The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  In the weeks leading up to Tap Day—the great spring event when the senior societies chose their new members—Harry alternated between hope and despair. At one point he concluded that “I shall not make ‘Bones.’ … I have felt all along that somehow I was not typical enough of Yale to ‘come through’ at that point.” It surely did not help his spirits that Brit Hadden took him out for a walk one day—“Brit, my rival since early Hotchkiss days”—and proposed getting “ten of the sure Bones men together to make it known that none of them would go Bones without me.” Harry was either deaf to or chose to ignore the condescension implicit in this implausible plan. It was, he said, “one of the greatest compliments I have ever received.” He declined Brit’s offer, however, arguing that “Bones meant everything for Yale, and that bucking it did no good for the college which means so much to us.” As with the News and the Lit, he again chose to see himself as one who looked “beyond the interests of the individual” to protect a larger good. When the New York Times—which regularly devoted substantial space to the social world of the Ivy League—published a story speculating about those likely to be chosen for Bones, Harry suffered over being mentioned as a “possibility” who would likely fail. (“I’m sorry I didn’t or rather won’t, make the grade,” he wrote miserably to his father. “With all the advantages I have had, it does not speak well for me not to come out on top.”) But he also happily reported campus gossip that both he and Brit were certain of selection. And he comforted himself that “what I shall never have to admit,—in fact, what it would not be true to say is this:—that in my own class I was not counted on as a ‘Bones’ man!”42

  Tap Day, May 15, was carefully orchestrated to create excitement and drama. Late in the afternoon much of the student body gathered on the lawn in front of the imposing, windowless buildings of the senior societies to watch the nervous juniors, who waited along a fence nearby. The windows of surrounding buildings were crowded with observers from the faculty and the town. At the tolling of the chapel bells at 5:00 p.m., the doors of the three societies flew open; and the senior members threaded through the crowd, pounding the chosen juniors on their backs and telling them to return to their rooms to be informed of their induction. Harry’s apprehension grew as the Bones seniors plucked one after another of his classmates (Hadden among them) while passing him by. But at last, at 5:20, as he wrote the next day to his parents, “your elder son received a terrific smack across the shoulders, delivered him by Winter Mead, 1919, Captain of the Crew and President of Phi Beta Kappa, and a member of the so-called society of Skull and Bones. And you can easily imagine that said son upon being told to go to his room did so go, and did moreover vouch for his being Henry Robinson Luce, and did accept an election to the so-called society! … I am sure you understand what perfect satisfaction is mine.” (One of his first tasks as a member was to choose a secret “club name.” Luce chose “Baal,” an ancient Hebrew name for “Lord” or “Master.” Hadden chose “Caliban,” the feral, half-human servant in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. No one ever used Luce’s somewhat pretentious club name outside of Skull and Bones, but “Caliban” seemed so appropriate for Hadden that it stuck—until it was gradually replaced by the nickname “Bratch.”)43

  Perhaps to compensate for the semester he had missed while in the army, Harry remained in New Haven during the summer after his junior year, enduring what he described as the “monotony” of courses at the law school. When the college reconvened in September, he stepped easily into his new role as one of the “big men” among the seniors. He continued to work hard at the News, both as an editor and editorial writer and as a supervisor of the newspaper’s business affairs. He joined the debating team. He took more challenging and interesting courses than he had in the past. He was particularly drawn to the English political theorist Harold Laski, who was teaching for the moment at Yale, and he wrote a senior thesis under Laski’s supervision titled “The Influence Exerted on the American People by Theodore Roosevelt During the Last Ten Years of his Life: A Study in Public Opinion.” In the spring, when the national convention of collegiate Republicans met in New Haven, Harry served as the meeting’s chairman—“the highest public honor of my college days,” he wrote exuberantly at the time.44

  But Harry was not through pursuing honors yet. In the spring he won the college’s most distinguished public-speaking prize, the DeForest oratorical contest—an especially rewarding feat for a young man who had worked for years to conquer his childhood stammer. He did so with a Wilsonian speech calling for America “to do her share in the solution of every international difficulty, that she will be the great friend of the lame, the halt and the blind among nations, the comrade of all nations that struggle to rise to higher planes of social and political organization, and withal the implacable foe of whatever nation shall offer to disturb the peace of the world.” A few weeks later he was voted a degree of “honors of the first rank,” the equivalent of summa cum laude—although in a collegiate world that had relatively little respect for academic honors, he would probably have preferred the distinctions that Brit, a mediocre student, received. Hadden was voted by his class “most likely to succeed” and perhaps most important of all by Harry’s standards, the person who had “done most for Yale.” Harry took consolation when he was quietly chosen as the Skull and Bones member of a defunct sophomore society, Eta Phi, to which two seniors were appointed each year “so that the things would be handed down in perpetuity in case they should ever be revived.” It was, he conceded, “in the eyes of the world a very insignificant matter—a pleasant bauble.” But to Harry, still yearning for signs of social acceptance, it was “an honor which I treasure as only one other.” (The other, it went without saying, was election to Skull and Bones, which he once described as a “religion.”) He had assumed he “had taken in all I could of collegiate honors,” he wrote, but now he was a member “of the most exclusive society in the world.”45

  If Harry had graduated from Hotchkiss still very much a boy, he graduated from Yale self-consciously an adult. He now looked and dressed like an older man than he was—his tall frame no longer gawky and adolescent; his hair oiled and parted in the middle; his clothes well tailored and conservative; his gaze studied and serious. Having succeeded so brilliantly at Yale—academically, organizationally, socially—he considered himself a man of substance and importance, someone to whom greatness was due. Unlike many of his classmates, he had little money of his own. But he managed nevertheless, even if precariously, to maintain a lifestyle compatible with his Yale contemporaries through his own modest earnings and the gifts he continued to receive from Nettie McCormick. He was still sexually inexperienced, but he interpreted even that as a sign of maturity. To friends in the throes of romance and contemplating marriage, Harry cited “Hannibal, Napoleon, Disraeli, & Company, dealers in careers, and discounters of domesticity!”46

  His newfound manhood also altered his relationship with his family. The Luces remained a close and loving family, even though separated by vast distances. But their letters to one another—letters that for many years constituted virtually the entirety of their relationship—were changing. Harry no longer implored his parents to approve his activities, no longer apologized for doing things he feared might disappoint them. When they chided him, as they occasionally did, about being careless with money, he replied so sharply that his mother wrote an anguished letter back saying that “the only reasons I even wish for money is that I might pour it out to you.” When his father—whose influence over him had always been profound—wrote him with some gentle advice about tempering the language in his News editorials, Harry patiently but unapologetically explained that Yale had changed since the senior Luce’s time there. His father also advised him to prepare himself for a “trade” (journalism, the senior Luce warned, was a “dog’s life”), even to see a “vocational specialist.” Harry ignored that advice too. The entire Luce family with the exception of Harry senior returned from China in the spring of 1918 so th
at the girls could enter Abbot, a girls’ secondary school associated with Andover. Harry—partly because of his military obligations but also because of his preferences for his own social life—visited them infrequently, despite his mother’s frequent pleas to “come to us” and his father’s request that he spend time with Sheldon, who “needs a ‘big brother.’” He was drifting away from them, in the way adults almost always do.47

  And yet for all his confidence in his own adulthood and for all his seeming certainty about his future, Harry was not quite ready to venture out into what college students would later call the “real world.” Completing college in the early twentieth century, Henry Seidel Canby recalled, was “more painful than triumphant” as the graduate “stepped out into the world trailing clouds of memory behind him.” Harry sought to postpone that painful day by spending a year at a university even more storied than the one he was leaving: Oxford. Although he had visited Oxford during his first trip to England in 1913, there is no evidence that he had ever thought about attending the university until his senior year, when Harold Laski began to encourage him and others to consider studying there and offered to help him gain admission to the most famous of the Oxford colleges, Christchurch. Harry applied for a Rhodes Scholarship—not surprisingly, given his propensity for pursuing badges of achievement—but did not seem perturbed when he did not receive one, even though his friend and classmate Bill Whitney did. (“We are all proud and delighted,” he wrote, adding that his own failure to be chosen was a result of his “half-way method.” If he had tried harder, he implied, he too might have been selected.) But the experience only increased his eagerness to attend Oxford, and he now went about arranging a year there with typical single-mindedness. He wrote to Nettie McCormick asking if she might provide him with the thousand dollars that he calculated the year would cost him, and she quickly agreed. Another fifteen hundred dollars he received as his share of the profits of the Daily News ensured that he would be financially comfortable for many months. He explained earnestly to his parents how a year at Oxford would prepare him for the “public life” he expected to live as an adult. But it seems likely that the idea of going to Oxford was most appealing because it would postpone the difficult decision of how to begin his professional life—and perhaps also because it would help confirm his acceptance into the upper levels of the Anglophilic American aristocracy.48

  The social attractions of his new undertaking seemed foremost in his mind from the day he sailed for England in July, a few weeks after attending the Republican National Convention in Chicago, where he developed no enthusiasm for the party’s nominee, Warren G. Harding. On board the SS Olympia, he found himself once again in the same second-class accommodations he had become accustomed to in his travels in 1912–13. But this time he was acutely conscious of his inferior surroundings. The bunks, he complained, were “precariously narrow,” the food barely edible, and his companions “good natured boors.” And so he and several other Yale friends similarly consigned to second class began a furtive shipboard life—sleeping in their modest staterooms, enduring tasteless meals, but spending virtually all the rest of their time in first class. “We tremble … lest the hand of the law be upon us,” he conceded. “But so far all is fine; and … first class travel aboard this vessel is quite agreeable,” particularly since it gave him a chance to socialize with people more to his liking, several of whom extended invitations for him to visit when he arrived in England.49

  His first days in London were an uncharacteristic whirl of social activity, during which—for the first time—he wrote of his relationships with women. Perhaps now that he felt liberated from the closely scrutinized, all-male social world of Yale, he felt free to behave less cautiously. “Friday night I took Katherine Bissell out for a party,” he wrote happily, “dinner, theatre, cabaret, usual stuff. She and I have (apparently!) hit it off very well.” That was particularly fortunate, he added, because her sister was married to a wealthy Englishman, and Harry was invited to visit their country house in Worcestershire “for as long as I want to stay.” After a week in London he and some Yale friends took a sightseeing trip through Devon, the Lake District, and Scotland—“a glorious trip, and we all enjoyed each other’s company in every kind of weather.” Back in London he resumed his glittering social life, dining with Goulds and Auchinclosses and Whitneys, meeting more young American women and escorting them about town. “London, you know, is rippingly cheap for bachelor bums,” he reported, “but once you go swanking round with a lady on your arm it’s quite as bad as New York!” Somewhat to his surprise, he found himself a sought-after guest—both for evenings in London and for weekends in the country, where his strong tennis game “managed to earn some kudos.” “I suspect you’re very provocative to women,” his friend Thornton Wilder wrote him a few months later. “Your interestedness makes ’em sit up.”50

  The Oxford term did not begin until October, so late in August, Harry traveled to Paris, hoping to spend some time with Brit Hadden, who was expected in early September. Once again he found himself in demand, chaperoning the daughter of a Yale alumnus “for three entire days—which by the way is some job…. On Friday we tore all over town, seeing as much as we could, and went to the opera, Faust. Saturday the same, driving through the Bois in the evening…. Altogether we, or at least I, had a ripping time.” A few days later, before Brit arrived, Harry left unexpectedly on a trip to Istanbul, which he, like many Anglo-Americans (and virtually all Greeks), still called Constantinople. His wealthy Yale friend Hugh Auchincloss had arranged the trip months before, only to find that his original traveling companion could not join him. He invited Harry to come along and offered to pay his expenses “over a certain amount,” since he himself planned to travel in style. They rode first class on the Orient Express, in berths reserved for them by the American ambassador in Paris, an Auchincloss family friend; and they found themselves lavishly attended by embassy officials in almost all the cities they visited.51

  Even so, Harry was appalled by eastern Europe—“another world, a world poorer, more animalistic, uncontrolled, dishonest, a people of geniuses and crooks, whose geniuses unfortunately are dead.” Istanbul itself was a “dirty, filthy place,” made tolerable to the young travelers through their “pull with the embassy,” which gained them access to lavish dinners and even the chance for a monthlong trip around the Black Sea aboard an American destroyer—an invitation they had to decline. Next was a hurried trip back through Romania, whose capital, Bucharest, was a “beautiful city—the Paris of the Balkans,” but whose people were “a lot of dirty crooks! That goes without saying.” Returning finally to Paris, he felt as though he were “coming home.”52

  By the beginning of October he was ensconced at Oxford, living in modest “digs” near Christchurch with a Yale classmate and bemoaning the “Britannic shell” that made it difficult to make friends with English students. He arranged to read English history, beginning with the Tudor period. He joined the Oxford Union (although he had little hope of actually speaking before it). He played a great deal of bridge and tennis. And he energetically socialized with other Americans at Oxford, and with their families and friends in London. There was none of the methodical striving and frantic competitiveness that had characterized his time at Hotchkiss and Yale. The year at Oxford, he explained to his skeptical parents, was “a holiday I feel justified in taking. I think it will bring me back stronger and fresher and broader-gauged.” To their suggestions that he was being frivolous and extravagant, he replied defensively: “I don’t think I can be accused of having sought out rich friends. I have never tried to be ostentatious in the slightest. I have tried to get to know all the best men I could. Some of them are very rich, with an occasional exception they are all much wealthier than I. That comes of going to Yale.” In any case, he argued slightly defiantly, it was too late to back out now, and “precious little opportunity for economizing.” Still, after receiving their gentle reprimands, he was careful in future letters to writ
e more often about his intellectual than about his social life.53

  In reality, although Harry drew some excitement from his reading of British history and enjoyed his frequent encounters with Harold Laski (now back in England) and his “bolshevik crowd,” he was not very interested in the intellectual life of Oxford. Instead he spent as much time as he could traveling and engaging with the upper ranks of expatriate society. Over Christmas he visited Geneva and used his Yale contacts to arrange a privileged visit to the inner workings of the League of Nations. He then spent time in Rome, guided by help from the American Embassy and his former Chefoo and Yale schoolmate Thornton Wilder, who was ensconced at the American Academy writing plays. “Next week,” he wrote from Rome on Christmas Eve, “I attend a dance or two—a side of Rome I didn’t see last time!” At one of those dances he met an attractive young American woman, Lila Hotz, to whom he was apparently immediately and powerfully drawn. (“For twenty-three years,” he wrote her later, “I never considered marriage except with supercilious scorn…. Then one night in Rome, theories, attitudes, pronouncements were demolished by—well, by a mere fact.”)54

  Lila was from a wealthy, socially prominent Chicago family. She had attended the Spence School, in New York City, one of America’s most prominent and most academically serious schools for young upper-class women. She was now spending a year in Europe, in the manner of many young women of her class, studying art and leading an active social life. She had rich, curly dark hair, pale skin, and large, dark, haunting eyes. Although she was not nearly as serious or intellectually curious as Harry, she was well read, well educated, and sophisticated enough to find him intriguing and to intrigue him in turn.