The Publisher (73 page)

Time
’s undeniable favoritism in its reporting on American politics generated increasing criticism of other areas of the magazine. The Philippine ambassador gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1959 describing
Time’s
editorial philosophy as “All the news as we angle it.” A few years later the left-leaning New York magazine
Fact
collected complaints about
Time
from prominent people and published their stories of “lies,” “distortions,” and “rampant inaccuracies.” (The editors apologized for not having enough room in the magazine to publish all the comments they had solicited.) “Every music column I have read in
Time
has been distorted and inaccurate,” Igor Stravinsky claimed. The actress Tallulah Bankhead went on the
Tonight Show
to warn the audience, “Don’t believe a word you read in
Time….
It is made up of fakery, calumny, and viciousness.” The parade of accusations continued for more than twenty pages: “I regard
Time
as prejudiced and unfair in its reporting” (Senator John McClellan); “There is not a single word of truth in
Time
magazine” (Broadway producer David Merrick);
“Time
slants its news” (poet Conrad Aiken); “Totalitarianism … rather than insight or intelligibility is the object of all of
Time
’s technical brilliance” (media scholar Marshall McLuhan); “… about the most inaccurate magazine in existence” (novelist P. G. Wodehouse).
Time
was not nearly as biased as these critics claimed, but there was enough “slanted” reporting to give the accusations credibility. Luce alternated between defensiveness and distress in the face of such attacks, and he occasionally made efforts to defuse the criticisms. But for the most part he simply lived with the charges of bias. “TIME will remain pro-Eisenhower and therefore pro-Republican,” he defiantly wrote a critical colleague in 1955. He remained convinced that pure “objectivity” was both impossible and undesirable, and he was convinced as well that these were
his
magazines and should reflect
his
view of the world.
⁴

Through much of the 1950s and the early 1960s, Luce’s view of the world was disproportionately driven by his vision of American abundance and American social and cultural progress. And those views in turn helped drive the contents of his magazines, especially
Life
. This was
not a radical shift for
Life
, which had always devoted considerable energy to promoting wealth, progress, and American lifestyles. But the 1950s and the early 1960s intensified its fascination with the flourishing economy and with the way the middle class lived. Just as
Life
in the 1940s had been the great chronicler of the war, it became in the 1950s the great chronicler of prosperity and consensus. As early as December 1945, the magazine happily proclaimed the return of “normalcy.” Prosperity, of course, had been far from a norm even for middle-class Americans for most of the past fifteen years, and it remained far from the norm for many Americans even in the 1950s and 1960s. Nearly a third of Americans lived below the government poverty line in the first decade after the war. But
Life
was insistent that Americans were putting “their minds and energies to work” and were going back to “football games, automobile trips, family reunions and all the pleasant trivia of the American way of life.”
⁵

By 1954 the idea of abundance was a consistent subject for
Life
. On the one hand the magazine expressed wonder at, and some concern about, the great bounty Americans had created. “How does one prepare for an Age of Plenty?” the magazine asked in its Thanksgiving issue. “How can one feel thankful for too much?” A year later
Life
was still worrying: “Is abundance a good enough thing by itself for Americans to take pride in?” Mostly, however,
Life
celebrated the nation’s wealth. In the magazine’s own assessment of the state of the union (published shortly before the president’s annual message), it claimed that Eisenhower’s “reports get better every year;” and it cited “three major economic blessings which had previously seemed politically incompatible: rising wages, lower taxes and stable prices.” A
Life
cover story later in 1956, “Peak Year for Big Jobs,” announced an unprecedented $33 billion investment that was “reshaping the continent…. Even on a continent accustomed to huge projects,” it was “more than ever before” and was “providing for the future.”
Life
regularly trumpeted new milestones in American prosperity. “History’s biggest stock issue” (the first public offering of the Ford Motor Company); “a remarkable recovery” for the “U.S. construction industry,” which was filling “skylines with a spectacular array of bold new building shapes;” an unprecedented $250 million investment by Chrysler in a redesign of its 1955 models (“longer, lower, sportier … with a lot of horsepower”). “Last week,” the magazine reported in July 1955 in a story on houseware manufacturers, “at a time when the country had more money to spend than ever before; the trend seemed to be running toward two pots for every chicken, fish, egg and carrot … a dramatic example of overall U. S. prosperity.”
⁶

The Time Inc. magazines even began to celebrate labor unions. Luce had long been mostly critical of unions, and the company was fighting off efforts to unionize of some of its own employees during much of the 1950s. But Luce was impressed with Walter Reuther’s leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which he insisted marked a major turning point in labor history. Everything about the union movement, he decided, was suddenly “new.” The UAW had reached a new agreement with the automobile industry on a new “guaranteed wage” for workers while abandoning some of the more radical proposals the CIO had once promoted. “New Affluence, Unity for Labor,”
Life
announced in a 1955 cover story. A “new era of peace” had emerged out of the labor wars of the 1930s and 1940s with the reuniting of the AFL and CIO in 1955.
Life
even profiled men it had once reviled: the “new kind of unionists,” labor’s newly responsible “wealth of leadership.”
⁷

Abundance was the key not just to business and wages but also to technology; and because Luce was suddenly fascinated by technological progress,
Life
reveled in the achievements of American scientists and engineers. “The advances have come with an overwhelming rush,”
Life
reported in a “major series on the frontiers of our achievement,” momentously titled “Man’s New World: How He Lives in It.” Americans had “been learning at a phenomenal rate,” benefiting from government subsidies and from research at university and corporate laboratories. Among the great discoveries was atomic power, “man’s great hope of harnessing fusion.” By 1955,
Life
announced, the atomic industry was “big business,” having developed methods for powering submarines with nuclear energy and creating electricity for consumers in atomic-power plants—the foundation “for a new industrial age.” Equally dazzling was the birth of what
Life
called “the jet age,” with its promise of faster travel for citizens and its opportunities for improved military capacities in warfare.
Life
devoted an entire issue in 1955 to the “Air Age,” which argued that “the need and the will to master the world’s air has brought changes which are reshaping our economy, our cities and our global relationships.” But the progress so far,
Life
predicted, was paltry compared with the “true wonders” of the air age “not yet at hand” but “imminent.”
Life
reveled as well in the great medical discoveries of the 1950s: the discovery of the Salk and then the Sabin vaccines that effectively eliminated polio; an advance in the treatment of cancer that “seem[ed] close to bringing under control” this “dread enemy;” improvements in X-ray technology; new techniques in heart surgery; and new and more sophisticated weapons to fight bacterial infections and viruses.
⁸

Life
’s fascination with technology reached its highest point in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the magazine became, in effect, the “official” chronicler of the manned space program. To
Life
, as to many Americans, nothing personified the linkage between scientific progress and the greatness of America’s mission more than the goal of exploring outer space; and nothing excited Americans more than the idea of humans themselves doing the exploration. Almost as soon as the first seven Mercury astronauts were named (and overnight became extraordinary celebrities),
Life
moved in to buy exclusive rights to their stories for a total of five hundred thousand dollars. In the two-page advertisement announcing
Life’s
significant coup, the editors could hardly contain their excitement. “The Astronauts’ own stories will appear only in
Life,”
they wrote. “The lives that these seven men—and their wives—will lead between now and the day that one of them becomes the first American to orbit into outer space will in itself be one of the most absorbing, dramatic human stories of our time.” Luce himself played no direct role in his company’s commitment to the astronauts, but over time he too was drawn into their extraordinary magnetism and even began referring to them as “my boys.”
⁹

But to Luce, and thus to
Life
, the best evidence of America in this new “age of abundance” was the middle-class home. One of the most important and most inspiring successes of the postwar years, he believed, was the rapid growth in home ownership, facilitated by the proliferation of suburbs and generous federal support. Partly in response to his enthusiasm,
Life
launched a series titled “Modern Living,” which focused almost entirely on the character of American homes. There were lavish features on opulent or innovative houses—a “push-button paradise” in Palm Springs, built by a wealthy manufacturer who called it a “mechanical dream house,” with swimming pool, tennis court, nine-hole putting green, and a “human Lazy Susan” of seven outdoor couches that revolved “slowly under the sun.” In other articles
Life
showcased the great variety of American home designs—a “cross-country roundup” of homes that illustrated regional styles—“rough timber and Texas Cordova stone” in the Southwest, “Scandinavian flavor” in the Midwest, redwood furniture in California, all of them crossing over and becoming national in their reach. There were stories on “pretty underpinnings for modern furniture,” a “bathroom built for two,” “stylish mixing of decor,” the “return of elegance” in home decor, “opulence in plain rooms,” and a “buyer’s guide for antiques.” A three-part series on housing in 1958 illustrated suburban growth across the country and focused
on “ideas for better houses.” Later
Life
chose “six outstanding homes” as examples of “the country’s most livable houses in varying price ranges.” Perhaps the most bizarre article in “Modern Living” was a 1955 feature, “H-Bomb Hideaway,” which showed a newly designed bomb shelter inhabited by a smiling middle-class family of five, surrounded by canned foods. They were photographed in the three-thousand-dollar “luxury model” and were playing games, reading books, and sewing—a vision of doomsday domesticity almost indistinguishable from
Life
’s many other portrayals of suburban living.
¹⁰

“Nobody Is Mad with Nobody,”
Life
happily reported in its July 4, 1955, issue. America was “up to its ears in domestic tranquility.” The country was “embroiled in no war, impeded by no major strikes, blessed with almost full employment,” and “delighted with itself.” As if to provide evidence of this remarkable moment, there were photographs of “delighted Vermonters at the Rutland fairground,” a field of high wheat in the Midwest captioned “Abundant Again,” a Junior Chamber of Commerce parade in Atlanta, a suburban den with multiple televisions, a convertible painted with dots to match the owners’ Dalmatian, and a taffy-pulling competition in Peabody, Massachusetts. “Spirits and Industry Are Expansive,”
Life
announced in another article featuring photographs of new cars, a performance by a symphony orchestra, and an automobile plant expansion in Flint, Michigan. In the 1950s, even more than in the past,
Life
was promoting what historians and intellectuals were beginning to call the “consensus,” the belief that almost all Americans shared a broad set of ideals and aspirations. Those shared aspirations,
Life
seemed to be saying, were affluence, consumerism, and middle-class values and lifestyles. The magazine celebrated overt—if mostly contentless—patriotism, stable nuclear families, and male “breadwinners.” It made occasional gestures to women’s work outside the home, as in the 1956 article “My Wife Works and I Like It,” which noted the role working women played in improving the family’s lifestyle. But much more common were celebrations of female domesticity. When
Life
veered away from the middle class, it often focused on affirmative stories of immigrants embracing the “American way of life,” or on marginal Americans entering the middle-class mainstream through hard work or philanthropy.
¹¹

The change in American life that had the biggest material impact on Time Inc. was the rapid growth of leisure and entertainment. Working hours for many Americans had been reduced; family incomes had risen.
Fortune
published an ambitious series in 1953–54 on “The Changing American Market,” and among its conclusions was that there had been a dramatic growth in leisure since the end of World War II and a booming search for entertainment. Or, as
Fortune
put it, there was “$30 Billion for Fun.”
Life
was an energetic chronicler of the growth of leisure activities, just as it was of other aspects of abundance. It gave lavish coverage to the opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in 1955. It was fascinated by the emergence of Las Vegas as a magnet for gambling and sybaritic entertainment. But perhaps most of all,
Life
took note of the growing interest in sport and outdoor life. It began to run more major articles than in the past on skiing, duck hunting, Little League baseball, wilderness hiking and camping, horseracing, water sports, and even bowling. It celebrated the sports ordinary people played and the outdoor activities they pursued. But it also celebrated the sports people watched—in stadiums, in arenas, and on television.
¹²