Agee’s disaffection was no secret to anyone. Macdonald’s restiveness remained mostly hidden. He argued with Luce occasionally, once accusing him of not having “enough social consciousness.” But mostly he kept his opinions to himself until he finally decided to rebel openly. He was assigned in 1936 to coauthor a four-part series on U.S. Steel with his fellow Fortune writer Robert Cantwell. The story sharply denounced the company’s harsh labor policy, “the most severely criticized and most uncompromisingly defended position ever taken by the Corporation.” And it concluded sourly that “three great social groups are affected by the Corporation: its stockholders, its customers, its employees…. It has in the past pleased no one of them.” But Macdonald was not content with criticism of the company’s performance alone. In the course of his work on the project, he had taken a strong dislike to Myron Taylor, U.S. Steel’s president; and he wrote scathingly in the last of the four articles that Taylor had come to head the giant corporation only because he “looked like a movie director’s idea of a big corporation CEO.” (Even years later, looking back on the story, he described Taylor as “that great ham character actor.”) He also, as he himself later claimed, included a deliberate provocation to Luce: an epigraph that read “‘Monopoly is the final stage of capitalism.’ V.I. Lenin.” Luce demanded that Macdonald rewrite the article. Macdonald refused—apparently no longer able to suppress his loathing of his work at Fortune—which he later expressed openly in an acerbic article about Luce and his magazine in the Nation.30
Luce had been mostly tolerant of the critical tone of Fortune despite his frequent grumbling about the complaints he received from his friends and colleagues in the business world. But his intervention in the U.S. Steel piece was a clear sign of change. In 1936 Luce began to harden the tone of Fortune—partly in response to the passions raised within the company by the Spanish civil war, which was, Luce later wrote, “fought in the Time-Life Building with some bitter consequences.” Many of the more left-leaning writers and editors departed. Macdonald resigned, openly defiant. His departure was the most wounding to Luce, who later recalled spending “more time trying to educate that young man than any other writer I’ve ever dealt with.” Agee moved out of Fortune at about the same time and became a book reviewer for Time. A few years later he left the company to write novels. MacLeish resigned in 1938 to accept a position at Harvard, unhappy with the direction the magazine was taking and disappointed in Luce.
The growing restiveness among the Fortune staff was driven as much by their unhappiness with Time as by the changing character of their own magazine. Macdonald wrote Luce not long before his resignation that “the chief difference between Time and the [liberal journal of opinion] Nation seems to be that the Nation is consciously left-wing … whereas Time is ostensibly impartial but actually (perhaps unconsciously) right-wing.” MacLeish, in his own last year with the company, frequently sent Luce tough if courteous criticisms of Time. He was particularly contemptuous of Laird Goldsborough, whom MacLeish, like many others, still accused of fascist inclinations. “I don’t think anyone here has ever thought Time was fascist in intention,” MacLeish wrote in 1936. But the magazine did have “a strong unconscious bias, particularly in labor stories and in foreign news relating to revolutionary developments.” MacLeish engaged in an increasingly acrimonious exchange with Goldsborough himself about Time’s coverage of the Spanish civil war and its often-unsubtle admiration for fascism, Franco, and Mussolini. Goldsborough, in turn, accused MacLeish of being in league with communists. Luce stood largely apart from the fray, which MacLeish correctly interpreted as his siding with Goldsborough. “I wish some things had gone differently with you,” he wrote Luce ruefully in a farewell letter. “You were meant to be a progressive—a pusher-over—a pryer-up. You were meant to make common cause with the people—all the people. You would have been very happy I think if you could have felt that the New Deal was your affair. Because it was your affair.”
The angst within Fortune was, in short, a fear that it would become more like Time. That concern grew when Ingersoll moved out of Fortune and into a management position in 1936. The shift created anxiety about his successor and also doubts about Ingersoll’s ability (or willingness) to resist Luce’s influence. (Ingersoll later left the company entirely to start his own short-lived newspaper, P.M.) Ingersoll’s departure from Fortune hastened the changing culture of the magazine. His immediate successor was Eric Hodgins, whose views were not unlike Ingersoll’s but who was weaker and more deferential to Luce. He was replaced less than a year later by Russell Davenport, who was considerably more conservative than either Ingersoll or Hodgins had been and who set out enthusiastically to change the magazine’s tone.31
The changes at Fortune were in part a result of Luce’s loss of patience with what he had come to consider the increasingly anticapitalist and pro–New Deal tone of the magazine. As early as 1933 Luce had told MacLeish that he “ought not to resent the millionaires in the audience, and should cheerfully remember that that happens to be the audience to which they were invited to lecture.” By late 1936 Luce was becoming concerned by the rising level of complaints from advertisers and by what he called the “considerable change in [Fortune’s] philosophy.” The trouble with Fortune, Luce once said, “is that it often forgets it is a Journalist and imagines itself like the Oxford Union … (Socialist these days, of course).”
He was also developing a “growing antipathy to Mr. Roosevelt and the New Deal,” despite some initial enthusiasm. Luce had arranged a meeting with the president in 1933, and he brought MacLeish—who was writing a Fortune profile of Roosevelt—along with him. As they left the White House, MacLeish later recalled, Luce said excitedly, “My God, what a man!” But by 1934 Luce was regularly criticizing the administration—both in speeches and in print. And by the end of 1935 he was becoming exasperated by the great enthusiasm for the New Deal among Fortune writers. He became determined to “get Fortune a little bit straightened out ideologically.” The magazine was, he later recalled, “going more and more socialistic in its attitude. And the question was how could we honestly ask businessmen to advertise in Fortune if our editorial policy had diverged so far from the general business community’s sentiment.” The result was what Luce called a “Respectus” in mid-1937, in which Luce charted a revised course for the magazine. “Fortune,” he announced, “can be either a great Communist magazine or a great Capitalist magazine,” and there was no doubt which choice Luce was making: Fortune would “have a platform with two planks.” One would be the “free and fearless journalism of inquiry.” The other would be “a bias in favor of private enterprise” and against “State-control…. Fortune views with alarm the weakness in private capitalism which invokes collectivism; and points with pride to those merits in private capitalism which argue against collectivism.”32
The new direction for Fortune was not just a result of Luce’s disagreements with his writers about capitalism. It was also a reflection of Luce’s own growing determination to impose a coherent ideology on the magazine—and on the company as a whole. Fortune had, in fact, never been an anticapitalist magazine. Most of its content always fit comfortably into Luce’s own sympathetic, if slightly skeptical, view of the business world; the iconoclastic stories from some of his more left-leaning writers were the exception. What Luce found increasingly troubling about Fortune was less its politics than its diversity of opinion. He had tolerated such diversity into the mid-1930s, but gradually, he had ceased to tolerate the wide range of views reflected in his magazines. Instead he had come to believe that the Time Inc. publications needed to reflect a shared sense of purpose—a purpose defined largely by him.
It was not easy to impose his own beliefs on a large and growing institution. For the rest of his life, Luce railed frequently about his inability to control the contents of the magazines, about the ways in which his writers and editors appeared to ignore his wishes. But he continued to try, and he succeeded often enough to ensure that the Time
Inc. magazines would be distinctive in the world of journalism, that they would present not just the news, but the editor in chief’s own sense of what it meant.
The battle for control began almost immediately upon Luce’s presentation of his “Respectus.” Several staff members protested vehemently against it, not because it marked a turn away from the “socialist inclinations” of the past, but because of the very idea that the magazine should have a more-or-less official “purpose” at all. Fortune, they argued, should “not stoop to a profession of faith … we do not need a platform.” Seventeen female researchers signed a statement denouncing the “total disregard of facts” and the “deliberate bias” that was creeping into the magazine; the principle underlying Fortune, they insisted, had always been the honest pursuit of truth without “a pre-established editorial bias.” Davenport and Luce emphatically disagreed with them. Davenport had, in fact, accepted the managing editorship in 1937 precisely because, as he later wrote, it was necessary “to develop a policy that business men could accept … if Fortune’s reputation in the business world was to be saved.” Luce had a larger goal. He believed that the magazine should take a stand on the great issues of the day—a stand that would reflect Luce’s own political and ideological progress.33
Although Luce would eventually become best known, and most controversial, for his opinions on international affairs—and for his passionate views on China—his first active political interventions focused on the role of government in the economy. He was unhappy with the New Deal and what he considered its arrogant and dismissive attitude toward business. But he was not a reactionary. He was impatient with the rigidity and conservatism of many corporations and their leaders. Beginning tentatively in 1935, and with greater emphasis in the later years of the decade, he helped craft an economic policy for himself and for his magazines—a set of ideas similar to what some years later would come to be known as “corporate liberalism.” He began increasingly to argue that the dangerous path to “collectivism” could be averted only by a change in the character of private enterprise. He also came to believe that one of Fortune’s missions must be to explain and promote his views.
Corporate liberalism as Luce understood it had roots in the efforts of some corporations in the 1920s to create a benevolent environment for their workers, a system known at the time as “welfare capitalism.” The relatively few industries that embraced this concept had provided employees with previously rare benefits such as pension contributions, paid vacations, and most of all higher wages. Luce was a quiet champion of welfare capitalism in the late 1920s. But more than that, he was a harsh critic of what he considered the “defensive, suspicious, false” conservatism of many business leaders. “Toryism resists change,” he had said in 1928. “But business is the great innovator. Business discards the good for the better, the best for the once impossible…. And with business came liberalism. It remodeled thrones, rewrote constitutions, altered, adapted, renovated, recreated. And what could not be renovated, it removed.”
Although Luce disliked many New Deal policies, his principal complaints against Roosevelt were more personal. The president, he believed, was governing outside the rule of law; he had become an authoritarian leader who exercised power almost arbitrarily, and had used his position to make demagogic attacks on rival institutions, most notably business. As early as 1935, in an article titled “The Case Against Roosevelt” (which Luce, somewhat capriciously, assigned to the very pro-Roosevelt MacLeish), Fortune noted the “personal character” of New Deal regulation, its apparent vindictiveness, its “feel of the human interferer.” The president, MacLeish wrote, “has opened a door through which a dictator could easily pass.” Such criticisms grew steadily over the next several years—in commissioned pieces in Fortune from such anti-Roosevelt figures as Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan (“This either is, or it is not, a government of laws rather than of men,” Vandenberg wrote, citing the New Deal’s “disregard for the spirit as well as the letter of the Constitution”), and in Luce’s own public statements (“It is now Franklin Roosevelt’s task without delay to restore the long-term conditions of confidence which private capitalism requires,” he told a group of Ohio businessmen).34
Corporate liberalism, therefore, was simultaneously a plea for government to respect the “rule of law” and the prerogatives of business, and a call for the private sector to embrace an enlightened policy of social responsibility. As early as 1934, despite his unhappiness with the New Deal, Luce was—through Fortune—exhorting business to accept a series of progressive principles: “that a livelihood should be guaranteed to every man, … that there must be a dwelling for every man, woman and child, and that it must conform to some minimum standard of decency,” and that “there must be developed a widely understood pattern for the reward of talent” because the “greatest practical test of a nation’s devotion to liberty is the extent to which it maintains the open door of opportunity.”35
Luce’s commitment to enlightened business leadership as the key to a successful society was clearly at odds with the belief of many liberals, and virtually all socialists, that capitalism was a less reliable provider of justice than was the state. But Luce was not entirely hostile to government. Were the New Deal to fail, he predicted, the result would not (and should not) be “a return to laissez-faire capitalism.” The nation’s economy “can be established only by Business working with Government and Government working with Business, over a long period of years, toward a progressively higher standard of living derived from the incentives of private enterprise.”36
By 1939 Fortune’s idea of a rapprochement between government and business was far from that of the left-leaning liberals who had written for the magazine in the mid-1930s. By the end of the decade, Fortune reflected instead the emerging moderate Republican position of accepting some of the New Deal and rejecting a great deal more. Through a series of Fortune “Round Tables,” the first published in March 1939, the magazine presented the views of a carefully selected group of business leaders brought together to discuss important political issues, beginning with federal fiscal policy. “In general,” the panel agreed, “the social and labor reforms so far established should be retained … [and] public spending should indeed be used to counterbalance the business cycle.” But while government spending was not inevitably bad, it should be used to “increase productive opportunity rather than merely spend to create purchasing power.” Fortune’s editors summed up the Round Tables with considerable pride: “We have the satisfaction of having done a small bit in the herculean job of bringing business and government points of view into alignment.” A year later they boasted further about the new, progressive business spirit, which had changed not only political economy but culture.
In “The Culture of Democracy,” an essay in a special 1940 issue of Fortune on America, the editors argued that literature and art were no longer the property of Popular Front critics of capitalism. They were, rather, moving into a “dialectic” with the world of enlightened business, helping to create a stronger, more abundant, and more pluralistic America. The essay concluded with a passage from Walt Whitman, which expressed—in a way certainly unintended by Whitman himself—Fortune’s own optimistic vision of the new, enlightened capitalist age:
Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared,
I see the genius of the modern, the child of the real and the ideal,
Clearing the ground for a broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand,
To build a grander future.
Fortune had not given up its commitment to elevated language, as Whitman’s florid poem made clear. But it had made a decision about what the magazine stood for: no longer a broad, pluralistic look at the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism, but a vehicle for expressing the ideas and convictions that Luce had come to believe must be Fortune’s new mission.37
VII
“Time Marches On”
By the mid-1930s Luce had become�
��as he would remain for the rest of his life—a famous publishing titan, admired by some, reviled by others, but to almost everyone in his orbit an object of curiosity and fascination. “How could you work for Luce?” was a question serious writers such as Dwight Macdonald often encountered from friends and literary colleagues. And yet many important writers did flock to Time Inc. Some of them stayed for decades, attracted in part by the good pay but also in part by Luce’s own magnetism and energy.
He was still a very young man. (He turned thirty-seven in 1935.) He had good reason to feel satisfied with what he had achieved. Time itself was healthy, robust, and consistently profitable even during a deep Depression. The erratic performance of its managing editor, John Martin, who was dogged by alcoholism and apparent depression, troubled Luce. But the rise of the talented and reliable John Shaw Billings, who now edited National Affairs, and the continued if controversial competency of Foreign Affairs editor Laird Goldsborough kept Time on a stable track. Fortune was admired, popular, and financially stable. In September 1931, Luce leased two floors in the prestigious Chrysler Building as if to announce Time Inc.’s transition from a presumptuous fledgling company to a publishing giant. “This was an extravagance,” he said of the move in a memo to the staff. “I believe we will not regret it because of the satisfaction to be derived from such a unique place to work.” Within a few years the company had expanded to all or part of eight floors.1
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