The Publisher (47 page)

More significant than Ingersoll’s departure was the fall of Goldsborough. Throughout the 1930s he had written about European fascism as if it were at worst a minor irritant that did not much threaten the United States. (In 1935, in the midst of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, Goldsborough wrote about a modest Mussolini overture to improve relations with France, and insisted it made him a “prime candidate” for the Nobel Peace Prize.) Where once Luce had tolerated Goldsborough’s essentially isolationist views, he now found them unacceptable. Goldsborough “has just has not grown up with the times,” he confided to Billings, “and he sees Europe as it was in 1930.” By mid-1939 Luce had begun to marginalize Goldsborough, sending him on long trips overseas and assigning the editorship of Foreign Affairs to others. By late 1940 Goldsborough was gone—exiled briefly to a new and meaningless job as “assistant” to Luce before a forced if lucrative retirement in 1941. “His fall will be a hard one,” Billings accurately predicted. (After ten years of lonely obscurity Goldsborough jumped to his death in 1950—carrying his omnipresent gold-headed cane with him—from a window in the Rockefeller Center offices where he had once been a titan.)
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The weakness of Time Inc.’s global vision in the 1930s had been a product of both attitude and uncertainty. The magazines’ cultural and literary style had remained rooted in
Time
’s early, slightly cynical brashness and its tendency to take nothing too seriously. These traits were increasingly incompatible with the serious and ominous state of the world of the late 1930s. Luce and his colleagues were also, for a time, uncertain about their position on the rise of dictatorships and the advent of war. Torn between the extremes of Goldsborough’s quasi-fascist leanings and the Popular Front inclinations of others, the magazines struggled, and generally failed, to produce a coherent position on the looming crisis. But by the end of 1939, with Ingersoll gone and Goldsborough
shunted aside, and with fighting under way in Europe and widening in China, Time Inc. had begun to recast itself as the chronicler of the great global catastrophe—a recasting launched through a series of dinners Luce held with his senior editors in 1939 in an effort to “reintroduce” himself to his own staff. The
Fortune
writer Charles Wertenbaker later described those dinners in his novel
The Death of Kings
, which included a thinly disguised profile of Luce. His employees sat mesmerized, Wertenbaker wrote of the only slightly fictionalized publisher portrayed in the book, awed by “the purity of his belief.” Others who attended the dinners noticed a new tone of authoritativeness, rooted in Luce’s increasing certainty about his own positions. “Is TIME utterly unbiased, impartial, objective?” he asked. “No, TIME is prejudiced” in favor of “individual liberty” and American leadership in the world. At the dinners and elsewhere he laid out his new vision for the magazines:
“Time
cannot escape the fact that it is the bellwether of the most successful journalistic group in the world,” he wrote in one of several memos outlining the company’s future course. “At last it is clear to me what FORTUNE’s No. 1 Job in this crisis is,” he announced a few months later. “The No. 1 Job is to straighten out U. S. Businessmen (
and
“Liberals”) on the great matter of appeasement.” He had similar conversations with his colleagues on
Time
and
Life
, advocating a new goal: a “journalism of information
with a purpose.”
Having thought about the “great changes in the world,” he wrote in November 1939, he had acquired “a deeper conviction that … in our execution of The Newsmagazine Idea we shall indeed ‘justify journalism’ in our time.”
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Luce’s sudden and deep conviction in 1939 was a departure from his and his magazine’s outlook even a year before. Through much of the 1930s, the Time Inc. editors and writers eagerly covered the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish civil war, the growing arsenal of the German military, and the halting American steps toward rearmament. But covering war was not the same as taking a position in the emerging global conflict. During most of the decade, Luce and his magazines were largely indifferent to who was winning or losing the conflicts in Europe and Asia. Time Inc.’s coverage was clinical and detached, expressing little sense that the conflicts had very much to do with the United States.
⁷

Time
, for example, chronicled the Japanese invasion of China through much of the 1930s as a dispute between two tyrannies: Japanese warlords fighting Chinese dictators. The magazine routinely referred to
Chiang Kai-shek, later one of Luce’s—and thus
Time’s
—great heroes, as “Dictator Chiang,” and even treated the brief kidnapping of Chiang by a militant Chinese nationalist in 1937 not as a crime or a tragedy, but as an example of China’s disarray. The magazine took a similarly detached view of Mussolini. “The years have dignified and tempered Benito Mussolini,” the magazine declared in 1936 in the aftermath of Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, “and he has dignified and tempered the Italian people” while speaking with “Augustan calm.” Even Hitler, whom the magazines generally scorned, received gentle treatment on occasion.
Time
described the 1936 Nuremberg rallies benignly as “the greatest show and heartiest picnic on earth,” admired Hitler’s “magnetism,” and uncritically reported the good news about Germany’s economy that the führer had touted in his speeches. In August 1938
Time
greeted Hitler’s mobilization of a million soldiers with sunny indifference: “Last week Europe was in a mood to let Adolf Hitler exercise his boys and put on a show.” And a few weeks later the magazine responded to the September 1938 Munich accord in which Britain and France ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, as a welcome example of settling a major conflict “by talking instead of shooting first.” Indeed, the enforced surrender of Czechoslovakia,
Time
claimed, may have “set a precedent which might flower into a great influence for peace.”
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In
Life
a story on a 1938 Hitler visit to Rome noted that “democratic observers relaxed” in the face of evidence that neither Germany nor Italy were likely to cooperate in any future wars. The magazine’s grim 1938 reports of the Spanish civil war and the Sino-Japanese war made no judgments about the justice of anyone’s cause and instead cited the fighting as a reason for the United States to insulate itself from the global crisis. “The love of peace has no meaning or no stamina unless it is based on a knowledge of war’s terrors,”
Life
wrote in a caption below a Robert Capa picture of corpses on a plain near Teruel in Spain.
Fortune
, in the meantime, treated the growing crisis only glancingly and with exceptional detachment—worrying about the impact of global instability on business, expressing more contempt for Britain’s democratic weakness than for German tyranny, and displaying a cheerful confidence that war would be averted. In its September 1939 issue, published only days before the beginning of World War II,
Fortune’s
only mention of international news was a brief upbeat story about the improvement in France’s finances.
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The events of 1939 abruptly changed the attitude of Luce himself and of his magazines. The once-benign interpretation of Munich quickly
turned into a savage attack on appeasement. Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, which
Time
had largely shrugged off in September 1938, now became the conclusive evidence of Hitler’s incorrigible ambitions. “The treaty-breaking, lie-telling German Dictator … threw away all pretence of being anything but a Conqueror,” the magazine noted in March 1939. A month later, when Mussolini invaded Albania, the editors responded furiously both to the Italian aggression and to the spinelessness of Britain and France: “There are in Europe two madmen who are disturbing the entire world—Hitler and Mussolini. There are in Europe two damn fools who sleep—Chamberlain and Daladier.” At about the same time the magazines began their (and Luce’s) long love affair with Winston Churchill, who became “a symbol of British democracy … of the kind that totalitarian governments cannot endure.” One of the decisive moments in Luce’s full commitment to war was the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, a “nightmare” that created “a mighty cordon of non-democracy stretching one-third around the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific” and that united the world’s two leading “revolutionary tyrannies.” By the time Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, formally beginning what
Time
had already labeled World War II (thus cementing the conflict’s enduring name), the magazines were already mobilizing themselves for a full-throated defense of democracy and a determination to defeat tyranny.
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Nowhere was the new attitude more visible than in
Life
—as Longwell had predicted in 1935 and as Luce now mandated in 1939—which became one of the nation’s most important chroniclers of war and the great champion of the Allied cause. A special issue of
Life
shortly after the invasion of Poland was devoted entirely to the war and not only portrayed the anguish of the Polish people as “German bombers rain death and destruction on Warsaw” but outlined in terrifying detail the ominous power and terrible ambitions of the Nazi empire. Among its many warnings were the first of many hypothetical scenarios showing the catastrophic possibilities of a German victory, including the total destruction of British and French industry through airpower. But it also began what would become an earnest celebration of the courage and resourcefulness of Britain. (The issue included the results of a new
Fortune
survey that showed 83 percent of Americans in favor of the Western Allies’ winning the war—and only 1 percent hoping for a German victory.)
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For the next two years
Life
was the adoring chronicler of the British war effort and of the plucky courage of the British people. “The R. A. F. Fliers Are Young and Brave,” the magazine announced as it presented portraits of “smiling, keen, and confident” British “heroes.” Stories
about the German bombing of London were accompanied by photographs of beaming, “unruffled” “Thumbs Up” young women singing, “We’re going to show the world who’s who.” Despite the blitz,
Life
assured its readers, “the life of London continues with calm, incongruous persistence.” The devastating British retreat from France at Dunkirk was an opportunity to salute the “unshaken, unbroken, unbeaten” British military.

Time
and
Life
both became as well the indomitable foes of America’s “appeasers” and isolationists. “Rather than risk involving U.S. troops in the War,”
Life
wrote contemptuously (and not wholly inaccurately), the “appeasers” were “prepared to see Great Britain defeated and Hitler’s power extended to the very sea gates of America.” Unflattering photographs of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, U.S. ambassador to Britain Joseph Kennedy, and U.S. senator Burton K. Wheeler accompanied a portrait of Lawrence Dennis, “America’s No. 1 intellectual Fascist.”
Time
was particularly hard on Lindbergh, “who to many Americans represents the narrowest isolationism, the broadest appeasement.” Uncharacteristically dense essays explained to
Life
readers the great dangers of a German victory—among them a five-page article by Walter Lippmann describing the terrifying economic consequences of Axis control of Europe and the likelihood that Germany would then dominate and devastate the United States. “The small American businessman has long complained about how difficult it is for him to survive in the competition with the large American corporation,” Lippmann warned. “What will he do when he has to face the competition of totalitarian monopoly organized on a continental scale?” At the same time a newly energized
March of Time
issued one of its most ambitious films: “The Ramparts We Watched,” an unapologetic call for American military preparedness. And
Fortune
began to mobilize its readership for the struggle as well. “The people of the U.S. must now choose among retreat, isolation, and international leadership,” the magazine wrote late in 1939.
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The rapid and dramatic movement of the Time Inc. magazines from ironic detachment to committed advocates of the Allied cause did not escape the notice of the editors of
The New Yorker
, Luce’s most persistently biting (and wittiest) satirists. Harold Ross, always eager to tweak what he considered the pomposity of Luce and his magazines, took note of
Life’s
simultaneous fascination with “pretty women” and its doomsday fantasies as it attempted to prepare its readers for war. Shortly before Pearl Harbor,
The New Yorker
ran a satirical cartoon version of
Life
Goes
to a Party titled “Life Goes to the Collapse of Western Civilization.” It was most likely based on a trivial 1941
Life
story about “twin sisters from Flint,” Lois and Lucille, arriving in New York hoping to break into show business and meet “successful, cultured and refined people.”
The New Yorker
parody told the story of two “pretty New York models”—Meenie and Babs—who move smiling and wide-eyed through a war-torn New York, always dressed in the latest and most provocative outfits. In one frame the girls dress in “scanty sport clothes for the task of lugging $3,450,000 in inflated United States currency to famed Elizabeth Arden’s to buy a tube of vanishing cream.” In another Babs and Meenie “buoyantly participate in a bread riot for a lark.” “Goodness gracious,” Babs exclaims, “if I ate even one slice of bread I’d have to stop wearing tailored suits.”
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Luce had reacted to
The New Yorker’s
satirical 1936 profile of him with almost violent fury. But by 1941 he was so deeply immersed in the cause of the Allies that he gave
The New Yorker
, and his other critics, virtually no notice at all. His newly powerful sense of mission kept his gaze squarely on the global crisis, and on the important role he believed he must play in it. His frustration with America’s slow path to intervention grew steadily, but no more than his frustration with his own inability to change the nation’s course. Roosevelt, he charged, was guilty of “apelike fumbling;” but in fact, he somewhat narcissistically insisted, “it is all, all our fault … that all this monkey-business happens when
we
are ‘the most potent editorial force’ in America.” The intensity of his commitment even led him to propose transforming
Fortune
from a magazine of business to the “Magazine of America as a World Power.” His staff talked him out of this radical notion, but not out of the sentiments that it reflected.
¹⁴