The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Once Billings took over, Luce’s intrusions into the editorial life of Time became less frequent (although, to Billings, more unnerving when they did occur). Luce continued to take an active hand in Fortune, especially during its ideological tumult in the mid-1930s. But little by little he began thinking of new ventures. In March 1932, to the surprise of some of his colleagues, Luce bought an obscure magazine, Architectural Forum, which (having begun its life in the nineteenth century with the prosaic title Brickbuilder) had become a glossy but specialized trade journal for architects. Luce had recently developed an interest in architecture on his own and, as was often the case, assumed that anything that interested him would likely interest others. He had even toyed for a time with launching a new architectural magazine himself and had hired a recent Princeton graduate, C. D. Jackson (who was eventually to become a major figure in Time Inc.), to help him develop the idea. They produced a dummy issue, under the title Skyline, but never had enough confidence in it to proceed. Architectural Forum took its place. The magazine would, Luce wrote in his announcement of the purchase, chronicle “the several elements of the building world—architects, engineers, contractors, workmen, investors”—that were “at last integrating a great single industry.”

  There could hardly have been a less promising moment to invest in a magazine devoted to the construction industry, which was hit harder than most economic sectors by the Great Depression. Time Inc’s own research—quoted in the dummy of Skyline—found the president of the American Institute of Architects warning architects to avoid New York City. Another architect asked, “We wonder if there will ever be a building again.” But Luce’s real interest was less in the economics of architecture than in its aesthetics and innovations, an outgrowth, perhaps, of Fortune’s interest in design. “We do not know when business will turn,” he wrote to some of his investors and employees. “We do know that great changes in the building art lie ahead…. We believe that the architect, as he has been in days past, will again be the decisive factor in the rate and character of building progress.” Luce liked the Forum because its longtime editor, Howard Myers, used it to showcase important young American and European designers. It was also unusual among trade journals in giving significant attention to the architecture and design of private homes. That gave the Forum a small but significant audience outside the professional world, among readers interested in home design, and made it a precursor of the soon-to-be robust market for what became known as shelter magazines. (Twenty years later Architectural Forum spun off its housing coverage into a second magazine directed at a wider audience, House and Home.)

  Architectural Forum never became a fully integrated part of Time Inc. Myers stayed on as editor, and the magazine remained a largely autonomous organization, in its own building with its own staff and its own culture—although the merger helped the magazine’s circulation, which grew from under six thousand at the time of the purchase to forty thousand, still modest, by the end of the decade. Although it was never profitable, Luce resisted proposals to sell it, partly because it was a prestigious journal in a field he cared about, partly because he liked its content (the magazine once prudently ran a major story about one of Luce’s own homes, designed by Edward Durell Stone), and partly because he continued to hope, in vain, that it would erase its small losses and generate real income. It remained part of the company until 1963, when Luce finally closed down Architectural Forum and sold House and Home to McGraw-Hill.14

  Luce also authorized a new publication developed by the Experimental Department (an office created originally by Luce himself to help him develop Fortune, but now a landing place for Martin after his removal from Time). Martin argued that the correspondence Time received from its readers could itself be the basis of a magazine, and in January 1934 he launched Letters—a slim publication distributed free at first to interested Time subscribers and later sold for a dollar a year. It attracted a modest 35,000 readers at its peak, had relatively little success with advertisers, and ceased publication in 1937.15

  The company’s greatest new commitment of the early 1930s after Fortune was its excursion into broadcasting and film. Time had made a brief and tentative entry into radio in the mid-1920s, taking the news quizzes that Hadden and Luce had developed to entertain business groups and turning them into short promotional broadcasts. Later, Larsen launched a weekly ten-minute broadcast that summarized the contents of the most recent issue of Time. For it he coined the word “newscasting,” which also became the show’s title. The program appeared on a few dozen local stations and was sold to them much like other forms of advertising. But a much more significant experiment began in 1932 with the creation of The March of Time, a half-hour weekly radio news show that was broadcast over the CBS network.16

  Both the idea for and the implementation of The March of Time radio show came largely from Larsen. What had begun for him as simply another way of publicizing the magazine gradually became something close to a creative passion—a belief that he was part of the invention of a new form of journalism. Luce never shared Larsen’s faith in the importance of nontextual journalism and remained skeptical both of the radio March of Time and the newsreel version that followed it. But he grudgingly supported the projects, both because of his confidence in Larsen and because he understood the publicity value of these efforts even if he failed to grasp their potential as powerful news media on their own.17

  The March of Time broadcasts aptly conveyed their divided mission: to promote the magazine on the one hand, and to present news in the style of Time on the other. No listener could miss the connection between the radio show and magazine. “Whatever happens,” the show’s narrators concluded at the end of most broadcasts, “you can depend on one magazine to summarize for you at the end of the week all the news of all the world…. That publication is Time—the weekly newsmagazine. A new issue goes on all newsstands every Friday.”

  The source of the program’s news was, of course, Time magazine itself, with all its strengths and all its idiosyncrasies—the distinctive language, the sometimes-overwrought dramatization, the heavy emphasis on personality and physical description. But The March of Time went well beyond the magazine in dramatizing the news by hiring actors to re-create real events in the world. Indeed, the broadcasts often consisted almost entirely of dramatized re-creations, without very much concern about literal accuracy. In one early episode, for example, the program offered a preposterous reenactment of an imagined conversation in New Delhi between the “nut-brown little Mahatma Gandhi” and some American women on tour. “Oh Mahatma,” one of the Americans gushed, “when are you coming to America? They’ll go wild about you there … simply wild.” The more serious re-creations portrayed meetings between heads of state or statements of President Hoover and later President Roosevelt (until the White House protested and the practice stopped). They had a stagy quality that seemed contrived even by the normal, somewhat stilted standards of 1930s radio drama. A twenty-three-piece orchestra added to the dramatic quality of the program, as did the narrators themselves (who were identified to listeners as the “Voice of Time”)—experienced announcers with grave, stentorian voices who concluded each segment of the program with the portentous trademark phrase: “Time marches on!” (a phrase borrowed from a Harold Arlen song that also served as theme music for the program).18

  The radio March of Time was never profitable, but it gave a significant boost to the image and success of Time magazine. There are no reliable figures on the size of the program’s audience, but no one involved with it—its producers, Luce, the radio networks that broadcast it—doubted its broad appeal to listeners. When Time Inc. announced the cancellation of the show in 1932, an avalanche of letters demanding its continuation (combined with Larsen’s ardent support of the show) persuaded the unenthusiastic Luce to change his mind—and, perhaps more significantly, CBS to provide financial support to keep the program going. It remained on the air, with a short suspension at the end of the 1930s, until 1
945.19

  Although Luce never took much interest in radio, he was, at least briefly, more attracted to the idea of producing a newsreel, an idea first proposed to him by Larsen. The March of Time newsreel, Luce believed, could provide a more serious account of world events than did such existing newsreels as Fox Movietone News, Pathé, and Hearst—all of them weekly, all of them, in Luce’s view, “juvenile—and stupid juvenile,” providing nothing (as the Christian Science Monitor described them in 1935) but the “bare bones ‘This happened here’ kind of thing.” Time Inc.’s newsreels would be monthly, would “get behind the news,” would show “what has led up to a given event,” and would have a “dramatic coherence,” Luce wrote as the newsreel venture gathered steam. While radio was important, he told his staff in an internal memo, “the greatest supplement to the invention of language itself for the purpose of communication of news-fact is the photograph. And the most potent development of the photograph is the so-called moving pictures.” The cinematic March of Time, therefore, would be “an instrument of significant journalism,” in effect a newsmagazine on film.20

  Despite Luce’s initial enthusiasm for newsreels, he played only a slightly larger role in their production than he had with the radio broadcasts. The March of Time was largely Larsen’s project, and he in turn recruited a talented young filmmaker, Louis de Rochemont, who became and remained the principal creator of the newsreels for nearly a decade. De Rochemont had begun making films as a high-school student in Worcester, Massachusetts, served as an unofficial wartime cameraman during World War I, and then did stints with the Hearst, Pathé, and Fox Movietone newsreels. Frustrated with what he considered the stale, formulaic content of commercial films, he left in 1933 to work independently, making unorthodox films of his own that relied heavily on dramatic re-creations of events. He noted the similarity between his films and the radio March of Time, and he approached Larsen in the spring of 1934 with a proposal to join forces with Time Inc. “It was love at first sight,” Larsen recalled decades later. De Rochemont was not only skilled at making films, but also adept at uncovering existing film footage (from the Fox film library, among other places) that might be useful for the new series. After eight months of experimentation, the first March of Time newsreel opened in theaters across the country on February 1, 1935, after an intensive publicity campaign. It was an almost immediate success. Critics were, with a few exceptions, enthusiastic. “It has been left to Time,” Alistair Cooke, then the BBC film critic, wrote, “and now ‘The March of Time,’ to combine for the first time in journalism, intelligence, energy, and aloofness.” More important, The March of Time was, as Variety put it, “box office.” Within a few weeks, it was being screened in more than four hundred theaters in 168 cities. At the end of its first year, it was in five thousand American theaters and in more than seven hundred in Great Britain. The crude audience estimates of the time claimed that within a year more than twenty million Americans saw each edition of The March of Time every month. “The March of Time is now established in the world,” the company boasted in an in-house book celebrating the films’ success. “It is a chapter in the history of pictorial journalism … a new gallery of American faces … the faces of the U.S.” Time Inc.’s competitors likewise recognized this new format as a revolution in newsreel production. After “the March of Time came along” a Paramount filmmaker wrote, “the entire industry hunted around for the real purpose and medium of the newsreel,” and there were soon dozens of imitators, both in the United States and abroad, attempting to capture the energy and popularity of the Time Inc. Films. The newsreel even received a special Academy Award in 1936, through the intervention of Luce’s friend, the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick.21

  “Harry and I were agreed,” Larsen wrote at the launch of the project, “that before we even consider it, we must be sure that there is a lot of money to be made in it.” But by the time The March of Time premiered, it was already clear to everyone that there was, as Luce told his directors in 1934, “little assurance as to its financial success.” In fact, like the radio shows, the films never made a profit. But also like the radio shows, Luce and Larsen came to believe, the publicity the newsreels provided boosted sales of the magazines enough to justify the expense. It undoubtedly helped that Luce was more intrigued with the newsreels—“the most daring venture we ever made,” he once said—than he had been with the radio show. In part this may have reflected his unspoken rivalry with William Randolph Hearst, the controversial newspaper magnate whom Luce regarded with a combination of envy, contempt, and awe. Luce considered Hearst’s newsreels to be his principal competition, even though his Time Inc. colleagues denounced them for “the most stultifying self-imposed censorship ever known to journalism.” Unlike Fox and Pathé, the Hearst films expressed strong political beliefs—most significantly Hearst’s own militant anticommunism and anti-Stalinism. The March of Time was never as overtly polemical as the Hearst films (and never provoked the clamor and organized boycotts from the Popular Front that Hearst encountered), but Luce wanted his newsreels, like his magazines, to have a distinct point of view.22

  There were tensions with Hearst, and even some initial efforts by his company to block the distribution of The March of Time. But relations between the two companies improved in early 1935, especially after Fortune ran a prudent and disingenuous story on the Hearst empire that deliberately understated the serious financial problems it was facing. (“Hearst … means $220,000,000: 28 newspapers, 13 magazines, 8 radio stations, 2 cinema companies, $41,000,000 worth of New York real estate, 14,000 shares of Homestake [a legendary gold mine in South Dakota], and 2,000,000 acres of land,” the Fortune writers wrote admiringly, overlooking the mountains of debt that shadowed the Hearst empire.)23

  Luce occasionally appeared in the editing room toward the end of initial production, prodding, criticizing, offering suggestions. “Why do you like it? Just what do you like about it?” he challenged his colleagues time and again. But for the most part he left the project to Larsen and de Rochemont. He attended the glittering premiere at the Capitol Theater in New York in February 1935, and for some months after that arranged dinner parties for friends and colleagues, interrupted by chauffeur-driven trips to a local theater to view the latest March of Time (but not the feature films that it accompanied), with the party returning to Luce’s home for dessert. Little by little, however, he also came somehow to resent the newsreels. They were, he believed, superficial providers of news, and yet their enormous reach and reputation far exceeded that of the magazines themselves. He complained of encounters with strangers, in the United States and abroad, who associated Time Inc. more with The March of Time than with the magazines. (His lack of enthusiasm for his own newsreels may have contributed to his relative indifference toward television decades later.)24

  Despite its high level of autonomy within the Time Inc. organization—even Larsen drifted away from daily contact with the films after the first few months—The March of Time reflected the culture of the company in many ways: in the stylized language of its superheated narration (deeply identified with the clipped, oratorical voice of the announcer Westbrook Van Voorhis); in its broad and somewhat unorthodox choice of topics; and perhaps most of all in its cultural and political attitudes.

  The March of Time proudly announced in its opening credits that it was “a new kind of pictorial journalism,” and in fact it did set out to differentiate itself from other newsreels both in its format and in its choice of material. Most other newsreels consisted of many short clips of visually interesting material: world crises, sports events, ship launchings, beauty pageants—“a series of catastrophes followed by a fashion show,” one humorist quipped. The March of Time presented only a few stories in each of its monthly episodes, few of them shorter than five minutes, some as long as fifteen or twenty. De Rochemont was exceptionally talented at acquiring film footage from other companies, both in the United States and abroad, and from the growing number of independent photogra
phers who were shooting film all over the world; so the newsreels, in fact, had more “real” material than did the radio show. But de Rochemont did not shy away from reenactments. Some of them were literal reenactments of actual events by the very people who had been involved in them (senators, governors, movie stars, and others doing on camera what they had previously done in other settings). Others were true dramatizations, using professional actors, sets, and extras. Everything in The March of Time, original or reenacted, reached its audience shaped not only through visual images, but also by the powerful narration and the almost unceasing musical sound track that self-consciously imposed an emotional tone on every scene. The pictures rarely spoke for themselves.

  The films had their share of fluff: a breathlessly admiring feature on summer theater in New England featuring “the coming stars of stage and screen;” a worried story about hunting and the need to restrict shooting to allow the duck population to replenish; a piece on the sale of dogs filled with images of children cuddling small puppies; and an ominous account of the spread of Dutch Elm disease and other insect-borne plagues, with a militarylike description of “the nation’s crucial battle against bugs.” But The March of Time also dealt with more serious subjects, and as early as its first episodes in 1935 paid particular attention to the growing threats of war in Europe and Asia.25

  The films, like the magazines, had one cultural standard that they used consistently to interpret and explain events: the progressive outlook of the Anglo-American world, reflecting Luce’s own consistent views. Almost everything carried in The March of Time either displayed that world or made invidious comparisons with it. One example was an otherwise pointless piece about Lake Tana in Ethiopia, the source of the Blue Nile. “High in the mountains of northeast Africa,” the narration boomed over shots of the landscape, “fed in the rainy season by the drainage of a vast plateau, lies a lake seldom visited by white men but of vital importance to one great white nation.” The importance of the lake, in short, was that it irrigated cotton fields that were important to the British textile industry. An enthusiastic 1936 story on Palestine celebrated the “thriving Jewish settlements” that refugees from Europe were building there—“a miracle in the desert” that yesterday (in the hands of the Arabs) had been nothing but “a world of sand and cactus where jackals roamed.” Not surprisingly given Luce’s well-known interests, the films gave particular attention to China. It was a difficult subject, because China in the mid-1930s was simultaneously in the midst of an aggressive effort to “modernize” the nation while facing a growing invasion from the Japanese. Luce’s preference, unsurprisingly, was to emphasize progress. As a result, the films offered a relentlessly optimistic picture of Chiang Kai-shek’s success in bringing the once-backward nation into the modern, progressive, Western world. Over upbeat scenes of new buildings, museums, schools, and swimming pools, the film’s announcer declared that “a new generation acquires a deepening sense of national unity, and a newborn happiness spreads through the land … and in mid-summer 1937, China’s transition to a progressive, reorganized nation is in full swing.” The Japanese, in contrast, were the backward alternative to the people of China—a combination of mindless automatons slavishly committed to the state, and smirking savages bent on violence and destruction. It was a portrait that augured the harshly racist American demonization of Japan during World War II.26