The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  The basic structure of Time remained largely unchanged as well. The relentless “departmental” organization, the disciplined brevity, the reliance on borrowed sources, and the commitment to giving readers a comprehensive view of the week’s news that could be read in less than an hour all survived the transition from precariousness to success. Not everything stayed the same, of course. Some of the sillier features of the first years gradually fell away: the “imaginary interviews” with historical figures, the “Comings and Goings” of celebrities, the pompously opinionated “Point with Pride” and “View with Alarm” columns, the news “quizzes” that had begun in Cleveland. So did some of the rote reporting dictated by the magazine’s format. News of state governments and foreign nations, for example, became more selective and more reflective of the importance of events and less dutifully in response to the need to fill up all of the magazine’s “departments.”

  The more significant changes were a result less of shifts in philosophy than in the character of the editorial process. From a magazine written by a small group of young, like-minded, Ivy League men working inhumanly long hours under tremendous pressure, Time slowly became a publication produced by a large staff of professional writers, few of them any longer friends and classmates of Hadden and Luce, trained in what were becoming the settled conventions of the magazine. Time was not yet dispatching reporters out into the world to gather news and did not begin to do so until the 1930s. It did have a research department, which had begun with the hiring of Nancy Ford in the first months of the magazine and grew to become a large and very active part of the editorial process. (It was the only nonclerical area of the magazine to hire women, whom Hadden called “young lady assistants,” and for many years it hired only women.) On the whole, however, Time continued to rely on newspapers (above all the New York Times) and other magazines as the source of its stories—to the increasing dismay of the journalistic community, which had ignored the borrowing when Time was obscure and unknown but which sometimes complained loudly once the magazine was a success. Writing, not reporting, was the most highly valued aspect of Time’s internal culture. Partly because the stories were distillations rather than reportage, no story carried a byline, and only the most knowledgeable or observant reader could distinguish clearly among the styles of different writers.35

  The emerging organizational culture actually cemented and standardized the style and tone that Hadden, in particular, had imposed upon the magazine through sheer force of will in the magazine’s early days. Most of the writers emulated his tastes—both because they feared his wrath and because they admired his brilliance and wished to absorb it. Indeed, by institutionalizing the style and tone of the early Time, the staff was also in some ways expanding and exaggerating the magazine’s peculiarities.36

  The most visible and famous idiosyncrasy of Time was its language—sometimes admired, often ridiculed, never as pervasively distinctive as its critics claimed, but a defining element of the magazine nevertheless. In setting out to challenge the norms of journalism, Hadden and Luce wanted, among other things, to confront the sober and, in their view, drab language that was the lingua franca of the newspapers of their time. Time, they believed, should be not only concise but also lively, irreverent, and entertaining. Developing a distinctive literary style for the magazine was the first important step toward that goal—and a feature promoted heavily from the start in the company’s own promotional literature. “TIME has given such attention to the development of the best narrative English,” Larsen wrote grandiosely in a letter to potential subscribers, “that hundreds of editors and journalists have declared it to be the greatest creative force in modern journalism.”37

  As with most other editorial innovations in the early years, Hadden took the lead—although Luce was an active partner in the effort. Both had studied Greek at Hotchkiss and at Yale; but while Luce was by far the more serious Greek scholar, it was Hadden who proposed the Iliad as a model for the language the magazine should use. He carried a tattered, heavily annotated translation with him to the office and kept a notebook filled with lists of words and phrases that would, he believed, replicate the energy and poetry of Homer. The Iliad* used such phrases as “much-enduring Odysseus,” “wine-dark sea,” “fleet-footed Achilles,” “far-darting Apollo.” Time created its own compound adjectives to describe people in the news: “flabby-chinned,” “snaggle-toothed,” “coffee-colored,” “bandy-legged,” and “trim-figured.” While the Iliad referred to “many-fountained Ida,” Time wrote of “many-towered Danzig.” In the Iliad were inverted sentences such as, “Up to his side he dashed and flanked Great Ajax tight.” Time countered with: “Up to the White House portico rolled a borrowed automobile,” or the especially clumsy: “As impossible of fair historical evaluation is [Hoover’s] two-year record as was the battle of Gettysburg at noon of the second day.” And at times the magazine provided long, irrelevant passages that directly (and inelegantly) mimicked the Iliad’s lofty language: “The pens and tongues of contumely were arrested. Mocking mouths were shut. Even righteous protestation hushed its clamor, as when, having striven manfully in single combat, a high-helmed champion is stricken by Jove’s bolt and the two snarling armies stand at sudden gaze, astonished and bereft a moment of their rancor” (an introduction to a story on the 1925 Scopes trial).38

  But Hadden did not stop with the Iliad. He made exhaustive lists of other techniques that he proposed for the magazine. Occupations, origins, and personality types became titles: “Teacher Scopes,” “Governess Ross,” “Editor Mencken,” “England’s Baldwin,” “Demagog Hitler.” Middle names sprouted everywhere, whether or not the subjects in question (or anyone else) ever used them: “Herbert Clark Hoover,” “Samuel Morgan Shortridge,” “Alfred Emanuel Smith.” In 1930 a Smith College professor wrote an article in Philological Quarterly about what Lewis Carroll had once called “portmanteau words,” combinations of two distinct terms. Among his most prominent examples were words from Time: “cinemactor” and “cinemactress,” “primogenial” (to describe a pleasant young man who had inherited his father’s congressional seat). Hadden’s crudely handwritten style sheet for Time writers used other examples of this kind of vivid wordsmithing: “Broadway-farer,” “eccentrician.” In writing about Alabama senator Tom Heflin, Hadden created a verb, “to heffle,” which he defined as “to talk loud and long without saying much.” He also liked heavy-handed metaphors: “eyes big as baseballs,” “ruddy as a round full moon.” Hadden encouraged Time writers to use vivid words, whether newly invented or not. People in Time were “famed,” not “famous;” “potent,” not “powerful;” “blatant,” not “obvious.” They “whacked” rather than “struck,” “ogled” rather than “looked,” “strode” rather than “walked,” and “smirked” rather than “smiled.” They “irked,” “bumbled,” “vexed,” and “ousted.” Rhyming and alliteration were popular devices, too, as in the frequent use of “late, great” to describe recently deceased people, or the euphemism “great and good friend” to describe someone’s unmarried lover. Obituaries did not simply report but banally philosophized, with the frequent introduction: “Death, as it must to all men, came last week” to the subject of the notice.39

  At times, particularly in its first years, the magazine’s language was often flip and even sophomoric. Time often began a story with an irrelevant cliché or a banal truism. In writing about the divided views of Alaskans, Time began: “Some like it hot, some like cold, and some like it in the pot nine days old.” Or, in describing a meeting between the president and a senator, “When a sharp tongue takes to soft words, good nature prospers.” On other occasions stories were introduced with what can only be called pedantry: “There is no more tragic phenomenon in this vale of tears than the deliberate perversion of an idea or philosophy out of its original meaning in order to serve the base purpose of its enemies.” But even as the magazine matured and shed some of its more egregious excesses, writers—in their effort to avoid conv
entionally informative leads—forced readers to wade through considerable imagery before encountering any real information. “Winter tramped prematurely out of the Northwest last week,” a 1927 story on a Labor Department unemployment report began. “A Montana stockman died in a blizzard. Minnesota lakes were skimmed with ice. Michigan had icicles…. Car radiators froze in Illinois.”

  And yet Time frequently used these same techniques to real effect, successfully drawing readers into subjects they might otherwise have overlooked, and making people and events more vivid than a more conventional story could have done. A story on the Treasury Department’s woes in 1931, for example, began: “For ten years, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew William Mellon has had fair fiscal weather. Ample taxes from a busy, thriving nation piled up whacking surpluses for him to administer. Under the sun of Prosperity, the public debt melted like a snowman in May. A happy man devoted to his job, Secretary Mellon was kept awake at night by no great problems of government finance.” Time could be pompous, irritating, pedantic, even ridiculous. But if that was all it was, it would never have succeeded. To most of Time’s large and rapidly expanding readership, even many who were annoyed occasionally by its idiosyncrasies, the magazine was also lively, witty, entertaining, and informative. Perhaps most important, Time’s language, however idiosyncratic, was consistent and homogeneous. It presented readers with a familiar and predictable experience. Time boasted often of its “cover-to-cover readers,” of whom there were many, and the magazine’s language was almost certainly an important part of the reason.40

  Throughout the 1920s Hadden drilled his writers in the literary formulas he had created for Time, using his oversize pencils and his gruff, booming voice to browbeat the staff into meeting his demands. T. S. Matthews, a Time writer and editor for many years, described his own early days at the magazine as a period when “all ‘neophytes’ [Time’s word for cub writers] were expected to memorize Hadden’s invented words and phrases and to use them at every opportunity.” But many writers later recalled adopting the style less because of pressure from above than because it was so much a part of the culture of the magazine that it was almost impossible to resist. Even decades later, after years of efforts to wean reporters from some of the excesses of the original Hadden style, Matthews recalled that “the iron had so far entered our souls that the attempt at reform was never successful.” The standardization of style was sometimes stifling to serious writers. John O’Hara, the soon-to-be-famous novelist, spent a few months writing about sports for Time in the early 1920s and then fled to The New Yorker. Such defections, although usually after longer periods of service than O’Hara’s, were common for many decades. But other writers settled comfortably into the Time system, came to value its distinctive kind of writing, and remained for many years.41

  “Timese” or “Timestyle”—as the magazine’s writing was often called, sometimes mockingly, sometimes affectionately—was, if nothing else, contagious, and not just within the magazine itself. Words that Time invented, retrieved from obscurity, or borrowed from foreign languages became enduring parts of modern English: “tycoon,” “pundit,” “socialite,” “kudos.” For years schools and universities reveled in producing parody issues of Time and took special delight in their mastery of Timese. “White-sweatered, good-looking friend of beauty-queen Virginia Clark, James Graham (‘Cheerleader’) Woodford strode into a … meeting breathing fire,” a University of Washington lampoon wrote in 1931. “To the stacccato blast of forty machine guns Hizzoner Pedro de Miguel took office,” a Foreign News story announced in a Naval Academy satirization of Time. Hotchkiss, Luce and Hadden’s alma mater, produced an issue of the student magazine, the Index, in Timese. Time itself encouraged some such parodies. In 1934 the White Company, a manufacturer of trucks and buses, enlisted some of the editors to help them produce a mock issue promoting the company, with a cover story on “Truck of the Year.” Even mainstream newspapers and magazines reporting on the progress of Time or on the activities of Luce and Hadden could not resist mimicking aspects of Timese in their own stories. “Birth of a new species of man of power, the tycoon, was predicted this noon by quick-speaking successful young Henry R. Luce,” a Rochester reporter noted in 1929. An Edmonton, Alberta, newspaper wrote of a Luce appearance in Banff, “No speaker for publication is pleasant, personable, energetic, ex-cub Henry Luce.” Even Harry’s own mother could not resist a gentle poke at Timese in September 1926 when she wrote him about her imminent departure from China: “As Time would say, America looms.”42

  As distinctive as Time’s language, and closely related to it, were the magazine’s opinions and attitudes. Luce and Hadden had promised from the start that Time would not be a “digest of opinion,” that it would have “no axe to grind,” that it would be “objective” and “unbiased.” And in many respects, at least in the beginning, they kept that promise. Time did not clearly favor any political party, and Luce, at least, was himself unsure in the 1920s of whether he preferred Democrats or Republicans. (He and Hadden voted for Calvin Coolidge in 1924; Hadden voted for Hoover in 1928, but Luce supported Al Smith.) Unlike in later years, when Luce’s own strong views on certain issues reliably shaped—and at times distorted—reporting, Time in the 1920s and much of the 1930s only rarely took clear or sustained positions. But the magazine was nevertheless filled with opinions, even if not consistent ones. Indeed, its insistence on expressing its own views on almost everything it reported, however random and varying those views may have been, was a fundamental part of its character.43

  To some degree the opinionated tone of Time was simply a literary device, much like the magazine’s eccentric language. It reflected in part the generational irreverence of those who, like Luce and Hadden, had grown up during and after World War I and had been shaped by the skepticism and impatience with pretense of their time. Hadden, in particular, continued to emulate H. L. Mencken’s talent at ridiculing almost everyone of importance. The attitudes of Time, although not its literary style, had at least some things in common with Mencken’s the Smart Set, which he edited with George Jean Nathan and called “a magazine of cleverness.”

  But Time’s outlook reflected more than a generalized irreverence. It conveyed as well the elitist cultural conservatism of its principal editors and writers. On the one hand Time shared the contempt of Sinclair Lewis and others for the tastes and values of the lower bourgeoisie (or what Hadden, borrowing a term from Mencken, privately called on occasion the “booboisie”). The magazine only hinted at this contempt in its pages, knowing that its targets were, or could become, an important constituency for the magazine. But in the early years at least, there were many signs of condescension—the demeaning descriptions and nicknames assigned to people the editors considered crass and boorish, the sly anecdotes and dismissive phrases that made those they considered dull look pompous and ridiculous. (“It is the conviction of stupid people,” a Time review of an irreverent play stated, “that only that which is solemn may be profound and that to seem satirical is to be unsympathetic.”)44

  Time was similarly contemptuous of the iconclasts of its own generation who sought to overturn many of the canons of traditional high culture. Hadden and Luce were as hostile to artistic revolution as they were to dull conformity. In the very first issue of Time, the editors wrote witheringly of what they considered incomprehensible books. “Lucidity is no part of the auctorial task,” the editors wrote censoriously of modernist writers. Time was particularly contemptuous of what are now considered two of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century. “To the uninitiated,” the magazine described James Joyce’s Ulysses, “it appeared that Mr. Joyce had taken some half a million assorted words—many such as are not heard in reputable circles—shaken them in a colossal hat, and laid them end to end.” Of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the writers dismissively noted, “It was rumored to be written as a hoax.” (The article was cryptically titled “Shantih Shantih Shantih,”* after the obscure last line of the poem.) Even les
s radical intellectuals attracted Time’s scorn. The witty, self-consciously “clever” writers and intellectuals who populated the Algonquin Round Table were, the magazine gratuitously commented, “the supposedly elect,” “log rollers and back-scratchers,” and really little more than “clever gossips.” Modern art attracted skepticism, too. Cubism, the magazine claimed, “is in danger of itself becoming a mere convention.” In the same issue Time ran a strong defense of classical education, because “Greek and Roman thinking is the core of our culture.”45

  Time was also distinctive for its fascination with powerful men and women. “People just aren’t interesting in the mass,” Luce once said. “It’s only individuals who are exciting.” For decades, beginning with the first issue, virtually every cover of Time carried a portrait of an important man or, on rare occasions, woman (and once, in 1928, a basset hound, to draw attention to the Annual Dog Show of the Westminster Kennel Club in New York). The magazine chose a “Man of the Year” every January beginning with Charles Lindbergh in 1927. (There were only two “Women of the Year” in Time’s first fifty years—Wallis Simpson in 1937 and Queen Elizabeth II in 1953). Cover portraits—black-and-white drawings and photographs at first, gradually replaced by color images starting in 1929—became a signature feature of the magazine. For decades being selected for the cover of Time came to seem to many readers (and increasingly to the editors themselves) a very high honor. The magazine in fact attracted considerable criticism when on occasion it chose controversial or reviled people for the cover—for example, Al Capone in 1930 (smiling and elegantly dressed), which one reader called “an outrage to public decency”—as if the selection was by itself a sign of approval. But cover subjects were overwhelmingly people of relatively conventional distinction and respectability. Major public figures—statesmen, business leaders, generals, and the royalty of the worlds of art, entertainment, and sport—were the staples. Although most subjects were American, the Anglophilic Hadden and Luce included a heavy representation of English figures and a scattering of people from other nations. The profiles of cover subjects could be breathlessly admiring or, on occasion, bitingly critical, but they almost always had a heightened level of judgment and descriptive detail. (Time’s distinctive language could burnish a reputation as easily as it could tarnish one.) Cover stories were usually preoccupied with power, and so it was not surprising that the magazine focused on the world’s most powerful men. In the magazine’s first half century Stalin appeared on the cover twelve times, Roosevelt, Churchill, Franco, and Mussolini eight each, Hitler seven, and Chiang Kai-shek ten.46