Luce, Hadden, and the other founders of Time did not expect (and in the beginning did not particularly want) a vast circulation. They were, they believed, creating a “quality” magazine, aimed at a relatively elite readership—the busy professional people who had largely inspired them to imagine their great project. Their target audience was wealthy, educated men and women, “modern-minded by environment and education.” They solicited subscriptions at first from the alumni of Ivy League universities, from the members of elite men’s clubs and country clubs, from directories of corporate board members, from buyers of the Harvard Classics, and from people listed in social registers and in Who’s Who. Time boasted of the eminent bankers, industrialists, and politicians (among them Franklin D. Roosevelt) who were early subscribers to the magazine. But the more important characteristic of its readership, at least for advertisers, was its relative youth (“70% of TIME’s subscribers are under 46,” the company boasted) and its wealth. “Our subscribers,” they claimed, “are overwhelmingly classifiable as … potent business & professional leaders, … younger business and professional men, already influential but still climbing the ladder—definitely en route for greater fortune and influence … [and] Wives of Business & Professional men.” In a nation characterized by “a hundred temperaments and a hundred degrees of wealth and class,” one Time advertisement argued, “our success is the result of hitting the fancy and imagination of America’s most important and interesting class—the Younger Business Executive—young in years—young in spirit and young in outlook.”58
During its early struggles the Time staff drew a perverse satisfaction from what they considered the “exclusiveness” of their circulation. It was, they believed, a kind of club: a group of like-minded people in tune with the sensibilities and opinions of the editors. (“One reader on a train would see someone else reading Time,” Luce once said, “and that would be enough to serve as an introduction.”) Time readers, they claimed, constituted a “colony” filled with “men and women who have in common a desire to know and comprehend the news … a distinctive unit … set apart from all other magazine readerships.” This profile was a useful advertising device. But the leaders of Time genuinely believed it to be true, and they based that belief in part on the extensive, if unscientific, surveys they frequently did of their readers. In 1928, shortly after the return of the company to New York from Cleveland, Time mailed out a questionnaire, whimsically titled “Do You Own a Horse?,” to ten thousand subscribers and received more than four thousand responses, which constituted about 3 percent of the readership. It reinforced all the assumptions the circulation and advertising departments had been claiming. Ninety percent of the respondents were under sixty-five years old. More than 80 percent were “plainly of the executive and professional class,” 27 percent were officers and directors of “companies other than their own,” and 62 percent owned stocks and bonds. More than half of Time’s surveyed subscribers had servants, and a quarter had more than one. More than 40 percent were members of country clubs. A third had traveled to Europe, and another quarter planned to do so. And nearly 11 percent of respondents actually did “own a horse.” For several years in the 1920s and early 1930s—before circulation grew so large that the economic base of readers could not easily be characterized—Time was ranked in some surveys first among magazines in the wealth of its subscribers, a position later occupied for many decades by The New Yorker. Time, a 1928 advertisement grandly claimed, “has built up the greatest, the largest, the soundest quality circulation in the history of U.S. publishing.”59
Hadden liked the idea of Time readers as a distinctive, elite “club,” and he came to believe that circulation should not rise much above 250, 000. Anything more might dilute the quality of the subscriber base. Luce imagined a much larger readership. Shortly after the publication of the first issue, Luce wrote desperately to Lila asking her what her distinguished stepfather thought of the magazine. “His approbation [would be] a very valuable piece of evidence,” he said, because of his wealth, his stature, and his “maturity and stability.” If Time could “get by” men like that, “we can later broaden down and catch the rabble of George F. Babbitts etc.” (Frederick Haskell apparently did not respond.)60
• • •
The return to New York, for which Hadden had fought so strenuously, did not for long relieve the boredom and restlessness that had plagued him in Cleveland. Friends and colleagues commented frequently on his apparent unhappiness, his almost frantic search for stimulation and excitement, and his erratic and sometimes self-defeating behavior. Shortly after the move, Hadden ceded the editorship of Time to Luce. Rotating jobs had been part of their plan from the beginning, but—except for Hadden’s brief absence from editing in 1926, to allow him to spend more time in New York—neither man had really pushed to keep their initial agreement. To Hadden editing Time had been a kind of passion, and no other activity related to the magazine had been remotely as satisfying to him. That he agreed to give it up in 1928 was almost certainly a sign of boredom, a search for a new and different challenge. “He wasn’t only losing his interest in Time,” Luce claimed years later. “There didn’t seem to be any other interest that was absorbing him.”61
Although Hadden was ostensibly taking over the business side of the company, he spent relatively little energy dealing with the routine tasks that Luce had overseen for so long—circulation, advertising, production, staff management. Instead, he often came into the editorial offices late at night and reedited copy that Luce had already approved. He also began searching for other creative projects that might relieve what he quickly came to consider the tedium of his new job. In 1927 Time had begun producing a small house organ that it somewhat whimsically called Tide and that mimicked Time’s format and style. It was distributed free to potential advertisers as a kind of promotional brochure. Soon after leaving the Time editorship, Hadden decided—despite considerable skepticism from Luce and other colleagues—to transform Tide into a real magazine about advertising for paid subscribers. It quickly grew from a small pamphlet into a substantial-looking magazine, with a cover almost identical to Time’s (although with a blue, not a red, border) and with “departments” not unlike those in the newsmagazine. Tide rarely received letters, so Hadden and his fellow editors wrote them themselves, attributing them to invented people (a practice Hadden had occasionally employed in the early years of Time). For a while Hadden devoted himself to Tide with something like the same energy and enthusiasm that he had given to the launch of Time. But he was not content for long. Tide did not flourish in the way Hadden had hoped. In its first two years, its circulation never reached five thousand and it had only fifteen hundred paid subscribers. (The company sold it in 1930, and it became a modestly successful independent enterprise of the advertising industry that survived until 1959.) In any case a small advertising journal was not enough to satisfy Hadden, and he indicated his frustration by starting to run articles in Tide gratuitously attacking the very advertisers—including important Time clients—to whom the magazine was appealing. (“When a preacher turns commercial writer and applies the smug platitudes of his old calling to his new job,” he wrote of a prominent automobile-advertising executive, “he should be hailed with raucous laughter.”) In his restlessness Hadden also began thinking of new projects for the company. He devoted a page in his notebook to his ideas for expansion: “bus mag, spt mag, aviation mag, secy mag, letter mag, TIME monthly, women’s mag, daily newspaper,” and many others.62
In the meantime Luce threw himself into the editing of Time. He was a more efficient and organized editor than Hadden. He created a schedule for writers and editors, held regular meetings, had an organized staff critique of each issue every week. (“Don’t hesitate to flay a fellow-worker’s work. Occasionally submit an idea,” he wrote.) He was also calmer and less erratic. Despite the intense loyalty Hadden inspired among members of his staff, some editors and writers apparently preferred Luce to his explosive partner; others
missed the energy and inspiration that Hadden had brought to the newsroom. In any case the magazine itself—whose staff was so firmly molded by Hadden’s style and tastes—was not noticeably different under Luce’s editorship than it had been under Hadden’s. And just as Hadden, the publisher, moonlighted as an editor, so Luce, now the editor, found himself moonlighting as publisher, both because he was so invested in the business operations of the company that he could not easily give them up, and also because he felt it necessary to compensate for Hadden’s inattention.63
Outside the office the hard, wild life that Hadden had been leading for years grew harder and wilder. Friends began to note a change in him—he was, one friend later recalled, “increasingly nervous and irritable and hard to get along with. He wanted desperately to have a good time, and yet nothing seemed to give him pleasure.” He complained frequently of boredom and drove those around him to join his frantic search for diversions. Always a heavy drinker, he gradually became a self-destructive alcoholic. He stayed up late, gave or searched for parties almost every night. He began to participate in, or provoke, brawls for which he was periodically arrested and spent nights in jail. He seemed to dread returning to his apartment to sleep alone, which suggested that his boredom and wildness was in part a result of loneliness. He would arrive at work many mornings bleary-eyed, having gotten only a few hours of sleep—and sometimes none. Hadden had many friends but few intimates. His “ferocious” temperament, one of his longtime colleagues later wrote, hid an uneasiness with normal personal relations, a profound shyness. He had few serious relationships with women and sometimes appeared to be a misogynist. (In 1926, when a member of Time’s board proposed appointing a woman director, Hadden replied dismissively that “women are notorious for their inability to see things in perspective, their tendency to exaggerate, their desire to live in a fool’s paradise…. They are conspicuously deficient in such fundamentals as sense of humor, fairmindedness, good sportsmanship and sense of responsibility.”) He seemed to many people to be having trouble in general adjusting to adulthood. (A lifelong passionate baseball fan, he began participating in a youth baseball league in Central Park, even though it was restricted to players under eighteen. He tried to hide his mustache whenever park officials walked by.) According to a later (and unverifiable) account by one of his friends, Hadden began to disappear periodically for days and even weeks, once traveling to a farm in Indiana, on another occasion working on a tugboat, prompting Luce to send staff members out to find him and bring him home.64
Luce had little contact with Hadden any longer outside the office. He spent evenings with his family (his second son, Peter, was born in 1928) or at the kind of establishment social functions that Hadden scorned. At work the relationship between the two partners was rapidly deteriorating. Their friendship had always been a complicated and competitive one, and there had been many periods of tension between them over the years, but the problems had rarely lasted very long. By the late 1920s, however, their ability to recover from disagreements appeared to be eroding. Hadden seemed both contemptuous and envious of Luce—scornful of his bourgeois lifestyle at the same time that he yearned for some kind of stability of his own. In 1926 Yale awarded Luce an honorary M.A. degree—a significant honor for so young a man—for “distinguished accomplishments in a novel and worthy field of journalism.” Luce, of course, was thrilled, although he recognized the effect this would have on Hadden, who might rightly have considered himself an equally plausible candidate. Harry happily attended the Yale commencement with members of his family, in-laws, and friends. But he did not invite Hadden and did not even tell him that he was receiving the degree. Hadden learned of it through reports from others and deeply resented the fact of the award and Luce’s failure to inform him of it.65
Henry Winters Luce, an aspiring missionary, and Elisabeth Root, a YMCA worker, marry in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1897. Less than a year later, they were en route to China.
The Luces occupied this home in Tengchow through the first years of Harry’s life. Elisabeth Luce sits on the porch with Harry, Emmavail, and a Chinese nurse. They shared the house with another missionary family.
Henry W. Luce and his four children posed for this portrait in the family’s second home in Wei Hsien, approximately 1912. From left to right: Rev. Luce, Harry, Sheldon, Elisabeth, and Emmavail.
Henry R. Luce in China at three or four, posing imperiously in a chair that his father had used as a child.
Young Harry in 1914, on a farm in Colebrook, New Hampshire, during a summer vacation from Hotchkiss.
Luce (left) and Brit Hadden (right) at Hotchkiss in 1916, inseparable friends and rivals.
Luce in uniform in 1917, a cadet at Yale. A few months later, he and Hadden were transferred to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where they spent the rest of the war training infantry.
Lila Hotz, the alluring Chicago socialite whom Luce met in Rome on New Year’s Eve 1920 and who became Luce’s first love and first wife. Luce was attracted to her both because of her warmth and energetic charm and because of her social distinction and family wealth. She is pictured with the couple’s boys Hank (right) and Peter Paul.
The first offices of Time Inc. were above a retail store in a building on East Seventeeth Street in New York City. It was the first in a series of constantly moving and expanding headquarters for the magazine. This picture was taken some years later by Margaret Bourke-White, the first staff photographer for the company.
Brit Hadden was only twenty-five when this photograph of him was taken shortly after the publication of the first issue of Time magazine. Despite his sober pose, he was a lively, engaging, volatile young man of great brilliance, whose relationship with Luce was both extremely close and extremely competitive.
The first issue of Time magazine, in March 1923. The line drawing of the powerful Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Joseph Cannon was the first in a long tradition of portraying people on the cover. Soon after the magazine’s debut, it acquired its trademark red border, and a few years later it began using color portraits created by a group of artists commissioned by the magazine.
Luce promised that Fortune would be the most beautiful magazine ever published. Whether or not it achieved that goal, its design was undeniably impressive—and expensive—as was the magazine itself. The first cover, in February 1930, designed by Thomas Cleland—who had also chosen the typefaces and other design elements—showed a “wheel of fortune,” a symbol of the magazine itself and of the precariousness of fortune in the first year of the Great Depression.
Some of the successful early editors and writers of Fortune in the 1930s: Clockwise from top left: Ralph Ingersoll, managing editor; Archibald MacLeish, Luce’s most admired writer; Dwight Macdonald, a talented young reporter who claimed to loathe his job; and James Agee, also unhappy at Fortune but reluctant to give up the salary. By the end of the 1930s, all of them had left. None of them had any previous experience in business writing, but Luce considered that an advantage—as in many ways it was until the group began to disband.
Margaret Bourke-White was the first woman to be hired full-time at Time Inc. as a photographer—and for that matter, the first woman to serve outside the clerical and research staffs at the company. She was intrepid, and eager for the world to know it—as this dramatic photograph of her perched with camera on a parapet of the Chrysler Building far above Manhattan illustrates.
Laird Goldsborough was Foreign News editor of Time from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. He was a brilliant and efficient writer with a big personality, and he towered over his colleagues even while writing often and favorably of Mussolini and bitterly criticizing the antifascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Luce began easing him out shortly before the beginning of the war.
The first cover of Life magazine, 1936, featuring a dramatic Margaret Bourke-White photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. The picture’s monumentality drew immediate attention to the new magazine and helped make it an immediate, se
nsational success. Bourke-White was the first great celebrity among Life photographers, but she was soon accompanied by a large retinue of equally talented (and in some cases equally famous) colleagues.
Luce looks over possible photographs for Life, flanked on the left by John Shaw Billings, the first managing editor of Life, and on the right by Daniel Longwell, the most energetic champion of the new magazine and eventually Billings’s successor as managing editor.
Harry and Clare became great celebrities—partly as a result of the marriage of these two famous people, and partly because their marriage coincided with the runaway success of Life. They are shown here debarking the Queen Mary after a trip to Europe in 1938.
Luce’s fascination with Wendell Willkie exceeded all but a few of his many political infatuations. He used his magazines zealously (and perhaps recklessly) to promote Willkie’s cause—including this Life cover a few weeks before the 1940 presidential election.
Harry and Clare walk with Madame Chiang Kai-shek through a reverent group of Chinese near Chungking, in a 1941 visit. The crowd was organized by Kuomintang leaders to impress Luce, whose influence was important to the regime. Their hosts were not disappointed by their treatment in Luce’s magazines.
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century Page 20