The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  All the members of the staff braced themselves for the daily struggle—the struggle to write, edit, and produce the magazine; to keep up with the bills despite minimal funds; to wrest payment from their charter subscribers. “It was just like pulling teeth to get the $5 bills in,” Luce later recalled. In March they received slightly over eleven thousand dollars in subscription income, and in April more than seventeen thousand dollars. But whatever optimism this healthy increase produced was shattered in May, when income dropped to just over ten thousand dollars. “With any luck,” Luce noted sardonically, “one day we will have $5,000 on deposit.” Advertising income was also minimal. “From the advertising world as a whole,” their first annual report frankly observed, “Time has met with a cold reception…. Advertisers are human. It was years before evolution was generally accepted as a theory.” Inside the office they were less philosophical. Luce and his new (and first) advertising director, E. R. Crowe, were battling constantly—Crowe calling Luce amateurish, Luce accusing Crowe of extravagance. Crowe left angrily after only a few weeks of publication, returning his shares of TIME Inc. stock and, as Luce later recalled, saying “the hell with you.” There were other casualties as well. Hadden was unhappy with John Franklin Carter, one of the new writers, and dismissed him after a few weeks, leaving the editorial operations seriously undermanned. Luce, who was already fully occupied with the magazine’s precarious business operations, had to pitch in. (Carter went on to become a successful columnist, writing as “the Unofficial Observer.”)4

  Little by little, however, Time’s fortunes improved—not so much as to erase the anxiety, but enough to create some realistic hope. Word of mouth was drawing new subscribers to the magazine, slowly increasing circulation. “I think,” Luce wrote in May, “that two weeks from now I will be saying with some light degree of definiteness that TIME will in all probability at least outlive the summer, and that if it can do that there may be hope for it.” His spirits brightened considerably in June, when he was invited to give a short speech at the Yale commencement as a representative of recent distinguished alumni. “Feeling fit as fiddle and ‘morale’ is very high,” he wrote after the event. “The speech is of absolutely no importance … except as a soothing reassurance that our classmates cannot point the finger of scorn at us.”5

  Having resisted paying to publicize the magazine in the early months, Luce and Hadden now decided to use some of their precious dwindling capital to take out advertisements in prestigious but relatively inexpensive magazines such as Harper’s, the Atlantic, Century, and Literary Digest. They seemed to help. Circulation began a slow but steady rise and averaged 18,500 over the second half of the year—more than twice where they had started, even if little more than half of their projections. They ended the year with a little over $36,000 in the bank and another $9,500 still owed them by subscribers and advertisers. They had spent more than half their initial capitalization to stay afloat, but they had feared much worse. Time, Hadden wrote optimistically at the end of 1923, “has grown from an idea into an established institution” and “has gradually been accepted by an increasing number of people as part of their weekly reading.” But the boasting was, they realized, to some degree premature. The charter subscriptions were set to expire in February, and they knew that to survive they needed a healthy renewal rate. Once again they waited nervously each day for the mail to gauge their success. In fact renewals were strong, and new subscribers were continuing to sign up as well.6

  According to their initial agreement, Luce and Hadden were scheduled to trade jobs each year, alternating between running the business and editing the magazine. Early 1924 was Luce’s turn to be editor. But the switch did not occur. Both men realized that Hadden had little interest in or talent for business matters, and Luce—who in other circumstances might have insisted on the trade anyway—decided that the time was not right. Despite the improvement in Time’s health by 1924, Luce remained appropriately worried about survival. “Oh, we were in too much trouble … too much trouble,” he later recalled of his decision to stay where he was.7

  By mid-1924 they were becoming more confident. Over the next nine months they raised an additional fifty thousand dollars from the original stockholders, “quite easily” according to Luce, in return for more stock. They were even willing to consider expansion. Henry Seidel Canby, their onetime Yale instructor, was now the editor of the struggling Saturday Review of Literature. He approached Time and proposed a partnership, which Luce and Hadden were, as Luce later put it, “nervy enough” to accept. Saturday Review moved into offices in Time’s inelegant building, contributed to the rent, and shared other expenses. Larsen in return helped them more than double their subscription base. The editorial life of the Review remained largely autonomous, but the partnership gave Time more visibility and, perhaps as well, an entry point into the Review’s small but elite readership. Time’s circulation grew even more rapidly in the second half of the year, so much so (to seventy thousand a week) that the magazine registered its first profit at the end of 1924 (a modest $674, but a tremendous advance from the heavy losses in 1923).8

  Launching Time and tending it during its perilous early months was an enervating job. Luce worked constantly, maintaining only the most minimal social life and even seeing very little of his family when they were still in New York. Often he returned home after everyone else was asleep and left in the morning before anyone was awake. In the summer of 1923 the family moved out of Manhattan to a summer house (which Harry never visited) in upstate New York for a few weeks, after which his mother and Sheldon returned to Beijing (joining Emmavail, who was working at the YWCA there). Later that fall his sister Elisabeth returned to Wellesley, and his father embarked on another arduous round of fund-raising in the Midwest. Harry remained in the city, so busy that he seemed almost oblivious to his family’s dispersal. With the family apartment in Morningside Heights now gone, he lived for a time in a room at the Yale Club and then moved downtown to a spartan and less expensive room (“four walls and a door, and a very fine desk,” as he described it) on Stuyvesant Street, to be nearer the office. He was accustomed to a frenzied life, and the pace of work—exhausting as it must have been—did not often seem to bother him. Quite the contrary, in fact, for despite his frequent complaints about the grim fortunes of his enterprise, he loved the battle. “Doing something, getting something done, … finding a way out of a difficulty, … just the ‘game’ of it,—that … is the ‘kick’ I get out of it all—whatever it is, now, or in the future.” And yet this period of intense preoccupation with the magazine coincided with a period in which he was desperately attempting to sustain what at times seemed to him a hopeless romance.9

  The struggle for Time was, in fact, crucially connected—in Luce’s mind at least—to his struggle for, and sometimes with, Lila. Harry remained infatuated with her and was constantly fearful that she might give up on him. At the same time he worried that the woman he loved might not be wholly compatible with the life he envisioned for himself. By now he and Lila had known each other for more than three years and had developed a very serious relationship. They had quietly and informally agreed to marry. But the marriage, at least in Harry’s mind, remained far from certain, since Lila’s family—in particular her somewhat imperious stepfather, Frederick Haskell, a prominent Chicago banker—remained skeptical. Haskell questioned the suitability of a young man with little money and an uncertain career: “a person of no importance,” as he put it. His views were no secret to Harry, who wrote Mrs. McCormick that his prospective stepfather-in-law was “apparently convinced that I am thoroughly worthless.”10

  The relationship, with the exception of the few months Harry had spent working in Chicago, had been—and remained—mostly epistolary. Harry wrote long impassioned letters to Lila every two or three days, often rushing to Penn Station late at night to get them onto the last train to Chicago. Lila wrote frequently in return, less often than Harry but with equal affection. They had pet names for e
ach other: Lila was “Tod,” and Harry was “Chuck.” More often they used gushing terms of endearment—“Beloved,” “Dearest,” “Carissima,” “Angel,” “Beautifulest,” “Totally adored.” And yet they rarely saw each other. Lila traveled occasionally to New York with Mrs. Haskell, but even then Harry found it hard to see her, both because he was busy at work and because, when he was free, Lila’s vaguely hostile mother had often made plans that excluded him. For a while they took to meeting in Washington, where Lila went occasionally to see friends. But even these infrequent, furtive visits came to a sudden halt in late June when Lila sailed with her mother for a summerlong sojourn in Europe—a trip perhaps designed to encourage her to forget about Harry.11

  Despite her constant reassurances Harry could not help but fear that Lila’s love was incomplete and unreliable, and he rarely hesitated to share his anxiety with her. He believed, or at least claimed, that his love had begun earlier, and was deeper than hers. He insisted, for example, that he had fallen in love with Lila in Rome in 1920 “at first sight,” but that Lila did not then reciprocate. Even three years later he continued to search for reassurance. “I am desperate to find out whether or not you love me,” he wrote her in Europe in July, not long after reading Lila’s own impassioned assurances that she did. He could not help worrying about how Lila’s mother might be turning her daughter against him, and he wrote—perhaps preemptively—of the financial uncertainty about which he felt certain Mrs. Haskell was warning her daughter. He begged her to “reconcile yourself to the fact that for a little while you have got a lover who cannot play that role [the successful provider] as it ought to be played.” When Lila wrote that he should be satisfied with knowing she loved him, Harry continued to fret. “When it’s this job and that job, and get up and rush to the office, and hear this bad news and that bad news, … and get a bad lunch, and find this gone wrong and ‘must do that,’ and catch the subway and be late for dinner, and this must be done tonight, and now let’s get to bed, and start all over again tomorrow—Well, Tod, it’s not in me to maintain through all that drab and wretched business the calm and philosophical confidence of the idealist whose feet are planted upon the bases of the universe and whose right hand upholds the footstool of the throne of God.” The grandiose rhetoric could not disguise his terrible mundane anxiety.12

  His relationship with Lila was almost certainly the first serious romance of his life, and at times he seemed—at least in writing—utterly besotted, writing page after page of impassioned statements and restatements of his love. But as the level of commitment grew, Harry also began trying, in effect, to “improve” Lila. This was visible at times in small and inconsequential ways: his graceless references to her misspellings (“By the way, you might spell the great man’s name [Sam Insull] correctly!”); his blunt corrections of minor factual mistakes (“Tuchuns [Chinese military governors] have nothing to do with bandits … either etymologically or socially”); and his complaints about the brevity, superficiality, or, as he saw it, condescension of her messages. (“Don’t treat me like a pitiable dachshund with one leg shot off, but like a live animal!”)13

  But his criticisms were also visible in larger ways. He chided her for her frivolousness, and for a while lectured her about spending too much time playing bridge. He balked at times at Lila’s aristocratic prejudices, sometimes by mildly ridiculing her (“We are having turkey hash. It’s very unByronic & besides I know you despise anything so plebeian”), and sometimes by challenging her, as if to test her loyalty. “Some time ago you spoke scornfully of the ‘flats’ your young married friends inhabit,” he wrote almost tauntingly at one point. “Well, you shall see, as soon as we can afford anything even as good as that—pop! We shall be in it.” In fact the relative claims of status and achievement were a frequent source of discussion between them. “Some people,” he wrote pointedly, “do attach great importance to comfort, to eminent respectability, etc…. Other people believe that these things, while very desirable, are not to be compared in value to other things. The corollary of the former belief is that there is no immortality and that therefore no one will even know whether it was not just as important to attend the right party and have a ‘good time’ as it was to attend the right church and love ‘justice.’” On another occasion he accused Lila of not valuing his work. “I think you care a great deal more for the kudos (fame etc) or the general results which personally accrue to me out of it than for the actual doing of it, and I care just the other way around.”14

  Harry was right about Lila, at least in part. She was a vivacious, even flirtatious young woman who was immersed in the whirl of society and who—as Harry perceptively noted—lived “for the entire crowd.” She was preoccupied with the trappings of the upper class: its social conventions, its material expectations, its style, its values. She loved things—furniture, clothes, houses, jewelry—and continued to do so throughout her very long life. She cared a great deal about appearances and looked to Harry not just to be successful but also to be socially presentable, which at times he still was not. He often dressed badly (“dashed in and bought a suit, all ready made so that it probably fit about as well as a pair of pajamas,” he once wrote her); he had almost no awareness of his physical surroundings (he once described his residence to her as “two beds, four chairs, and a table”); and he was not yet wholly comfortable—and perhaps never fully became so—in Lila’s elite social world because he did not like, and was not good at, small talk and gossip. In some ways it was hard to see how someone as serious and intense as Harry had found himself drawn to Lila—and vice versa.15

  And yet a large part of Lila’s appeal to Harry had always been that she provided things he himself did not have. Despite his protestations, he shared her aristocratic aspirations, coveted her social position, and envied her family’s wealth. These were not his only ambitions, of course, but they were far from the least important. His own social life, limited as it was, was securely rooted in the world of his wealthy friends from Hotchkiss and Yale. He spent weekends in the summer of 1923, a summer in which he never visited his family in their own modest summer quarters, playing tennis and attending dinners at the country homes of people in his “circle.” As much as he tried at times to resist the values and prejudices of the world of the wealthy, he found himself drawn to them—to their assumptions of entitlement, to their camaraderie, to their willingness to express and even defend positions that might shock people outside the circle. For Luce, at least, this was still a predominantly male world; and through his late-night conversations with his upper-class friends, he labored to find a social philosophy of his own—one that seemed to change almost weekly but was always at least to some degree in opposition to his understanding of Lila’s worldview. When she wrote him about the value of the aristocracy, he subtly chided her by hinting that she did not understand what the aristocracy really meant. He parroted for a time the views of his English colleague, Thomas Martyn, citing Martyn’s pompous statement that if the Duchess of Devonshire thought him ill-mannered, “I shouldn’t care twopence.” But if “the man who sells newspapers in front of my club should fail to respond heartily to my ‘Good morning,’ I should be upset for a week.” This was evidence, Harry claimed, of the “undeveloped” American sense of “what it is to be aristocratic.” And yet on another occasion, apparently after an evening of conversation with his Skull and Bones colleagues, he wrote to Lila very differently, but again implicitly chidingly, about her modest charitable work in Chicago: “Don’t kid yourself into believing that you really sympathize or ‘feel for’ the poor people…. I make no pretense about the poor…. My claim to virtue is that at least I don’t pretend to sympathize with them.” And even though he rarely expressed, and often fiercely criticized, racial and religious prejudice, he continued occasionally to fall unthinkingly into the casual bigotry of the upper class of his time, referring, for example, to his physician as “the Jewboy doctor” who lived in a “swank Jew apartment on Riverside.”16

 
; The summer of 1923 was a hard one for Luce, despite the slowly rising fortunes of Time. His family had left the city. Lila was in Europe. He was living in a depressing room. And he was beset by bad news. One of his friends from Yale, Harry Davison, had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and had been rushed off to the West, where the dry climate was supposed to help with recovery; Luce was aware that tuberculosis was often fatal and was distraught—in part, no doubt, because Davison was an important Time supporter and a member of its board of directors. (Davison eventually recovered fully.) He learned that one of his Chefoo friends, the Englishman Harold Burt, with whom he had traveled in Europe in 1920, had committed suicide. He reproached himself bitterly for not having contacted him recently: “Suppose he had received a cheerio letter from his nursery companion,” he lamented. But the greatest blow was probably the death of Nettie McCormick, Harry’s unwavering patron and surrogate parent since his childhood. Only days before her death he had written her warmly about his relationship with Lila and his hopes that she would attend the wedding (not mentioning that he was still not entirely confident that it would occur). The letter never reached her and was returned unopened. Days later he was in Chicago serving as a pallbearer at her funeral.17

  These worries and losses, combined with his lonely stressful life in New York, made him even more obsessive in the way he thought and wrote about his relationship with Lila. His own anxiety contributed to his complaints about her behavior and values, his efforts to improve her, and to his fears that he would lose her. It also brought to the surface a clearly harbored but seldom expressed darkness in his understanding of his life. In an uncharacteristic letter to Lila in the fall of 1923 he described himself as “sick at heart” and laid out for her an “egoistic parade of my troubles”—a litany of resentment, ambition, envy, and insecurity. He described life in America, from his earliest days at Hotchkiss, as a grim “struggle for existence,” made all the more difficult because of a series of injustices: “the disgrace [a family divorce] which disrupted my mother’s family” and cut him off from his distinguished (distant) cousin Elihu Root; his paternal grandfather’s financial setbacks and failures; his own father’s demeaning existence as a fund-raiser (“begging for money for which he got no credit”); and his realization that the McCormick family—and even his beloved patroness, Nettie McCormick—had, as he put it, “played me for a sucker,” making him think he was in effect a member of their family when he was in fact “the poor well-deserving protégé” who had become not a family member but a family project. (He was not mentioned in Mrs. McCormick’s will. Unsurprisingly, the estate passed on to her own sons.)18