The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  In the meantime he had his eye on prizes more immediately at hand. In addition to striving perpetually, and usually successfully, to be “First Scholar,” he tried to excel in public speaking and debating—an unlikely ambition for a boy with a painful stammer, but one he embraced all the more intensely because of the obstacles he had to overcome. A few weeks after arriving at the school, he read a paper he had written—“Hannibal, a Leader of men”—before one of the Hotchkiss debating societies, as a kind of audition for membership. The next morning he wrote home excitedly: “I write principally this morning to tell you of the success of my essay. It was considered the best of the bunch—the first essay ever committed to memory in the Forum—And I am a member of that august society!”21

  Since he could not become a “big man” at Hotchkiss as an athlete, Harry was determined to become an important literary figure on campus. In addition to debating, he began working for both the school newspaper (the Record) and the literary magazine (the Hotchkiss Literary Monthly, known to students as the Lit) in his first term. Both awarded places on the basis of strenuous and highly quantitative competition. Boys received points not just for the quality and quantity of their submissions but for selling ads and subscriptions, doing clerical chores, even cleaning up. Harry had great success in getting his stories and poems published, but he did not stop there. He took every opportunity he had to pile up points, so that by the end of the term he could boast that his contributions to the Lit “have evidently been well thought of as I lead the competition of the whole school.” He was elected to the Lit in his first year. The path to distinction at the Record was longer and more difficult and therefore, to Harry, more desirable. “You ask why I want to make both papers,” he wrote his father in April, after “heeling” (competing like a dog following its master) for the Record for months without securing a place. “Well, first & foremost, because it’s quite some honor and quite something which very few if any others in my class will do. Secondly because it’s up to me to make good in everything I can.” Not until the middle of his second year—during which he worked almost maniacally for the newspaper to the slight (and temporary) detriment of his grades—did he finally win election. “My work on the Record has had quite a wonderful—not to say phenomenal—success,” he reported. “2500 odd points in 2 weeks has not been won since I have been at Hotchkiss.”22

  Even though he was one of the poorest boys in the school, Harry managed to stay on a fairly equal footing with his fellow students while he was at Hotchkiss. During most vacations, however, he was conspicuously different from all but a few of them. His parents were usually far away—in China, in Europe, or traveling, with no fixed address except when they were in Shantung. (“I do not know where I shall be” at Christmas, his father wrote from Pittsburgh in mid-December, outlining an exceptionally complicated travel schedule, “but since I ‘commit my way to the Lord’ constantly, He surely ‘directs my path.’ So all is well.”) There were no close relatives left in America from either side of the family, and no relatives at all with whom Harry had any more than a glancing acquaintance. So each holiday presented him with the challenge of finding, largely on his own, a place to go and something to do. It was, on the whole, a challenge he confronted eagerly, even joyously. He undoubtedly missed his family, but he faced a world of opportunities for experience and advancement.23

  His first such opportunity came from the old friend and devoted patron of the Luce family, Nettie McCormick. Harry had not seen Mrs. McCormick since his childhood visit to Chicago in 1906. But the family had remained in close touch with her, and Harry’s father had been a frequent visitor to her home on fund-raising trips to Chicago. Young Harry, whom she had once offered to adopt, was the member of the family she remembered most warmly. She began writing to him even before he returned to the United States: “I am addressing the little boy I loved so well long ago!” she wrote in the spring of 1913, when Harry was in Europe. “It is only yesterday—as ages count—and as my memory counts it I would say it was last night sunsetting when I took your little hand.” She treasured the photographs of him that Harry’s mother occasionally sent. “I recognize ‘the boy of 1906’ in the picture more readily than you will recognize me when you next come to Chicago,” she observed. So perhaps it was not surprising that she invited Harry to spend his first Christmas vacation in the United States with her, an invitation Harry immediately and eagerly accepted, with his parents’ approval. “It will give you an opportunity to come to know some of the best people in the land,” his father wrote. His mother confided to her husband that she had decided to abandon a planned trip to New York and stay in Europe through Christmas so as not to interfere with Harry’s plans to visit Mrs. McCormick in Chicago. (He had shown no such eagerness, to his mother’s considerable chagrin, when relatives had invited him to spend Thanksgiving in Scranton a month earlier, and he had declined their invitation to stop in over Christmas as well. “Where do we come in?” his uncle wrote, only partly in jest, when hearing of Harry’s holiday plans.)24

  Mrs. McCormick lived in a towering brownstone mansion on Rush Street in downtown Chicago (when she was not in her “country” home in the affluent suburb of Lake Forest). She was surrounded by servants but otherwise alone, visited occasionally by her wealthy but, to her, disappointing children. She welcomed the polite, intelligent, earnest young man from Hotchkiss with warmth, and she dazzled him with generosity. Suddenly Harry found himself in a social whirl unlike anything he had ever experienced. He was invited to dinners and dances and debutante balls at wealthy homes and country clubs. He went to the opera on Christmas Eve with the younger McCormicks and spent Christmas day on Rush Street, opening expensive gifts from the “great lady,” as the Luces always called her. (His modest gifts from his parents arrived at Hotchkiss by mail weeks later.) Mrs. McCormick’s generosity was not, however, restricted to Christmas. She “had four prs of fine silk socks laid out in front of my door one morning,” he wrote his mother. “Gave me $10 today for ‘incidental expenses’ and made me promise to take a taxi if ever caught in the rain—‘no matter what the cost,’ she said!”25

  When he returned to Hotchkiss, she paid for his train tickets, gave him pocket money for the trip, and sent him gifts of cash periodically during the rest of the year. Almost immediately, she began planning for his next visit. “The glow has fled that radiated through these humble halls, where at Christmas time young voices were heard—and light footsteps on the stair!” she lamented a few days after he left. In the meantime Harry sent her copies of his speeches in the debating society and his articles in the Lit, and wrote her—as he did to his parents—recounting the great events of his struggle to succeed. For the rest of her life, he remained her “dear boy,” the object of her continued attention, the recipient of her frequent largesse. Harry had no qualms about accepting her many gifts. Missionary families were accustomed to surviving through the generosity of others.26

  The summer of 1914 was a rare opportunity for the Luce family to be together. Harry’s mother and siblings had come over from Europe—his mother in February, leaving the girls behind in their German school until they hurriedly escaped Germany in midsummer on the eve of World War I. His father was committed to another full year of fundraising in the United States. So the family rented a house in Hartford (despite young Harry’s preference for New York) and spent the summer months—as they had so often done at Iltus Huk—pursuing self-improving activities for themselves. Harry created a chart to encourage the family to take “healthy walks”—“Nothing less than a consecutive half mile may be counted,” he announced—and made sure that he finished first in what he, at least, automatically considered a competition. In August he logged thirty and a half miles, more than twice as many as anyone else.27

  His parents remained in the United States long enough for him to spend at least part of both the 1914 Christmas holiday and the 1915 summer vacation with them. But he rarely stayed for long. The day after Christmas, despite earlier protest
ations that he hoped to spend the entire holiday with his family, he left for two weeks with Mrs. McCormick in Chicago. During the summer of 1915, he worked for a time on a farm in Massachusetts (a job he found through a friend at school), but he also visited family friends near Scranton, where he was “forthwith shouted into a whirl of golf and tennis.” Toward the end of the summer, he traveled west to San Francisco to see his family off as they finally returned to China—his sisters en route to Shanghai, where they would enroll in an American boarding school; his parents and Sheldon temporarily to Wei Hsien, pending the move of Shantung Christian University to a new campus in Tsinan, the provincial capital—built largely as a result of Rev. Luce’s prodigious feats of fund-raising in the United States. Characteristically, Harry combined his emotional farewell with a bout of strenuous sightseeing, into the Yosemite Valley and through the Muir Woods (“all fine exercise … [and] a good tanning process”), and later into San Francisco to get a look at the celebrated evangelist Billy Sunday, whom Harry dismissed as “that loud-mouthed fellow … [who] could jump pretty well, and knew how to box the ears of the wind.” He was much more impressed with a distinguished Presbyterian minister who was visiting a church for the New York City elite. He was “famous as Rockefeller’s pastor,” Harry noted, and spoke both more “intelligently” and more “beautifully” than Billy Sunday had. On his way back east he spent most of his time in the train’s observation car, even though he was traveling on a second-class ticket that did not entitle him to sit there. “I went on the plan ‘go, keep going till you’re stopped,’” he unapologetically explained.28

  He spent the last several weeks of the summer in Chicago with the McCormicks, where he found himself drawn into conversations about the long unfolding of the Chinese Revolution. “Ideals are a nation’s greatest asset,” he wrote his father after a spirited conversation with some conservative members of the Chicago business elite, whose views he seemed to have adopted. “But the ideal of democracy is not and never has been, in my mind, either understood or embraced by China as a nation.” Perhaps, he said, the nation would be better off with “a monarchical form of government,” which might “let China find that law and order & courage which is the foundation of liberty,” outside the circle of America and Western Europe. Like his boyhood hero Theodore Roosevelt, he was coming to think of China as one of the “problem” nations for which the best course was “Order first, Liberty second.”29

  Harry was a junior when he returned to Hotchkiss in the fall of 1914 and was living now, he excitedly reported, in one of the school buildings, no longer in a rooming house in the village. He was also beginning the year in which the school’s great prizes would be open to him: editorships, club presidencies, class offices, and the like, all of which were bestowed in the spring. Harry’s competitive impulses, which had shaped much of his first year at Hotchkiss, now grew in intensity, and he spent much of his time scrambling for advancement in one organization after another—and writing to his parents with elaborate accounts of his achievements, along with detailed and self-exculpatory explanations of his occasional failures. His father warned him about his “nervous disposition,” which he said ran in the family and which had, he claimed, physical as well as psychological risks. Harry should avoid his tendency to eat too quickly, which could cause stomach ailments and “distemper;” and he should also avoid rubbing his face nervously with his hands—which, his father insisted, contributed to Harry’s mild acne problems. “I note that the people of best breeding I know never touch their faces, noses, or ears.” But he did not discourage Harry from pursuing his ambitions. Perhaps he knew that such discouragement would be futile.30

  Harry paid little attention to his father’s advice. He continued to strive for and almost always attained academic distinction (with courses again narrowly concentrated in Latin, German, Greek, French, English, and the Bible); he remained first in his class through almost all of his junior year and was the only junior to make the High Honor Roll. As a result, as he somewhat smugly put it, he became “the object of a little more respect than here to fore.” But his principal ambition was now not for grades but for office. To achieve a high position in the school, he explained to his occasionally skeptical parents (who urged him to give first priority to his academic work) would “mean that I have made good—slightly above the average—in at least one branch of school life.” He added (somewhat disingenuously for the top scholar in his class) that “this is what scholarship boys are supposed to do and if I want to have my scholarship renewed it behooves me to push things as best I can.”31

  He continued to work hard at debating, hoping to become a major figure in the Debating Union, “one of the foremost school offices!” A highlight of the debating year was the contest between the school’s two debating societies: the Forum and the Agora, for which Harry prepared with some trepidation, since his opponent was a senior widely regarded as the school’s best debater. But he defeated the school star and won “the gold medal for myself” and critical points for the victorious team. “Thus another event in Life’s circle goes round,” he reported to his parents, “—‘something accomplished, something done!’” Toward the end of the year, when the Debating Union chose its officers, Luce was named president of the Agora.32

  He cast an occasional, hopeful eye at student government but did not pursue it, aware that social standing, not ability, played the principal role in the selection. He tried out for the drama society and secured a minor part (as “a new young missionary just going out to his field”) in one of its productions. He became involved with the campus Christian organization, the Saint Luke’s Society—although he did not see it as one of his principal commitments. His greatest hope, however, was to be president of the Lit, a goal he had set for himself during his first year and that he now single-mindedly pursued. He flooded the editors with poems, essays, and stories and kept meticulous notes on what was accepted (mostly poems, some essays, few stories). He assisted in the design of the magazine, helped with the sale of advertisements, and even came to the rescue of the business manager, who fell ill before a school play and asked Harry to accompany his date in his stead. His election as editor in chief in the early spring was anticlimactic: He had no serious rivals. Almost immediately he began looking ahead to his own time at the helm, determined to make a mark for himself in his new position. He organized a banquet for the outgoing board, “establishing a new precedent here at Hotchkiss … [and] putting the Lit on a distinctly respected and dignified basis.” In the meantime he was laying plans “for the wonderful Lit that we hope to make next year. If our dreams come anywhere near true, we shall give those interested in School Publications an eye opener!”33

  Harry’s high ambitions for the Lit were at least in part a result of his realization that he would not be a major figure on the more prestigious campus publication, the Record. Even though he heeled successfully for the newspaper in the winter of his second year, and even though he worked hard and published many stories in the paper, he was never in contention for the editorship. That was, he explained to his mother, because another of his classmates already had the office virtually locked up—“a boy, Hadden, who is already on the Board.” He did not know it at the time, but the “boy, Hadden,” was to become—with the exception of his parents—the most important figure in Harry’s young life.34

  Briton Hadden was born in February 1898 into a prosperous Brooklyn Heights family. His maternal grandfather was a successful silk importer. His father’s father was president of a Brooklyn savings bank. Brit’s childhood was in most respects as conventionally American and middle class as Harry’s was unusual. His father died when he was seven, but a close extended family and a doting mother softened the trauma of the loss. His mother eventually remarried, and Brit’s new stepfather—a physician—became a devoted and affectionate parent.

  As a child in Brooklyn, Brit was an exuberant, highly social boy, the leader of a circle of neighborhood friends, and—his mother later claimed—
someone with strong opinions about everything. He had two passions: writing and baseball. He wrote poems, stories, and reports of the neighborhood, beginning even before he entered school—including a series of mostly violent tales about battles among rabbits, cats, and other usually more innocent creatures. As a student at Brooklyn Polytechnic Preparatory School, which he entered at the age of ten, he created an unofficial, handwritten newspaper, illustrated with his own cartoons. He called it the Daily Glonk, after a word used in the popular comic strip Krazy Kat to describe the noise made when someone hit Krazy on the head with a brickbat. The paper was lively and irreverent. “The ‘Daily Glonk’ wishes to apologize to its many subscribers for its tardyness,” Brit wrote in one issue. “This was unavoidable, however, as the paper was twice destroyed by a rough politician who did not like to see his name in print.” It was also at times both cruel and openly bigoted. Of a Jewish classmate with a lisp, the Glonk wrote that “Theo. Oswald Clarke thallied forth to thcool arrayed in a thplendid new thuit. Unhappily for Theo., however, he forgot to remove a Moe Levy price mark…. Take it off Theo. We know you.” In a May 1913 issue he wrote of the “great success” of the “grand Yiddisher ball,” at which the “Jew Theo. Clarke performed wonderfully as leader of the grand march.” Under a crudely racist drawing of a local African American, the paper went on to note that “the niggers are jealous,” and that in response the “champion Nigger Spitter of America … is promoting the ‘Coon’s Cake Walk.’” In the insular, white, Protestant middle-class world of the Hadden family, such sentiments offended almost no one.35

  However much Brit liked writing and editing, he liked baseball more. Like many Brooklynites, he was a passionate Dodger fan, but his love for the game was actually almost indiscriminate. “I go and see either Brooklyn or the Giants play every day,” he wrote a cousin in 1914, “and that’s my idea of a good time.” When he was unable to go to the stadium, he often stood outside the Brooklyn Eagle offices waiting for scores. In the summers he organized fiercely competitive baseball games almost every day near the family’s summer home in Quogue. He dreamed of being a major-league player himself and spoke with contempt of friends and relatives who liked more sedentary or genteel sports like golf and tennis. When he entered Hotchkiss in the fall of 1913 (at the same time that Harry arrived), his principal ambition was to become a member of the school’s baseball team, as his brother had been before him. But he had little talent for baseball or, for that matter, any other sport. “I’m still on the class squad but I might as well be a dummy for all the baseball I’m getting,” he wrote his mother in despair. “Gee, my chances for making the big team before I get out of here are about as big as the Brooklyns’ of winning the pennant.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Brit soon turned his ambitions to student journalism instead, where he found himself before long in an unstated rivalry with another refugee from Hotchkiss team sports: Harry.36