The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  The heady economic climate of the late 1920s inspired other publishers to launch new business magazines, including the short-lived Magazine of Business, which, like Fortune, claimed to be committed to a broad portrayal of the capitalist world aimed at a wide readership. In many ways, however, it epitomized the kind of business journalism for which Luce and the other founders of Fortune often expressed contempt. Luce’s colleague Eric Hodgins might well have had the Magazine of Business in mind when he once described business reporting in the 1920s as “simply pap…. If they weren’t written from handouts [from corporation publicists], they might just as well have been.” The Magazine of Business was, indeed, a willing promoter of its corporate constituency. Launched in 1927, it was clearly failing by mid-1929, even before the stock market crash. In August it was absorbed by a new and more important periodical published by McGraw-Hill: Business Week—a magazine inspired in part by Time and once proposed to Luce, who rejected it in favor of Fortune.7

  Luce’s idea for what became Fortune had come in part out of his own longtime and growing curiosity about the world of business and the people who led it—an unsurprising interest for someone who was himself a young businessman working in the booming economic climate of the late 1920s. Seldom in American history had there been more interest in and enthusiasm for the corporate world and its leaders, an enthusiasm epitomized by the laconic Calvin Coolidge’s claim that “the business of America is business.” Luce echoed Coolidge’s view. “Business is essentially our civilization…. Business is our life,” he said in a March 1929 speech.8

  But Luce’s interest in business was also partly anthropological. Because corporations now exercised so much power in the world, Luce argued, it was important for Americans to understand how they worked. Corporate leaders in the past had tended to hide from public view, aided by what Luce called the “Stygian ignorance of business which has almost universally characterized the press.” Corporations, he said, needed to be held up to honest scrutiny. Luce denounced the common belief in the 1920s that “anything faintly resembling an honest analysis of business was regarded as vulgar or Communistic or both,” that “something called private business as then organized was the God-given order of the universe.” He worried that most writing about business was uncritical, even adulatory. This slavish adulation of the “tycoons,” as Time had famously named corporate titans, could not continue, in part because of a fundamental change in the nature of business management. Corporate leaders, Luce insisted, were no longer mainly the visionary founders of their companies; the “tycoon” was becoming “less and less the owner and more and more the semi-detached or, at any rate, detachable manager.” That meant that corporate leaders were more likely to play multiple roles in society, at times using their generalized expertise as strategists and managers in areas outside business altogether. “Many more tycoons … will emerge as public characters,” Luce accurately predicted. “Being well-known they will be repositories of public trust … they will constantly be called upon for advice and even for positions in local and national government.” They would, in short, be even more influential than the single-minded founders of great companies in the late nineteenth century had been. And so the press would now have to watch. Given the dramatic collapse of the American economy, and of the stature of business that began just as the new magazine was being launched, this idea of looking at business from the outside proved to be especially critical to the magazine’s success.9

  Most of all, however, the creation of a new magazine gave Luce a vehicle to establish a voice for himself within the company. He was proud of Time, to be sure, but it it had never really been his magazine—not only because Hadden had dominated its early years but also because its rigid format and inflexible system limited the ability of any one person, even its owner, to shape its content. The new business magazine, by contrast, would allow Luce to design a publication for his own boundless curiosity and ambition. Providing news to busy, uninformed people—the principal goal of Time—was a worthy but no longer a wholly satisfying purpose. Luce wanted as well to communicate big ideas, to tackle important questions, and to establish great goals for the world of business and for the nation. At first, he considered calling the new magazine “Power.” But in the end, that seemed to him an inadequate name for what he envisioned. He settled instead—partly in response to a suggestion from Lila—on the title Fortune, which Luce liked because the name referred not just to wealth, but also to such ideas as “chance,” “fate,” and “destiny.”10

  Luce’s almost passionate commitment to Fortune—his “real love among his magazines,” Peter Drucker, briefly a Time Inc. writer, once observed—began to pour out of him once he threw himself into the planning. Among his first decisions was to emphasize design—to make Fortune “a beautiful magazine, if possible the most beautiful in the world.” It was certainly among the most elaborately and lavishly designed publications of its time. Luce hired “one of the finest typographers and art directors in the country,” Thomas Maitland Cleland, who revived an elegant eighteenth-century typeface, Baskerville, for the magazine. Luce also chose unusually expensive paper that would not have the shiny look of conventional coated stock but could still accommodate high-quality photographs. He commissioned eminent artists and designers—among them Rockwell Kent, Diego Rivera, Charles Sheeler, and Fernand Léger—to create elegant, complex covers. (The first issue bore a striking black-and-bronze image by Cleland of an almost abstract “wheel of fortune,” symbolizing not just the magazine’s title but industry and progress more broadly.) Fortune’s aesthetic represented, among other things, Luce’s own new attraction to modern art and design. Only one printer in the country could handle Fortune’s exacting demands, the Osborne Chromatic Gravure Company in New Jersey. It was necessary to print each side of each page in a separate run. Covers sometimes had to go through seven different print runs to handle the complex coloring. Fortune was not only expensive to print. It was also, unsurprisingly, expensive to buy—one dollar an issue, an astonishing price in an era when most magazines sold for five or ten cents, but one that Luce correctly predicted would give Fortune a kind of status that would attract the affluent readership he was targeting—“those active, intelligent and influential individuals who have a relatively large stake in U.S. Industry and Commerce.”11

  “And now the question,” Luce wrote in a crude early prospectus. “What’s going to be in this magazine?” Luce, Lloyd-Smith, and the few others who worked on the creation of Fortune spent days, even months, proposing and testing story ideas. Luce himself used his few idle hours—sitting in hotel lobbies, riding on trains—listing potential topics on scraps of borrowed stationery: “the Rothschilds,” “Inheritance—the Family Business,” the “Biggest Farmers in the World,” “Total value of art works in the U.S.,” “Sleep—how many hours,” the “Power Trust,” “Sewage,” “Why Jews in clothing business?” According to another early prospectus Fortune would be “not simply a magazine to look at or through.” Like Time it would be “a magazine to read from cover-to-cover.”12

  Fortune did not set out to be a cheerleader for businessmen. But it did intend to elevate the importance of business in the minds of its readers. “Accurately, vividly and concretely to describe Modern Business is the greatest journalistic assignment in history,” Luce’s prospectus announced. Even years later Fortune described itself as “a magazine with a mission. That mission is to assist in the successful development of American Business Enterprise at home and abroad.” But the real story of business, Luce insisted, was not simply industry and financial markets. It was “the daily activity of millions of men throughout the country and throughout the world.” Fortune would look beyond the obvious stories of great corporations and their leaders and search for opportunities to illuminate the workings of economic life. In a sense, therefore, Fortune’s charge was nearly without limits. It would be “the log-book, the critical history, the … record of Twentieth Century industrial civilization.” It would a
lso, Luce insisted, be without ideological boundaries. “Not always flattering will be these descriptions,” the prospectus announced (in high Time style), for Fortune “is neither puffer or booster. Both of ships and of men, Fortune will attempt to write critically, appraisingly … with unbridled curiosity.” Reading Fortune, moreover, “may be one of the keenest pleasures in the life of every subscriber.”13

  As the publication date approached in late 1929, there was something close to euphoria about the rapid progress Fortune was making toward profitability, even before a single issue had been printed. Larsen reported to Luce in early November that there were now thirty thousand subscribers and that nearly eight hundred pages of advertising had been sold, with more than eighty pages already committed to the first issue alone. The magazine, he accurately predicted, would “break even for the year 1930.” The rapid deterioration of the American economy after the October 1929 stock market crash only slightly dampened Luce’s optimism. “We will go ahead and publish,” he told the board, “but we shall be realistic…. We shall recognize that this slump may last as long as one year.” Luce never wavered in his commitment to proceed, and he even persuaded himself that the emerging Depression might be a good thing for the magazine, whose first issue was published in February 1930. “We didn’t want Fortune thought of as stock market fluff,” he later recalled. “In starting out in a slump we had a more solid base.”14

  Fortune was indeed not stock market fluff. Although it went through several distinct phases in its first decade, it remained true to many of its initial goals. It was almost certainly, as Luce had hoped, the most beautiful broad-circulation magazine in America. It was also a true writer’s magazine. Although its language sometimes mimicked Time’s, there was no consistent effort to impose a single literary style on Fortune. That was one reason that it attracted so many distinguished staff writers in its first years: James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald, among many others. Another reason was the relatively high salaries Luce offered in the midst of an economic crisis. (“We have absolutely nothing now but what I earn here,” MacLeish, who missed his poetry but on the whole rather liked writing for the magazine, wrote his family in a low moment, “and … it has meant that I have written nothing [except for Fortune] for a year. Which I cannot endure.”) Fortune was also distinguished by its commitment to photography, so much so that in its early years it promoted itself to a large degree by showcasing a woman who would become its most famous staff photographer, Margaret Bourke-White.15

  Bourke-White came to the attention of Fortune by chance. She had been among the first American photographers to show an interest in industrial design. A series of striking pictures she took in Cleveland between 1928 and 1930—including a particularly impressive set of images of the Otis Steel Company—established her reputation as, in Luce’s words, the “greatest of industrial photographers.” (“It seems to me,” Bourke-White wrote at the time, “that huge machinery, steel girders, locomotives, etc., are so extremely beautiful because they were never meant to be beautiful. They are an expression of something that has come about in a perfectly natural way.”) Luce wired her in Cleveland and invited her to come to see him. Within a few weeks Fortune had hired her on unusual terms. She would work half-time for the magazine at the substantial salary of one thousand dollars a month and would have the remaining weeks to work on her own. Few photographers had achieved widespread fame by 1929; Bourke-White herself was still largely unknown. But Luce saw in her an opportunity to provide a new kind of star power to Fortune, and he began publicizing her association with the magazine as if she were already famous. Promotional literature in the months before publication contained full-page photographs—such as a picture of a steel mill that “imprisons the glow of molten metal”—credited to “The Photographer: Margaret Bourke-White of Fortune’s staff, now touring the U.S.” She was, she later said, impressed by Luce’s sophisticated understanding of what photographs could do and his curiosity about “what the average man is interested in. As though he was a sort of super-average man.” She remembered Luce telling her that “the camera would be as an interpreter, recording what modern industrial civilization is, how it looks, how it meshes.” It was almost “miraculous,” she later said, that a magazine could so perfectly capture her own ambitious hopes—“I with my dream of portraying industry in photographs, and they with their new magazine designed to hold just such photographs.”16

  Time Inc. was not accustomed to hiring women for high-profile positions. Talented women abounded in the company, but almost never did they emerge from the virtually all-female research and clerical staffs, which—while indispensable to the magazines—were rarely considered pools from which to draw writers and editors. Bourke-White was among the first women to break that mold, and she was able to do so only because the company had never before hired professional photographers and could, despite her growing fame, consider her in some way outside the core editorial activities of the magazines. Perhaps as a result of her anomalous position, she and her editors were almost always in conflict—about money, about the quality of her photographs, about her “inappropriate” work for other publications. Her reputation with the editorial staff was, one editor wrote, someone who caused “troubles and headaches wherever she operates.” And yet through the early years of Fortune (and later Life), she provided some of the most memorable and important images the magazines ever published, and she became in many ways more renowned (and more marketable) than any other editorial employee.17

  Among the qualities that made Bourke-White so valuable to Fortune was that her own photographic aesthetic coincided with—and also helped to shape—an important aspect of the magazine: Luce’s own fascination with and admiration for what was coming to be known as the “machine age.” Just as Bourke-White had found herself drawn to the physical structures of modernity in Cleveland, so Luce, and his Fortune staff, were enthralled by the new social aesthetic that the modern industrial world was creating. Their enthusiasm for the beauty and power of technology was visible in the first issue of Fortune, in which Bourke-White provided photographs of the Swift Meatpacking Plant in Chicago. A factory that was, in essence, a slaughterhouse would seem an unlikely example of the new machine age. But Bourke-White’s pictures revealed the state-of-the-art technology of the slaughterhouses with few glimpses of the carnage. Her opening photograph—accompanying an elaborate and clinical diagram of a hog’s various cuts of meat—provided an almost abstract image of a vast herd of hog backs, nearly unrecognizable as living animals. Even the more conventional photographs of pigs moving through the plant emphasized the orderly, almost mechanical process. The text of the article, by Parker Lloyd-Smith, was similarly dispassionate in its description of the efficiency, and even the beauty, of the grisly process. The hogs that arrived at the Swift plant were, Lloyd-Smith wrote, “beautifully assembled mechanisms…. By countless individual acts of destruction, Swift & Company paradoxically increases the value of products which are the result of countless individual acts of creation.”18

  Fortune’s admiring portrait of Swift had a special meaning, because Swift was the meatpacking giant that twenty-four years earlier had been a target of Upton Sinclair’s sensational novel The Jungle. Sinclair had used the meatpacking industry as a symbol of the greedy, rapacious, and chaotic character of American industry. He was particularly effective in providing revolting depictions of the slaughterhouses, and especially accounts of how sausages were made:

  There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it … a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats…. the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.

  The book crea
ted a popular sensation and led directly to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which imposed new sanitary standards on the industry.

  Fortune’s very different portrait of Swift deliberately reflected the broad, “modern” changes in meatpacking that Sinclair had helped create. The choice of Swift as the first article in the first issue of Fortune was also designed more broadly to contrast the character of modern industries from the unregulated, inefficient factories of a generation earlier. And it was also a deliberate effort to draw a contrast between the hostile muckraking of the Progressive Era and the more professionalized journalism of Luce’s world. Fortune’s Swift was no longer a “jungle” but a model of modern, progressive technology: