean Acheson] came down the ramp. (January 8, 1951)
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A tall, sunburned man in a straw hat climbed out of a small plane at the Syracuse airport last week, and with a trim, grey-haired woman hurrying along beside him, made for the airport waiting room. No one recognized Mr. & Mrs. John Foster Dulles as they crossed the crowded lobby, sat down at the lunch counter, and ordered ice-cream sodas. (August 13, 1951)
The Homburg versus the Ice Cream Soda—who would hesitate to choose between them? The Acheson story ends on a particularly strident note, asking whether the then Secretary of State constitutes so great a political liability as to be a “national danger.”
Sometimes, to be sure, Time has found targets that deserved its enmity; the magazine's early stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy is certainly to Luce's credit. In the issue of October 22, 1951, the junior Senator from Wisconsin was roundly attacked; indeed, he was even worked over pretty well on the cover, which carried the caption: “DEMAGOGUE McCARTHY, Does he deserve well of the Republic?” (The answer to Time-cover questions, it seems, is almost invariably negative.) Not only in this particular issue, but at almost every opportunity Time's editors scorned McCarthy's destructive antics as, among other things, a “national disgrace.” But Time's memory is short; what is said one week may bear little relation to what was said in the past or will be said in the future; the current issue is the issue. Thus, while Time thoroughly excoriated McCarthy and McCarthyism in October 1951, a cover story on Acheson, nine months earlier, had stated that “A lot of the charges that the State Department had housed party-liners and homosexuals had obviously stuck”; and, “The Acheson group [in State] (which included, among others, Alger Hiss) had held various attitudes toward Russia, none of them unfriendly.” And ten months after the expose of McCarthy, a cover story on Richard Nixon made no mention whatever of the latter's use of McCarthyite smear tactics to defeat Jerry Voorhis for Congress and, later, Helen Gahagan Douglas for the Senate.
As one might suspect from the above attacks on both McCarthy and Acheson, Luce's own attitude toward the dangers of Communism was not unambiguous. He could be open-minded enough to remark to Emmet John Hughes: “I don't care how my editors add up their facts and omens. I just don't feel the Soviets bringing on world war. In the 30's I felt it—surely—with the Nazis. The Communists? Damn it, no.” At other times, he could reveal a remarkable lack of sophistication in this area. In Witness, Whittaker Chambers tells of an evening he spent with Luce and an unnamed European. When the subject of Communism and the Hiss case entered the conversation, Luce demonstrated his naivete by saying to Chambers: “By any Marxian pattern of how classes behave, the upper class should be for you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?” Shortly afterward, incidentally, there occurs one of the most moving passages in Chambers's strange book. In it Luce shows that at times he could achieve a depth of humaneness seldom to be found in his publications. The passage occurs after the European has left:
Alone, we sat facing each other across a low table. Neither of us said anything. He studied my face for some time as if he were trying to read the limits of my strength. “The pity of it is,” he said at last, “that two men, able men, are destroying each other in this way.”
On the Soviet Union generally, Luce tended to reflect rather than direct public opinion. Like almost everyone else, Time was glad to have Stalin's troops on our side in World War II; in the 50's, like almost everyone else, including many American intellectuals, the magazine was rather crudely anti-Communist; in the 60's it cooled its anti-Communist zeal—once again, like almost everyone else.
Luce's and Time's line, then, cannot be described as simply anti-liberal. If one wished to “keep score” one could say that Luce and the liberal community found common ground on the following causes: the fight against Fascism, the United Nations, world law, and the civil-rights movement, at least in its more respectable manifestations. They were opposed in their assessments of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dean Acheson, both of whom Luce fervently despised, and of Harry Truman, whom he simply could not abide. In the Time story of Truman's firing of General Douglas MacArthur (April 23, 1951), there appears a passage that is less interesting for what it has to say about the two combatants than for what it has to say about the sympathies and temperament of Henry Luce:
Seldom had a more unpopular man fired a more popular one. Douglas MacArthur was the personification of the big man, with the many admirers who look to a great man for leadership, with the few critics who distrust a big man's dominating ways. Harry Truman was almost a professional little man, with the admirers who like the little man's courage, with the many critics who despise a little man's inadequacies.
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But the one subject on which Luce seemed to depart completely from reality was China. “Luce was stubborn and headstrong,” T. S. Matthews has written, “but facts and logic could usually persuade him; on this issue alone he went beyond the bounds of reason.” His view of China doubtless owed something to his love for the country in which he had been born and brought up, something to his loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek, and something to his capacity for wishful thinking. It has even been suggested that he shared the dream of his missionary parents and wished to Christianize China. That, of course, is a dubious speculation, but after the Communists gained control of the country, Luce's attitude toward China did resemble that of a man advocating a Holy War. Not only was he blind to the brutalities and ineptitude of his friend Chiang Kai-shek, but he almost seemed to take a positive delight in the better organized—and hence larger-scale—brutalities and ineptitudes of China's Communist leadership:
Two out of every three able men in Canton are unemployed. In other cities the problem is swelled by thousands of rural refugees, who have lost their means of support in the land reform. Whole classes of merchants and professionals like lawyers, brokers, and jewelers are idle: their functions have simply vanished. In Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankow, Chungking, Foochow, and Swatow, thousands of shops and factories have gone bankrupt. Shopping centers in almost every big city in China now seem lifeless and deserted.
That, last week, was China under the rule of a mob of Communist soldiers, politicians, and intellectuals. (June 18, 1951)
In the Luce-Time view, the proper policy of the United States toward China was to stir up more of the above: “China's Red masters may be in for plenty of trouble,” the magazine reported in the summer of 1951, “(and if the U.S. chooses, it can increase that trouble).” As far as I know, Luce never openly advocated an invasion of China; it seems he hoped that one day the Communists would simply throw up their hands and go away. As late as January 1967, he was apparently still hoping. In a cover story entitled “China in Chaos” and dealing with the power struggle among the Chinese leaders and the activities of the Red Guards, Time reported: “To many observers in both the West and the East, it seemed as if China were reaching the final stages of the legendary dance of the scorpion—just before it stings itself to death.” “The Great Revolution,” the story added, “had clearly begun to devour itself.” Moreover, anyone who has ever proposed that the reality of a Communist government in China be acknowledged has been bitterly put down. In 1953, when the New Statesman suggested that the Chinese Communists be given a seat on the Security Council, so that “the cement that holds the Stalinite empire so rigidly together might begin to flake away,” Time rejoined that the New Statesman “inhabits a pink cloud all its own.”
It is safe to say, then, that Henry Luce's magazines have done more than their share to contribute to the mystification and general hysteria about Communist China. “And the Chinese leadership,” Oscar Gass has written,5 “now tells its people another fundamental thing—a thing not to the credit of any of the sons of man. No country helps China.” For which Time Inc., among others, is entitled to take a bow.
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As one moves away from politics, Time's “line” becomes harder to discern. In its coverage of the arts, for example, the magazine has been fairly catholic in its interests and tastes. Sometimes, it is true, the Books section has been used to support the political views of the magazine—as when a recent review of The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell turned out to be little more than an attack on Russell's present politics. But it is also true that Time's cultural departments have occasionally differed from the rest of the magazine in permitting the individual voice of a single writer to emerge—as in the days when James Agee was writing movie criticism and when Louis Kronenberger was the magazine's drama critic. One reason for this is that critical judgment in the arts is by its very nature resistant to a collective line and to collective journalism. Luce's indifference to most areas of culture may well be another reason; insofar as one can discover, he had no great interest in secular literature, visual art, music, or drama. He may have allowed his critics their own points of view for the simple reason that he did not believe in the power of art to move men's minds.
Yet no artist is honored by a Time cover story unless he meets one of two criteria: he must either be financially successful or make extraordinarily good copy (preferably both). In literature, recent Time cover-story subjects have included such disparate types as Herman Wouk (1955), James Gould Cozzens (1957), Boris Pasternak (1958), Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1962), James Baldwin (1963), and Phyllis McGinley (1965). Slowly developing talent and hard-won achievement in the arts have never been among Time's excessive concerns; flashiness and the flat dead level of the “interesting” have always been. In the mid-50's the Luce publications thus latched on with great excitement to the antics of the Beat Generation. Even now they are said to employ a woman who serves as their connection to the American avant garde, such as it is, and whose job is to ferret out and report on the more exotic goings-on in the artistic underground.
To return now to our original question: was Luce a great editor-journalist? Was he a missionary or Muggeridge's “piano player in a brothel”? Did he guide public opinion or merely reflect it? As must be obvious by now, the answer is necessarily a mixed one. While the spirit of the missionary ran deep in Luce, it was frequently in conflict with the spirit of the businessman-journalist, which (China always excepted) more often than not won out. Luce's stand in the 1964 Presidential election is a case in point. One of his deepest commitments, surely, was to the Republican party, but he failed to support Barry Goldwater. It may well have been that Goldwater's Republicanism was too much even for Henry Luce, though the two men probably agreed on a number of fundamental issues. But it may also have been the case that the businessman-journalist in Luce, sensing which way the wind was blowing, managed to still the voice of the journalist-missionary. Again always excepting China, Luce seems to halve had a nice sense of how far he could go without discrediting his magazines in the eyes of the general public. Whatever his missionary impulse, Luce always managed to keep that piano handy.
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V
Though Henry Luce was something less than a complete tyrant who imposed a monolithic line on Time, a subtle totalitarian influence—to use Norman Mailer's term—has nevertheless been at work on the magazine for years. To discover that influence, one must turn to the editorial practices and organization of Time. As Luce and Briton Hadden recognized more than forty-five years ago, the intended audience of Time lacked the “time” properly to inform itself of what was going on in the world—and time, as they say, is money. But they also recognized that it wasn't enough simply to inform people; in the process they had to be entertained as well. These insights led to Time's standard practice of dramatizing the news, making of every little item a short story whose point and purpose cannot be mistaken. “I am,” Luce once allowed, “all for titillating trivialities. I am all for the epic touch. I could almost say that everything in Time should be either titillating or epic or starkly, super-curtly, factual.”
But to titillate and apply the epic touch—let that “starkly, super-curtly, factual” go for a moment—required talent, as Luce and Hadden were well aware, and talent of a kind that was likely to be expensive. In fact, Time's first foreign news editor, an Englishman named Thomas J. C. Martyn, was hired at a larger salary than that of either of the magazine's two founders. Luce's magazines were among the first on which the editorial budget was not slighted. He might exhort his employees to be “troubadours of the Lord,” but the rewards which Time Inc. conferred upon its editors were by no means confined to the after-life.
“You get what you pay for,” to quote another business maxim, and the talent that has gone through the mill at Time Inc. has been of a very high order. The phenomenon of intellectuals who have worked for Henry Luce constitutes an interesting chapter in the 20th-century history of that class. Besides Agee and Kronenberger, the roll call of Luce's employees at one time or another included Stephen Vincent Benet, Archibald MacLeish, John O'Hara, J. K. Galbraith, Theodore H. White, Alfred Kazin, John Chamberlain, Daniel Bell, Whittaker Chambers, Dwight Macdonald, John Hersey, William Schlamm, and Robert Cantwell. Edmund Wilson probably had this phenomenon in mind when he once called Luce one of the “two great enemies of literary talent in our time” (Hollywood was the other). Hadden's biographer, Noel Busch, is by no means a hostile critic of Time, but he makes a similar, if more moderate, assessment when he states that “writers of strongly personalized talent rarely found the medium much to their taste.” It is interesting to note that, despite Time Inc.'s various stylistic innovations and all the talent that has been lodged there over the years, perhaps the only genuine work of art produced under the corporation's auspices has been Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Written originally for Fortune, it never appeared there, presumably because it was considered altogether too uneven and complex for that magazine's readers.
It is a safe bet that few of the writers who have gone to work for Time started out with the assumption that they would spend many years there. One imagines that they planned to write “on the side” while taking home those hefty Luce paychecks, and dreamed of an early day when the recognition and rewards due their own work would allow them to quit Time. But, as is often the case with writers who in an analogous fashion decide to turn out potboilers to finance their masterpieces, it seldom worked out that way; they tended to get caught up in the system.
T. S. Matthews and Whittaker Chambers are characteristic instances. Matthews came to Time from the New Republic. Starting out as a part-time book reviewer who for the most part worked at home, he ended up, twenty-four years later, as principal editor: “My work week was then about seventy hours, packed into five days.” Chambers also started out as a Time book reviewer. Over the years he rose to Senior Editor, and at one time he was in charge of thirteen sections of Time. He called it an invaluable experience, though “it was somewhat like working directly behind a buzz saw, chewing metal faster than the eye can follow and throwing off an unremitting shower of sharp and shining filings.” During this period, Chambers and an assistant “ended our week at four o'clock in the morning after having worked for thirty-six hours, almost without stopping and wholly without sleep. We kept up the pace by smoking five or six packs of cigarettes and drinking thirteen or fourteen cups of coffee a day.”
How was Luce able to get such Sisyphean labors from his employees? There was, of course, the money—for example, within nine years Chambers saw his salary raised roughly sixfold, to the extraordinary (for 1948) figure of almost $30,000. But money wasn't the whole story. Even those who came to Time with stark cynicism were likely to be infected by the seriousness with which the magazine took itself. Surely no one could have been more cynical about the magazine at the start than T. S. Matthews. As he writes in his autobiography:
The contrast I felt between the New Republic and Time was a contrast between scholarly, distinguished men and smart, ignorant boys. The New Republic did not exist primarily to call attention to itself; it had the nobler motive (or so it seemed to me) of trying to recall Americans to their better senses. The New Republic was a failure. And what was Time up to? As far as I could see, Time simply wanted to succeed, to get bigger, to get all the readers it could collect by exhibiting its bumptious, impertinent, adolescent self. After it grew up . . . but I couldn't imagine Time growing up.
Twenty-odd years later, however, there was Matthews, dead on his feet after a seventy-hour week at Time.
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Luce's high seriousness extended to all his enterprises. In this connection, Dwight Macdonald tells a revealing anecdote. He worked on Fortune for six years during the 30's, and in his spare time began editing a little literary magazine. Thinking to impress his boss with his new cultural enterprise, he sent a copy up to Luce. Far from being impressed, Luce felt betrayed. “But Henry,” Macdonald said, “you can't expect Fortune to be my only interest. I give it a good day's work from nine to five, that's what you pay me for, and it's my business what I do in my spare time.” Luce, however, didn't see it that way. “This is,” he told his employee, “a twenty-four hour profession, you never know when you may get an idea for us, and if you're all the time thinking of some damn little magazine. . . .”
However unreasoning, this attitude of Luce's undoubtedly contributed greatly to Time Inc.'s success, especially in the case of Time. That he was able to secure such great devotion from so many able men is especially impressive in view of the fact that his employees had to forgo much of the pleasure that ordinarily attends a journalist's work. The reasons for going into journalism are usually four in number: (1) ego satisfaction in one form or another; (2) aesthetic satisfaction; (3) money; and (4) a chance to alter the world in some small way. By implementing the editorial practice known as “group journalism,” a practice devised by himself and Briton Hadden, and one integral to Time, Luce in one swoop did away with reasons (1) and (2).
Group journalism is what it says it is: writing produced not individually but cooperatively by a team composed of writers, researchers, correspondents, and editors. Newsweek, which took over the practice from Time, has described it in its ideal form:
Group journalism is a demanding craft which at its best can (and often does) produce journalism of the highest order. Theoretically no one man is master, not even of the coverage of such specialized subjects as medicine, fiscal affairs, or science—no one man, except, that is, for the man at the top of the pyramid; and he, in turn is (or should be) strongly susceptible to the advice, background, and judgment of those under him. Thus reporters and correspondents often file vast and meticulously researched reports on a given subject, only to see their labors appear in print as a concentrated distillation of a few hundred words.
In practice, however, group journalism achieves nothing so much as to put the journalistic coverage of an event at several removes from the direct experience of it. Let us assume for a moment that Time is planning to do a cover story on the Union of South Africa. The mighty and smooth wheels of group journalism will roll in the following fashion. The magazine's African correspondents will file reports on the country, its research staff will get up all sorts of additional statistical and other factual matter. All the material will then be placed on the desk of the editor assigned to write the story. As like as not, this editor will never have been to South Africa, so his job will call not merely for expository skills but for certain powers of invention as well. One of his tasks will be to lend authenticity to the story—in other words, to belie the fact that it is being written in New York. Our imaginary writer will have to depict South Africa's veld and mining towns, neither of which he has ever set eyes on; he will have to describe the faces of politicians on the basis of photographs, and the Afrikaans accent of the Prime Minister, which he has never heard; he will have to insert all manner of facts and statistics, of whose real significance he is ignorant. When he has finished, the country of South Africa will doubtless have taken on a few new dimensions, and everything will be at one substantial remove from reality.
The story will now go to the Senior Editor in charge of international news, who will no doubt want to sharpen it up a little: state the issues somewhat more forcibly, describe at greater length the desolation of the compounds in which the Blacks live, interlard the story with a few more statistics, etc. The story is now at another remove from actuality and ready for the perusal of the Managing Editor. Though the copy should be in pretty good order by this time, the Managing Editor might be in a mood to add a touch or two of his own (give the Prime Minister another wart, lend his smile a slight twist). If the subject is one on which Time has a “line,” the story will now be sent upstairs—formerly to Luce, now perhaps to Hedley Donovan, his most trusted associate and currently Editor-in-Chief—for further tinkering and yet another distancing from first-hand experience.
At some time during this process, the story will be sent back to Research.6 Those facts which have been wrenched out of all shape will have to be modulated somewhat; outright errors will have to be corrected; the various editors' imaginations will have to be forced into some accommodation to the hard information. Finally, the piece will be printed and read and no doubt enjoyed by almost everyone except those who happen to have been in South Africa and know what it is really like; such people are likely to experience a strange, rather queasy feeling.
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It is one of the unmistakable signs of writing produced by group journalism that it violates one's personal knowledge of what it describes. Edmund Wilson has made much the same point superbly:
Time's picture of the world gives us sometimes simply the effect of schoolboy mentalities in a position to avail themselves of a gigantic research equipment; but it is almost always tinged with a peculiar kind of jeering rancor. There is a tendency to exhibit the persons whose activities are chronicled, not as more or less able or noble or amusing or intelligent human beings, who have various ways of being right or wrong, but—because they are presented by writers who are allowed no points of view themselves—as manikins, sometimes cocky, sometimes busy, sometimes zealous, sometimes silly, sometimes gruesome, but in most cases quite infra-human, who make speeches before guinea-pig parliaments, issue commands and move armies of beetles back and forth on bas-relief battle-maps, indulge themselves maniacally in queer little games of sport, science, art, beer-bottle-top collecting or what not, squeak absurd little boasts and complaints, and pop up their absurd little faces in front of the lenses of the Luce photographers, and add up to a general impression that the pursuits, past and present, of the human race are rather an absurd little scandal about which you might find out some even nastier details if you met the editors of Time over cocktails. . . .
It should be added that Time is not altogether insensible of some of the defects of group journalism. A former editor informs me that, whenever possible, Time writers are now sent out on a whirlwind tour (often at lavish expense) of the place they are assigned to write about. But this does not and cannot change the decisive fact that they are allowed no point of view of their own. Nor are their manuscripts ever really free from all sorts of editorial infringement by their superiors. So entrenched is the practice of group journalism at Time that Henry Luce himself was prepared to submit to it. T. S. Matthews tells a story of a piece Luce had written about a speech by Charles Lindbergh on isolationism; the piece was, for Time, highly unorthodox. In the editorial process, the lead had been lopped off and the rest largely rewritten. “Well,” said Luce, upon reading his mangled copy, “quite a lot of it got by.”
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But even if Time were to drop group journalism altogether, Wilson's indictment would still stand, for Time has all the inherent defects of a mass magazine designed for a mass audience. Among other things, this means that between teaching and delighting its readers, the latter must, wherever possible, be given priority. Not only must the readers all be delighted but they must all be delighted in roughly the same way, for it is the common emblem of the products of mass culture that they treat a heterogeneous audience homogeneously. Time is admirably suited to this; the only price it pays is in the coin of reality. “How can Time get very close to reality,” Dwight Macdonald has written, “when every story has to be tailored and tortured into a little drama, with an angle, a climax, an arresting lead and a ‘kicker’ at the end?” As a B-movie contorts human experience, snuffing out its complexity and tidying up its loose ends for an audience which has, after all, come primarily to be entertained, so does Time magazine: the B-movie of current events and personalities.
But B-movies are usually harmless, because they do not usually deal with real people and events; Time does, and is often harmful. P. G. Wodehouse has said, “Time is about the most inaccurate magazine in existence. They will write just about anything to be picturesque and amusing.” During Wodehouse's internment by the Germans in World War II, Time had him, he says, “‘throwing a cocktail party in the jolly old pine woods at Le Touquet’ as the German army was sweeping toward Paris.” “Can you imagine the bastards inventing an idiotic story like that?” he has asked.7 “Apparently everyone believed the story because it has been picked up time and again. It did me a lot of harm twenty years ago, and is still repeated often. It is embedded in the world's folklore-thanks to the inventiveness of one of Time's editors.”
A Time piece entitled “Of Time & the Rebel” (December 5, 1960), on the subject of Norman Mailer's stabbing of his second wife, provides another illustration of the magazine's capacity for harmful irresponsibility. The piece begins by describing the incident and the background against which it took place, a party at the Mailers' apartment. It reports who was at the party; it describes what they did and talked about; and it tells us why Leonard Lyons left early. But it very quickly gets down to the problem of causation. For it is not enough for Time readers to know that a man has done a terrible thing; they must also know why he did what he did—in less than a thousand words, preferably. In this case, Time had no great difficulty: it claimed that since The Naked and The Dead Mailer's career had been going downhill, his work had been going sour, he hungered for a succès d'estime, he had of late become preoccupied with the subject of violence—a list made up of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, and simple falsehoods—ergo, at the end of the night he walked into his wife's bedroom and stabbed her. This “explanation,” of course, denies almost totally Mailer's rich complexity as a writer and human being, and brings him down to the level of the little man who has had a rough day at the office and then comes home to take it out on his wife. The piece also contains the inevitable Time “kicker.” The last paragraph includes a poignant plea from Mailer that he not be sent to an insane asylum, lest the validity of all his long years of work be thrown in doubt. Whereupon the story concludes with the following sentence: “Not so sure, Magistrate Reuben Levy sent Norman Mailer to Bellevue Hospital for mental observation ‘in the public interest.’”
One wonders whether this is what Henry Luce had in mind by the “starkly, super-curtly, factual.” One also wonders whether anyone would have the nerve to affix his own name to a piece of writing so clearly malicious in its intent.
This brings us to the subject of the anonymity of Time writing, which not only makes it easy to be irresponsible but serves other functions as well. For one thing, it gives an evenness of tone and style to each week's issue, a uniformity to the whole product. It also lends a kind of specious authority to what is being written about, as if the magazine were produced not by insignificant human beings but by an omniscient machine. At present, there is no distinct Timestyle in the sense that there was one in Briton Hadden's day, and for some time afterward. “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” Wolcott Gibbs noted of that style; now the sentences run forward, though the mind might still reel. Nonetheless, it is still true that “The overwhelming fact about Time,” as Marshall McLuhan has written, “is its style. It has often been said that nobody could tell the truth in Time style.” But the truth is one thing, the demands of the product another. What Luce and Hadden in their original prospectus for Time called the “complete organization of the news” has actually turned out to be a consummate packaging job. It may be the most artful packaging job in the history of publishing, giving its readers the illusion that by investing a few hours of time they can acquire knowledge of everything of interest that has happened in the world during the past week. “Time,” according to McLuhan, “is a nursery book in which the reader is slapped and kicked alternately. It is full of predigested pap, spooned out with confidential nudges. The reader is never on his own for an instant, but, as though at his mother's knee, he is provided with the right emotions for everything he hears and sees as the pages turn.”
It remains to be said, however, that Time is in some curious way nearly irresistible. Nor are Americans the only people who have succumbed to the charms of Lucean journalism. As Newsweek reported in its cover story on Luce: “By last week, in fact, there were at least 50 journals throughout the world that trace their origins to some extent to the ideas first incorporated in Time. They run the gamut from the prestigious West German Spiegel and France's Express to the smudgily similar but eagerly read magazines that appear in some half-dozen newly independent African nations.” It is perverse, but apparently true, that the Oxford Don, the Brooklyn mechanic, the Lebanese merchant, the writer of this article, and (with a little training) the African tribal chief are all eager to store up a little information each week about Coptic art, leather lungs, Carnaby Street, NATO, what's doing with Liz and Richard Burton, etc., etc.
What does all this information add up to? It is a question few of us bother to ask ourselves—it is, after all, hardly a pressing one. The answer, of course, is nothing; it all adds up to absolutely nothing. But for Henry Luce's employees the question was not so easy to avoid. After six years as editor of Time, T. S. Matthews asked himself: “And what did I accomplish in those six years? Nothing tangible, visible, or lasting, as far as I could see. . . . I was sometimes told that I had ‘changed the tone’ of Time—which I am quite sure I didn't—or at least had left some ephemeral impress on the magazine. I could never see any signs of that myself, much as I should have liked to see them.” Ezra Goodman, for years Time's Hollywood correspondent, tells of a colleague who answered the question in less articulate fashion. “Every morning before leaving for work,” Goodman reports, “he would throw up.”
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VI
How did Henry Luce view his own accomplishments? As is to be expected, in judging himself he usually bowed to the spirit of business and the specter of public opinion. “. . . All our publications, all our activities, are successful,” he once said. “They are successful not only at the box office, but they are successful also in the opinion of a large part of mankind. This is a considerable consolation for our efforts over the years.”
But Luce also had another standard for assessing men and their achievements. Of Douglas Mac-Arthur he once remarked to Emmet John Hughes: “You may not like him, but he meets the test of greatness. He fills the living space around him. He cannot be trespassed upon, or toyed with, or subtracted from. Whatever ground he stands on, it is his.” He probably would have liked to be judged in the same way, and it is a measure of his influence that by and large he was. Writing in Newsweek, Hughes said of Luce: “He plainly filled the space around him. He made the ground he stood on truly—sometimes defiantly—his. And so his life served its sovereign and precise purpose: to make some difference to history.” The New Yorker's TV critic, M. J. Arlen, suggested that television could stand more men of the stature of Luce: “One thing you could say for Henry Luce—when you picked up one of his magazines, especially Time, you really felt his presence. Think of it—all those pages, pictures, words, long series on snakes and Art, and whatever happened to the Holy Roman Empire, and you felt that presence of this one man.” And in the Saturday Review, Herbert R. Mayes went so far as to suggest that Luce would have made a “superb President,” adding: “I am content, however, that he gave himself to publishing.”
There can be no question but that Henry Luce was a man of a certain stature and that he has a place in history. Yet that is something which can be said of villains as well as heroes; it tells us nothing of the worth of a man's achievements. Viewing Luce's life in retrospect, one finds it difficult not to conclude that he accomplished little of positive value and because of this one is filled with an almost overwhelming sense of waste. There was in Luce all that energy, all that religious zeal to do good, and it all came to so little. Through the agency of his magazines, he confused more issues than he clarified, harmed more people than he helped, and contributed more to the Gross National Product than to American culture.
Commenting on Luce's death, the President of the United States declared: “The magazines which bear his stamp are an authentic part of life in America.” Since Luce's ardent dream for an “American Century” has soured for so many—both in the United States and abroad—even this well-intended accolade is ambiguous. To be sure, Time marches on even after the death of Henry Luce, but when one views his life one is haunted by a line from Shelley's “Ozymandias,” a line which in one of his rare introspective moments, Luce himself might have uttered:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
1 Briton Hadden. A Biography of the Co-founder of Time, Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1949.
2 Twenty years later, Time Inc. bought House & Home, another magazine in the same field. In 1964, however, Architectural Forum was discontinued and House & Home was sold to McGraw-Hill, Inc. The Forum was an exceedingly good magazine, but Luce's attitude—typical of modern corporation executives—toward his corporation's losing enterprises was similar to that of the Spartans to their malformed children: he buried them.
3 “It seemed to me at Yale,” Santayana wrote in his autobiography, “as if enthusiasm were cultivated for its own sake, as flow of life, no matter in what direction. It meant intoxication, not choice. You were not taught to attain anything capable of being kept, a treasure to be laid up in heaven. You were trained merely to succeed. And in order to be sure to succeed, it was safer to let the drift of the times dictate your purpose. Make a strong pull and a long pull and a pull all together for the sake of togetherness. Then you will win the race. A young morality, a morality of preparation, of limbering up. ‘Come on, fellows,’ it cried, ‘Let's see who gets there first. Rah, rah, rah! Whoop-her-up! Onward, Christian Soldier!’”
4 See Ben H. Bagdikian's analysis of Time's coverage of the '52 and '56 Presidential elections in “Time, the Weekly Newsmagazine” in the New Republic of February 23, 1959.
5 “China, Russia & the U.S.,” COMMENTARY, March 1967.
6 For an interesting commentary on the function of the researcher and the newsmagazines' general attitude toward facts, see “There Are 007 Trees in Russia,” by Otto Fried-rich, in the October 1964 Harper's.
7 For an account of the injustice done to Mr. Wodehouse in regard to the stories about his collaborating with the Germans, see The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge.
