The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Harry had good reason to be pleased with himself. Only a little more than one semester into his life at Yale, he had not only achieved one of the most coveted positions in the college—a place on the News—but had placed first in his class academically, had a poem accepted by the literary magazine, and been awarded the Chamberlain Prize for the best performance by any Yale student on the university’s comprehensive entrance examination in Greek, which he had coveted throughout his years at Hotchkiss. “This achievement will mean a holiday for the Hotchkiss school [a tradition when recent graduates achieved something notable], and a valuable reputation for myself,” he wrote. Harry also found himself socially popular, something he had never quite been in the much more class-conscious environment of Hotchkiss. “Am meeting more fellows all the time, and, to be brief, am enjoying college,” he boasted. He even joined a club for “foreign” students—which mostly consisted of young Americans, like Harry himself, who had lived abroad. One of its members was the future playwright Thornton Wilder, a missionary son from China who had spent a miserable year with Harry at Chefoo. Harry’s roommate—a result of pressure from his parents—was Horace Pitkin, Jr., the son of his father’s beloved, martyred college classmate. The younger Pitkin was a slightly troubled young man utterly without the restless ambition that drove Harry’s life and whom Harry gradually came to view with some condescension and even contempt. Harry’s relationship with Brit Hadden was close, friendly, and slightly tense, as it would always remain, reflecting their tacit acknowledgment of both powerful bonds and profound rivalry. His larger social circle—the young men with whom he had an easier intimacy—consisted, at least at first, almost entirely of other Hotchkiss graduates.15

  At Yale, unlike at Hotchkiss, Harry was not a scholarship student. He paid his own way with his own earnings at college and in summers, with help from his parents, and with generous gifts from Nettie McCormick. That spared him the outward badges of inferiority he had experienced in prep school. There were no demeaning work assignments, no talk of “special responsibilities,” no banishment to remote accommodations. Even so Harry remained one of the least affluent members of his class, a problem he seldom revealed to others but one he agonized over privately. He struggled to keep within his tight budget even as he yearned to join the expensive activities of his friends. His residence hall, he conceded, “is not the most desirable dormitory socially.” He claimed not to mind, but he balked at eating in the college commons, at $5.00 to $6.00 a week the cheapest place on campus. Instead, Harry chose to join a dining club, which cost $7.50. He explained this “extravagance” to his parents by saying that “the food is excellent,” and “the fellows are the nicest in our class.” His father, always concerned about Harry’s social status and—intrepid fund-raiser that he was—acutely aware of the advantages of connections with the wealthy, supported the decision.16

  Yale was, in fact, a turning point in Harry’s attitude toward wealth. An important part of the missionary ethos he had absorbed as a child was a kind of pride in having forsaken the material rewards of more lucrative professions, a belief that material self-denial was a sign of virtue and character. Although Harry had already decided not to become a missionary himself, he tried still to embrace the ethos and struggled (with scant success) to resist material temptations. Even years later, when he himself was enormously rich, he often seemed impatient with and even embarrassed by the opulence of his life and from time to time tried ineffectually to escape from it. But his experience at Yale also helped intensify his fascination with, and attraction to, wealth—an attraction that had begun in his first years in America during his frequent visits to Mrs. McCormick’s palatial home in Chicago. His thirst grew stronger as he became exposed to the way his more affluent classmates lived.

  During Yale’s spring recess in 1917, in the aftermath of the exhausting competition for the News, Harry’s Yale and Hotchkiss classmate Alger Shelden invited the newly elected board members to spend a week at his home in Detroit. Harry claimed to enjoy the visit most because it gave him a chance to take walks through the “soggy wood and muddy field” surrounding the Shelden estate. “My heart beat high in praise of ‘the country again,—the country!’” he wrote at the time. But his accounts of the week in letters to his parents could not disguise his awe at the manner in which his friend’s family lived. Alger’s father, he wrote, was a high-ranking executive at the Ford Motor Company and “one of Detroit’s richest of the rich.” His home was “one of the largest and handsomest estates in Grosse Point.” The young men from Yale were entertained lavishly, with visits to the Hunt Club, the country club, and other institutions serving the city’s automobile aristocracy. They went riding and hunting on “splendid mounts.” They were served a “sumptuous supper” after going to the theater one night. On another day they were taken on a tour of the Ford factory—young princes in suits and ties quietly watching what Harry described, without comment, as the “thousands of workers whose job consists of ‘screwing one screw or hammering one nail, or turning one lever of a machine.’” The vacation, he wrote en route back to New Haven, “gave me about as much fun as I ever had in my life.” It was the last such vacation he was to have for several years.17

  Three years earlier, at the beginning of his second year at Hotchkiss, Harry had returned from the summer to find a large map of Europe on one of the school bulletin boards, with dozens of blue and red pins stuck along a line running through Belgium and France: The First World War had begun. Every day the teachers would move the pins to mark the slow, inconclusive movement of troops back and forth across the swath of France in which the torturous, stalemated struggle was being fought. The war was naturally the subject of much conversation among Harry and his classmates, but until 1917 their interest was essentially academic. “I do not believe in the possibility of [America going to] war,” Harry wrote in March 1916, a few months before his Hotchkiss graduation. The “heroes of Verdun”—British, French, and German—would never “allow innocents like ourselves … [to] interfere much in the way they settle things.”18

  But in April 1917, as he and his friends returned to Yale from their lavish week in Detroit, the war was no longer an academic question. The United States, after more than two years of hesitation, had finally entered the conflict, and Harry knew that, in one way or another, he would enter it too. Looking back a year or so later, as the war shuddered to a close with Harry never having left America, he claimed to wish he had chosen what his more adventurous classmates had done—left the college and enlisted right away. “Had I done that I would probably be in France now,” he said wistfully. But Harry was not one to defy the norms of his institutions, and so he did what the president of the university, Arthur Hadley, urged all Yale students to do: stay in school, stick together, join the Reserve Officers Training Corps Field Artillery Unit that the army had established on campus, and prepare for war as “Yale men.” There were plenty of available troops, Hadley said; what the nation needed was officers, and the university would provide them.19

  As a result the next fourteen months produced relatively modest changes in Harry’s life and in the lives of most of his classmates. The routines of the college, the academic and social rituals, continued. The only major exception was a few hours a week when there was military training by officers of the special Yale unit—ranks of college boys doing calisthenics and marching up and down the New Haven Green dressed in pressed khakis and carrying rifles they almost never fired. About two-thirds of Yale’s students enrolled in the program, which took the place of one academic course. (The other third had already gone to war.) Harry still talked occasionally of leaving college to join the army, to work in military intelligence in Washington, or to do something else—anything else—that might put him in closer touch with the war, including a fanciful proposal that he go to China to help the United States recruit coolies to help in the war effort (a proposal the American consular service in Shanghai brusquely rejected). In the end, he convinced himself that hi
s best option was to stay at Yale “unless something turns up in which I can serve with my brains as well as my heels and hence educate myself in the act of service.”20

  Once he made his decision, duty and ambition seamlessly merged. With the News competition over, he wrote, “another form of strenuous life is forced upon me.” Harry would contribute to the war effort by writing exhortatory editorials for the News “pushing Yale to a more and more intensive war-training life.” While doing so he could advance his fortunes on the paper by filling in for the older editors who were being “called away” to the war. In early June he was elected to the “emergency council” the News had established to run the paper in the absence of some of the more senior board members, and he predicted that his election as chairman for 1920 would soon be “railroaded through.” The council would work to sell Liberty Bonds and “keep Yale together.” Harry explained, perhaps slightly defensively, that “I may be of some service to my country here.”21

  So little did the war impinge on life at Yale that after a few weeks of ROTC camp in early June, the students scattered and began their normal summer vacations. Harry spent July and August working on the farm of family friends in western Pennsylvania, reading Homer, and making plans for “my conduct next year.” His priorities, he said in a letter to his parents a few weeks before returning to Yale, were to “give more attention to personal affairs, economy, clothes, correspondence, reading, etc., … to discharge thoroughly my college obligations,” and to tend to “the cultivation of ‘myself’ by all the cultural means that come in the course of the day’s work, from religion to friendly chatter.” He did not mention the war.22

  By the time Harry returned to New Haven in September 1917, the war had become a somewhat more prominent part of life. “Here at college we are practically in government service. All members of the R.O.T.C…. are obliged to stay in uniform the entire time, except when they go out of town,” he wrote in October. Seeing an opportunity in the new military frenzy, Harry spent his first few days on campus serving as an agent for a local tailor who was providing uniforms for students. For days he could be seen running up and down the stairs of the freshman dormitories taking orders. His profits financed most of his sophomore year.

  On the whole, however, Yale’s leisurely, gentlemanly approach to the conflict continued for a while longer. Students spent a few more hours in military training than they had the previous spring, but their principal concerns remained largely unchanged. For Harry that meant excelling in his language, literature, and history courses; continuing to advance at the News and in the many other activities to which he found himself drawn; and consolidating his social life. He ran for a position on the student council, survived the primaries to become a finalist, but came in fourth in a race in which only three men were chosen (Hadden finished first). “I am just as glad that I didn’t get the election,” he wrote in a characteristic effort to rationalize his disappointments, “because it would have meant that in spite of my determination to have a ‘literatus’ year, I would once more be deeply plunged by another route into the trifling turmoil of collegiateness.” He won election to the Elizabethan Club, a literary organization for faculty and students that he called “a joy and delight.” He had another poem accepted by the Lit, which almost assured him election to the board. He and Brit Hadden recruited a table for one of the Yale dining societies, attracting “a nucleus of the best men in the class, … the most desireable [sic] ‘crowd’ socially.” In return, they received their own meals free “without scarcely turning my hand.”23

  Most of all, however, he was preoccupied with the impending selection of new members to the Yale fraternities. And as always he wrestled with himself over what to do. Psi U “is the socially best, so, of course, I should prefer to get in that,” he said at the beginning of the process. But he was soon “soundly disappointed” to discover that there was no likelihood of his receiving an invitation there. The “social types,” with whom he still had awkward relations, had “blackballed me,” he explained, not just at Psi U, but at his second choice, DKE. That suddenly threw Luce’s view of the whole process into a different light: “The Junior fraternities at Yale do not seem to mean much,” he now wrote, and he had little “respect and regard” for them. Psi U, he decided, was no longer “the big fraternity,” for “this year there was a general stampede from it, because it catered strongly to purely social elements.” He finally joined Alpha Delta, which he now insisted had many of the “best men” in the class—among them, a year later, a recruit of whom Harry was particularly proud, “Frank Gould, who will be the richest of the third generation of Goulds.” Adding to his poorly disguised disappointment was his usual guilt about devoting so much time to what he feared his father would consider trivial things. “The social side of life—which I suppose is a necessary evil—throws one so completely off one’s trolley,” he wrote shamefacedly to his parents. “My room is in a terrible state, as are also my finances and studies. In fact the first half of the first term ends to-day, and I shall have a ridiculously low average, and the only comfort I’ll get will be that it is probably higher than any other fraternity man’s.” Even so his grades remained within Phi Beta Kappa range, and he consoled himself for his social disappointments by insisting that he was certain to achieve “the three things I wanted most to: News, Lit, & P.B.K.”24

  By the beginning of the spring term, military training had expanded to fill almost half the college curriculum, and there was talk of turning the campus over altogether to the military, of establishing a “West Point at Yale.” More and more students were leaving the university to join the military, and Harry continued to consider doing the same. Although he was only in the middle of his second year, he took to referring wistfully to “my last year under the academic aegis,” and to imagining himself a commissioned officer leading troops in France. “Well, so this college world gets along,” he mused in March 1918. “And a very happy and pleasant place it is. How soon shall it be but a memory.”25

  One of the reasons Harry may have been looking beyond Yale so soon was a crushing disappointment he had suffered in January 1918. Because so many upperclassmen were away in the military, the News felt obliged to elect its 1920 board a year earlier than usual. Harry and Brit were clearly the two leading contenders for chairman. But by a single vote Hadden won. Publicly Harry dealt with the defeat calmly and graciously. He deflected a suggestion that the News create a special, unprecedented position for him—vice chairman—and agreed instead to serve as managing editor. He told everyone that Brit was an excellent and talented choice, which at one level he truly believed. But beneath his stoic surface was a profound sense of failure. “My fondest college ambition is unachieved,” he wrote his parents in a letter suffused with disappointment. “It’s been a hard pill to swallow. You can say such things are petty etc. etc., but just the same a man’s heart’s desire is his heart’s desire whether it be President of the U.S. or Chairman of the News. Not a soul, I think, has seen what this all means to me.”26

  A few days later he began trying to convince himself that the decision might still be reversible. Hadden’s election, so far ahead of schedule, had been a result of wartime disruptions. Luce briefly clung to the possibility that there might be a second vote at the normal time, which he might win. Harry wrote his parents that the “final vote” had not yet been taken, and one of Hadden’s supporters told Harry that he was willing to switch and vote for him. But when the time came there was no reconsideration of the earlier vote, and Hadden’s election was confirmed. Once again Harry was plunged into despair. “I could have been chairman of the News,” he insisted, had he pressed his supporters to reconsider the vote. But “in the greatest sacrifice of my life I signed away the possibility.” The whole story was too painful to recount, even to his parents, with whom he usually shared almost everything. “When a man fails, the less he had better talk of it,” he wrote dejectedly (and again with more than a trace of self-pity). “However, I hope you won’
t think too harshly of me, nor believe that I have been irretrievably unworthy of you…. When I lie down tonight I shall be supremely glad that there are some that love me forever.” His parents did not underestimate the severity of the blow to Harry’s passionate ambition. From his mother he received an anguished letter of sympathy, praising him for his “great renunciation.” From his father came a letter comparing his son’s disappointment over the News election to his own disappointment in failing to gain the presidency of his college. “Usually the door opens to wider and richer experiences than if we had attained the idol of our hearts’ desires; and wonderful is the way the heart forgets the past and presses on.”27

  More disappointment eventually followed. Harry was elected to the board of the Lit, on the basis of his fifth publication in the magazine, early in 1918. Several weeks later the Lit board met to choose its new leaders. At one point, according to Harry’s own accounts, the other members of the board voted to choose him as chairman, despite what he claimed was his own stated reluctance to serve. But “then the row started.” Several members of the board were enraged that someone who had never heeled the Lit and had played no previous role in its editorial processes should be chosen. In fact, during the entire previous year, Harry had done little more than submit an occasional piece to the magazine. “I decided that the Lit didn’t mean enough to me to go through with a public scandal,—which was impending. I therefore resigned from the Board. Finally I was persuaded to return to the Board, and the Board against its will, but because I said so, elected Andrews,” a more conventional choice—“typically ‘literary’ &—well, just a bit effeminate,” as Harry described him.28