But success, however gratifying, did not create satisfaction. Luce was always searching for new challenges and new purposes. Early in 1932 he decided, almost abruptly, to change course, at least for a while. He made plans for a three-month trip around the world.
Luce had been an enthusiastic traveler as a boy and a young man. But since his return in 1921 from his year in England and Europe, he had done relatively little traveling and had left the country only twice—in 1927 and 1931—for brief trips to France with Lila. Now travel became again a central part of his life. To his father, who was “mystified as to the purposes of my trip,” Luce explained that it would be a “vacation—sheer idleness! … I’m going to leave behind an awful pile of mental baggage.” But Luce was as incapable of “sheer idleness” as he was of leaving behind his “mental baggage.” The trip was a product both of his own insatiable curiosity and his belief that he must educate himself to guide the future of his magazines and to play a larger role in the world.2
He did not want to travel alone, but he apparently never considered asking Lila to join him. The trip would likely be too arduous and too dangerous, he explained to her, and he had no intention of traveling with his two young boys, Hank and Peter, in tow. Instead he asked Leslie Severinghaus—the husband of his sister Emmavail and now a high-school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia—to accompany him. (“I’d rather have you with me than anyone else,” Severinghaus later recalled Harry saying.) The two men were not close, and Les was surprised—even if pleased—by the invitation to join his brother-in-law. Harry never explained his choice, but it is reasonable to assume that Les’s modest, self-effacing manner and his fluency in Chinese were among his attractions. (The earlier tension with Emmavail had eased, and she was now friendly with Lila—perhaps another reason for his choice.)3
After a cross-country trip by train and two hectic days of sightseeing in Seattle and Victoria, they boarded the Canadian Pacific steamship Empress of China on May 7 for the long voyage across the Pacific. Except for a short interlude in Hawaii, during which Luce raced frantically from one meeting with local dignitaries to another, they were at sea for just over two weeks. There were relatively few passengers in first class, and it did not take long for boredom to set in. Luce spent much of his time reading, exercised every day in the gym and the saltwater pool, and tried—not always successfully—to avoid the bridge games and idle social conversations with which most passengers filled the day. It was, he wrote Lila, “the dullest trip I have ever made,” leavened only by the presence on board of the missionary Leighton Stuart, president of Yenching University and a close associate of Harry’s father. Although Harry brought most shipboard conversations to an abrupt end as soon as he became bored (which was generally very quickly), he often sat up late into the night talking with Stuart and reconnecting himself with China.4
He spent six crowded days sightseeing in Japan—“very drab” with an “occasional bit of loveliness,” he described it. But he was already preoccupied with his impending return to China, which was the real purpose of the trip. In “a few lazy hours,” he said, he had formed a “workable notion of the simple (though, of course, fascinating) history of the Island Empire. But China! … Here we have to deal with the complete gigantic and elaborate symphonies of the human heart, its incomprehensible discords and its resolutions of breath-taking sublimity. Oh brave new world! … Oh China!” (Aldous Huxley’s newly published novel had been part of his shipboard reading.)5
Harry and Les rose before dawn—both of them too excited to sleep—to watch the Chinese shoreline come into view. Their first glimpse of the country was a nightmarish landscape of physical devastation, the product of recent Japanese air and gunboat attacks, which were among the first battles of a war that would continue for more than a decade. But once on shore they were whisked through customs and taken quickly to Shanghai, where Luce almost immediately began a busy series of meetings, visits, and social events—most of them carefully arranged in advance by the network of family friends and business acquaintances who had been paving the way for his arrival. Throughout his monthlong journey through China, Harry was at once reserved (rarely talking about himself) and almost aggressively inquisitive with guides, dinner companions, fellow journalists, and almost everyone else he met. (“The curiosity appetite of Harry is insatiable,” Severinghaus noted in the extensive journal he kept of their trip. “You should have heard him fire questions at the guide!”) Luce was tireless in exploring Beijing, a city he had not known during his childhood, and he organized sightseeing trips to shrines and mountains outside the city—on one of which he encountered an international commission that included U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson. He also visited Yenching University, for which his father had worked tirelessly for many years. It was, he wrote his parents, one of the “climaxes of the trip,” although in fact he found the campus drab and disappointing.6
But to Harry the most rewarding part of his time in China was visiting the sites of his childhood. At the mission compound in Wei Hsien, where his family had lived for most of his youth, he talked so rapidly and excitedly that Les could hardly understand him. But Luce could not help feeling downcast after a while as he discovered that almost everyone he had known there twenty years before was now gone. “The shell of our house and our compound hasn’t changed,” he wrote, “but the spirit is gone out of it.” He had a similar if fainter sense of loss when he visited the “sadly bedraggled” missionary compound in Tengchow, where he had been born (and from which his family had fled the Boxer Rebellion in 1900). Oddly enough, one of his warmest experiences was his return to the British boarding school at Chefoo, which he had so hated as a student. The real highlight of his trip, however, was a week at Iltus Huk, the seaside resort at which he had spent most of his childhood summers. “To be here is indescribable delight,” he wrote Lila. “Mountains, hills, ocean, sand (real silky sand), rocks, woods, grass—I think there never was such a place…. Such a satisfaction to know that all these years I haven’t been harboring a false illusion of first-love.” He spent his days swimming in the ocean, hiking, reading, and driving around the region in a car he had leased—“an idyllic holiday within a holiday…. Along with the tan, health seems to be zooming in every department. A tremendous appetite.”7
During the almost twenty years since he had left China, Luce had been only intermittently interested in what was happening there. He paid more attention to China than did most of his American contemporaries, to be sure. But his sense of connection had grown faint, beginning at Hotchkiss, where he struggled to escape the image of “foreign-ness” that had earned him the unwelcome nickname “Chink;” continuing at Yale, where he wanted nothing so much as to fit in to its powerful and wholly conventional culture of achievement; and persisting through the early years of Time, when he had relatively little influence over the contents of the magazine and struggled mostly to make it a financial success. Among the results of Hadden’s death had been a new freedom for Luce to embrace and advance causes of his own, and during his 1932 trip he revived and strengthened his identification with China.
Reacquainting himself with the important places of his own childhood was only the beginning of this new commitment. A more enduring result of his visit was his discovery of a “new China,” a China Luce believed to be struggling to its feet after centuries of oppression and backwardness and now joining the modern world. He had left China in 1912, in the midst of a revolution that had brought to an end four thousand years of empire. He returned in 1932 in the midst of a war with Japan and an emerging civil war between the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang—the nationalist party created in 1936 by Sun Yat-sen and now led by the fiercely anti-Communist Chiang Kai-shek. Among the many Chinese leaders Luce met during his travels, perhaps the most important to him was T. V. Soong, the former minister of finance and a powerful banker of great wealth and even greater political connections. One Western journalist called him the “Pierpont Morgan of China.” Luce was stron
gly attracted to Soong, a sophisticated, worldly, Harvard-educated man only slightly older than Harry. Soong was also a Christian—the son of a Chinese Methodist missionary and Bible salesman. (One of his famous sisters had married Chiang Kai-shek and had been responsible for Chiang’s conversion to Christianity.) Privately Soong himself was deeply worried about the future of his nation, but he kept his pessimism to himself. Instead he excited Luce with alluring predictions of great economic and political progress in a united, democratic China. Luce had always believed in the power of great leaders to transform societies. Now the discovery of this new political and financial elite seemed to him to promise the fulfillment of his father’s dreams of drawing China into the modern, Western, Christian world.8
That Luce could leave China in 1932 with such confidence in the nation’s future was a measure of how selectively he processed his own experiences. Although he saw many signs of apparent progress and stability during his travels, he also saw areas devastated by the expanding conflict with Japan, the growing civil war, widespread poverty and famine, and a governing elite that, however urbane and Christian, was awash in corruption and incompetence—and itself deeply divided. (Soong, for example, saw Chiang’s preoccupation with fighting the Chinese Communists as a dangerous distraction from the more important conflict with Japan.) All this, Luce chose to believe, was simply the necessary price of China’s wrenching transition to modernity—a transition the United States should support whatever the cost.9
The next leg of Luce’s journey took him across the Soviet Union on the famous Trans-Siberian Railroad. He had traveled through China focusing on whatever buttressed his affection for the country, but his trip through Russia evoked what he described as a “violent dislike,” much of which had preceded his actual arrival in the country. Russia was, he said, a “100% proletarian” society, whose people were “sloppy and boorish,” with “an atrocious body odor.” Indeed, the “stink” of Russia was perhaps his single most vivid impression of the country—perhaps understandably, given that he spent six days in a crowded, unventilated train filled mostly with Russian farmers and workers. He and Les had booked “first-class” accommodations, but there was little deference to such distinctions on the Trans-Siberian. As the train filled up, passengers squeezed into every available space, including Harry’s supposedly private compartment (which he had refused to share with Les and which instead attracted a Russian woman and her five-year-old son, who used the compartment’s small washbasin as a urinal). “Everybody on the train is getting somewhat on everybody else’s nerves,” Severinghaus wrote in his diary. Suffering from a head cold, revolted by the heavy food served in a dining car crowded with “barefooted Russians, dirty, bearded, and smelling of toil,” so overpowered by the “stink and sourness” that he sometimes spent the night standing in the corridor to escape his fellow travelers, Luce began to think of Russia as a place outside the civilized world. The Russians, he wrote in a memo to his editors in New York, were “neither Oriental nor Occidental,” a people without “an indigenous civilization.” He referred to the Russians he encountered on the train and in Moscow as “natives,” and the Americans and Western Europeans as “whites.”
They spent a week in Moscow, doing a great deal of sightseeing and meeting with journalists and a few low-level Soviet officials. To the horror of his Intourist guide, they even visited a randomly chosen “typical Moscow apartment” identified for him by a fellow journalist. Moscow did little to change Luce’s grim views of the Russian people, but it did much to increase his alarm about Stalin’s regime. “The belt is being tightened,” he wrote from Moscow, “by the screws of Terror.” The journalists he met were “practically unanimous” in their loathing of the Soviet regime—and united as well in their contempt for the few Western journalists there, most notably Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who shamelessly continued to write optimistically about Stalin’s policies. “Duranty—you take him seriously in America?” a hardened French reporter dismissively asked Luce.
Approaching the border with Poland after two weeks in the Soviet Union, Luce sourly watched the last miles of the “scrabbly,” “drab” Russian landscape from another “stinky and dirty” train. Crossing into Poland was, he wrote, like entering “Paradise.” He was dazzled by the contrast—“a beautiful sunny day,” “the most beautiful railroad car in the world. Clean, glistening, all-steel, immaculate.” Waiters came by offering ice cream and cake, while Luce admired the “perfectly cylindrical haystacks” in the fields outside, the “contented cows,” the “buxom hausfraus positively stylish in black dresses trimmed with white lace…. Never in all my tens of thousands of miles of travel has a border seemed to signify so much.” Looking back on his time in Russia, he wrote, “I don’t think I learned or heard a single basic fact” that he did not already know from a recent Fortune article he had helped edit months before. And so Luce, the veteran traveler, came to the end of his long journey of education having absorbed many new images and many powerful impressions, but having interpreted them all through the lens of his already settled beliefs.10
Before returning home, Luce spent a few days in Western Europe with Lila and the boys, but he was already impatient to return to his company. The Great Depression (as it was now coming to be known) was heading toward its nadir. A critical presidential election was only months away. For now, at least, one of the biggest stories in the world was happening in the United States, and Luce was eager to be part of it. Time Inc. itself had so far largely escaped the impact of the Depression. Advertising dropped significantly in 1932, but far less than it did for most other publishers. And in 1933, both advertising and profits resumed their upward momentum. Luce was certainly aware of the momentousness of the crisis, and he periodically raised alarms within the company about “economic conditions,” at one point proposing—but never enacting—a salary freeze for all employees. From time to time he examined expense accounts for waste. But the reality of the Depression had very little impact on his personal life or on his company’s fortunes at the same time that the crisis became a powerful story that shaped the future of his magazines.11
Even without serious financial worries, Luce remained restless, tense, and unpredictable—“very fidgety … harassed and hard-hearted,” one of his editors noticed. To a large degree this took the form of what Billings called “nervous, strange … high pressure” intrusion into the writing and editing of the magazines. Luce was, of course, editor in chief of all Time Inc. publications, but the managing editors of Time and Fortune were mainly responsible for the contents of the magazines. Luce’s engagement was frequent enough to unsettle the routine of the editors and their staffs but not consistent enough to give him real control. In the fall of 1932, for example, Luce urged editors to highlight the accomplishments of the beleaguered Herbert Hoover, hoping to improve the president’s chances of reelection. Most of his editors, however, wanted Roosevelt to win, and they quietly ignored his suggestions. When Luce pushed to have Hoover on the cover of Time shortly before the election, Larsen took him aside and talked him out of it. More often Luce simply dabbled. He gave after-the-fact notes to editors and picked up individual pieces almost randomly and rewrote them. Sometimes he tore a story apart, then—unable to concentrate long enough to fix it—dumped the ruins on an editor’s desk and departed. Once he spent a morning cutting a few lines out of a small piece and then writing a memo to the staff about it, as if to make clear that he remained in charge. “I got fussing with it,” he wrote. “Fuss. Fuss. Fuss. I fussed for an hour. At the hour’s end, I had in 30 lines every single fact which was in the 50 lines.” Because he was so unpredictable his staff was often on edge. “Luce rarely expresses satisfaction,” Billings complained in his diary, “… a devil to please…. He never has any praise for anybody.”12
And yet Luce could also be encouraging and generous. His editors generally hung on his approval, however infrequently expressed, and reveled in his occasional compliments. “Luce was rather critical,” Bi
llings noted in 1933. “I must get used to that…. But I am devoted to him—and would work my heart out for him.” Luce was a shrewd judge of quality and, however hard-driving he might be, moved gently when he had to change or dismiss struggling personnel. In the early 1930s he found himself with real competition for the first time when News-week* began publication. No one at Time was much impressed with the new magazine. (“Dull and stodgy,” Billings wrote. “This first issue doesn’t frighten us. Most of its writers … were fired from Time for incompetence.”) But Luce understood the potential danger and moved quickly to shake up his own editorial staff. John S. Martin’s deteriorating behavior had become increasingly disturbing, and, Luce believed, threatened the future of Time. He had always deplored but tolerated Martin’s conspicuous womanizing. But what made him finally lose patience was Martin’s increased drinking and frequent absences. (“He gets drunk and says the most outrageous things about Luce … a horrible mess,” Billings confided to his diary.) Luce finally eased Martin out as managing editor of Time in October 1933. He replaced him with Billings, who had already proved himself a brilliant if unflamboyant editor—perhaps the most talented ever to serve under Luce. Billings was from an aristocratic southern family, and maintained a large, historic (and expensive) family plantation—Redcliffe, in Aiken, South Carolina. He privately yearned at times for fame and visibility of his own. He longed to travel. He looked enviously at the glittering social world that Luce (and a few of his other Time Inc. colleagues) inhabited. But he rarely achieved, or even spoke of, any of these ambitions, and seemed slowly to abandon them (especially after the traumatic death in infancy of his only child). He gradually became what, at first, he had only appeared to be: a sober, somewhat reclusive man, deeply devoted to his wife and content to provide sure and steady editorial guidance to Time.13
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