The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  By early 1938 Life’s circulation growth seemed to have lost momentum. “We’re having trouble selling 2,000,000 copies a week,” Billings wrote in his diary. “Hence, we have to pick material that will sell that last 100,000 copies [to get circulation up to the two million guarantee to advertisers].” Luce worried that Life might be losing its novelty, that it was already growing tired and predictable. As always when he sensed editorial weakness, he made his presence felt. “We have to get more and more remarkable pictures,” he complained. “We have got to have sound reading matter…. LIFE lacks humor.” To Billings such periods were agonizing, not just because he found Luce’s presence intimidating but also because Luce’s interventions rarely provided useful advice. “Luce came in, sat down, looked at layouts over for 30 minutes,” Billings wrote of a meeting with Luce to discuss “the form and patterns” of Life. “Then he got up and said, ‘I can’t help you—you’ll have to work it out for yourself.’” Luce’s intrusions were particularly unsettling to Longwell, whom Billings described as “a bundle of nerves and tall talk” and who, when Luce expressed his concerns, “yowled and yammered and swore and shouted—and plainly showed his frustration.”34

  Early in 1938 Joseph Thorndike, the Life editor responsible for coverage of the movies, learned of a controversial documentary titled The Birth of a Baby, which included an actual childbirth. Even by the prim standards of its time, the film was deliberately unsensational. It was intended to be instructive to new mothers, and it was sponsored by the U.S. Children’s Bureau, the American Association of Obstetricians, Gynecologists, and Abdominal Surgeons, and other medical and social service organizations. Despite its impeccable credentials and the mostly good reviews it received, the film faced strong attacks and extensive local efforts to ban viewings. Thorndike proposed that Life publish images from the film as a “public service” and as a challenge to narrow-minded censorship. Luce deferred to Larsen and Billings, who together decided to proceed, and they publicized the event heavily. At the same time they tried to cushion themselves from criticism. They wrote to all subscribers shortly before publication assuring readers that the story would be “wholly and sincerely frank” and “something which the public, and all the public, ought to see.” The story as it appeared in the April 10, 1938, issue was understated to a fault, accompanied by lifelessly unimpeachable text—or, as the advertisers put it, “an altogether wholesome spirit.” The layout was “a long series of small pictures,” Billings wrote, “so as not to sensationalize the birth scenes.” The mother giving birth was so shrouded in fabric that she was virtually invisible in the photographs. The entire story was bound loosely in the middle of the magazine so offended readers could remove and discard it, or hide it from their children. Despite all these precautions the story created a modest firestorm of criticism; and even though the U.S. Post Office had approved its distribution through the mails, publicity-seeking local prosecutors in dozens of cities, including New York, tried to ban the issue from the newsstands (largely in response to pressure from Catholic organizations). Larsen decided to exploit the controversy and arranged to have himself arrested by publicly selling one of the banned issues to a detective in the Bronx. The charges were quickly dismissed, but not before generating valuable press coverage for Life. A Gallup Poll revealed that 76 percent of the public approved of the article, and the April 10 issue sold out immediately. But the more important result of the controversy was to make Life once again a center of national attention. It brought to an end the brief lull in circulation growth. Beginning within weeks of the “Birth of a Baby” issue, subscriptions and newsstand sales were rising again. Circulation passed 2 million by midyear and continued to grow. A year later it was more than 2.5 million and finally making a profit ($950,000 in the first half of 1939). “Life has definitely turned the corner,” Larsen wrote in late April 1938: “Now is the time to snowball its success trend.”35

  Life’s sensational ascent in its first two years occurred despite the widely shared view among much of the editorial staff that the magazine was not yet very good. There were, of course, dazzling pictures and powerful individual stories and essays of which everyone was rightly proud. But most of the editors remained unhappy with the totality of the magazine—with what they considered its frequent blandness, its unevenness, its incoherence. “We all feel that the issues aren’t as good as they should be,” Billings confided to his diary in one of his many private expressions of dismay. “Are we slipping again?” he asked in February 1938, as circulation stagnated. “Are we getting routine?” “A lousy issue,” he wrote in April. “A bad week—and a bad issue—and home with a bad taste in my mouth about the whole mag.” Billings was not alone. The volatile Longwell erupted frequently with complaints about the mediocrity of the layouts and the poor photographic choices. Larsen intermittently looked over issues and complained about their dullness and predictability. Andrew Heiskell, then a young staff member, recalled “the feeling on many weeks that this phenomenally popular magazine was not up to our standards—and was sometimes really quite bad.”36

  No one was more chronically dissatisfied with Life than Luce himself. Although he spent less time editing once Billings was in charge, he continued to drop in, usually without notice, to take a hand in the process. Luce’s arbitrary intrusiveness was driven by the same concerns that had bothered him during their work on the dummies. Like other editors he thought that the magazine was not yet right. “The text doesn’t look inviting,” he wrote in one of his frequent memos to the Life staff. The magazine “lacks humor.” The pictures, even when beautiful, “don’t always look beautiful.” There was not enough “personality stuff.” There was too much attention to people “Life’s readers never heard of and never will again.” But most of all Luce worried that the magazine did not have “a plan” or “a formula”—a consistent and coherent sense of what it should present. He tried at times to achieve this by fiddling with the structure of the magazine: changing departments, reordering stories, trying new kinds of layouts. More often than not these efforts simply produced disarray. “Luce is a disturbing influence,” Billings complained. “He hurts rather than helps the smooth progress of getting out an issue…. He tosses everything up in the air like a juggler—and then ducks out and leaves it to us to catch the pieces as they come down.” Equally often, Luce tried to energize Life by reshuffling the responsibilities of the editors—something else Billings and others found disruptive, even when they agreed with the principles behind the changes. Whatever Luce’s tactics, his underlying concern was always the same: that “we wonder whether there’s something wrong with the editing of the magazine.” Even years later he described the issues in the first years of Life as “dull and pedestrian.”37

  Life benefited greatly from this concern about quality—and from the pressure it placed on everyone to do better. But in fact Life in its first two years was never as bad as its creators sometimes thought, and it was steadily improving. “Life,” Longwell later said, “was not a magazine until two years after its publication.” But during those first years Luce and his editors made considerable progress. They developed a writing style for the magazine, self-consciously different from “Timese,” a simple and almost self-deprecating prose that tried to avoid competing with the photographs. They also developed a tradition of respecting the integrity of their photographs. Unlike many other publications, newspapers and magazines alike, that cropped, retouched, and otherwise altered photographs at will, Life treated its photographs as finished works, and quickly abandoned the random shapes and size (circles, ovals, and others) that most periodicals used to create visual interest. The editors learned quickly that buying photographs from the Associated Press and other suppliers would not be enough to meet their needs, and so they built a staff of photographers of their own, whose work soon dominated the magazine. The Life photographers were men and women of extraordinary talent to begin with, but their association with Life—now the nation’s, and perhaps the world’s, premier
publication for serious photography—greatly enhanced their stature and helped make them famous. The editors also very quickly understood that Life had to have a structure—that readers needed to feel that they were not simply flipping through a randomly assembled album of photographs. From the beginning the editors had been committed to using photographs to create “essays” on important or interesting subjects, and they refined this technique until they felt confident they were creating powerful works of visual journalism. They were less successful in producing coherent departments within the magazine. Life was never organized clearly and predictably in the way Time had always been; nor, with its almost unlimited scope, did it ever develop the sense of editorial focus that Fortune had from the start. Over time the editors made progress in creating “balance” within the magazine and learning how to “sequence” different kinds of stories, but they also came to recognize Life’s unpredictability as one of its strengths. Most of all, perhaps, Life gradually became a mostly serious magazine, committed to presenting the most important issues of its time to a public hungry not just for textual information but for images of great events. This was in one sense simply a good marketing strategy, a way of differentiating Life from such lower-quality competitors as the early Look and the Saturday Evening Post. But it also reflected Luce’s own inherent preferences—particularly his belief that any publication he created had to serve an important purpose. Life continued, of course, to publish its share of light and even frivolous amusement, but the steady movement of the magazine was away from an emphasis on superficial entertainment and toward a serious engagement with an increasingly troubled world.38

  Almost everyone who had been at Time Inc. for more than a few years recognized the enormous change that Life created in both the image and the internal culture of the company, which many people, including Luce himself, felt had reached a low point in 1936. C. D. Jackson, Luce’s special assistant, wrote at the time about what he considered the precarious condition of Time Inc. There had, he claimed, been two periods in the company’s history—first, the “enfant terrible” period when “no matter what we could do no wrong.” In the early years “we could be guilty of practically anything and get away with it, because when we committed the uncommittable, there always were sufficient apologists to jump up and utter their particular version of, ‘Okay, he killed his sister, but ain’t he cute, he’s only six’—and no more rational explanation was necessary.” But by 1936, he argued, the company had long ago entered a second period, during which “the aura of success—the story—the two Yale boys and everything—was beginning to wear thin a little bit.” There was “a touch of envy” emerging around the great success of the still-young and still-brash company, and increasing annoyance at what many observers considered its cocky, arrogant, and at times sophomoric style. “We became a storm center in the public eye,” Jackson continued.

  Congressmen and Senators discussed what we wrote—President Roosevelt requested that we no longer imitate his voice on the air—Communists called us Fascists and Fascists called us Communists…. And all this time our manners did not improve because in the early days we had been too busy to develop manners, and in lieu of manners we developed brusqueness…. So people began to take an unholy glee in calling us names and whispering and sneering at our journalistic and business mannerisms. I think this second stage reached its peak and its end the day Wolcott Gibbs’s story was published in The New Yorker.39

  Luce, like Jackson, also came to believe that 1936 was a turning point, the beginning of a “golden age” in the company’s history. It began with Ingersoll’s effort to change the tone and style of Time magazine itself—to weed out the excesses of its language, to dampen its polemicism, to tone down its sarcasm. (He tried in vain to get rid of Laird Goldsborough as well.) But if Time Inc. was indeed entering a new era, it was doing so mostly because of Life. Luce made that point both privately and publicly as Life began its spectacular, if still unprofitable, rise. The success of the magazine, he said, “would repay us more than in dollars by restoring Time Incorporated,” by bringing to it “a good will and … popularity.” People may have respected Time and Fortune, he declared. But Life was different. “It wasn’t a love-hate relation,” he later said.

  It was a very likable relation … “I like Life,” whereas Time—well, you know, “I love it” or “I’ll fight it.” … I’d done something which hit the whole big American public … whether they were archbishops or truck drivers—they all seemed to go for it. This popularity of Life—it meant a lot to me sort of personally … wide popularity. But it was also good for the corporation, I thought, in making Time Inc. a likable proposition, having taken some of the curse of hostility off it.40

  Luce’s pride in the popularity of Life was on full display in a speech he made in 1937 to the American Association of Advertising Agencies—a group whose opinion of the magazine was of crucial importance to its future. “A year ago,” he said,

  … we chose to create a magazine called Life…. It has been an enormous success. Evidently it is what the public wants more than it has ever wanted any product of ink and paper. Nevertheless, I confront you with a question…. Should we publish Life? And this is not a question only for my partners to decide. We have decided. We like Life…. I stand before you as a court. Your court is also the Appropriations Committee of the American Press…. I ask that you shall appropriate over the next ten critical years no less than one hundred million dollars for the publication of a magazine called Life…. You will either give it to us, or you will not. If you do, there will be Life. If you do not, there will be no Life.

  Luce had few doubts as to the answer he would receive. Over the following decade advertisers invested far more in Life than one hundred million dollars, making it one of the most lucrative advertising vehicles in the United States. But to Luce the endorsement of the idea—that Life was a product that people greeted with affection—was almost as important as its financial returns.41

  Making Life into the enormously popular, enormously likable magazine it became—“the most successful weekly the world has ever known,” an enthusiastic former editor once said—was a project not only of the people who created it and the advertisers who supported it but also of the millions of men and women who read it. Why did so many people “like Life”? In part, certainly, the interest was exactly what Luce and Longwell had predicted from the beginning: People wanted to see pictures. But Life was only one of many vehicles for displaying photographs. The enormity and durability of Life’s popularity was mostly a product of its concept, its look, its message. For many Americans, over many years, Life provided a vision of the nation and the world—a vision mediated by the magazine’s photographers, its writers, its editors, and to a significant degree its owner and creator.42

  Life usually published more than two hundred pictures a week (supplemented by photographs and images in the magazine’s many glossy advertisements). Not every photograph was memorable, and not every layout was interesting. The magazine published more than its share of ordinary pictures of public figures and public events. Some were laid out in neat columns, numbered, to guide readers through a series of linked pictures, suggesting a preference for coherence and accessibility over design. The opening pages of the magazine routinely offered pictures of events around the nation and the world, similarly laid out in an almost mechanically symmetrical style. In later years Life became known for its slick and often dazzling presentation of photographs, but in the 1930s the magazine’s design was often prosaic. And yet the impact of Life, even in its earlier years, was far greater than the sum of its sometimes drab layouts. That was largely because of the extraordinary talent of the magazines’s photographers, and the editors’ exceptional reverence for photographs. Wilson Hicks, the magazine’s picture editor for many years, a man loathed by many of the photographers for his cold, autocratic, and sometimes abusive style, was nevertheless a tireless champion of great photography and a skilled judge of talent. Above all he was
a true believer in the power and importance of photographs, which, he once said, constituted “the body of beliefs and convictions upon which the magazine was founded…. Life looked at what people thought and did in a particular way. It stood for certain things, it entered at once the world-wide battle for men’s minds.”43

  One of the inspirations for Life’s early presentation of photographs—unacknowledged by the editors—was the rapid growth of documentary photography in the United States in the 1930s. Among the most famous examples of this new style were some of the products of the Farm Security Administration’s photography division—which at times rivaled Life in the quality of its photographers. Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and many other participants in the FSA project saw photography as a polemical vehicle for prodding social change. By documenting the social realities and injustices of their time, by using their pictures as political weapons, by publishing them in newspapers and political magazines and allowing them to be cropped and altered to emphasize their political power, they hoped to contribute to the projects of the New Deal and the larger task of pursuing social justice. They understood the power of photographs to convey an image of unassailable “truth” at the same time that they manipulated images to convey the messages they wanted to deliver. Many of the documentary photographs of the FSA, among others, were efforts to reveal difference, to portray oppression, suffering, or—in the work of Walker Evans and some others—noble endurance. Such photographs could be grim, even shocking, or they could be respectful and admiring. But they were almost always designed to reveal the “other,” outsiders excluded from what was coming in the 1930s to be called “the American Way of Life.” Perhaps the most famous example of this ethos was a photograph Margaret Bourke-White took in 1937 (not intended for Life) of a breadline populated by displaced African–American victims of a flood in Louisville, Kentucky, whom Bourke-White recruited to pose below a billboard showing a happy, well-dressed, white, middle-class family driving in a spacious automobile. It included the promotional text: “World’s Highest Standard of Living … There’s No Way Like the American Way.” Such photographs—ironic, caustic, designed to produce outrage—virtually never appeared in Life.44