part0000

2. Hall of Fame

3. Never Killed an Indian §/

4. Bolsheviks vs. God

CHAPTER IX 93

1. OfiF to China

2. Scenes of Boyhood

93 96

3. Into Enemy Country gg

4. The Luce Reports jqj

CHAPTER X 104

1. The Gospel of Success J04

2. The Militant Godless J07

3. Not Really Mature iQg

CHAPTER XI 114

1. Meet Me at the Commodore iJ4

2. A Man Beside Himself jj7

3. Abide with Me jj9

CHAPTER XII 121

1. Until Reeled the Mind J21

2. Haile Selassie on Broadway 125

3. Hitler in the Jam Closet 127

4. The Heating Problem J33

CHAPTER XIII 137

1. The Reds and the Whites 137

2. The People, No 141

3. Make More Money 144

4. Workers in the Luce Vineyard 145

CHAPTER XIV 153

1. The Meek People 153

2. The Four Cheeks at Munich 157

3. The Gentleman from Indiana jgj

4. The Republic in Danger IQ4

CHAPTER XV 168

1. Jack Benny and Winston Churchill J 68

2. The Rex Letter 17Q

CHAPTER XVI 176

1. The Willkie-Luce League 176

2. The American Century igQ

3. Like a King J83

4. For This Hour America Was Made 188

1. America First 191

2. Another Golds borough 195

3. Globaloney 197

4. The Mighty Missimo 200

CHAPTER XVIII 204

1. See Me About Hitler 204

2. Celestial Interrogation 209

CHAPTER XIX 211

1. Early Frost 211

2. Enlarging Category Three 213

3. Luces vs Roosevelts 219

CHAPTER XX 223

1. The Chambers War 223

2. The Chinese Puzzle 226

3. Ghosts on the Roof 229

CHAPTER XXI 233

1. The American Frontier 233

2. Take Drastic Measures 237

3. Pubhc Enemy Number One 239

4. How to Make Igloos 245

CHAPTER XXII 250

1. The China Lobby 250

2. "Fearfully Irresponsible Journalism" 255

3. Trouble with the Dots 261

CHAPTER XXIII 265

1. The Auspicious Star 265

2. The Little Old Voter 268

3. Using the Devil 273

4. The Church and the Pentagon 276

5. Eighty-four Important People 278

6. The "Loss" of China 282

CHAPTER XXIV 284

1. Time Marxes On 284

2. God Has His TV on You 288

3. The Powers of Evil 292

4. Success Is His Element 296

5. God in the Elevator 302

6. Implementing God-Agreement 306

vii

1. The Man Is Great 311

2. Two Presbyterians 316

CHAPTER XXVI 320

1. Sizing Up Eisenhower 320

2. The Nixon Crisis 324

3. Rubbing Their Noses in It 330

4. Value Judgments in Asia 333

CHAPTER XXVII 339

1. Morality, Ho! 339

2. Twisting the Leg 342

3. Year of the Snake 346

4. Burning the Books 351

5. The Ridgefield Memorandum 356

6. Soft-headed Liberals 359

CHAPTER XXVin 366

1. Massive Retaliation 366

2. My Favorite Queen 368

3. The Ambassador Is Poisoned 372

4. "Oh, Harry," Spake the Lord 376

CHAPTER XXIX 381

1. The Lucepress Pollution 381

2. Truth Up the Chimney 385

CHAPTER XXX 390

1. Cadillacs or Freedom? 390

2. Rally Round the Flag 392

3. The Public Be Damned 396

4. Welcome, Khrushchev 400

5. To Make Men Free 404

CHAPTER XXXI 410

1. May the Best Anti-Communist Win 410

2. Profiles in Courage 416

3. Christians, to Arms! 419

4. Pass the Ammunition 421

5. Shy and Guarded 425

6. The Birds and the Kittens 427

CHAPTER XXXn 430

1. Ambiguity in Perfection 430

2. Parkinson's Corollary 435

viii

4. Lyndon Johnson Calling 441

CHAPTER XXXIII 444

1. The Crack in the Monolith 444

2. Naked Women on Deck 447

3. A Hypothetical Question 451

CHAPTER XXXIV 456

1. The Eagle-Scout Escalation 456

2. I'm from Oskaloosa 461

3. The Real Enemy Is China 464

4. Caring for the News 469

CHAPTER XXXV 473

1. The Man Behind the Culture 473

2. Mount Rushmore 477

Afterword 484

NOTES 486

author's note and acknowledgments 513

INDEX 515

BETWEEN PAGES 178-179

1. Baby Henry Luce

Courtesy of members of the Luce family Luce at age three

Courtesy of members of the Luce family

2. Mother Luce with Harry, Emmavail, Ehsabeth and baby Sheldon

Courtesy of members of the Luce family

3. Reverend Henry Winters Luce

Nation Wide News Service

4. Young Luce with classmates at Chefoo School

Courtesy of members of the Luce family

5. Collegian Shavetail Luce

Courtesy of members of the Luce family Luce as managing editor of the Yale Daily News, with stafiF From History of the Class of 1920, Yale College

6. Luce's first wife, Lila

Courtesy of Mrs. Lila Tyng Henry Robinson Luce

7. Clare Brokaw with daughter and Daniel Longwell in Salzburg

Courtesy of Mary Eraser Longwell

8. Briton Hadden

Photograph by MofiFett, Chicago

9. Archibald MacLeish and Laird S. Goldsborough

10. John Shaw BilHngs

11. Ralph Ingersoll and T. S. Matthews

12. Luce with sculptor Jo Davidson

Courtesy of Mary Eraser Longwell Luce alighting from plane

13. The famous courtroom confrontation in which Whittaker Chambers stands to identify Alger Hiss

United Press International Photo Close-up of Chambers

United Press International Photo

14. John Hersey and Allen Grover

15. Luce in China with Theodore White

16. Eric Hodgins and C. D. Jackson

TOP left: By Joe Steinmetz, Sarasota, Florida

17. Roy Alexander

18. Luce and his second wife, Clare Boothe Luce

Photograph by George Karger

19. Halsman caught this pose of Luce

20. Wendell Willlde

United Press International Photo Chiang Kai-shek and Madame

United Press International Photo

21. Luce with Tsingtao journalists

U.S. Marine Corps Photo Luce, with H. H. Kung, dedicates Chinese hon as a memorial to his father at China House

22. Luce and his ensign son, Hank

U.S. Navy Photo

23. Congresswoman Luce acknowledging ovation

United Press International Photo

BETWEEN PAGES 322-323

24. Manfred Gottfried, Roy E. Larsen, and Luce

25. Mary Bancroft, long-time friend of Luce

Comtesy of Mary Bancroft

26. Dean Acheson

United Press International Photo

27. Luce presents President Truman wdth his Time cover portrait

United Press International Photo

28. General Marshall

United Press International Photo

29. General MacArthur

United Press International Photo

30. Luce inspects Chiang's army

Central News Agency, Taipei Luce and Timen hstening to Lord Beaverbrook

31. Luce in Indochina with U.S. Ambassador Heath and French General Gonzales de Linares

32. Flanked by Churchill, Dewey and other bigwigs. Luce presides at Ritz Hotel jamboree

33. Madam Ambassador Luce chats with group including President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles

United Press International Photo

34. Adlai Stevenson

Wide World Photos

35. Cardinal Spellman and Luce with Ngo Dinh Diem

Standard Studios

36. Nasser with Luce

Photograph by John Mecklin

37. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Luce

Wide World Photos

38. Chiang and Luce

39. Senator John F. Kennedy, presidential candidate, with Luce and Timen

40. Cartoon from The New Yorker

41. Queen Frederika of Greece with daughter and Luce

42. Time's fortieth anniversary party in 1963

43. Luce with President Johnson

Photograph by Yoicho Okamoto, courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library

44. Luce, Charles Rhyne, and Richard Nixon

45. Luce and Marshal Tito

46. Luce and Hedley Donovan

Wide World Photos

Xlll

1. THE SPRING IN ROMANTIC CHUNGKING

When Henry Robinson Luce looked down on the muddy Yangtze oh October 6, 1945, he had reason to feel exultation in the consummation of one of the great dreams of his life. China had won. Almost a half billion people—about a fifth of all humanity—were saved for Christianity and democracy. The dimensions of what had happened in the eight weeks since the Hiroshima bomb were so vast that not even Luce could see all the way to the edges, but that part of the panorama which was visible was inspiring even if there were a few villainous faces lurking in the background.

But his pohtical jubilation was clouded by distress at a momentous decision of his wife Clare, the beautiful and astonishing Congresswoman from Connecticut.

Their marriage had been beset by difficulties perhaps inevitable between two brilliant, driving, power-seeking people who were often in intellectual competition with each other. The difficulty this time was a religious one. Clare had been in spiritual torment since the death in an automobile accident of her nineteen-year-old daughter Ann. An indifferent Baptist, she had decided to become a Catholic and was taking instruction from Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen "in order to rid myself," as she would explain in McCall's magazine, "of my burden of sin." A woman of such combined beauty, wit and finesse at disparagement naturally had enemies inclined to discount the sincerity of her conversion, undertaken by one of the most famous of priests. Luce had given her every sympathy and support in her bereavement. But he was, after all, the son of missionaries and one of America's leading Presbyterian laymen. For all his ecumenism and enjoyment of friendship with Catholic dignitaries including Cardinal Spellman, he was not married to Spellman.

Now he was riding first-class in the plane of Major General Robert B.

W. A. Swanberg

McClure of the American China Command. Strangely, since despite his ties with China he had not a drop of Chinese blood, his eyes had a subtle slant that rendered his lean face striking if not quite handsome and made him seem doubly at home over the rippling Szechwan landscape. It is safe to say that he chain-smoked and talked a blue streak, as he almost always did. From his notes it is evident that, characteristically, he pumped McClure for information, eying the general closely as a possible Time cover subject to go with a six-page story on this unparalleled Asian drama.

"McClure thinks Generalissimo made a mistake in ousting Lung Yun as Governor of Yunnan," Luce noted in his diary. "Looks to me like Generalissimo did an important job very neatly."

"Generalissimo" meant Chiang Kai-shek, who was and would remain in a sense the most important man in Luce's life—his pride, joy, worry and disaster. Never for a moment did he forget his own enormous power in shaping American public and official opinion. There was a joke around Time that he was about to call a five-power conference to diwy up the postwar world—the United States, England, Russia, China and Time Inc. Although the various company editors and executives, some of whom had known him for years, differed sharply about his character and motivation, there was partial agreement that he felt close to God—perhaps even a little chummy—and that the two were collaborating, in Luce's view, on the solution of world problems. He had used his power and would continue to use it for the Christian Chiang, the America-oriented Chiang, the Communist-hating Chiang.

Despite some reservations. Luce venerated Chiang as the savior of China. He was impatient with American ignorance of China, American disillusionment with China and cynicism over the diversion of its mercifully intended dollars into official Chinese pockets—with American GI's who called their own government "Uncle Chump from Over the Hump" and gave Chiang Kai-shek the revolting nickname of "Chancre Jack." It is not impossible that General McClure's offhand remarks about the Lung Yun incident, questioning Chiang's judgment, were a factor in keeping his likeness, in four colors, off Time's cover.

The jumbled buildings and winding alleys of Chungking came into view— the malodorous provincial town that had become China's wartime capital and had swollen to a million people who now, with the war's ending, were scattering again. The American soldier's disenchantment with Chungking and all it stood for had been expressed in ripe verse by General Joseph Warren Stil-well:

I welcomed the spring in romantic Chungking.

I walked in her beautiful bowers.

In the light of the moon, in the sunshine at noon,

I savored the fragrance of flowers.

(Not to speak of the slush, or the muck and the mush

That covers the streets and the alleys.

Luce and His Empire

Or the reek of the swill as it seeps down the hill— Or the odor of pig in the valleys.)

The plane descended between cliffs—an experience that could be unnerving to travelers less seasoned than Luce—and touched down at the riverside airfield. It was in honor of the publisher rather than General McClure that a deputation of important people waited.

"Met at airport," Luce noted faithfully, "by General Shang representing the Generahssimo; K. C. Wu, who is to take charge of my arrangements here; General [George E.] Stratemeyer and [Walter S.] Robertson [Counsellor of the U.S. Embassy, in charge now that Ambassador Hurley was in the United States], and Commander Reynolds of the embassy."

He was not met by his former protege, Theodore H. White, until recently Time's valued Chungking correspondent. White, who loved China almost as extravagantly as Luce, had, as Luce interpreted it, broken under the strain of seeing great world events through a Szechwan fog. He had come to regard the Gimo as a power-mad dictator, a reactionary surrounded by bandits, a burden that China's suffering millions could no longer support. His dispatches to New York had said this, but they had not appeared in Time that way. They had been revised in the Time-Life Building by the foreign news staff under Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist agent who had become the most zealous of anti-Communists and who, like Luce, would not permit a bad press for the anti-Communist Chiang. White had seen the import of his dispatches altered. Items unflattering to Chiang were removed. Criticism of Chiang became praise of Chiang. White had protested by mail and by cable against what he described as "making Time a Chiang house organ. " The New York alterations continued. White hung a sign on his office door: "Any similarity between this correspondent's dispatches and what appears in Time is purely coincidental." Luce, who was fond of White and valued him as a reporter, would yield to no one in his understanding of China, where he had been bom and reared.

It was his magazine, after all. He could print what he wanted. He was at the center of newswires from the whole world, informed in the round, privy to events unknown by White. Time policy could hardly be made in the boondocks by a twenty-five-year-old reporter. Luce had held his temper and tried to soothe the young man by giving him a byline on several dispatches and printing his picture.

But White had continued in a rebellion that had its counterpart among correspondents in Europe and among a group in the home office. That was the year of the Great Schism at Time—a tug-of-war between those who were suspicious of or hostile to the Russians (who were still America's aUies) and those who were sympathetic with them or, if suspicious, anxious to give them honest treatment and the benefit of the doubt in the belief that every effort must be made for postwar amity rather than postwar war.

W. A. Sivanberg

Thus, Luce and the staff at Time were among the first to raise in such internecine struggle the question that would become the great issue of the twentieth century—indeed of all the centuries, since human siirvival would depend on it.

The Presbyterian Luce being violently opposed to godless Communism, the outcome of the argimient at Time Inc. was never in doubt. White had been recalled three weeks before Luce arrived in China and eventually would be cashiered. To "repair the damage" Luce had cabled his tall, Tory "star writer" Charles J. V. Murphy in Guam and dispatched him to Chungking.

For fifteen years Luce had roamed the world, communed with the great, watched and weighed the news, his mind absorbing facts which his astonishing memory preserved in mental microfilm. The intense effort he had expended in self-education would have exhausted a lesser man. Now, at forty-seven, he was at his peak, not entirely without justification in feeling that he was the best-informed man on earth. He knew of the corruption around Chiang. But he felt Chiang himself to be unblemished, the leader who opposed the Reds in the world's most populous nation. Peace and time should heal China, as they would America—which was not without its own scoundrels—and ultimately the complaining Theodore Whites would realize their folly.

Now Luce, who had traveled a week, was just in from Calcutta and Kunming and should have been bone-weary, swung smartly into the kind of eat-drink-and-talk program of fact-gathering that had always stimulated rather than tired him.

He was whisked in an embassy Umousine up the hill to town and given a suite in the handsome home of Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer, Stilwell's successor as the top American officer in China. Wedemeyer, absent in the field, had been ideahzed in a Time cover story of June 4 as "born to soldiering," "tireless," "briUiant." Two hours after landing. Luce was having cocktails at the American embassy as the stag-dinner guest of Counsellor Robertson, a banker-turned diplomat whose good manners did not conceal his consciousness of old Virginia ancestry. Manners were unimportant to Luce because they took extra time and got in the way of fact-finding, and his own were neghgible. He was worried about the impression of Chiang harbored by many GI's, who would carry it back home and spread it among the voters.

"Stratemeyer says majority of G.L's will go home sympathetic to the Chinese," he noted in his diary; "Robertson says no. I am sure that the G.L reaction to China is a problem."

2. THE ODOR OF PIG IN THE VALLEYS

Next morning, Sunday, he attended the Protestant church service (". . . a very poor sermon by the Army chaplain"). He lunched with the current Time

Luce and His Empire

Chungking staff—Murphy, Annalee Jacoby and Marjorie Severyns—talking incessantly, asking for information and barely giving them time to reply. But this was after he had expressed sympathetic concern for Mrs. Jacoby, whose husband, Melville, a Time correspondent, had been killed in an airplane crash in Australia. ("Talk with Annalee was most painful," he recorded.) He rushed away from the trio, jumped into a waiting Cadillac and was driven twelve miles into the country to join the mighty. He had tea in the ornate mansion of sixty-four-year-old Dr. Kung Hsiang-hsi—always Anglicized in Time as Dr. H. H. "Daddy" Kung—the Shansi-born Yale graduate who had married the eldest of the powerful Soong sisters, amassed a fortune as Standard Oil agent in China and had served his brother-in-law Chiang and his ruhng Kuomintang party in many important posts, including that of premier. Luce had met him often in New York. The amiable, triple-chinned and politely predatory Kung had nevertheless spent most of the war in grubby Chungking while his family preferred the luxuries of Hong Kong and America. He was proud of a family tree that made Walter Robertson's six generations look stumpy, for he was deemed a direct descendant of Confucius in the seventy-fifth generation.

"Dr. Kung recalled my telling him," Luce noted, "on July 3 in New York that the war with Japan was already militarily finished; he complimented me on my prognostication of a probable end to the war in the very near future."

Next came the ultimate honor, dinner with Chiang himself. He had abandoned his magnificent home across the Yangtze and was living near Kung in a smaller villa surrounded by blooms and famous for its tiled bathrooms trimmed with chrome. Bathrooms were almost unknown in Chungking, much less tile and chrome, and it was said that coolies who had heard of the wonderful conveniences in this one would almost have forfeited the good will of their ancestors if only they could have seen it and tried the various levers.

Luce had performed enormous services for Chiang and his Kuomintang dictatorship and could perform more. He had been the moving spirit in founding United China Relief in New York, which had funneled American millions to China and had also become a powerful American political lobby backing Chiang. His magazines had made the Chiang couple not only famous but heroic in the United States, whose government had poured billions into the Kuomintang coffers and, it was devoutly hoped, would keep on pouring. At the same time he had helped render Chiang's most dangerous enemy, Mao Tse-tung, infamous. He would permit only gentle criticism of Kuomintang abuses in his publications, always stressing the positive. The departure of Theodore White, recently so bitter toward Chiang, was the latest sign of his partiality. White had become a terrible threat. The Kuomintang people had been holding their breaths about him, so anxious were they about their image in America, and even though much of his criticism had not got into Time magazine, his departure had caused celebrations in Chungking. The New Re-

W. A. Swanberg

public and other liberal American publications had taken to sniping at Chiang, and even if their influence was negligible in comparison with the mighty Time, Life and Fortune, it was a disturbing trend.

Luce had arranged for his powerful magazines to become propaganda vehicles for the Nationalist government of Chiang. He had once assured his managing editor of Time, T. S. Matthews, that he would never permit any political use of his publications "unless I thought the Republic was in danger." He had no doubt that the greatest possible danger to America and the whole democratic world would be the takeover of China by the Communists. He had used and would continue to use every ounce of his power to prevent this. Only Chiang, he reasoned, could bring democratic unity to this disordered land. ". . . [W]e should realize," he had written in a "strictly confidential" New York policy memorandum, "that China's top priority is the need for Unity. Remember the priority that Lincoln gave to the Union." He added, "The most difficult problem in Sino-American publicity concerns the Soong family. They are . . . the head and front of a pro-American policy. It ill befits us therefore, to go sour on them."

Time Inc. had not gone sour. The man on whom Luce had conferred the unique prestige of appearing most often on Time's cover was not an American. He was Chiang, recently pictured there for the sixth time, gravely impressive in uniform, along with a triumphant four-page story ("At 57, Chiang Kai-shek stood at one of the pinnacles of his own and his nation's history"). Madame Chiang had decorated the cover three times—twice with her husband, once alone. Madame and the Gimo had been given enthusiastic attention on the cover and inside pages of Life. That thick magazine for businessmen, Fortune, had been admiring too. Some of Chiang's subordinates had also been treated warmly, and the Chinese people had been represented as devoted to Chiang and to America—the kind of perspective most likely to keep American aid coming.

There had also been agreeable personal visits and exchanges of gifts between Luce and Chiang. Chiang's interest in him seemed totally expedient. But if it came to that, Luce himself was imbued with a Calvinist expediency governing his effort to shape the postwar world with his own hands. If he could make use of Chiang on the side of God and democracy and meanwhile get a few journalistic scoops—hallelujah!

"I found Generalissimo and Madame," he wrote, "having tea with the High Command of China Theatre—Generals Stratemeyer, Ho [Ho Ying-chin, Chiang's chief of staff], McClure. After a few minutes I was taken away to a guest cottage. Returned for dinner alone with Generalissimo and Madame and K. C. Wu."

The plump, American-educated K. C. Wu, wartime mayor of Chungking, was a favorite of Chiang's. Madame, Chiang's consort, was Mei-ling, the Wellesley-educated youngest of the Soong sisters, brilliant, haughty and still beautiful at forty-nine. With Luce's help she had coaxed so many millions for

Luce and His Empire

China out of the United States that she was said to be worth ten divisions to the Gimo. She was the "baby" of a family too fantastic for fiction. Her father, Charhe Soong, had gone to America at nine, found a wealthy sponsor, studied for the clergy at Vanderbilt University, and had returned to China as a Methodist missionary briefly before he flouted the biblical warning about the camel and the needle's eye and made his fortune as a merchant. Since Luce's father had been a Presbyterian missionary in China, and both his sisters were Wellesley graduates, he and Madame were linked by strands of sentiment and Protestantism; she had been his guest in New York, he previously had been her guest in Chungking, and each had great respect for the other's sphere of power. Besides, he spoke virtually no Chinese, and Chiang spoke no English. It would be up to Madame and Wu, a Grinnell College graduate, to interpret for them. The tall, distinguished American, always a little humble when he felt himself in the presence of true greatness, faced the smaller but very erect Chinese who claimed the governance of a population three times that of the United States, whose shaven head shone, whose face was immobile except for the quick Mongol eyes, and whose speech was punctuated by the occasional clicking of poorly fitted false teeth.

"After dinner had wonderful conversation with the Generalissimo," Luce told his diary, "mainly of a philosophical nature. For the first time I learned what the concept of 'freedom' meant in Chinese thought. The GeneraUssimo, discussing the Chinese character for freedom, said it connoted 1) movement and 2) naturalness. The character suggested a fish in the water—moving freely and naturally. . . . After the Generalissimo retired the Madame and I talked for an hour or so. Her main point: the Government now has a terrible responsibihty not to disappoint the hopes of the people."

The Gimo's lecture on freedom had no visible connection with his rule in China. Under him, the Chinese had been unable to move freely and naturally, like fish. Luce, always aware of moral issues, knew that he faced one in Chiang—one that affected more human lives than any in history.

It was not only Chiang's unrealized promises of reform, the democracy unfulfilled, the sale of army commissions, the routine appropriation by officers of wages intended for their starving men, the theft of American supplies until recently brought at peril over the Hump and their immediate appearance on the Chinese black market. It was also the decay and rapacity around the Gimo himself, the luxury of his family and favorites in the midst of the misery of millions, the atrocities committed by his secret police, the injustices for which Chiang, though always said to be personally honest, could not escape blame.

Luce knew something of this. It did not pain him as much as it should have pained a good Presbyterian. He overlooked it in view of Chiang's Christian anti-Communism, and perhaps put more faith than was justified in Madame's high-sounding pronouncement.

W. A. Swanberg

3. SANTA CLAUS PRIMUS

Any doubt of Luce's position in Chiang's regard would have been dispelled next day when he appeared at the dinner honoring the Communist leader Mao Tse-tung. While Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had all recognized the Gimo's group as China's ruling government during the war, and Chiang and Madame had sat with Roosevelt and Churchill at the Cairo Conference, the Chinese people had never had an opportunity to vote him into office. He had won whatever legitimacy he possessed by force of arms. During the war he had made an uneasy accommodation with Mao, who controlled his own fiefdom to the north, on the theory that they should fight the Japanese instead of each other. American war material sent with such difficulty, however, had gone to Chiang as the recognized leader. Chiang had had an exasperating tendency to let the Americans fight the Japanese while he hoarded his supplies and men for his postwar effort to destroy the Communists. Now the Americans, still recognizing Chiang, hoped to solve the problem by encouraging a coalition government that would join China in peace as it reoccupied the areas taken by the Japanese and accepted the surrender of Japanese armies which were as yet waiting for someone to appear to whom they could sui-render. The U.S. ambassador. General Patrick Jay Hurley, the Oklahoma eccentric who liked to regale heads of state with Choctaw war whoops, had coaxed Mao to come to Chungking with Chou En-lai and begin parleys with the Kuomintang.

Luce was the only non-Chinese among the three hundred dinner guests. He was placed at the speakers' table next to General Chang Chih-chung, who presided in behalf of Chiang and who sat next to Mao himself. Although he never permitted any slackening in his detestation of Communism, Luce also never lost his reporter's interest in newsworthy personalities. He essayed a conversation with Mao, who spoke a little English, telling him they had several mutual friends. "He was surprised to see me there," Luce observed in his diary, "and gazed at me with an intense but not unfriendly curiosity. His remarks: polite grunts."

General Chang addressed the group about China's great need for peace and said that the negotiations with the Communists had achieved about 70 percent agreement.

"Then it came Mao's turn to step to the mike," the diary went on. "His face is heavier and more peasant-like than that of most national officers. His sloppy blue-denim garment contrasted sharply with his host's snappy berib-boned uniform. He started slowly, with a slight clearing of the throat between nearly every phrase, but he built up gradually to a full-throated shout at the end. He said about what Chang had said plus: that the 30% of the problem which remained to be settled 'will be settled by discussion and by no other

Luce and His Empire

means' (great applause) and that China must find 'unity under Chiang Kai-shek.' "

This was a declaration that Luce himself could applaud. Unfortunately, similar sentiments had been uttered before by both sides in this savage struggle, always ending in more throat-cutting.

Next day saw the arrival from Shanghai of Wesley L. Bailey, a Time representative who had spent three years as Luce's personal assistant in New York. Bailey was at once impressed into service as secretary and general expediter of the Boss's activities, a duty he described as "like riding a tornado." Luce made it a rule while on tour to discuss problems with all the most important people from the top down, and could be irascible about staff work that was less than perfect. Bailey had become his New York assistant after successfully promoting United China Relief, and had also been an effective aide in the campaigns that had twice elected Mrs. Luce to Congress. Luce had rewarded him with kindnesses that included the gift of seventy valuable shares of Time stock. Bailey admired Luce, was acquainted with much of the Chiang hierarchy through his work with UCR, and was as willing as the Boss to work overtime. ". . . [A]s usual we are off in a cloud of dust," he wrote his wife in New York.

Luce dined with China's number two man, the impassive. Harvard-trained, wealthy banker T. V. Soong, the hard-driving brother of the Soong sisters, who was premier in his brother-in-law Chiang's nepotic government. Soong had appeared on Time's cover the previous December 18 along with a flattering sketch of his career. Only recently he had met with Stalin in Moscow and hammered out the Sino-Soviet treaty that had humiliated Mao and his Communists by ignoring them as a factor in China. Neither he nor Luce trusted Stalin despite the treaty. "He [Soong] had seven or eight of his cabinet there," Luce recorded. "T. V. was in a very relaxed mood and the conversation rarely got more serious than a discussion of the food—we had a much admired fish from the Yangtze; also deer's tendons, etc. . . . The serious talk was about Russia. What a terrible nuisance Russia is; if it weren't for her we could have surcease from the politics of crisis."

He dined again with Chiang: "The Generalissimo had most of the cabinet to dinner and laid on a fancy version of my favorite but very bourgeois dish: jow-tzes. After dinner Mao Tse-tung came to spend the night as the Generalissimo's house-guest!"

He chatted with the number two Communist, the charming Chou En-lai: "We had a nice talk—and completely frank from the moment we sat down. He said we [the Lucepress] hadn't been very nice to them recently. I said that was too bad because we had a world-wide battle on our hands with worldwide left-wing propaganda—and it was just as nasty as a skunk."

He called on Chen Li-fu, co-leader of the right-wing "C-C Clique" which was said to have a sinister political dominance over Chiang. "I found him a man of great charm who had thought deeply about human affairs. He gave a

W. A. Swanberg

brilliant brief exposition of Confucian ethics centering around 'love' in the aspect of filial piety. As a basis for family and solid cohesion he thought there was something to be said for love in the aspect of father and son in contrast to the Western emphasis on love in the aspect of boy-meets-girl."

Love was something China could use in any aspect. Luce discussed China's outlook with many others, including the minister of finance, the minister of education and the president of the National University of Peking. He met with groups representing various specialties and endeavors—a committee of United China Rehef officials, a gathering of Chinese newspapermen, a committee of UNRRA executives, and a deputation of alumni from Yenching University in Peking. Luce's father had helped found Yenching a quarter-century earlier, and these graduates had come to honor both father and son.

On October 11 he took off in an army plane provided by General Strate-meyer, with Murphy and Bailey in his party. He wanted to see as much of postwar China as he could, visit with generals and officials, find out if possible how the nation's crisis would be resolved, and help Murphy write a story about it. They would enter areas still controlled by Japanese troops whose surrender so far was purely theoretical—areas possibly dangerous for Americans—but Luce was not in the least intimidated. Their first stop was Chengtu, where the jeep transporting them from airport to town broke down immediately.

"Presently," Luce wrote, "a truckload of G.I.'s come by and they take . . . [us] aboard. This isn't so pleasant. I sit on the floor of the truck. ... As my tail is being beaten by the bumps and my eyes watch the retreating Szechwan landscape, I hsten to the chatter of the sergeants. Sitting about me [sic] is one of those typical Americans who speaks slowly and deliberately repeating guide-book facts with what appears to be deadly accuracy. Most of the facts he recites are unflattering to China . . . Up ahead there is the loud-mouthed wisecracker. . . . We pass a battalion of Chinese soldiers carrying guns. The loud-mouth yells out 'The war's over; so now you're going to fight.' ... As we enter the town the scholarly fellow explains about Chengtu. . . . There are two whore houses, he says, one for 200 and one for 700 (China dollars or something). The $700 one is pretty good and even the $200 [one] isn't bad— they are or were government inspected. . . ."

In Chengtu Luce and his party dined with the Chiang-appointed governor and inspected the Kuomintang-controUed West China University. In the next three days they touched down at Sian, Taiyuan ("Grubby town," Bailey wrote in his diary. "Lunch in Jap-controlled railroad hotel.") and Tsinan before alighting in Peking on October 15. Here Luce took a suite at the expensive Hotel de Pekin and enjoyed the luxury of a bath. He was driven to Yenching University and greeted there by the president, his and his late father's old friend Dr. John Leighton Stuart, and visited the Luce Pavilion on the campus provided by Luce money. Bailey, impressed by the ceremonious greeting given Luce by officials everywhere (greetings rendered all the more

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ardent because of his friendship with the Chiang couple), wrote his wife, "I don't think any foreign visitor . . . has been so welcome since Marco Polo as HRL and his party have been."

Accompanied by an interpreter, Luce stopped at a jade shop, where he instructed the proprietor to bring a few dozen fine pieces to his hotel where he would make a choice. Meanwhile Murphy, a tall, handsome Harvardman for nine years a writer for the Lucepress, had noticed four bottles of Gordon's gin on a shelf in a shop near the hotel. It was the first time he had seen this cheering label in the Orient. He bought all four bottles, along with some vermouth, returned to the Hotel de Pekin suite and made martinis.

The dealer arrived with the jade, each piece beautifully wrapped in silk, and Luce began bargaining with him through his interpreter. He had an astonishing strain of innocence for so experienced a man. He was certain that the Chinese, grateful for America's aid during the war, would not take advantage of an American—particularly one friendly with Chiang. If this was a principle not recognized by the dealer. Luce was unaware of it. As he would demonstrate on other occasions in buying pearls for his wife or Swiss watches as gifts for his friends, this brilliant exponent of hard-sell in mass advertising was the soul of ingenuousness when face to face with a salesman. Now and then he dropped in at Murphy's room to sip at a martini and speak enthusiastically of the jade.

Whether it was in celebration of China's deliverance or in sorrow at his wife's current difficulties, the temperate Luce took aboard more liquor than usual. He was feehng gay when he. Murphy and Bailey left to be the dinner guests of Hsiung Pin, the Chiang-appointed mayor of Peking, at the Chinese Bankers' Association. Many high officials of the municipal government were present. Each of them insisted on drinking kan pels —bottoms-up toasts in rice wine—to the American publisher hailed by the Peiping Chronicle as "a sympathetic friend of China" who in Chungking "was entertained by Generalissimo and Madame Chiang at dinner." The loyal Yaleman Luce was overjoyed to discover that one of the city officials was Y. L. Tong, class of '13— "A classmate of Ambassadors Bullitt and Harriman," he noted, being wrong about Bullitt, who was '12.

Tong and Luce had further kan peis in behalf of Yale, Bullitt and Harriman. A pretty Chinese girl in charge of cultural affairs for the city topped it oflF with a whole salvo of toasts honoring the American friend of Chiang and China. Luce got up and spoke a few words of acknowledgment in diction less chiseled than usual. He ended by singing several bars of "Boola Boola" in his rather nasal voice, a song perhaps meaningless to the mayor and most of the guests but surely bringing a glow of nostalgia to Y. L. Tong.

"He got just a wee bit tight," Bailey wrote, ". . . and he and I took a rickshaw ride under the stars to cool him oS . . ."

Next day. Luce bought rugs and Chinese silks for his wife. He saw Bailey admiring two lovely blue-and-white vases and said, "Take them—a gift from

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me." Meanwhile he was watching General Stratemeyer's planes perform a gigantic feat in transporting what would become a total of 200,000 of Chiang's troops to take over East China from the Japanese, and the landing of American troops to help them. He bombarded his editorial director in New York, John Shaw BiUings, with cables about what was going on: "The reoccupation of China by the Chinese with American aid is something I believe unique in history. . . ." "The city of Peking is in good shape. . . . The city is bouncing back rapidly to normal, peaceful life. ... A new energetic municipal government seems well established under Mayor Hsiung Pin. . . . Law and order prevails throughout the city . . ." He was, it could be seen, thoroughly approving of Chiang's leadership.

He spoke at a banquet of the Chinese-American Institute of Cultural Relations held in his honor. He was interviewed by the press. He dined at the French embassy. On October 18 he moved on to Tientsin, where he found many factories closed for want of raw materials. "The notorious inefficiency of our State Department," he cabled Billings with typical scorn for the Truman administration, "is once again exhibited by the fact that the American consul has not yet arrived in this great commercial center ..." But he was cheered by the presence of 25,000 American Marines in Tientsin: "The desire of local Chinese officials to show their appreciation of Americans and to have Tientsin make a good impression on them cannot be exaggerated."

His next stop was Tsingtao, on the Shantung peninsula, where he luxuriated in nostalgia, an emotion rare in one so obsessed with today-and-tomorrow. Tsingtao was hardly more than 100 miles from his birthplace. As a boy he had come here with his family to loaf and swim in the summer. Now, gazing at the beach, he yielded to a famihar Luce mental-visual defect, one so chronic particularly in his view of China that it had alarmed Theodore White and some of Time's more reahstic editors. He saw it the way it ought to be rather than as it was. He seemed unaware that years of war and neglect had left the beach overgrown and the cottages shabby.

"Isn't it beautiful?" he said. "I shall take a Sabbatical and bring Clare to live here for a year."

Murphy, who could be blunt, saw it as it was. "It looks like Far Rockaway," he said, reahzing his tactlessness when he saw the instant frown on Luce's face.

Tsingtao, another monimient to the Western exploitation that had weakened and humiliated China, had been seized by German troops in 1898 and expanded into a German city. Luce took a suite at the Edgewater Hotel with a magnificent view of the Yellow Sea and—after the usual reception given him by the mayor—went for a swim with Bailey and Murphy and told them of boyhood experiences here almost forty years earher. When he heard church bells ringing, he noted, "I recognized the tone at once; they were the deep, rich clanging voice of the old German church."

Dedicated as he was to a world mission for which he felt himself uniquely

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equipped, gripped by an American patriotism that was religious in its origin and intensity, he was moved alike by the bells, by the defeat of Japan and by the glorious sight of American warships in the harbor so that he fell back reverently on the Psalms: "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof. ..."

And he was seized by an impossible idea. He wanted Bailey to organize— immediately or thereabouts—facilities for the printing of Time and Life in China. When Luce had an idea, it was not politic to throw cold water on it. Bailey pointed out, with all the tact at his command, that the country was still in chaos, fighting continued in many localities and that even if adequate printing and paper supplies could be found somewhere (which he privately thought impossible), there could be no distribution over the shattered highways and railroads for many months. He suggested Tokyo. The magazines could at any rate be published there, though distribution in China would still be limited virtually to seaport areas.

"He was vastly impatient with this kind of talk," Bailey later recalled. "It seemed to be a dream of his, to publish quickly in China. It was one of the few times I ever saw him utterly unreasonable."

Of course he wanted his magazines to be first to publish in his China. All his life he had made his dreams come true by dint of hard work and inteUi-gent planning. He was in entire sympathy with the aggressive American pride in accomplishment exemplified in the Air Force motto: "We do the difficult immediately; the impossible takes a little longer," and he was apt to suspect indolence when he was told that something could not be done. But good cheer returned as he dined with the Chinese governor, lunched with the American general in command, then went out by gig to dine with Captain Noble of the U.S. cruiser Alaska and saw a flat-top and other elements of the fleet anchored nearby. "Incredible mihtary power is represented by the Stars and Stripes," he wrote with that patriotic ardor that often edged into jingoism. "And the autumn so rare and bright makes the heart joyful."

Then on to Nanking October 22, where he pursued another fast schedule ("Visited Jap hospital, barracks, arsenal") that included lunch with the mayor at the ugly tomb of Sun Yat-sen on nearby Purple Mountain. When he reached Shanghai at 3:00 p.m. October 24, he should have collapsed in exhaustion in his penthouse suite at the Cathay Hotel. Not at all. Four hours later, Bafley having handled the arrangements. Luce gave a convivial Chinese dinner for the eight Time-Life people then in Shanghai.

"He acted as host and master of ceremonies, and asked a thousand questions," Bailey recalled. "Perhaps there was a shade of the return-of-Mac Arthur air about him, but mainly he wanted to know from all of us what we had observed in China and what was likely to happen next."

In his remaining time in Shanghai he gave detailed instructions to his news representatives, discussed with Murphy the approach to be taken in his series on China, addressed a YMCA group, gave a press conference, dined with

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Chiang's Mayor Chien Ta-chun, lunched with Chiang's General Tang En-po (who presented him and his aides with swords taken from the Japanese), gave a dinner for the wealthy American "old China hand" C. V. Starr, gave a tea for Chinese newspapermen, addressed the China Foundation and wound up by giving a lavish dinner at the Cathay for the American commanders in Shanghai, Admiral Thomas Kinkaid and General Stratemeyer and their staflFs. On October 29, wearing a gray double-breasted suit and gray fedora, he boarded a plane at Shanghai's airport and headed for America.

In his twenty-three days in China he had been conferred attentions such as he had never received at home. From Chungking to Peking to Nanking to Shanghai he had been exposed to the most alluring of Oriental blandishments. Naturally he would have hked to think that all this homage was given without guile to Henry Luce the man. But as a hard-headed tycoon he must have known that in some part it was given to Henry Luce the powerful pubhsher who had influenced American public opinion and American policy in favor of Chiang and could, if so incUned, continue to do so.

Luce did not forget the changing Time-Life staff in Shanghai. At Christmas—a time when Americans could be lonely in the Chinese metropohs—he cabled Bailey: "You are hereby given temporary rank of Santa Glaus Primus to provide for yourself and all [in Shanghai] a big extra bundle of Christmas cheer chargeable to the Old China Boy. . . . Merry Christmas."

Bailey spent $200 of the Old China Boy's money to buy gifts for the eight staff people then in Shanghai.

1. INTOXICATED WITH GOD

Henry Robinson Luce was born April 3, 1898, in Tengchow, China, under circumstances that had a part in providing him with a dazzling spectrum of talents and failings. Both his parents were descended from Englishmen who landed in New England long before the Revolution. Both were distinguished in their character and abilities. His missionary father, Henry Winters Luce, was a man so physically and mentally energetic that few could keep up with him. Within him there was a struggle of extremes—a sweetness of spirit combined with a temper as fiery as his red hair, fundamentalism and modernism, humility and determination, quiet persuasiveness and a bluntness of speech that sometimes offended his churchly elders.

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1868, son of a wholesale grocer of modest means, Luce was active in Presbyterian church work as were his parents, but he intended to be a lawyer. It was not until shortly before his graduation from Yale in 1892 that he was stirred by an irresistible call to the ministry. His parents, surprised at his shift in aim and his subsequent enrollment at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, were something more than surprised at his next decision.

"God willing," he wrote in his diary, "... I purpose to go to the foreign field and witness for Him as best I may in the uttermost parts of the earth." He chose China as his field.

The missionary movement had then reached a pitch of ardor that would be chastened by later experience. The assumption of the transcendence of Christianity and the American culture, and the conviction that representatives of other cultures would be grateful for our role in their improvement rather than resentful at our interference, had become a national article of faith championed by four successive Presidents. The tide of religious fervor whipped up

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by the Moody-Sankey style of evangelism had washed every corner of the nation. Women's missionary societies burgeoned, Sunday school children gave pennies and nickels to save the heathen, and returned missionaries were heard with veneration. The Student Volunteers for Foreign Missions were establishing organizations in scores of colleges. Luce's good friend and classmate, Horace Tracy Pitkin of Philadelphia, was the leader of the movement at Yale.

There was a world-saving urgency in the appeals for more young missionaries. The Reverend Adoniram J. Gordon of Boston told missionary candidates that they must become intoxicated with God: "God wants that kind of men today, men inebriated with the Holy Ghost; men that may be counted insane sometimes because of the tremendous earnestness of their fire and zeal." Others, such as the veteran missionary Hudson Taylor, stressed the need of haste with the gospel. "A million a month in China are dying without God!" he said—a reminder that those million every month were doomed to eternal hellfire because our missionaries had not arrived soon enough to save them.

The piety of Horace Pitkin—one of those vulgarly called Jesus' Little Lambs by the more worldly collegians—was formidable. Luce was editor of the Yale Courant, with Pitkin an associate editor. Wine was served at the more important Courant dinners and at other Yale functions. As Luce put it, "Not a few earnest men felt that it was sufficient to go, and manifest their position by having their glasses turned down and thus unfilled; but Pitkin could not look on it in this light and so stayed away altogether." Sherwood Eddy, a close friend of both of them, noted of Pitkin, "On the question of dancing, cards, the theatre and similar amusements, he took a stronger stand than any man in the college."

Pitkin, who hoped to become a missionary in China, contributed a humorous piece to the Courant about a Chinese emperor who roared, "OflF with his head!" when anyone annoyed him. By a ghastly irony, Pitkin himself was fated to be decapitated in China eight years later. When Luce, Pitkin and Eddy went on to the theological seminary in New York, they were inseparable friends. "Once each day," Luce wrote, "and often several times a day, we met to pray over the things pertaining to our 'great purpose' . . ." He believed that he had been divinely selected. He was deeply responsive to his re-Ugion, intensely loyal to it, ready to work endlessly for it, dedicated, unshakable—qualities that his oldest son would apply to secular life with startling results.

Many of the influences that affected him would also affect the son. These two would form a bridge over which several nineteenth-century attitudes and doctrines including Manifest Destiny came thumping into the twentieth— doctrines and attitudes which in turn would affect important men and institutions, among them Dwight Eisenhower, Chiang Kai-shek, Wendell Willkie, the Kremlin, the American embassy in Rome, and indeed the domestic and world policies of the United States.

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Finishing at Union, the elder Luce joined the Student Volunteer movement for a year as a traveling representative, cramping his length into upper berths as he traversed the country to speak at colleges and campaign for more missionaries. His kindly eloquence astonished Edward H. Hume, who as a Yale freshman looked forward to becoming a physician and had an active antipathy toward missionary work until Luce visited his alma mater. "He got hold of me one day and took me for a walk," Hume said. "We stood on a hill and looked toward the horizon. 'Let this be a hill of vision to you,' he said. 'Let your view include the whole world. Where else, except as a medical missionary, could you possibly find so unlimited a place of opportunity and service?' That night I went back to my room and signed the Student Volunteer card." Hume would later rise to become head of Yale-in-China.

Luce's father went on to Princeton, where he received his Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1896, then returned to his travels for the movement. On a visit home he met tall, dark-eyed Elizabeth Middleton Root, who had come to Scranton as a YWCA worker among factory girls. Daughter of a lawyer of Utica, New York, Miss Root was a young lady of great tact and charm who was already slightly handicapped by deteriorating hearing caused by childhood typhoid. She was less rigid and doctrinaire than the rather intense young man who asked, with all the formaUty of the day, for her hand in marriage. Both were courageous, knowing that eleven missionaries had been murdered in China in 1895. They were married on June 1, 1897, and they sailed for the Orient in September. Fittingly, however, their first son had already been conceived in the United States of America which he would always uphold and exhort and reproach and defend and glorify.

The son was an unseen presence when they stopped to sightsee in Japan, where the father showed a trace of the inflexibility that would appear in the child. He could not bring himself to admire the beauty of the heathen Buddhist temples, whereas his bride glowed.

"You haven't said so, but don't you think they are beautiful?" she asked. "Oh, do say they are!"

"Yes," he replied, "I think they are beautiful—and very, very sad."

At Shanghai the travelers transferred to a coastal vessel for the voyage to Chefoo, on the Shantung peninsula. A rough two-day trip in a shen-dzi —a conveyance on poles slung between mules—took them the last fifty miles to Tengchow. Here they became a part of the East Shantung Presbyterian Mission, an^ here Henry Robinson Luce was born in a house without gas, electricity or plumbing.

A few dozen Western people and a few score of Chinese students inhabited the compound which, with its high stone wall, was a fortress against a dangerous outside world. Government was uncertain, law enforcement minimal, and violence was almost as common as the hunger that often caused it. Bubonic plague, smallpox, typhus and cholera were so prevalent that strangers were

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not admitted and when missionaries returned from their evangeUzing labors they were quarantined in a house outside the gate.

2. ENLIGHTENING THE HEATHEN

The Chinese, despite appaUing ignorance and poverty, were the conscious heirs of a culture long antedating the Age of Pericles, much less the discovery of America. Certainly no great nation had ever been so systematically invaded, exploited, partitioned, oppressed, threatened, robbed, insulted and humiliated as theirs. The kindly motives of the missionaries who poured into the country in increasing numbers after 1890 were largely vitiated by their lack of tact and understanding.

The Chinese discovered that the various Western religions which set out to "show them the way" were in disagreement and competition with each other even though they worshiped the same god. The Presbyterians felt that they could save Chinese souls better than the misguided Catholics, and the Con-gregationalists were happy if they could snatch converts from the Baptists. The confusion was compounded by the fact that the different Western religions had five different Chinese names for what was presumably the same Western god, in addition to disagreements over his description, age, pronouncements, jurisdiction and mode of operation. Hence Voltaire's story of the Chinese who, after listening to a theological disputation among a Catholic, a Protestant, a Quaker, a Jansenist, a Jew and a Moslem, finally clapped each of them into separate cells as insane.

Voltaire could see more humor in it than the Chinese. They did not enjoy having strangers arrive and pronounce them absurd in their deepest beliefs, especially since the foreign guests, while temporarily more affluent, were millennia later in achieving civilization. Their conviction that they were God's ambassadors was not humbling. China was overladen with missionaries whose good intentions never could make amends for their complacency.

While all Western missionaries were guilty in this respect, the Americans usually were more so because of the young, aggressive vigor of their nation and the tendency of American missionaries to mix patriotism with their religion. They had "no squeamish doubts about the superiority of American fife," which they attributed to their brand of Christianity and government. They were not only drunk with God but with country too. Yet their lot was not easy because their first experience with Chinese mass destitution aroused their immediate sympathies and their desire to help. It seemed evident to most of them that China needed American democracy and American know-how as well as American religion. The very humaneness of the missionaries thus led them to pile disparagements of China's government on top of their reflections on Chinese religion.

Although it was known in America that the Chinese were difficult to convert, what was less known was the overwhelming preponderance of those

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who resisted conversion, the determination with which they resisted it and the sense of outrage they felt. They resented being looked on as benighted heathen, resented the American ban on Chinese immigration, resented their whole treatment as an inferior race. One of the most xenophobic of peoples, they regarded the invaders as barbarians. They were offended by missionaries who condemned "infidel" Confucianism, behttled Chinese politics and institutions and even insisted that Confucius was expiating his sins in hell.

The number of converts was minuscule, never exceeding more than a fraction of one percent of the population even after more than a century of proselytizing. No one was sure how many of these converts were opportunistic "rice Christians." With these few exceptions, the Chinese hated the missionaries with a passion, used every stratagem they could to thwart them and occasionally murdered them.

Not until years later would the American churches themselves become aware that the effort in China was stronger in zeal than in judgment. It would take an exhaustive Protestant laymen's inquiry to discover that mismanagement was common in mission work, that it was impossible to "speak of the total impression with the high enthusiasm we should like to offer," and that while some missionaries exhibited real devotion and power, "the greater number seem to us of Umited outlook and capacity." Their report also made an astonishing concession—that Christianity was only one of many great religions and could no longer claim the exclusive approval of God.

Similar thoughts would come to Pearl Buck, daughter of a missionary in China, who had spent many years there. She would admit disillusionment with the mediocrity of the Christianizing campaign and its ultimate failure. "... I feel that Christian missionaries are basically good," she would write. "Certainly I never knew of any who were thieves or rascals. I did know one or two who had illegitimate children—lonely men without their wives—but they were immediately dismissed. Yet, while missionary standards were high for moral conduct, missionaries themselves were not usually people who understood the Chinese or made much effort to understand the people whose souls they wanted to save—this with some notable exceptions, among them my own mother and father. In general, missionaries lacked the education for a country where the culture was as old as that of China."

Henry and Elizabeth Luce joined in this enterprise with intentions wholly benign. Unlike some of the earlier missionaries, they were well educated and of exceptional intelligence and ability, and if they had httle previous instruction about their new land, they would make it their business to learn and appreciate Chinese history and culture. They were superior people except for the Christian prejudice without which they never would have gone to China. Henry Luce indeed was specially imbued with that mischief-making pohtico-theological doctrine of the time, being an ardent patriot convinced that God had given America His particular blessing and had entrusted the nation to spread not only Christianity but democracy.

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When he had mastered enough of the Chinese language for simple conversation, he joined the faculty of the mission-founded Tengchow College, an institution of less than actual collegiate rating where young Chinese were prepared for the Christian ministry. Although he had had only one elementary course in physics at Yale, he became the physics instructor simply because one was needed. Vigorous and enthusiastic, he had the gift of communicating with the young. But he suffered some discomfiture and possibly even damaged his own career because of his bullheaded opposition to the standpat older missionaries who were interested only in saving souls. He saw the need for curricular improvement and a better all-around education for the mission's young Chinese charges, and he was blunt in saying so. As even his sympathetic biographer put it, "The elder statesmen within the Mission struggled to exercise Christian patience in showing this brash young colleague the error of his ways."

But if mission work was gruehng, it had its compensations. Missionaries were a privileged class. Chinese servants removed all need for menial work, and leisure was provided by school vacations. The Luces spent the sxm^imer of 1898 at the seacoast town of Petaiho, where Luce was overjoyed to meet his Yale classmate, Rev. Horace Tracy Pitkin, who now also had a wife and son and was a Congregational missionary at Paotingfu.

3. GOD AND OLD GLORY

The Luces had become part of a holy crusade which had fallen into tyrannical practices. The Protestant missionary movement, which began in China in the 1830's, had by degrees arranged for special privileges backed by the power of the United States. The behef that God had participated directly in America's founding had encouraged an aggressive collaboration with the Almighty and had maintained a conviction of essential goodness as Manifest Destiny ordained the appropriation of the West, then Hawaii and the Philippines. President McKinley, a Methodist, explained that it would have been shameful to neglect the Filipinos:

. . . [Tjhere was nothing left for us to do but to take [the islands], and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died.

Mr. Dooley saw it in a different light:

We're a gr-reat civilizein' agent, Hinnissy, an' as Father Kelly says, "So's th' steam roller." An' bein' a quiet man, I'd rather be behind thin in fr-ront when the shtreet has to be improved.

Expansionists such as Theodore Roosevelt and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan saw in the widening network of missionaries a useful instrument in ex-

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tending American power and commerce. One witticism had it that American missionaries and the Standard Oil Company had the same motto, "Let there be hght," and that one group sought the souls of 400 million Chinese while the other went for their pocketbooks. The writer Margherita Hamm returned from the Orient and pointed out that notice of the missionaries' possessions created a demand for them among the people. "From this point of view," she wrote, "every missionary is a salesman for the manufactures of Christendom!" In a phonograph record made by William Howard Taft, he praised foreign missions on one side and urged a bigger army and navy on the other. The most orotund coupler of God and Old Glory was Senator Beveridge, who echoed Kipling's "White Man's Burden" and would himself be echoed decades later by the journalist Henry Luce:

God . . . has made us the master organizers of the world to establish systems where chaos reigns. . . . He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night . . . He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world.

Sections of the Chinese melon had been seized by the English, French, Portuguese, Russians, Japanese and Germans. China, with the largest population of any nation, had sunk to the peculiar status of a colony not of one country but many. America, arriving late, had taken no territory but had demanded every advantage exacted by the other nations. China had been forced by treaty to admit American missionaries and businessmen, grant them extraterritoriality, guarantee their safety, and to pay indemnity for offenses against them. The missionary organizations, determined to spread God's word despite the people's hostility, had pressed hard for these imperiahst concessions. American businessmen in China generally dissociated themselves from the missionaries in the hope that they could thereby escape the hatred felt for them.

The corrupt Empress Dowager was helpless to prevent these humiliations, or to prevent foreigners from taking over more and more of the port facilities, banks, railroads, mines and other enterprises. In the international race for booty, China had become infested with plump foreign merchants and promoters whose clubs excluded the Chinese. But the most intolerable affront was the attack of the missionaries on their sacred beliefs. As Nathaniel Peffer observed:

. . . [T]here was fundamentally something unhealthy and incongruous in the whole missionary idea. If the endeavor had been confined to primitive savages something could have been said for it. But to go out to a race of high culture and long tradition, with philosophical, ethical, and religious systems antedating Christianity, and to go avowedly to save its people from damnation as dwellers in heathen darkness—in that there was something not only spiritually Umited but almost grotesque.

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Not a year had passed without sporadic outbreaks against the foreign religionists. The Chinese were fertile in their invention of ingenious tortvire and protracted execution. Missionaries of various sects had met death in many forms, ranging from dismemberment to crucifixion. All this paled before the violence that occurred when the secret organization of the Boxers, dedicated to the extermination of the "foreign devils," launched their great bloodletting in the spring of 1900.

One Boxer manifesto began: "The Catholic and Protestant religions being insolent to the gods and extinguishing sanctity, rendering no obedience to Buddha, and enraging Heaven and Earth, the rain-clouds no longer visit us; but eight milhon Spirit Soldiers will descend from Heaven and sweep the Empire clean of all foreigners."

The New York Times of June 12 listed the Luces as among those in danger as Boxers streamed into Shantung. A week later, its headline over a story about the many Caucasian nationals in peril was, "china is at war waxH the world!" By the end of June the whole Presbyterian colony at Tengchow was forced to flee for their lives—a process made difficult for the Luces because their second child, Emmavail, was only three weeks old and Henry was still a baby of two.

With an amah helping them, they escaped on July 1 on a boat operated by friendly Chinese. Ultimately they were taken, along with other refugees, in a larger vessel across the bay to Seoul, Korea, where they spent the summer with sympathetic American missionaries while American and other troops dealt with the Boxers. They learned that Pitkin was among those killed, decapitated with a heavy sword. His wife and son would have suffered the same fate had they not been vacationing in America.

"What days these are for China!" Luce wrote. "Days of suspense, days of suffering and persecution, days of blood and death! But in it all the missionaries have not lost their quiet and calm, standing firm in their determination to pour out their Uves for China."

Missionaries in China, as elsewhere, tended to be determined, undoubting men. There seemed no feehng among them that it might be better to pour out their lives in their own imperfect homeland. With few exceptions they returned in their hundreds to their posts when peace had been restored. Altogether some 136 Protestant and 44 Cathohc missionaries and 53 children of missionaries had been killed, in addition to about 30,000 Chinese converts to Christianity, who were regarded as traitors. Life was cheap in China, anger ran high and the savagery of the killings was shocking, many of the victims being decapitated, burned to death or mutilated with slow torture.

Incidents in Peking after the troops had driven off the Boxers and rescued the foreigners there illustrated the strangely inverted attitude of some of the clergymen. Angered by the Boxer atrocities, some American missionaries appropriated Chinese mansions and palaces whose owners had fled, looted them and sold their silver and furnishings. The practice was justified on the ground

Luce and His Empire

that Christians, inchiding Chinese converts, deserved to be indemnified for their losses. Yet this seemed a high-handed method of seeking indemnity, as did the fact that a part of the profits was used for such things as speculation in rice and the purchase of land for a "summer residence for missionaries."

News of this, as well as churchly demands that the McKinley administration exact summary vengeance, took aback readers in America, one of them being Mark Twain. "Sometimes," Twain wrote in the North American Review, "an ordained minister sets out to be blasphemous. When this happens, the layman is out of the running; he stands no chance." To missionary replies that they had only followed local custom. Twain rejoined that the Commandment should be revised to read, "Thou shalt not steal—except when it is the custom of the country." The missionary defense that they had taken in indemnity only a little more than the value of the mission property destroyed, Twain likened to the girl who, when reproached for having an illegitimate child, said, "But it is such a little one."

In America, a small minority of critics drew from these events the reflection that we had no right to impose our rehgion on the Chinese and that if we did so it should be at the missionaries' own risk. But the American people as a whole entirely missed the lesson of the rebeUion. They still regarded the Chinese masses with sentimental affection, feeling that the Boxers were a group apart, a band of fanatics who should of course be brought to retribution.

Punishment was ruthless. Boxer leaders were publicly beheaded. Poverty-stricken China was compelled to pay an indemnity of $333 million to the various injured nations and to extend greater concessions to Western business interests as well as to permit the stationing of a foreign garrison in Peking.

The killings and the destruction of church and business property resulted in hundreds of individual claims for indemnity on the part of businessmen, missionaries or their families. The Horace Pitkin estate, for example, filed a claim against China for $100,000. Herbert Hoover, who would later be a Waldorf Towers neighbor and friend of the Henry Luce who was now only two years old, asked $52,707 to reimburse him for the three-year engineering job in Chihli Province which he had been forced to give up because of the turmoil. The claims commission, learning that he had soon found another job almost as good, allowed him only $10,759.

By late fall the Luces and their colleagues were back at Tengchow and the school and mission were functioning again. Rev. Henry Luce, an ecumenist ahead of his time, was now winning the disapproval of some of his elders by urging educational consolidation with other Protestant groups in Shantung. ". . . It is both uneconomical and a denial of our unity in Christ," he said, "that the Presbyterians are attempting to carry on their own little college, with insufficient staff and funds, while at the same time several other American and British missions are also trying to estabUsh and maintain colleges with equally inadequate resources."

In 1902 his exhortations were heeded when a collaboration with English

W. A. Swanberg

Baptists, something unprecedented, was agreed on. In 1904, soon after the birth of their second daughter, EUsabeth, the Luces moved to the new arts college at Weihsien, 125 miles to the southwest. Here Luce was made head of the physics department—a tribute to his independent study of the subject. And here young Henry, easily the handsomest boy of the mission, began to exercise his intellect.

Obviously gifted, he received more than ordinary encouragement from his parents. At age three he had attended the Chinese Christian church as well as the Sunday service in English. At five he "delivered his own sermons—to the neighbors' children, or anyone else who would listen," his sister recalled, and his proud mother wrote them down for his father. The other children stared when the sandy-haired young Harry, as he was called, declaimed: "He has established the earth and he founded it upon the seas. For the tower of Babel, it was a wicked thing that man should do, and Jehovah smashed it. . . ."

Not unaware of his keenness, he might have been an insufferable little peacock but for his great seriousness and his intention to do good in the world. It was the mother who was the disciplinarian and who turned him over her knee when he needed punishment. The father, for all his stubbornness and occasional temper, was the lenient parent. He had an axiom from the Greeks, "character means destiny," which the son would adopt as his own, and he would urge, "Use your native Lucepower" to encourage effort and determination. He was patriotic, a believer in America, an extravagant admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. There was in this family perhaps even more of the strong love of country commonly felt by missionaries far from home. And they had gone through the Boxer Rebellion, an experience blending the religious and patriotic as nothing else could. The Luces would never forget their escape from Tengchow. And they would remember and retell the story of the arrival of American troops in Peking, coming gloriously to the rescue as the hard-riding cavalry was wont to do in melodramas. The advance of the flag to the great Oriental capital was at once an act of God, a merciful deliverance from barbarism run amuck, and an event inspiring deep national pride, the proof and vindication of America as a world power.

All this was absorbed by the young, intelligent, patriotic and religious Harry Luce. Years later, some of his colleagues would swear that if one looked sharply he could see Old Glory rippling in each of Luce's blue eyes.

"I have the globe ready to teach the history of George Washington," he told his mother at age six; ". . . the boys like to hear about Isaiah . . . but Paul is the easiest of all Bible men ..."

1. LAND OF THE FREE

Early in 1906 the excitement in the Luce family was almost unbearable as, after vast preparations, they sailed for San Francisco. Rev. Henry Luce was on a money-raising mission for Weihsien that would take more than a year. For young Harr)' it was his first ghmpse of the great republic he had heard so much about, the country that was his country even though he had never set foot on it before.

He was, for such a bright boy, astonishingly literal. To him, the nation was in actual fact the land of the free and the home of the brave, just as the anthem said. He marveled at the wonders of America, where even the poor seemed rich by Chinese standards and were blessed with the vote, and where Theodore Roosevelt sat in the White House, put there by those millions of voters in a democratic way unknown in China.

The most important stop the Luces made was at a turreted brownstone palace encircled by a spiked iron fence—the home of Mrs. Cyrus HaU McCor-mick at 675 Rush Street in Chicago. Mrs. McCormick, the enormously rich widow of the founder of the International Harvester Company, was as devout a Presbyterian as her hard-shelled husband had been, a generous contributor to the church and its missions. She and her late husband had been the largest donors in the construction of the huge Fourth Presbyterian Church nearby, which therefore became known colloquially as The Church of the Holy Harvester, or sometimes as The Church of the Divine Reaper. She so hked Rev. Henry Luce that she asked him to bring his wife and children from their hotel. Petite, regal, surrounded by crystal and footmen, she was drawn to the missionary family who had made such sacrifices for the faith and whose very clothing showed signs of Chinese design and needlework. Perhaps a further reason for her appreciation of them was the fact that she, like Mrs. Luce, was

W. A. Swanberg

deaf—she used a jeweled serpentine ear trumpet—and that the Luces had all acquired the habit of speaking distinctly. She took an immediate liking to the handsome, articulate, grave-faced, eight-year-old Harry Luce.

The palace contained such wonders as a hydraulic elevator and, on the ceiling of the main hall, an intricate painted design which had as its central figure a glorified version of the McCormick reaper. At Mrs. McCormick's insistence, the Luces called on her several times during their fifteen-month stay in America. She would remain their friend and benefactor as long as she lived, donating generously to the mission, contributing to the children's education and corresponding with Mrs. Luce. She was so fond of their boy and so fearful that life in China might impair his schooling and opportunity that she offered to adopt him and educate him in America. In later life he never forgot his terror at this proposal, having taken a strange notion that she wanted to "buy" him from his parents. The Luces prayed for guidance. They decided that they must keep their son, but they could not refuse Mrs. McCormick's offer to pay for a new house for them at Weihsien.

Harry's tonsils were removed while the family was in America. He emerged from the anesthetic before the surgery was finished—a painful experience to which the parents ascribed the stutter which tormented him for years afterward. In June, Rev. Henry Luce received an honorary Master of Arts degree at Yale in recognition of religious writings he had done in China, solidifying the family attachment to his alma mater. They visited Mrs. Luce's relatives, the Roots, in Utica, where Harry showed an aspect of the naivete he would never really outgrow. Attending church there, and seeing a stained-glass window bearing the quotation, "I am the Vine and Ye are the Roots," he remarked that he had not known of his direct relationship to Christ.

Meanwhile Rev. Luce solicited contributions from his Yale classmates— now men in their mid-thirties, even the "unsuccessful" ones prosperous enough to make a missionary feel poverty-stricken—and other wealthy men. "Trudged through the rain all day," he noted on one occasion. "Tried to see ten men, seven of them refused to see me." But his persistence—his "native Lucepower"—brought results and by the time the family was back in China in April 1907, the little college's prospects were at any rate improved.

Harry read avidly in the family library—from H. G. Henty to Dickens to Gibbon. The Luces were richer in books than in modern conveniences. One of the vivid memories of the daughters is the huge annual order the family mailed to the Montgomery Ward company in Chicago. Both mother and father worked over the order list, which included everything from stationery to canned goods, clothing and gifts. Since it took almost a year after the order was sent for the shipment to arrive, a special difficulty was to estimate how much the children's feet would grow in specifying the size of shoes. "When the shipment finally came," Emmavail recalls, "it was a holiday for all of us. We were allowed to skip school for the day while we helped father and mother open box after box and check each item off against the order Ust."

Luce and His Empire

Family life was warmly simple, the children gathering to sing as Mrs. Luce played the piano, or joining with other missionary families in sociables or outings. The excitement of 1908, however, was the building of the new eight-room house provided by Mrs. McCormick—a dwelling they hoped would end the makeshift accommodations they had endured, having lived in thirty houses or parts of houses including an abandoned temple to Kwan Yin, during their eleven years in China. It was mentioned in a charming letter written by Harry to his favorite magazine, St. Nicholas:

My dear St. Nicholas,

I am a boy born in China. I live in the country near Weihsien (Way Shen) city, in an enclosed compound or big yard about two blocks large. There are eight dwelling houses, a boys' and girls' school, a college, a big church and two hospitals.

A new house is being built (the house we are to live in) by Chinese carpenters and masons.

It will take about eight months to build it. What a long time! The Chinese have no saw-mills, but every log has to be cut and sawed by hand.

I think you are fine.

Your true friend and reader, Henry R. Luce

By now his sisters were being tutored by a formidable widow, Frau Netz, whose kindness of heart was hidden behind the sternest Prussian discipline. His equability vanished whenever she was called on to aid him in his school work. They struck sparks immediately. His willfulness toward Frau Netz decided his parents on taking him out of the mission school and sending him away to a private school where he would escape the heavily feminine influence at home, submit to a prescribed discipline and get better training for Yale, where he would of course eventually matriculate. At ten he was sent to the British boarding school at Chefoo, on the Shantung north coast.

2. IT WAS ALL GOD

Although he later said of Chefoo School, "I hated it and I loved it," it was the dislike that seemed to linger. On top of the displacement of his adoring parents by despotic masters who enforced regulations with canings, the young patriot was a member of a minority. The masters were all Britons, as were four-fifths of the hundred-odd students. His stuttering, about which he was painfully sensitive, could not have failed to provoke occasional taunts, nor could his aggressive Americanism. His imperfect sense of humor deprived him of the saving capacity to understand a joke and enjoy it rather than resent it. His ambassadorially serious estimate of himself and his country, which was discernible at a considerable distance, doubtless made him the butt of jokes he otherwise would have escaped. He later recalled that a British master in-

W. A. Swanberg

sisted that Ohio was pronounced "O-hee-o." He recalled that the "British code—flogging and fagging and toadying—violated every American instinct." He recalled having a fight with "a British bastard who had insulted my coun-

try"

One classmate remembered him as a "quiet, solemn, aloof boy," and went on to describe a part of the training at Chefoo: "He received the British disci-phne intended to train empire-builders and administrators and learned the code."

The empire building stuck, but so did many other things, for he had a capacity for concentration allied with his endless intellectual curiosity as well as that phenomenal memory. Homesick, he sent home a torrent of letters, mostly well phrased, mostly serious. He attended sermons and hung on words that most boys shut out in protective daydreams. "The best sermon I ever heard," he wrote at age eleven, ". . . on the redemption and what the death of Christ means . . ." And he could exhibit a formidable familiarity with God, as when he wrote home:

I am going to get into the fourth form. I do not care if I die for it. I must get inside. I must. I will. And God has, is, and will help me. Just take my 100% in Algebra. It was all God. I prayed he would guide my hand from all careless mistakes and again in the middle of the exam.

Probably no other Chefoo scholar wanted so desperately not merely to succeed but to excel, or sought God's help not only before the examination but in the middle, seizing a minute or two from his equations to renew the prayer that God might have forgotten in the press of business.

At home on vacation he joined other mission boys in "war games" in the fields and showed a historical bent in his re-creation of battles such as Waterloo with toy soldiers in the house. "He was always nice to us," Emma vail recalled, "but he warned us not to knock his soldiers over." The birth of a second son, Sheldon Luce, in 1909 expanded the family to six, but housework and child care were largely taken over by the half-dozen Chinese servants. The Luces and other missionary families acquired summer cottages on the beach at Iltus Huk, Tsingtao. Harry, growing tall and muscular, swam there with his friends but was always more the scholar than the athlete.

Back at school, determined to overcome his handicap, he deliberately courted the horror that most stammerers avoid—public speaking. "We have just founded a debating society . . . tonight we debate 'Should Mary Queen of Scots have been beheaded?' " The "quiet, aloof boy" could talk like one of Mr. Edison's phonographs when he had a properly appreciative audience. His best friend was Harold Burt, whom he knew from Weihsien, the son of a British missionary there. Another classmate was Thornton Wilder, whose father was American consul general at Shanghai and with whom he would have a sporadic friendship that ended curiously: "I had a long talk with Thornton Wilder on Darwinism. He says that it is quite the thing in the U.S. He says that until he came here he thought everybody accepted it! "

Luce and His Empire

Anger gripped him on Independence Day, 1912: "To my utter contempt of American citizens here in Chefoo, the 4th of July passed without note to sound the glories of our day. Has patriotism fallen to this degraded state? Is there no spark left to show our ancient glory?"

His national loyalty would always be a blend of Roosevelt, Beveridge and Dink Stover. At Chefoo School he did what would always come naturally to him, wringing from it every drop of learning it could offer. He raced against time as he would always race against time. He studied the Bible, worked at French, Latin and Greek, reveled in history, pored over the Yale bulletin, followed current events, watched politics both in China and America, cherished photographs of Roosevelt his father sent him, and indulged a promising creative urge. "I am still—I suppose foolishly—desperately keen on poesy," he wrote, still only thirteen, "and am in the midst of writing a long epic ... on the missionary's sacrifices and rewards . . . and an essay on capital punishment." Before he had finished the epic, a new enterprise claimed him:

Now a surprise ... a school paper has been urged. ... I am Editor-in-Chief (an elephantine title!). . . . The plan is to [make] 30 copies to be sold at 10(1; (weekly paper), ten pages: Poetry (classical and jocular). Editor's Arena, Short Story, News Columns (anecdotes like your "Campus Note Book"), Criticism on Works, Buriesque . . .

He already had executive ideas about the journalism that would ultimately claim him. Perhaps even more prophetic words came in an earlier letter, a remark tossed off with seeming carelessness except that this young man was never careless: "I would like to be Alexander if I were not Socrates." He wanted to be both conqueror and philosopher, and during the next half-century he would have some success at both.

At fourteen, in the fall of 1912, Harry said good-bye to family and friends, boarded a steamship at Shanghai and was off, alone, for England. He had won a scholarship at Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, but first he would spend a year in a school at St. Albans, north of London, whose headmaster had had success in curing stammerers. At Singapore his admiration for the botanical gardens gave way to his social conscience: ". . . I will not rave over a city where Botany is apparently first and Humanity second. Time in this city could be sold for a flower an hour while in the city of Life time is valued by the doUars per minute."

Ceylon, Suez, the Mediterranean—he recorded keen impressions in daily letters home, valuing his minutes like dollars. At Naples he first set eyes on Europe, a continent he would later crisscross with his pathways, and was simultaneously transported by a beauty which "scorns description by such as I," and indignant at its slums: "... with all its beauty, its churches, its ecclesiastical finery, there is a terrible poverty and hence a hotbed of socialism—no wonder!"

Reaching England and the St. Albans school in October, he used it as a

W. A. Swanberg

base for bicycle tours to castles, cathedrals and "the grassy remains of the old Roman walls, telling in a way that words fail to show: the fact of Ancient History." He read English newspapers and magazines. He called on his good friend Harold Burt, now back in London to prepare for Oxford. He explored the city, visited Parliament: "... I have attended a debate in the House of Lords, the greatest debate of the year ..." But alas, there seemed to be little improvement in his speech. He was itching to see Europe and in February 1913 he got parental permission to visit the continent. For a week he investigated Paris, then went on to Switzerland and Rome: "Spent my 15th birthday [April 3, 1913] in the Forum ... I have carried away with me some parts of Rome that can never be taken from me."

As he returned to finish the school year at St. Albans, his indefatigable family at Weihsien planned a European reunion and tour that was a continuing demonstration of the venturesome way they regarded the world as their oyster.

When Rev. Henry Luce again visited America that spring to raise more money for the college, the rest of the family—Mrs. Luce, Emmavail, Elisabeth and four-year-old Sheldon—accompanied him. The latter four continued on to Europe and took a pension at Lausanne. When Harry's school year was finished, he and young Burt joined them at Lausanne for hiking and moun-tain-cHmbing around Lake Geneva. (The mountain-chmbing would foster in him a poetic idea about the distant Matterhorn.) Next, Mr. Luce rejoined the entourage, intent on broadening his religious education. Taking Emmavail with him because her German was excellent, he visited the "Martin Luther country"—Eisleben, Erfurt, Leipzig and Wittenberg—thence to Wernig-erode, where they met Mrs. Luce, Elisabeth and Sheldon, Harry having meanwhile traveled down the Rhine with Burt, who returned to London. At Wernigerode, the two girls were put in a boarding school operated by the sister of Frau Netz, where they would spend a year. The high-stepping Rev. Henry Luce, not even breathing hard, joined Harry in Hamburg, where they embarked for New York. Mrs. Luce stayed on for a time with young Sheldon, visiting galleries and museums in Berlin and Leipzig before she and her youngest son in turn sailed for New York. These were people who got around.

1. AMERICA!

Hotchkiss School's row of handsome brick buildings with white cupolas surmounted a wooded hill near sleepy Lakeville, Connecticut, which overlooked a lake with a mountain beyond—a scene suggestive of a Japanese print. The school was purposely inaccessible in order to keep parents and other distractions away from the 250 boy scholars. The pompous headmaster, Dr. Huber Gray Buehler, known as The King, always wore a cutaway, and beginning students were told by upperclassmen that he went to bed that way. Tuition fees were high, the masters demanding, and the stiff collars required at daily chapel sawed 250 necks. Though the school professed to be nondenomina-tional, it was heavily Presbyterian. The more active boys complained that on Sundays they were permitted only to breathe, and that quietly.

Hotchkiss catered to sons of the affluent who were expected to go on to college, most of them heading for Yale. Rosenberg's and other tailors from New Haven and New York sent representatives there to take orders for expensive tweeds, and the boy who did not wear Frank Brothers cordovans and carry his own matched cowhide luggage was out of it.

Into this uppish milieu came Henry Luce, wearing scuffed shoes and a suit oddly tailored by a Chinese who had studied the general drift of American styles in an old magazine illustration. He stammered badly at times. He arrived at the Lower Mid (sophomore) year so that he was a stranger among classmates who had known each other a year. He was ignorant of American slang—a grave handicap—and could remain blank-faced at jokes that made others split their sides. He was promptly nicknamed Chink, which he loathed. Being a scholarship boy—that is, an object of charity—he cleaned classrooms and occasionally waited on table.

These multiple humiliations he managed to endure. If he knew that he

W. A. Swanberg

would never win his H at football, or hold a group spellbound as he spun out a joke, he also knew that he had talents of his own. Few of his classmates could match him scholastically or creatively, and not one of those well-turned-out boys from luxurious homes had his background of world travel, self-reliance and independent thought.

Still, he could not be blamed if, in some of his conversations with God, he requested improvement in things worldly so that he could meet the Rosen-berg-and-Frank Brothers boys on closer terms.

He was immediately an honor student. He quickly became a leader in St. Luke's, the religious organization, and won a place on the Hotchkiss Literary Monthly. "Next Saturday," he wrote his parents, "I deliver an oration, competing for the Forum Literary Team of five. It will be, so to speak, a very crucial point in my life here at Hotchkiss."

Every effort he made was crucial. An oration was especially so, with the nightmare possibility of breaking down in stammering. He did not break down, having discovered that words flowed more freely in a prepared speech, and he made the Forum. But in recitation or conversation he would get stuck and would suffer. In his room he studied a book of instructions for stammerers. Courage and will were evident in his lonely battle. Meanwhile his two sisters left Germany hurriedly before the Kaiser's ultimatum. It seemed that if the globe-girdling Luces were not escaping Boxers on one side of the world, they were dodging Uhlans on the other.

Luce was not on close terms with his noisy classmate Briton Hadden, who came from a prosperous banking family in Brooklyn, had a passion for horseplay and baseball, and would ultimately join him in the strangest of partnerships. He became friendly with another classmate, Culbreth Sudler of Chicago—himself an outstanding student with literary gifts. Sudler was impressed by Luce's habit of listening carefully to a chapel sermon, evaluating the speaker "and never questioning his competence to pass judgment on him." Sudler and Luce would hike to the lake on Sundays before chapel, Luce talking in the explosive way of the stammerer. "Harry's tie would be askew," Sudler recalled, "his jacket with a button missing . . . and his eyes would still be remembering the passage from Milton we had to memorize for the next day's English class. . . . For him the purpose of those walks was to sort out the contents of his mind. Was Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson ultimately right for the American people? "

Luce and Hadden measured each other in a singular relationship that always contained more of rivalry and respect than friendship, and would continue on that basis for fifteen years. Both won staff positions on the bi-weekly Record, the school news publication. In their senior year Hadden won the coveted post of editor-in-chief, but Luce stayed at least even in the competition, remaining as a Record assistant editor and becoming editor-in-chief of the Lit. If Luce had a wide margin in scholarship, Hadden's bluff good humor surrounded him with friends. Luce excelled in the Greek class they attended

Luce and His Empire

together, and yet it was Hadden who would find a use for Greek that would enrich them both. Hadden, who could write good prose, could not match Luce's flights into verse. Since Hadden's ability at baseball did not equal his love for the game, and neither boy gained the athletic prowess obligatory for "top men," they viewed each other a trifle warily from the subsidiary level of editorial and intellectual excellence. Each was going to Yale, and at some point along the way each recognized the other as a foeman worthy of his steel.

". . . [U]nless we race we rot," Luce wrote his parents as he sprinted. There was a no-nonsense toughness in him, a practicality, a belief in brain over heart that would later cause him to be thought hard, and which made him pen one line remarkably hard-boiled for any youngster, much less one of such churchly rearing: "Not for one sentimental cause shed one small tear . . ." He would throughout his life reject sentiment for what he saw as pragmatism. Not that this placed any limits on his schoolboy ambition. That was high and sure, perhaps because of confidence in his own brain and its freedom from softness. He could lampoon in verse the average man's limited aspiration, his passive content to climb a "little hill"—a poem ending:

Thus, thus, he spake,—the man earth-born Who feared to gaze on Matterhom.

It was Matterhorn or nothing for Luce. Though he had not yet decided on a career, and his admiration for Milton and Wordsworth tempted him to take up poetry in earnest, he wrote his father that he was not "aiming at anything paltry" and would depend on God to help him choose. But here was one young poet not defeated by a column of figures or a practical problem. Along with the numbers, he possessed the logic and acumen needed in business. On the one hand he could pen a sentimental vignette, innocently celebrating his own travels, West and East:

Oh, lights of Venice shining

A-through the mist to me; Oh, golden sun reclining

A-down a silver sea; Oh, paper lanterns darting

In Niko-in-the-hills; Oh, love-light at departing,

—Our world with glory fills.

On the other, he could travel to New York City, dicker with printers for the Lit, watch the October Scribner's magazine come off the presses, and call on the great Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook (and a friend of Theodore Roosevelt's!), to ask his advice on running the Lit ("I had expected five minutes with the distinguished gentleman. I got a good half hour").

On the one hand he could glorify adventure in China with lines that had a good gallop even if overlong (eleven stanzas) and rough in spots:

W. A. Swanberg

Oh, give me a Shantung shen-dzi, And the Hfe of a muleteer! Oh, give me a load And a mountain road. The way of a pioneer!

Farewell to the ships at anchor,

And the junks from old Shanghai.

I'll see them again

In the month of ten.

When the snow is lying high. . . .

On the other, he could conceive an unprecedented money-making scheme for the Lit—a special automobile advertising section at $12 a page which brought in revenue from Pierce Arrow, Dodge and other leading makers.

He made his class football team despite his athletic ineptitude, sang in the glee club although he was nearly tone deaf, made the debating team as if he had never wrestled with a consonant, wrote a play contrasting Cromwell and Milton, worked for the $10 Virgil prize, intentionally embarrassed the frock-coated King in Bible class by asking, "Why should we have to ask an all-protecting God not to lead us into temptation?," and during the Christmas vacation went to New York largely to hear three sermons in a row, one of them by the sonorous John Henry Jowett at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, who preached about the cherubim in Isaiah I, never dreaming that the gist of his message would cross the Pacific and be carried at last to the Luce parents in Weihsien by a junk from old Shanghai and a Shantung shen-dzi.

In the Record, Hadden found fault with Luce's Cromwell-Milton play but praised his "shen-dzi" stanzas as "by far the best poem that has appeared in the Lit this year." Doubtless both hoped for more than routine recognition at graduation time when the senior class voted for its "best." Alas, it was the athletes who took the honors. Luce was irked enough to enliven his last issue with a blast at the shin-guard mentahty and a frank tribute to Editor Hadden of the Record, not to mention Editor Luce of the Lit.

"After we graduated," Sudler recalled, "to my complete surprise, Harry sent me a note with a check for $40 or so as my share of the profits of the Lit." Luce took his own profits to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he had a summer office job at eight dollars a week with the local daily Republican. He economized drastically in the hope of bettering his financial position at Yale. It happened that cantaloupe was plentiful and cheap in the Springfield area that summer. So many of his meals consisted of cantaloupe and ice cream that he could never thereafter recover his enthusiasm for either. But to his deUght, he was occasionally allowed to fiU in as a reporter.

"The reporting work becomes more and more fascinating," he wrote his parents in his 457th letter since he first went to Chefoo (his letters were later edited and numbered by his sister Elisabeth). ". . . As a matter of fact, I be-

Luce and His Empire

lieve that I can be of greatest service in journalistic work and can by that way come nearest to the heart of the world."

2. SMOKE AMONG THE ELMS

When Luce entered Yale in 1916 he was eighteen years old and for the first time participating regularly in a society which, in its thought and talk, approached that of mainstream America. He had skipped entirely an ordinary American boyhood. His fiery Americanism was that of his parents out of the previous century. In matriculating at Yale he was consummating a family dream and was also beginning a more studied battle for mastery with Briton Hadden. The kid rivalry now escalated into a more mature combat which would reverberate along High and College streets for four whole years, trailing smoke among the elms. The accounts of a few of the surviving witnesses of the class of 1920—Culbreth Sudler, John M. Hincks and Perry Prentice— attest to the severity of the struggle. Even the narratives of Yalemen of slightly earlier or later vintage—Archibald MacLeish, William Benton, Allen Grover and E. V. Hale—touch on it. An interesting aspect was the fact that both Luce and Hadden were heavily armed with abiUties but, with the exception of their enormous drive and common gift for journalism, they were as different as if they had come from opposite sides of the world, which they had.

Since Rev. Henry Luce's day, Yale had subdued its stress on rehgion and the classics. It had become a four-year exercise in which fellowship still outranked scholarship but a more practical accommodation had been made toward mundane success. While any college modestly hoped that its graduates would be self-supporting, Yale trained its men assiduously for business, political and social supremacy. If it was true that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, Yale wanted to make it equally certain that the battles of Wall Street, Fifth Avenue and Washington, and all their smaller counterparts throughout the country, would be won in the ivied realm between Grove and Chapel streets. As Henry Seidel Canby, a graduate who taught English there and had Luce and Hadden as students, observed:

There was no fiercer competition in the business world than the [Yale] undergraduate competition for social awards. Beside its strenuosities the pursuit of marks or even of scholarship glowed dimly. . . . [Cjollege life . . . inculcated ideals that were viable in America as it was then, and these ideals were adaptations of general idealism (even of Christianity) to the needs of an industrialized, get-rich-quick country. It educated specifically for the harsh competitions of capitalism, for the successful and often unscrupulous pursuit by the individual of power for himself, for class superiority, and for a success measured by the secure possession of the fruits of prosperity. I do not see how a better education could have been contrived for a youth that wanted the wealth, the position, the

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individual power that was being worshiped just then in America—and wanted to get them quickly, easily, and with no public dishonesty.

Yale's gospel of success held out rewards to the faithful and withheld them from the dissidents. A Yaleman's orthodoxy was almost as visible as a Heidel-berger's dueling scar. The trickle of Yalemen into Wall Street was becoming a stream. The system permitted endless individuaUty so long as it did not conflict with the college concepts of loyalty, religion, patriotism, success and elitism. But if Yale was conformist, WASPish, dilettante and materialistic, it enveloped its purposes in rousing good fellowship and the glamour of elderly traditions, handsome buildings, ardent young men, mandolins, noseguards and secret societies. It took itself and its values seriously. When Yalemen sang "Bright College Years," they came down with a roar on the last line—"For God, for Country, and for Yale"—and especially on the last word, never seeing any anticlimax in this emphasis.

"This first Sunday at Yale," Luce wrote his parents a trifle rebeUiously, "... there was a Freshman meeting at Dwight Hall . . . rather sickened me . . . One thing is certain, that ... an over-dose of this fervid Xnity stuff, has completely aUenated my friend Brit Hadden from its holy halls."

But he was in perfect conformity with Yale's emphasis on the earning and accumulation of power. Power was the reward for competitive achievement, and so it was in life. Power of one kind or another was what made the world go round and kept it in order. The most thrilling example of it in his own background was the arrival of Old Glory in Peking with the American soldiers who helped put down the Boxers—righteousness armed with might and suppressing evil. The fight for power and the use of power that would mark and ultimately disfigure his life took their justification from the Bible and the flag. The Bible and the flag represented the power of God and country. Those paternal axioms about "native Lucepower" and "character means destiny" reflected the aggressive missionary whose own power depended on the Bible and the flag. The son had been unusually preoccupied with power since boyhood. His mention at twelve that "I would like to be Alexander if I were not Socrates," suggesting the struggle in him between conquest and contemplation, had been followed in other letters by mention of his more muscular interest: "Worthy men to place in power," "God's gentleness is power in restraint," "the power of the British lion," and "America's leadership of the world."

Luce and Hadden plunged immediately into the battle for a place on the Yale Daily News, a grueling six-month ordeal called "heeling" for several dozen young men of whom only four could win minor posts. Membership on the News staff, though an enormous honor in itself, was part of a complex system of awards leading as time went on to the greatest honor of all, membership in one of the three senior societies. Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, and Wolf's Head. Many freshmen who would have denied having read Stover

Luce and His Empire

at Yale had nevertheless learned something about the "society system" from that book, wherein the knowledgeable sophomore Le Baron explained it to the freshman Dink Stover on the first day at school:

"You'll hear a good deal of talk inside the college, and out of it, too, about the system. It has its faults. But it's the best system there is, and it makes Yale what it is today. It makes fellows get out and work; it gives them ambitions, stops loafing and going to seed. ..."

"I know nothing at all about it," said Stover, perplexed.

"The seniors have 15 in each [society]; they give out their elections end of junior year, end of May. That's what we're all working for."

"Already?" said Stover involuntarily.

"There are fellows in your class," said Le Baron, "who've been working all summer, so as to get ahead of the competition for the News or the Lit, or to make the leader of the glee club—fellows, of course, who know."

"But that's three years off."

"Yes, it's three years off," said Le Baron quietly.

Luce's utterly serious cast of mind combined with what one friend described as "a kind of terrifying egotism" deprived him of the popularity that inundated Hadden. Hadden's jovial shout at Luce, striding across the campus with responsibility etched on his face—"Look out, Harry, you'll drop the college"—underlined one difference between them.

"This heehng business is awful. . . ." Luce wrote his parents. "[It] not only uses up all your energy, it robs you of the mood or frame of mind to do anything like studying or reading or writing letters."

He had assured them that he would do his best to make the News, and that ultimately he would make Phi Beta Kappa. His one-word cable to them in China in March 1917 showed the extent to which they were engrossed in his lonely New Haven competition. It said simply, "Successful." The Luces, having been coached in advance by mail, understood with delight that he had won one of the coveted News posts. But Hadden was top man among the winners.

3. A PIECE OF THE RHINE

Luce fought his customary handicaps in scahng the New Haven Mat-terhorn. The prized collegiate quality of sophistication eluded him. Some thought him arrogant. His lack of poise, camaraderie and humor would classify him later as a square, and his lack of money would classify him any time as poor. He walked on thin soles in a class that included Morehead Patterson, son of the American Machine & Foundry mogul, Harry Davison, son of a Morgan partner, and scions of the du Pont, Hanes, Heffelfinger and other fortunes. Since his father had been able to send him only $500 toward his initial expenses, he could not with real feeling sing that hearty Yale ballad:

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O, father and mother pay all the bills, And I have all of the fun.

With few exceptions he avoided girls. He eschewed Rosenberg's. He got free meals by organizing an eating group. He did what Yalemen and all young men dislike doing. He economized.

Theodore Roosevelt was in paroxysms over President Wilson's pacific "emasculation" of America's righteousness and manhood, with Luce in agreement about the nation's duty to stop the Kaiser. America's entry into the war in April electrified him, although he felt it so late as to lose all moral authority and appear motivated by mere self-preservation. When summer came, with his family still on the far side of the world, he worked at a farm near Scranton owned by old family friends, the Linens. Back at Yale in the fall he earned money by taking orders for ROTC uniforms, including his own. He, Hadden and the rest fell in at 6:45 for campus calisthenics, working up a dripping sweat which they carried noisomely into classes before they could shower at noon. Everybody was singing "K-K-K-Katy" and "We Don't Want the Bacon, All We Want Is a Piece of the Rhine," and Luce badly wanted to go overseas.

Along with his classmates Hadden, Sudler, Walter Millis and Thornton Wilder he was elected to the determinedly literary Elizabethan Club. He was pledged to Alpha Delta Phi, while Hadden joined the somewhat more prestigious Delta Kappa Epsilon. He read his Bible regularly, gave occasional short sermons at the Yale Hope Mission, and was known by some as a "Christer" just as his father in his day had been one of "Jesus' Little Lambs." But the great question was—for the moment even eclipsing the war—who would win that most cherished of sophomore awards, the chairmanship of the Oldest College Daily?

It was between Luce and Hadden. In their subsidiary positions on the paper they had battled each other with outward amiability. Luce roomed with Sudler that year in Durfee Hall, but Sudler seldom saw him because Luce spent every spare minute grinding at the News. On the day of the balloting, the voting among incoming board members was known to be very close. One of the members. Perry Prentice, who voted for Luce, declares to this day that it would have been a tie but for the fact that another of the members believed that Luce preferred that Hadden should have the top position—a preposterous notion.

"Briton Hadden is chairman of the News . . ." Luce wrote his parents bravely although his competitive heart was surely breaking. "I am managing editor, and am to write a share of the editorials . . . Happily, I have the greatest admiration and affection for Brit which, in some measure at least, is reciprocated. "

If his diction was stuffy, he did have a generous appreciation of talent wherever he found it. Hadden, who was not scheduled to take charge until the junior year, got the office abruptly when the incumbent chairman joined

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the Army, and Luce rose with him. The college seethed with a fervor of en-Hstment that reduced enrollment by 40 percent and also threw heavier News responsibility on Luce—welcome in more ways than one, for the paper made a substantial profit from advertising that was distributed to the staff. The younger professors joined the colors. Yale became virtually a military school. "We give three weeks to Aristotle," Luce observed, "—Aristotle who founded twelve sciences!" Intercollegiate athletics were suspended and cultural courses suffered. It was said that Professor Edward Bliss Reed, formerly an academic tyrant, lectured his class in this wise:

Now take this down. It is important for the examination. We come now to Edmund Spenser, spelled with an s. Be careful about that. He wrote the Faerie Queene, spelled F-a-e-r-i-e Q-u-e-e-n-e. Got that? It will be necessary. Now we come to Christopher Marlowe.

Hadden and Luce made the News a propagandist thorn in the Kaiser's side. 'T have written 40% of the editorials and Hadden 30%," Luce wrote home. "... I can confidently say that we have played a major part in changing the spirit of Yale. There is now no college in the country more thoroughly and intensely patriotic—and intelligently!" He argued in a letter to the News against holding the Junior Prom as usual while men were dying in Flanders. Hadden responded with an editorial favoring the Prom, but at the patriotic price of a Liberty Bond. The yeas had it, but Luce did not attend. With Had-den's roommate and closest friend, John M. Hincks, he took the train to New York and bought standing-room tickets for Aida at the Metropohtan Opera.

Hadden's compulsion to keep the paper lively sometimes led him to use unorthodox techniques. At one time when news was slow, he wrote and pub-hshed a fake letter signed "Divinity Student," complaining of the noise and uproar at Berkeley Hall. He then addressed an angry reply from an equally mythical student resident of Berkeley, signed "Old Hatchet Face," who was in turn answered in anger. Soon the whole college was engrossed in the imaginary quarrel. Luce meanwhile tried soberly to shape campus opinion on larger issues. He sent the News home to China and to the family benefactor, Mrs. McCormick, in Chicago, as he had done with his Hotchkiss efforts. Despite the fierce pressure on his time, his energy and concentration were such that he still contributed regularly to the Lit, which was also sent to China and Chicago.

Luce and Hadden were among the many Yalemen who were overjoyed to become full-time soldiers in the summer of 1918 when their unit was sent to Camp Jackson, near Columbia, South Carolina.

"Of course in the eyes of the Eternal," Luce wrote his family, "the days of preparation and the days on the field of battle are one. I pride myself most on my small share in pushing Yale to a more intensive war-training life . . . The one greatest thing to do now is to fight, with all the life one has, so that the continuity of history 'toward the truth and the right of things,' shall be main-

W. A. Swanberg

tained." He described the French officers who gave instruction in the 75-mm. gun as "worthy of the greatest artillery nation on earth." His habit of dissecting moral issues removed him from the "regular fellow" category, as did his refusal to tell racy stories. But by now perhaps the innocuous song the artillerymen sang to the tune of "My Bonnie" did not offend him:

Saltpeter they put in my coffee; Saltpeter they put in my tea; Saltpeter they put in my oatmeal; Oh, bring back my manhood to me.

Army life loosened him a trifle. He, Hadden, Hincks and the rest of the Yale contingent celebrated with cigars when they were commissioned second lieutenants. As Luce later recalled it, it was at Camp Jackson that he and Hadden first discussed the idea of collaborating in the founding of a newsmagazine—a recollection Hincks is inclined to doubt.

Alas, six weeks after they were transferred to Camp Zachary Taylor near Louisville, the war ended and with it their dreams of battle command. It was a crushing blow to Luce. (More than two decades later, when an even greater war began, his second wife noticed that he still felt bereaved at his failure to see combat duty on the Western Front. "He had missed his war," said Mrs. Luce.) "I have absolutely lost all military ambitions," he now admitted dolefully, since military ambition was useless without a war.

In January 1919 the warriors were back at Yale, where Luce and Hadden returned to the News just in time to record the death of Theodore Roosevelt. The event evoked a front-page story and an editorial probably written by the admiring Luce (". . . a spirit unique among men . . . [like] that which imbued Napoleon. He possessed courage which never flinched . . ."). The college years—normally the years when the devil is abroad sowing doubt—left his arrangement with the Almighty unchanged. When Culbreth Sudler's Presbyterian beliefs were shaken by courses in science, Luce told him calmly, "Fundamentalism isn't all there is to religion, you know."

Luce the incessant questioner seems seldom to have questioned the dogma of his fathers. The oddly shy-but-aggressive Christer, the Chinaboy so lacking in finesse, was at a disadvantage socially with that master of the quip and horselaugh, Hadden. Luce competed with him nevertheless in every area where they touched, and was the better man in some of them. But it would be difficult- to measure the lifelong effect on Luce, the competitor who so badly wanted to be first in everything, to be pitted for seven years in prep school and college against a rival he could never match in magnetism and popularity.

Together they took Henry Seidel Canby's advanced writing course, English 40, an exceptional class including Stephen Vincent Benet, Thornton Wilder and Walter Millis. The class was often visited by recent alumni, among them Archibald MacLeish, John Farrar and Philip Barry. Again there was competition with brilliance. The precocious Benet had already published his third

Luce and His Empire

volume of poetry, and MacLeish and Farrar were writing verse of considerable polish. In such company, perhaps Luce decided that he could not lead in every field and had better concentrate on those more promising to him. Thereafter, his budding poetic gift seems to have drawn less of his attention.

With the April I, 1919, issue of the News, Hadden and Luce's names went on the masthead as Chairman and Managing Editor, making official the duties they had already exercised. They continued and enlarged a News tradition of covering the more important national and international events. This was a time of world concern over the fate of Russia that drew Luce's deepest attention. In his boyhood, Czarist Russia had been under permanent suspicion among American missionaries because of its "imperialist designs" on China. Now the shaky Bolshevist government was threatened by several foreign arni-ies and also that of the counterrevolutionary Admiral Kolchak. What was to be done about Russia—and indeed whether Communism should be permitted to exist—was an engrossing question in America. The earliest News story in the Hadden-Luce regime concerning it told of the return to Paris of William C. Bullitt (Yale '12)—a man later to be oddly linked with Luce—with a report to President Wilson "so favorable to the Bolshevist Government," as the News put it, "that it is dangerous to make it public."

It was dangerous to be favorable in any way to the Soviets during this period of anti-Communist turbulence. The News told in a later story of the national concern about the menace of Bolshevist propaganda spread by "insidious soap-box orators, who appeal to the uneducated masses," and of the plan sponsored by patriotic Americans to counter it with college-trained speakers who would expose their falsities. The News splashed the story of the unsuccessful plot, laid to Communists, to send bombs by mail to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., J. P. Morgan and others. These ominous doings were forgotten in what must have been the greatest day in Luce's life to that moment, Thursday, May 15, 1919.

On that day he was elected (along with Walter Millis and fourteen others) to Phi Beta Kappa, a laurel Hadden would never achieve. And he was one of the fifteen tapped for Skull and Bones—a great honor and well deserved, even if the order of selection placed him behind Hadden. Bones, founded in 1832, had on its "secret" roster so many of the wealthy and influential who were sworn to help other Bones men that cynics said a membership properly implemented meant lifetime social and financial assurance. As Le Baron said to Stover, "I'm frankly aristocratic in my point of view, and what I say others think. . . . You may think the world begins outside of college. It doesn't. It begins right here. You want to make the friends that will help you along, here and outside."

This aristocratic-elitist philosophy was one to which Luce would subscribe all his life. But he was appealingly modest about PBK, later admitting that this came about through hard work rather than brilliance, that he was indeed a greasy grind but was so fearful of gaining that reputation that he did much

W. A. Swanberg

of his studying in the dormitory bathroom. And he wrote his parents, with a generosity not easy for one so competitive: "Brit Hadden, if ever a class had one big man, is the big man of our class . . . my rival since early Hotchkiss days . . ."

That fall, the Bolshevist question stirred even more excitement, with Kol-chak suffering reverses in Russia, Attorney General Palmer's men raiding suspected Communist meetings in the United States and radicals being deported. Certainly the politically minded Hadden was interested in these events. Luce was doubly absorbed, politically and religiously, detesting the Bolsheviks on the score of Marxism and atheism. The News, continuing to follow Soviet developments, also ran a long article of opinion headed, "Kolchak is Hope of Russia," specially prepared by Max Solomon, instructor in Russian at Yale, and doubtless solicited by the editors. Luce, who would seldom admit that any subject was beyond his ken, had been further emboldened by his travels to regard international relations as a specialty. He was the leading anti-Bolshevist and pro-Kolchak debater when the Yale Union argued the question of intervention in Russia. As the News reported it:

[Luce] told how this radical group of Communists, despotically controlling a large part of Russia, was opposed by various groups of conservatives. In Kolchak, he said, the conserving influences of Russia converged . . . Kolchak, in order to win, must have assistance.

Luce then turned to the general question of international relations, drawing the conclusion that if we do not intervene soon Bolshevism will undermine the civilization of the world. He concluded by stating that this menace must be fought and overcome on the frontier of civilization.

Millis opposed him on the ground that Kolchak represented a minority, and David Ingalls argued that Bolshevism would die out eventually if let alone. But the Luce call for intervention won the audience vote by 45 to 18. It was the first well-publicized anti-Communist appeal by the young man who would become the Great American Anti-Communist. The basic Christian-moral-patriotic convictions that would drive him all his life were already well developed at Yale. And his concept of a morally superior America, destined to lead the world, was the stuff from which he composed a speech in his bid for the DeForest Prize.

At Woolsey Hall on April 26, 1920, a few weeks before his graduation, he won the prize with an oration about America bristling with mention of "power," "strength," "greatness," "honor and glory," "force" and "moral challenge." He described the nation as a powerhouse without purpose, a moralist manque which had failed to rise to its duties as world leader and international policeman:

. . . When we say "America" today we connote power. We hold the purse strings of the world. . . . We sell in the markets of every nation. . . . America is power in industry. . . . The glory of our strength flatters us. . . . America is

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power, and it sits astride the globe. But is our greatness after all great merely for the sake of greatness? Are we big to no purpose?

There was the rub, he said. America did not beheve in her world mission. For three years she had ignored the moral challenge of the war in Europe and had finally fought out of self-preservation rather than honor. She had lost much of her early spirit of adventure and democracy, and Luce urged on his own generation a rebirth of the national pride and spirit:

But when we say "America" twenty years from now may it be that that great name will signify throughout the world at least two things: First, that American interests shall be respected, American citizens entitled to trade and to live in every comer of the globe, American business ideals recognized wherever the trader goes; second, that America may be counted upon to do her share in every international difficulty, that she will be the great friend of the lame, the halt and the bhnd among nations, the comrade of all nations that struggle to rise to higher planes of social and political organization, and withal the implacable and immediate foe of whatever nation shall offer to disturb the peace of the world. If this shall be, then the America of this century shall have glory and honor to take into that City of God far outshining the glory and honor which the kings do bring. . . . For if America will be a defender of good faith throughout the world, hers will be an adventure more brilhant than Eldorado. . . .

The facetious Hadden would have bellowed, "Look out, Harry, you'll drop the world." But the DeForest Oration given at twenty-two, almost hue by line would be Luce's theme for the rest of his life, forty-seven years and three wars after Woolsey Hall.

1. THE MOST WONDERFUL GIRL

Luce's $1500 share in the profits of the News, plus a $1000 commencement gift from his fairy godmother in Chicago, Mrs. McCormick, made him richer and freer than he ever had been in his Ufe. He had decided on a year of graduate study at Oxford with two classmates, his fellow Bonesman Morehead Patterson and his fellow Phi Beta Kappa member William Whitney, a Rhodes Scholar.

But first he rode to Chicago with Patterson in the private railroad car of the latter's father, Rufus Lenoir Patterson, an inventive genius who had made a fortune devising tobacco-processing machinery for James B. Duke and had done even better on his own. The Patterson car, like the palace of Mrs. McCormick, was one of those exhibits of American luxury likely to arouse envy in a young man of the modest Luce circumstances. As he later admitted, one of his dreams was to own a chauffeur-driven automobile. In Chicago he attended the Republican National Convention, his fascination with politics being part of his solicitude for an America he felt was laggard in its destined world leadership. He saw the nomination of Harding, of whom his opinion was low. He paid his shouted devoirs to Mrs. McCormick, who promised him a job at International Harvester when he returned from Oxford. Riding East again in the same Patterson opulence, he joined two other classmates, John Hincks and Walter Millis, and boarded the Olympia third class with them in July. Hincks, son of a Bridgeport investment banker, had been twice captain of the swimming team and was Bones. Millis, son of a well-traveled Army engineering officer, could be forgiven his Wolf's Head affiliation since he was Phi Beta Kappa, Elizabethan Club, a fencer, class secretary and managing editor of the Lit in his senior year.

Luce had written his old friend Harold Burt, recently graduated from Ox-

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ford, and had told his two Yale friends how tall and powerful Burt was. He had not seen Burt for seven years. Hincks and Millis were amused at Luce's astonishment when they reached London, met Burt and discovered that he had stopped growing in the interim and was now undersized. Burt invited them to a dress party. Luce, always too absorbed in thought to mind his apparel, had lost the vest to his tuxedo. At a store in the Strand he asked for a black vest. The clerk, dumfounded, said he had vests only in white or pink. Luce in turn was astonished until he recalled that in England a vest was an undershirt, and solved the situation by asking for a black waistcoat.

After visiting Stratford-on-Avon, the three Yalemen donned their old Army fatigues and hiked for several days through Devon and Cornwall, then went by train to Wales and made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Elihu Yale. Luce was in good spirits. Perhaps a part of the reason was his escape, after seven years, from the overpowering personality and endowments of Briton Hadden. Continuing into the Lake District, they climbed the 3100-foot Helvellyn, England's nearest approximation to Matterhorn, before going on to Edinburgh and back to London, where they separated. Hincks, who thoroughly enjoyed the tour and would remain a good friend of Luce's as well as Hadden's, could not recall that Luce made any mention of a plan to start a news publication, and indeed there are signs that his ultimate aim at that time was politics.

Luce, for whom this jaunt was a mere warm-up, crossed to Paris and there by chance encountered another classmate, Hugh Auchincloss of Providence, son of a mining entrepreneur. They boarded the Orient Express for Constantinople. Apparently it was on this journey that the eternally curious Luce began his custom of stopping at American embassies for information and advice. "Excellent lunch at American Embassy," he wrote from Constantinople, "... and exceedingly intelligent aides." They stopped at others, including the legation in Bucharest. They spent hours in the Parliament in Budapest, which Luce found "the most beautiful interior I have ever seen."

As his colleagues would notice in later years, there was something about a tour—any tour—that exhilarated him far beyond mere interest. He always returned beaming, or sometimes bursting with indignation, but invariably stuttering in his eagerness to impart new knowledge which often turned out to be more opinion than knowledge. Now he wrote exuberantly, "Somehow I feel as if I know 500% more about Europe, its problems and its national passions, than I ever knew before ... a full account would fill volumes!"

At Christ Church ("Well, here we are at Oxford and Christ Church is grand!"), where he specialized in history, he and Patterson had spacious rooms and a servant to wait on them. Luce, unable to match Patterson's pink-coat-and-foxhunt opulence, was satisfied with tennis for recreation. He relished the fact that he could be addressed at "Ch. Ch. Oxon Eng," and that any post office in Europe would identify it. He immediately learned the history of the various colleges, faithfully observed traditions and planned for the future, writing his parents:

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My desire is to go into public life and whatever I do in the next ten years is preparatory to that . . . publishing? . . . business? . . . financial independence so I can go into politics without being entirely dependent upon the boss for my bread and butter.

Public life. Politics. These were his objectives, and journalism only one possible way to attain independence for a political career. It is hard to resist the thought that Luce already had his eye on the White House. Fascinated as he was by power, he wanted to attain power himself and use it in pushing America into her rightful place of world power. America as a world power with a world mission was on his mind to a degree uncommon for a Senator, much less a man recently out of Yale. "Through it all," he wrote after his latest look at Europe, "one realizes that the magnificence is now of America. May it prove to be a moral and spiritual magnificence!"

Love, however, complicated his life for the first time. With William Whitney he journeyed to Rome for the Christmas holidays and there met Thornton Wilder, studying at the American Academy. "Thornton Wilder," he wrote, "... watches over us. He illumines art and reads to me his plays which show a very great dramatic adroitness and subtlety of characterization."

Wilder did more than that. He took them to a New Year's Eve party at the Academy. Among the guests were the students at Miss Risser's School in Rome, a finishing school for American girls of wealth. Luce spent the entire evening with one of them, Lila Ross Hotz of Chicago, a graduate of Miss Spence's in New York. One friend described her: "Tall, dark, with very white skin and dark brown curls spilling away from her temples and neck, she was one of those dazzling ethereal people who hardly seem to be on the ground at all." She came from a family of wealth and social position, she was a Presbyterian and her brother had gone to Yale. An annual visitor to Europe since childhood, she knew the museums, cathedrals, palazzos and spas far better than Luce. She liked music and poetry and dashed off occasional verses herself. A blithe spirit, she was fluent in Italian and French, possessor of the natural warmth and charm Luce lacked. She later recalled that he was "a bit of an intellectual show-off at the time, and he talked a blue streak." He spoke of books he liked, said his favorite poet was Francis Thompson and startled her by asking suddenly, "Are you popular?"

One of the many surprising things about Luce, appearing as he did so impervious to tenderness, was the violence with which love smote him. Two days later. Perry Prentice—another member of this remarkably well-traveled class of 1920—was standing outside the Pitti Palace in Florence when someone touched his shoulder.

"It was Harry," Prentice recalled, "on his way back to Oxford. He said he had just met the most wonderful girl in the world and he was going to marry her."

To his parents Luce described it as "a perfectly delightful sojourn," with-

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out specifying its chief delight. He kept letters speeding from Ch. Ch. to Rome. Their reversed initials—HRL and LRH—seemed proof of the intervention of destiny. He raised a mustache, bought a cane. During the March vacation he met Lila again in Paris, where she stayed with an aunt, but then he returned stoically to the business of learning. He went on alone to Prague and Berlin, seeing important people and asking questions: "Prague—entertained by legation, German industrial baron, called on Foreign Minister Benes, chatted with young Masaryk. . . . BerUn—inspected schools, trade unions, Bolshevik club headquarters, a factory and one of the biggest German newspapers ..."

He seemed consciously preparing himself for greatness. He turned twenty-three on April 3—a reminder of inexorable time, so valuable in building a career, so sinful to fritter away. He frittered it away with every appearance of enjoyment during the gala May Week festivities at Oxford, when Miss Hotz was his guest at a dizzying round of parties, polo matches, dances and punting excursions on the Isis, and among the many personages present were John Masefield and his rather whiskery wife. All too rarely did the too serious, too ambitious young man permit himself such warmth and relaxation. "Ah, but there's no style to these English women," he wrote his parents, not saying that he saw style only in one girl, an American.

In June the halcyon English interlude was over. Luce sailed for New York, his money nearly gone.

2. STUDYING PIANO

Dr. Luce, whose strong opinions had caused arguments in Shantung, had meanwhile resigned his post to become vice president and second in command to Dr. John Leighton Stuart, president of the newly organized Ghristian Yenching University in Peking. He was as determined as ever to Christianize and democratize China. Alas, Yenching needed money urgently. Who was an experienced fund-raiser? Dr. Luce, of course.

The family now lived in New York while he resumed the old Pullman-car routine and pursued donors all over the country. When Harry arrived from England, Emmavail and Elisabeth were on vacation from Wellesley College and Sheldon was still in grade school. It was seldom that the six wandering Luces got together, and (if the father was home) perhaps this was one of those times—a great occasion to a family so devoted.

But soon Harry was drawn to Chicago by the presence there of Lila Hotz, the promise of a job at International Harvester being a contributing consideration. If he had visions of a Harvester job grand enough to enable him to marry an heiress, the vision faded. The 1921 depression was severe. Alexander Legge, the vice president of the company, was candid with the serious young applicant. Yes, he could have a job, since Mrs. McCormick had promised him

W. A. Swanberg

one, but it would mean that another employee, probably a married man, would have to be fired to make room for him. Luce recoiled at the thought of bringing hardship to someone else. "Of course I don't want you to fire anyone," he said. Looking around, he landed a job as legman for Ben Hecht, whose column "One Thousand and One Afternoons" was a feature in the Daily News.

To have one's first experience in metropolitan journalism under Ben Hecht must be likened to learning the banking business from an embezzler or studying piano in a bagnio. Hecht, a gifted romancer, never let facts interfere with a good story. He wrote daily about odd Chicago characters—an astrologer, a midwife, a snake charmer, a punch-drunk boxer. It was up to Luce to find such characters and supply a few basic details. Hecht would flesh them out with colorful flights of imagination presented as truth. Hecht himself, as improbable as any of his characters, had left his first wife and run off with another woman and as a result was dodging attorneys as well as bill collectors hounding him for the $20,000 he owed various people. He was forever darting out the Daily News back door to escape such annoyances. Chicago was then the journalistic battleground of the Hearst, McCormick (no relation to the Harvester McCormicks) and Lawson newspapers, a rivalry in which probity often suffered, and Hecht was only the most outrageous trifler with it.

One could make out a case for the proposition that Hecht's cynicism had a baneful effect on the young, innately truthful but malleable Luce, that it was the root cause of his later eccentricity with fact in his publications, and that if he had had his first training instead under someone like the solid Walter Lippmann he would never have taken such liberties.

A better argument would be that neither Hecht nor Lippmann would have made the slightest difference in the ultimate career of this determined young man who was already bursting with the philosophy and the message that would make him view the news less as news than as a vehicle.

". . . [M]y salary is about 10(1; a day over carfare," Luce wrote home, not saying that much of his carfare was spent on trips to call on Lila Ross Hotz.

Until he found permanent quarters, he stayed at the spacious near North Side home of his Yale roommate, Culbreth Sudler. He admitted to Sudler that he intended to propose to Miss Hotz. "When he finally came in about 2:00 A.M.," Sudler recalled, "he looked very striking in his black tuxedo with a white vest spanned by a gold chain with the Lit triangle which he always wore. He was immaculate except for a bow tie slightly out of place and an incongruous bright red gloss on his lips."

Clearly he had not met total rebuff. He was less successful at his job, writing home in September: "I have been fired—this department was instructed to cut off five men and as I was the last to come I must be the first to go . . . may be for the best as I wasn't getting very far around here ..."

Thirty-seven years later, on his television show, Hecht said Luce was not fired for economy but because Hecht complained to the editor that "this fel-

Luce and His Empire

low is much too naive. Nothing he writes makes any sense. I haven't been able to get a paragraph out of it."

While it is interesting that he remembered Luce's naivete, one can scarcely place any more credence in Hecht after thirty-seven years than could be placed in one of his 1921 daily columns. In any case, the worlds of Ben Hecht and Henry Luce glanced off and separated after this brief collision, the better for them both. But at the moment. Luce's need for money was urgent because of his determination to marry Lila Hotz and the equally firm disapproval of her banker stepfather, Frederick Haskell, of a jobless and penniless suitor.

Here a piece of luck intervened. The brilliant Walter Millis was then working for the Baltimore News. He was doing so well that the News wanted two more young men of his caliber and was willing to pay $40 a week for each. He reacted in the Yale tradition, writing Luce in Chicago and Hadden in New York.

Hadden meanwhile had worked for a year for the prestige-laden Ralph Pu-Utzer-Herbert Bayard Swope New York World. Although he was still a low-ranking reporter, he was a veritable Floyd Gibbons or Webb Miller in seasoning compared with Luce. The fact that he was willing to jump the World in favor of the third-rate, tank-town, Munsey-owned News, and at the same salary as Luce, indicated his eagerness to join Luce and plan their newsmagazine project. He was aching to get started. A few months earlier, when he and John Hincks had gone to Houston to usher at the wedding of their classmate and Bonesmate Peavey Heffelfinger, Hadden had jumped off the train at every stop to buy a local paper and had talked incessantly of starting a publication based on newspaper accounts. "I think during that trip Brit got newspapers in at least twenty different cities," Hincks recalled. He felt that Hadden was the prime mover in the venture, and the evidence seems to support him. Luce had not shown quite such journalistic enthusiasm, had made his try at Harvester and had mentioned "publishing" as one possible avenue to his career in politics.