The Publisher (84 page)

Henry Luce, who once expressed doubts about the lucrative Time-Life Books series because he feared he would not be able to read and approve them all, would likely have been bewildered by the vastness of what
Time Inc. later became—a company that no single man could any longer control in the way Luce had attempted, and had often succeeded, in doing. But in his own time, Luce was certainly among the most powerful media figures in America, and perhaps the world. His influence was in part the result of the enormous popularity of his consistently entertaining magazines, although other media were equally profitable and at least equally popular, especially after the advent of television. But what made Luce truly different from most other major media barons was his willingness to control the contents of his magazines. “To a remarkable extent,” Alden Whitman wrote in the
New York Times
obituary, “the judgments and opinions that were printed reflected the focus of Mr. Luce’s own views.” He was, the
Times
added, “a man of missionary zeal and limitless curiosity” who “deeply influenced American journalism.”
⁵

Luce’s willingness to make political judgments, to support politicians he admired (almost always Republicans), and to denounce government policies he disliked contributed to the intensity of his critics. Many of the denunciations of the Luce magazines—from presidents, statesmen, and other media chieftains—were a result of ordinary political disagreement or aesthetic distaste. Some criticized the company’s venality.
“Time
’s business is to promote Time Inc. as a corporate empire,” Andrew Kopkind, the former
Time
correspondent turned radical journalist, wrote shortly after Luce’s death. “Like all imperial systems, it is self-justifying; worlds must be conquered because they are there…. The basic urge is to its own expansion.”
⁶

But for others, most prominently the members of the liberal-left intelligentsia, Luce was someone not just to disdain, but also to fear. His magazine empire, many intellectuals came to believe, was a powerful vehicle of propaganda, capable of narrowing the horizons of readers while at the same time manipulating and mobilizing them. To many such intellectuals of the postwar era, the great danger facing democracy was the easily deluded middle class, which they believed could easily fall under the influence of a powerful and persuasive media. Ominous examples of this power, they argued, were the propaganda that fascist and Communist regimes used to delude and control their own populations; or the McCarthy-like American demagogues whose manipulation of the media had led Americans into believing in what McCarthy himself called the “conspiracy so immense” of Communist subversion. This was the fear that inspired the historian Richard Hofstadter to write his famous 1964 essay on “the paranoid style,” in which he argued that demagoguery and propaganda directed at many narrowly informed people
caused them to lose faith in democracy and to become convinced that they were victims of conspiracies. The social scientist Theodor Adorno warned of the specter of totalitarianism and denounced the tame middle class that embraced mass culture and rejected the skepticism and independence that a democratic society required. To such critics, Luce and his magazines were a kind of anesthesia, drawing readers into an imaginary world of consensus and homogeneity and numbing them to the active inquiry that citizens needed to understand their world.
⁷

Fueling that fear was Luce’s great success in reaching a broad middle-class constituency and in creating an intimate relationship with many of his readers. That was perhaps ironic, since Luce himself was a fundamentally shy, lonely, and somewhat awkward man with few true friends. And yet like many other hugely successful politicians, entertainers, and others who were privately reclusive, he had the ability to connect publicly with millions of strangers. Luce’s critics, and occasionally Luce himself, believed that his access to a large public gave him real power to control public opinion.

But in fact, and often to his own great frustration, Luce was almost never able to exercise as much power as he wished and as his adversaries believed he had. He hated Franklin Roosevelt and opposed most of what he did. But his opposition to Roosevelt—most visible in his passionate and at times reckless support of the failed presidential candidacy of Wendell Willkie in 1940—had almost no impact on Roosevelt’s policies or on his political successes. Luce railed for years about America’s failure to support Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalist China, but he could never overcome America’s public and political unwillingness to challenge the Communist regime. Luce had close relationships at times with Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, but rarely did any of them take his advice or adjust policies to avoid his magazines’ criticism. On the contrary, Luce more often adjusted his own views to sustain his relationship with people he considered important. There was much in the Luce magazines that was irritating and even infuriating to many readers, but there was little in them that could manipulate readers into abandoning their own political or cultural independence. His magazines were mostly reflections of the middle-class world, not often shapers of it. And despite their claims of disgust, even many of Luce’s most ardent critics continued to read the magazines, often with as much pleasure as annoyance. Some of them wrote for
Life
and
Fortune
even while denouncing Luce in other venues.

Where Luce was most influential was in promoting ideas that were already emerging among a broad segment of the American population—most
notably in the early 1940s, when Luce wrote his famous “American Century” essay and worked energetically to persuade Americans of what was already an indisputable truth—that the United States was now the most powerful and important nation in the world, that it no longer lived in the shadow of Europe. To Luce, that meant that America had a responsibility to reshape the world, a belief many other Americans shared. He may have articulated this vision more effectively (and more grandiosely) than most Americans, but the ideas he expressed were not new to him. Many of them reflected earlier essays in
Life
by Walter Lippmann, and even Roosevelt’s recently enunciated Four Freedoms.

Luce’s intellectual life may have been rigid and polemical on issues that were of great importance to him. But on other issues, he was as skeptical, inquiring, and independent as the most hostile of his critics. He bitterly opposed many liberal initiatives, but on the whole he supported the growth of government power and embraced many of the great changes of his time—the growth of the welfare state, civil rights for minorities, and, at least tentatively, the emergence of feminism and gender equality. He understood the broad transformation of the capitalist economy in the postwar years, supported unions to ensure that the profits were not reserved to a few, and applauded what he considered “modern” industrial leaders who believed in progressive corporate responsibility. He was a mostly loyal Republican, but not an uncritical supporter of the party’s right wing—always a moderate or liberal trying to draw the party into the mainstream. When it failed to do so, as in 1964 when Barry Goldwater ran for president, he repudiated the party’s ticket. Luce always described himself as a liberal—not a liberal of the Left, but a liberal in his openness to new ideas and his embrace of progressive change.

Luce did not change the world. His most important legacy remains his role in the creation of new forms of information and communications at a moment in history when media were rapidly expanding. His magazines were always the most important of his achievements. They reached unprecedented numbers of Americans in the 1920s and 1930s and helped transform the way many people experienced news and culture. His expansion into radio and film, even though relatively shortlived, helped legitimize these emerging media as serious sources of news themselves. Like all powerful media, Luce’s innovations had their day and then slowly lost their centrality as newer forms of communication took their place. And while his company survives still, far larger and wealthier than it was in Luce’s lifetime, little remains of the goals and principles he established for it.

Time
magazine’s cover story on the death of Luce was titled “End of a Pilgrimage.” It began with one of Luce’s most pompous statements: “As a journalist, I am in command of a small sector in the very front trenches of this battle for freedom.”
⁸
But the great and almost always futile crusades that Luce embraced are not his principal legacy. A simpler and more appropriate remembrance of his formidable life appeared almost two decades after his death, when
Time
added a new line to its masthead:

FOUNDERS,
BRITON HADDEN
1898–1929
HENRY R. LUCE
1898–1967.

The most important sources for an understanding of the life and work of Henry R. Luce are the vast Time Inc. Archives, which combine many of Luce’s personal papers with the archives of the company he founded and led. The archives also contain a small collection of the papers of Briton Hadden and oral histories of a number of other Time Inc. founders.

Another invaluable source is a collection of letters and other materials that were for many decades in the possession of Luce’s first wife, Lila Luce Tyng. My own use of these papers preceded their transfer to Harvard University, where they are now in the possession of the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute.

A third important source is the collections of John Shaw Billings, who was one of the most important editors in the first three decades of Time Inc.’s existence. They are held in the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Billings joined the company in the 1920s, became managing editor of
Time
in the 1930s, then the first managing editor of
Life
, and after that the editorial director of all Time Inc. magazines. His meticulously recorded diary is one of the most revealing sources for an understanding of the day-to-day workings of the company and of his own relationship with Luce. His papers duplicate many documents in the Time Inc. Archives but contain some that are not available elsewhere.

Another important window into the internal workings of Time Inc. is the vast collection of
Time
dispatches sent to New York from correspondents around the country and the world and preserved by the longtime general manager of the company, Roy Larsen. They are now at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Also at Harvard are the papers of Theodore H. White, an important Time Inc. journalist in the 1940s and again in the 1960s.

The Clare Boothe Luce Papers in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress are of great value in understanding her long and difficult marriage to Henry Luce. Also in the Library of Congress is another collection of the papers of Henry Luce, much of it duplicative of material in the Time Inc. Archives, but also with some materials not available elsewhere.

An important published work for anyone interested in the history of Time Inc. (and of Henry Luce) is the internally produced three-volume history of the company.
The first two volumes are by Robert T. Elson:
Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923–1941
(1968) and
The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1941–1960
(1973). The third volume is by Curtis Prendergast:
The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Changing Enterprise, 1960–1980
(1986). In researching the first two volumes Elson did extensive interviews with Luce, transcripts of which are available in the Time Inc. Archives.

Carl Albert Papers, University of Oklahoma Library

Frank Altschul Papers, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

American Friends of Vietnam Papers, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Mary Bancroft Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

John Shaw Billings Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina

Margaret Bourke-White Papers, George Arents Collection, Syracuse University Library

Thomas Corcoran Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress

Russell W. Davenport Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress

Stephen Early Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library

John Foster Dulles Papers, Seely G. Mudd Library, Princeton University

B. A. Garside Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University

Manfred Gottfried Oral History, Time Inc. Archives

Walter Graebner Papers, Time Inc. Archives

Frances Fineman Gunther Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University