'Tf we are ever going to start that paper," Hadden now wrote Luce, "this looks like our chance."

Luce said good-bye to Lila Hotz, left for New York, conferred with Hadden and then rode with him to Baltimore. Soon they were working on the News, an afternoon paper, and rooming together on Charles Street. If Luce's editorial dreams had somewhat faded, they quickly revived. These two high-powered young men became totally preoccupied with their idea. When their salaried work was finished in midafternoon, they returned to their apartment and began unpaid labors that often lasted far into the night and generated thick cigarette smoke. They became known among their Baltimore colleagues as "the Yale locks." Millis sometimes joined them, though he lacked their afflatus. It is not impossible that working long hours with two such aggressive and intense companions was not Millis's idea of pleasure.

In Baltimore, Luce was seized by one of those spasms of hero-worship

W. A. Swanberg

which would affect and sometimes impair his judgment throughout his life. During an interview with Archbishop Michael J. Curley, he was so impressed by the prelate and perhaps also by the power he wielded that he returned for further discussion and quite fell under the archbishop's spell. For a time, as he wrote Lila perhaps only partly in jest, he considered embracing Catholicism, entering the priesthood and ultimately becoming a cardinal.

While some friends came to regard this hero-worshiping trait as evidence of an open mind, as indeed it was, it also marked a mind so eager for ideas as ideas, for the new and stimulating, as to resemble a hungry terrier that will snap at anything. His incessant curiosity would prove endlessly valuable to the journalist Luce. Yet his lack of discrimination would occasionally mislead the politician Luce, the philosopher Luce or the world-saver Luce. Snap would go the mental teeth on a new morsel, sometimes swallowing it whole, sometimes ruminating a while, finding it flavorless and spitting it out. Those who worked for Luce, and those seeking to understand him, would have to be careful about that snap.

The handling of stories in the News gave Luce and Hadden a daily fare of discussion and criticism. How differently would they treat news in their magazine? How could news be more quickly told for busy readers? How could it be better organized? How could it be made more visually attractive? How could they maintain readers' interest in a weekly whose news would necessarily be far in arrears of daily papers with international wire-service facilities?

They studied the newsmagazines they would have to buck, headed so decisively by the Literary Digest that they hardly had to consider the others. The Digest seemed to settle any doubts that "old news" was readily marketable. It was a national institution, circulation L200,000, fat with advertising, seen on every respectable fumed-oak table and assigned to high school and college students for its coverage of current events. Its "news service" was very nearly scot-free. It consisted of subscriptions to the more important American newspapers and a few published elsewhere in the world. The Digest frankly stole its news from these papers, usually quoting them directly. The victims seldom complained because the magazine gave them full credit and because by the time it used their property it was several days old—waste material by daily journahstic standards. In that sense the Digest ran the most profitable news junk shop in the world. But it performed a useful service, an advance over the breathless patchwork and discontinuity of the dailies and bringing vital issues into more leisurely focus. It gave two or more sides to contentious issues by quoting newspapers holding opposing opinions—important to a pubhc that wished to be informed, but often done with tiresome verbosity.

Luce and Hadden thought they could do better with Facts, the working title of their creation. "Work progresses," Luce wrote his family with the curtness of a busy man. "First sample issue of Facts nearing completion."

On a free Sunday they hurried to New York with their dummy. Unknown as they were, they made full use of the few avenues of influence open to

Luce and His Empire

them—relationship, friendship and Yale loyalty, which included Bones, their fraternities, the Elizabethan Club, the prestige of the Yale Daily News and the fact that Hadden had been top man of the class of '20 and Luce not far behind him. They showed the dummy to their former writing instructor, Henry Seidel Canby, now editor of the New York Evening Post literary supplement. Canby was warmly encouraging. He agreed that there was need for a better newsmagazine, and emphasized the importance of developing a clear and concise prose for it. The advertising man Bruce Barton, on the other hand, told Luce the idea was impossible and they would lose every nickel they put into it. A friend of Luce's father, Samuel Everitt, treasurer of Dou-bleday. Page & Company and experienced in the publishing of books and magazines, tilted the balance the other way with his optimism.

Luce and Hadden returned to Baltimore, where they were cautious enough to make a deal with the editor of the News to give them what amounted to a seven-weeks' leave without pay and the option to resume their jobs if they reported back by April 1.

"I am confident," Hadden wrote his mother, "that in the seven weeks prior to April 1 we shall be able to determine whether or not the paper Facts is going to be brought into existence. We propose to devote our time in New York to working out our ideas and having them criticized by able journalists of the Swope type."

On February 8, 1922, Luce and Hadden left for New York.

3. THE STATUTE OF EQUALITY

Had wealth been their primary aim, the more logical place for them to go would have been into an established business or into Wall Street, where the money was—not into journalism, the riskiest of all enterprises. Wall Street was full of Yalemen. Had Luce and Hadden, with their impressive records, hurled the same formidable energies into finance as they did into journalism, the odds would have been heavily in favor of much quicker and greater pecuniary success. Instead, they were plunging into a venture which many conservative friends viewed as folly. Even Luce's parents seemed to have little confidence in it. Luce, if not his partner, would soon display a remarkable acumen that would have carried him far in virtually any business venture. Luce, far more than Hadden, had known lifelong impecuniousness that might logically have driven him into the sure thing rather than the gamble. And he had to demonstrate reasonable financial soundness before HRL could marry LRH, to whom he was writing daily.

One must infer that Hadden, always the journalist, had rekindled Luce's enthusiasm. But these two very shrewd young men did not truly love each other. Their seven-year rivalry still simmered. They had high respect for each other's abilities, but they were not cronies (Luce never had a crony—Hadden

W. A. Swanberg

had more than he could use) and there were actually elements of discord between them. They must have known that these frictions would increase as they worked closely together on a plane of vague "equality" that could never be quite equal, and as they decided matters of business and policy on which they would not always agree. Each knew that the other was determined and cocksure. They seemed on a collision course.

A further consideration on Luce's part was that he was subtly second man in the picture. Hadden had not only won the Yale sweepstakes but had the enormous advantage of a full year with one of the nation's greatest papers. Hadden had saved a little cash, whereas Luce barely had cigarette money. Would not the noisy extrovert Hadden run roughshod over the proud Luce? Was not Luce indeed the crazier of the pair to enter into such a preposterous arrangement?

If all these things were true, nevertheless in their collaboration perhaps they paid each other the greatest compliment possible between two men short of warmest affection. They implicitly agreed that the factors drawing them together were more urgent than the factors alienating them. They needed each other. Each loved journalism in his own way. They knew that in their differences they complemented each other.

On the World, Hadden had absorbed some of the enthusiasm that had trickled down from the great Joseph Pulitzer. He had worked obscurely among inheritors of that tradition, big men themselves—Frank Cobb, Walter Lippmann, RoUin Kirby, Heywood Broun. More than that, journalism excited him passionately. For him, no joy could surpass that of polishing his own—or someone else's—copy into lines that crackled. The evidence suggests that Luce, on the other hand, viewed journalism as a stimulating road to influence and power. He had those ideas about government, religion and international relations which he wished to promote. He had written at eighteen, "I believe that I can be of greatest service in journalistic work and can by that way come nearest to the heart of the world." "Service" and "coming near the heart of the world" could perhaps be translated as gaining and exerting power. The urge to power was a driving force, the greatest in his life. A great news organ was an avenue to power and to public office.

So the two young madmen were perhaps not really mad. They devised a plan to assure observance of their Statute of Equality and to keep out of each other's domain. Once they got started, they would alternate in running the business and editorial sides, each to his own. And after all, they were both Bones, sworn to eternal friendship.

4. THE MANIFESTO

Hadden thriftily moved in with his family in Brooklyn Heights. Luce, as frugal, became a non-paying guest at his family's apartment at 514 West

Luce and His Empire

122nd Street near Columbia University. They rented office space in a decaying building at 141 East 17th Street for $55 a month, supplied by Hadden. Luce wrote to Culbreth Sudler in Chicago to urge that he leave his job with his father's lithographing firm to become head (and only member) of the promotion and advertising sales staff of Facts. Sudler arrived in New York and room was found for him in the Luce menage.

"If I had only $1,000 I would put it all in . . ." Luce wrote his traveling father. "Right now I wish I hadn't put it into Oxford, although fundamentally I suppose the Oxford year is indirectly invested in the paper. "

They consulted Melville Stone, the recently retired head of the Associated Press, as to the propriety of lifting news from daily papers. Stone assured them that news was public property after a day or two of aging. None of them was satisfied with the title Facts, and Luce later said it was he who hit on the title Time as he rode home on the subway in exhaustion late one night. Alas, the evidence trips him in a mendacity. A magazine named Time, edited by Edmund Yates, had been published in England from 1879 to 1890, with a distinctive logotype identical in its hand-lettered design with that taken by its American descendant, and in fact Hadden had a bound volume of his own, still to be found in the company archives in 1970. The trio slaved over a prospectus that buttered the upper-crust educators and financiers from whom they would solicit prestige and capital. It warned them that they risked being unenlightened because until then "no publication has adapted itself to

THE time which BUSY MEN ARE ABLE TO SPEND ON SIMPLY KEEPING

INFORMED." Time would inform them swiftly because of its condensation and systematic organization of the news.

Luce and Hadden were so anxious that prospects not dismiss Time as "another Literary Digest" that they used four paragraphs to emphasize the difference. And under the heading, "editorial bias," they promised fair news treatment without objectivity—an opening that would become endlessly useful:

There will be no editorial page in Time.

No article will be written to prove any special case.

But the editors recognize that complete neutrality on public questions and important news is probably as undesirable as it is impossible, and are therefore ready to acknowledge certain prejudices which may in varying measure predetermine their opinions on the news.

A catalogue of these prejudices would include such phrases as:

1. A belief that the world is round and an admiration of the statesman's "view of the world."

2. A general distrust of the present tendency toward increasing interference by government.

3. A prejudice against the rising cost of government.

4. Faith in the things which money cannot buy.

5. A respect for the old, particularly in manners.

W. A. Swanberg

6. An interest in the new, particularly in ideas.

But this magazine is not founded to promulgate prejudices, Uberal or conservative. "To keep men well-informed"—that, first and last, is the only axe this magazine has to grind.

These prejudices about the shape of the world, cost of government and the desirability of courtesy did not represent any reckless defiance of existing orthodoxy. As Laura Z. Hobson would later point out, it was rather hke coming out firmly against muddy streets and in favor of blueberry pie. But the admission of prejudice opened wide a gate through which Hadden would drive odd contraband and through which Luce would ultimately send endless truck-loads.

The prospectus was as cheeky as its authors, twenty-three going on twenty-four, who served notice that they would not always be satisfied to report the news but felt quahfied to interpret it to some degree. They took it to many famous personages, including Nicholas Murray Butler, the recently paralyzed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Bayard Swope, Bernard Baruch, John Grier Hibben and, to be sure, President James R. Angell of Yale, succeeding in getting endorsements from them. Luce, Hadden and Sudler felt they could float their magazine on $100,000 in capital, thinking it should be simple to get ten of their richer Yale classmates to put up $10,000 each. There was the question of stock. They consulted John Wesley Hanes (Yale 15), a Wall Street banker, who wounded them by saying they were mad to think of competing with the Literary Digest but made amends by adding that if they were going ahead anyway they should keep stock control.

"How the hell can we do that if we haven't any money? " Hadden demanded. Hanes outlined a simple plan whereby they could reserve 80 percent of the common stock for themselves as entrepreneurs—a plan that ultimately would mean millions to them.

Less easy was the task of finding ten classmates willing to invest $10,000. They could not even find one. The 1920 men either did not have it, could not coax their fathers to part with it or simply could not help scoffing at the folly of bucking the Digest. A modest penetration was made with Henry P. Davison, Jr. ('20, Bones), now working for J. P. Morgan & Company, where his father was a senior partner. Young Davison, though skeptical, subscribed $4000 and also introduced the promoters to Dwight Morrow, another Morgan partner, who congratulated them on their enterprise and signed up for $1000.

But the going was slow. By midsummer they had raised only $35,000. The gloom at times was thick at 141 East 17th. Prospects eyed them suspiciously and showed them the door without really getting the Time message—an experience that gave Luce a keener understanding of the fund-raising trials of his father. Most infuriating was the you-can't-beat-the-Digest argument. In August the literary-inclined Sudler left to take a salaried job with Doubleday,

Luce and His Empire

Page, thus losing a fortune which he would later recoup in his owni advertising business, but never losing his admiration for Luce and Hadden. Luck turned through a steer given by Wells Root (class of 1922, chairman of the News in his own time, now with the New York World). Root introduced them to his classmate, William Hale Harkness, related to the multimillionaire Rockefeller partner Ed\\ard S. Harkness. Young Harkness not only pledged $5000 but suggested that his mother in New York might be receptive. Luce and Hadden gave Mrs. WilHam L. Harkness the ultimate in persuasion. She was verv deaf, and the story has it that she heard httle of what they said. She read the prospectus, liked their looks and said, "That will do, boys. You may put me down for $20,000."

It happened that Mrs. Harkness's daughter Louise was married to Davad S. Ingalls, a classmate and Bonesmate of Luce and Hadden—the same Ingalls who had opposed Luce in the debate about Russia. Ingalls, now at Har\'ard Law School, was so unfeeling as to say they had a nerve to think of competing with the Digest. His wife, however, signed up for $5000.

By October they had squeezed ever)- dollar out of every available prospect and still had only $86,000. They decided to proceed with pubhcation and try to raise more as thev went along. Luce could not afford the $60 annual Yale Club membership fee, so he habitually signed in under Hadden's name at the new Vanderbilt Avenue establishment. So far, the partner-rivals were getting along, observing the Statute of Equality. \Mien they met the kindly but expensive public relations counsel, Edward L. Bernays, at the Yale Club, and asked him to pubhcize their venture as well as invest in it. it was Luce who did most of the talking while Hadden listened and put in only an occasional word.

"Luce was so intense that he stuttered and spluttered and yet he made a strong case for Time," Bernays recalled. It was not strong enough, for he declined their offer of $125 a week for his ser\ices, saxing he would not take their money, nor did he care to invest, being unconvinced that they could compete with the Digest. Thus did Bernays (who later kindly handled their first public announcement of Time as a favor) thrust a\\ay a fortune, which he would amass anyway by his own efforts.

The headstrong pair hired Manfred Gottfried (Yale '22, Elizabethan Club, from Chicago and having the unequaled ad\'antage of know ing Lila Hotz and her family) as a writer at $25 a week. Luce again doing the talking. They hired Rov E. Larsen of Boston as circulation manager, Hadden this time handling the details. Larsen's dash and personalitv were so impressive that he not only overcame an unfortunate choice of colleges (Harvard '21, business manager of the Har\^ard Advocate) but joined up at $40 a week as against the $30 Luce and Hadden were pa\ing themselves as editor-pubUshers. They rented larger office space at 9 East 40th Street and gathered a few more full- and part-time staff members including the part-time Stephen \incent Benet (Yale

W. A. Swanberg

'19, the Lit) and the part-time Archibald MacLeish (Hotchkiss '11, Yale '15, Bones, Phi Beta Kappa and Lit). They put together two complete typewritten dummies of the week's news by way of practice. The first issue of Time, after more than a year of preparation, was dated March 3, 1923.

1. A LITERARY CHAIN GANG

The purpose of Time, said the New York Herald Tribune in a two-paragraph notice hidden on page 7, "is to summarize the week's news in the shortest possible space." Volume I, Number 1, sold only 9000 instead of the expected 25,000 copies, part of the loss blamable to college-girl workers hired by Lar-sen who ineptly sent some subscribers several copies and others none. It compressed the world's events into twenty-eight pages, minus six pages of advertisements sold at give-away rates. Although this was a time of big news—the American quarrel over Prohibition, the French occupation of the Ruhr, the German protests, the turmoils of the League, the famine in Russia—Time's account of it all could easily be read in a half-hour.

It was of course not for people who really wanted to be informed. It was for people willing to spend a half-hour to avoid being entirely uninformed. The editors so well redeemed their promise of brevity that Time seemed the capsulized abridgment of a condensation. Yet, considering the youth of its founders and the hectic conditions of its production, it was a surprising achievement. The news was fired in bursts of short sentences. Later tricky economies would include the elimination of the definite article and the use of "and" as a connective wherever possible, the frequent use of the ampersand also giving the reader a sensation of solicitude for his valuable time and lending the message something of the urgency of a telegram. Solemnity was avoided. The news was given a jaunty personal point of view. Readers felt instinctively that Time was the work of collegiate young men who were a little amused and a trifle superior but engaging fellows for all that. (That same week's issue of the Literary Digest was Volume 76, Number 9—eighty-eight pages thick, with thirty-nine pages of advertising, many in color, such as

57

W. A. Swanberg

Goodyear tires, Heinz and Cadillac, but its newswriting seemed the work of elderly gentlemen.)

"Congratulations on most interesting publication afloat . . ." Lila Hotz wired Luce from Chicago.

Few readers would have guessed that Time was digested entirely from the dozens of newspapers it subscribed to, gaining its greatest free lunch from the opulent tables of the New York Times and New York World. Education Editor MacLeish, for example, was working in Boston as a lawyer and teacher. Weekly he received in the mail from Time a batch of newschppings bearing on the subject of education. He rewrote them in condensed form and mailed his finished work back to New York—hardly a picture of frantic deadlines. MacLeish, who was married and had a family, was glad to add an easy $10 weekly from Time to his income.

"Dear Lassie," Luce wrote Lila in Chicago, "it's a quiet Sunday afternoon, a little Spring in the air, and the wheels seem to be grinding slowly & smoothly in the production of Vol. I No. 2 of Time. Not until tomorrow can we have any indication of how No. 1 was received." He and the rest were exhausted by a succession of twelve- to sixteen-hour working days. Anguish over the poor sale of the first issue was healed by improvement in the next. April saw an upsurge. May a decline again. Nevertheless, in July they moved to larger if dingier quarters in a malt-redolent building at 236 East 39th Street once occupied by Hupfel's brewery. Time was a literary chain gang. The partner-rivals enjoyed this slavery to their own creation, took for granted the same enjoyment in others and were surprised when an office helper named Nancy Ford quit not because of dissatisfaction but in sheer exhaustion.

All of them exerted every wile in promoting the magazine. Friends were not only urged to buy it but to tell other friends about it and to urge them to urge f^eir friends to spend a dime for Time. Lila created demand by asking for Time at Chicago newsstands and showing incredulity and annoyance when told by dealers that they had never heard of such a magazine. When Time got its first small Colgate advertisement with a coupon, Lila and her brother coaxed a dozen friends to send in the coupon in order to impress Colgate with Time's potency as an advertising medium. Even her stepfather relented and agreed that the magazine might succeed.

Luce planned to marry her in December. Their letters had passed each other on the Twentieth Century Limited and on dozens of ocean liners. Hers, in her travels with her parents, had borne postmarks ranging from Chicago to Canterbury, Grenoble, Lausanne, Rothenburg, Bad Gastein and Florence. His had invariably been postmarked New York. Once on reaching Paris from Switzerland she had found five of his letters waiting for her. His affectionate salutations for her included "Angel," "Carissima" and "Darlingest," while among hers were "Enrico," "Belovedissimo" and, not at all in jest, "Cher prince du journalisme." She clearly saw greatness in him and said so, but she also said that he worked entirely too hard. "Dearest," she protested in a letter

Luce and His Empire

from Brides-les-Bains, "do you HAVE to stay at your office till 2 a.m. and then get there at the crack of dawn the following morning?"

She and Luce had met \v hen she passed through New York, he being deep in publishing problems as he always would be. In Paris in the fall of 1923, with her mother's help, she selected her trousseau and before leaving for America she wrote Luce from her hotel on the Rue de la Paix in a charming vein of sentiment:

Alone in a taxi this aft., I made my first verbal farewell to Paris, driving up the Champs Elysees and back across the Concorde and down Rivoli, across Ven-dome and now here. Paris looked so appealing in her dress of pink and gold of the evening, and she reproached me sadly for being so anxious and glad to leave her. I was quite emotionized . . .

On December 22, 1923, Luce and Lila were married at Chicago's huge Church of the Holy Harvester on Rush Street, the church of Luce's late fairy godmother. (Time that week had only fifteen columns of advertisements including a full page for the Yale Review that was surely given away.) Luce stayed at the Sudler home while there. The ushers were all classmates and most of them Bones—among them Hadden, Sudler, John Hincks and William Whitney—and Morehead Patterson was best man. The bride and groom, after a honeymoon at the Homestead in Virginia, were at home on Fifth Avenue and 97th Street in New York.

Although men of large ego, vigor and ambition usually make poor husbands, the marriage got off well. Lila's mother, averse to seeing the young couple skimp on Luce's paltry salary, sent increments that doubled their income. Instead of a two-room apartment unattended, the Luces had a four-room apartment and a day maid.

2. SHAMBLING, SNARLING AND SIMPERING

After a summer slump. Time had picked up somewhat but was stiU selhng only about 20,000 copies weekly by the end of 1923. It had lost $39,454. Yet the partners audaciously raised their own salaries to $40 a week and issued an optimistic report to the stockholders, saying, "... Time has grown from an idea to an established institution . . . accepted by an increasing number of people as part of their weekly reading."

From the beginning there was no one in the shop with a tiresome sense of responsibility toward the news as something untouchable, something to be passed along to the reader unchanged in its fundamentals. On the contrary, the whole Time idea was change of approach and change of style, which quickly led to change of substance. Hadden's editorial ingenuity was devoted to the slicing, trimming, flavoring, coloring and packaging of the news to make it more interesting and more salable than it was in real life. Seizing and

W. A. Swanherg

running off with an old Pulitzer maxim that people in the news should be more than mere names, he began draping them with jazz-age versions of the Homeric epithets he had learned in Greek. People in Time became gray-thatched, gentle-spirited or beetle-browed, and as Hadden grew bolder they became pot-bellied, tough-talking, snaggle-toothed, sour-visaged or bag-jowled. Remembering the dislike of his writing instructor at Yale, Professor John Berdan, for quiet verbs, Hadden seldom let people merely say something. They barked, snapped, gushed, muttered, growled, blathered, grunted, cooed or shrieked. Nor were they permitted to walk. They dashed, shuffled, ambled, pussyfooted, sashayed, lumbered or lurched.

Various combinations of these adjectives and verbs could be used to give an attractive or unlovely coloration and supply the reader with extra drama or amusement. A trim-figured, keen-brained politician who strode in and unfolded his policies had no complaint against Time. But a. flabby-chinned, gimlet-eyed candidate who shambled and snarled was apt to lose votes, while a temperament-ridden, firmly-corseted prima donna who minced and simpered would have to be in good voice to retrieve her fame.

Other Time novelties were the reversing of subject and predicate, the use of alliteration and an insistence on middle names—a trick that seemed to give a new dimension to people often in the news and which delighted Hadden when, for example, he could unmask the man long known simply as James A. Farley as James Aloysius Farley. More and more. Time accounts took on the technique of fictional narrative. The reader was given a little story with snappy title, beginning, middle and end, sometimes complete with a bit of mystery or suspense which was resolved neatly in the last line. This required imaginative interpolation, since Time's news sources, the daily papers, failed to supply all the items necessary for the scenario. A touch here, a dash there —how it brightened dull fact! None of this tended to imbue the staff with regard for the sanctity of news.

The external mannerisms of Timestyle would gradually increase to and even over the verge of grotesquerie that would offend British and other ears. One English joumahst called the dropping of the definite article "a parsimony such as used to be thought of as natural only to the natives of Bengal." St. John Ervine referred to it as a style in which "adjectives are used as verbs, and nouns are telescoped to such an extent that a sentence looks like a railway accident." London's Cassandra would call it "as vile a piece of manghng as ever stripped the heart out of prose." Marshall McLuhan would suggest that "nobody could tell the truth in Time style." And even Westbrook Pegler would complain, diagnosing it as "a nervous disease of the typewriter." Time's collegiate tone was enhanced by the hiring in 1924 of two of Hadden's cousins, Niven Busch and one-armed John Martin, both Princeton men and admirers of Hadden. The former brewery sheltered imaginative young men racking their brains for new twists and effects. Cracking the whip over them was Hadden, who would groan and hurl his thesaurus against the wall when

Luce and His Empire

offended by a losing effort but would shout with glee over a winner. Luce, running the business office and having time only to write Religion and fill in on other departments, was less the originator than the collaborator.

Probably these two never suspected that a growing threat to their harmony was George F. Babbitt of Zenith. Sinclair Lewis's acid etching of the go-getting businessman who blocked all enlightenment had provoked a nationwide controversy. In Hadden it aroused not only amusement but anger that commercialism should be so vulgarly triumphant and that struggling young Time was at the mercy of these Babbitts for its advertising. He liked to point out such types on the street, growling "Babbitt" under his breath.

Luce disagreed sharply. He thought Lewis's portrait a malicious caricature, a libel on the men of business who were builders of the nation's greatness.

While no one could seriously identify the keen Luce with the stupid Babbitt, Luce's shining faith in business and his admiration for successful businessmen were traits of similarity Hadden could not miss. Obviously Luce became aware that in Hadden's mind he was not free from Babbittry. Whether Hadden went so far as to point out that George F. Babbitt was also a Republican, a Presbyterian and a super-patriot who named his own son Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt is not known.

Hadden had nothing against money. His goal was to make a million by the time he was thirty and he was enjoying every minute along the way. Business details bored him. When he did undertake them he was not impressive, a fact that faced Luce with unpleasant alternatives: If he insisted on citing the Statute and taking his turn as editor while Time was in delicate infancy, Hadden's fiscal errors might slaughter the babe. Hadden's misgivings were the reverse —that Luce might introduce a malign editorial flavor. When Hadden decided that he needed a vacation in Europe, part of it to be spent with his fellow bachelor Larsen, Luce protested this simultaneous desertion of two of Time's three most important people. He was overruled by his breezy partner, who rather upstaged him at times. Hadden even made Manfred Gottfried managing editor in his absence, telling him, "See that Luce doesn't meddle." Amused members of the staff fashioned a fake Time cover adorned with Luce's sober face and captioned, "He doesn't meddle."

Luce did meddle. Probably he was more than ever determined to do so when Hadden cabled from Paris for an additional $1500—Time's lifeblood-— to pay for gay parties held aboard ship and continued on land. There had been discussion of a move to a more central point because the railroads were getting Time to Western readers a day or even two days late. Hadden, the bon vivant, had opposed any move to the provinces. When he returned in May 1925 after six weeks in Europe, he discovered that Luce had made firm commitments to move to Cleveland.

Hadden blew up. He and Luce retired to the Yale Club to quarrel in a private corner—evidently a policy with them, for neither Gottfried, Hadden's secretary, Mary Fraser, nor the red-headed office boy, Joseph Kastner, ever

W. A. Swanberg

heard them in open wrangUng at the office. Luce's calculations showed that in addition to the improvement in shipping they would save about $20,000 a year in rent, salaries and printing costs. He had won what seemed legitimate revenge.

They could not afford to move their lesser personnel to Cleveland. Hadden kindly raised Kastner's salary the last week so that he could use this as a bargaining point in seeking another job. The employees were notified that they were fired as of August 16 and would be rehired in Cleveland if they appeared there on the 19th. The Penton Building on Lakeside Avenue would be Time's address for the next two years. One of those who made the move was young Laird S. Goldsborough (Yale '24, the Daily News, the Lit, Elizabethan Club). Goldsborough, son of a Purdue University engineering professor, used a cane as a result of a childhood leg accident. A clever, fluent writer, quite deaf and something of a loner, he had a strange career ahead of him on Time.

The Luces took a house in suburban Cleveland Heights with their infant son Henry HI, born in New York April 28. They now owned a Chrysler sedan driven exclusively by Lila since Luce, so devoid of mechanical skill that the operation of the dial telephone was a terrible hurdle, could not learn to drive safely. "He kept bumping into things," his wife recalled. He had not approved of speakeasy-infested New York. Middle-sized Cleveland, where people seemed more friendly and entertained at home instead of at night clubs, suited him better, and Cleveland Heights, with its winding streets and substantial houses, was the essence of middle-class respectability.

Hadden loathed Cleveland, where the New York World and Times arrived ten hours late and where the cafes and night clubs did not match his favorite Manhattan spots. Almost every week he would board an east-bound New York Central train, sleeping en route so that he would have more wakeful hours in New York, and would return to Cleveland with revulsion. Only when forced by circumstances would he hand editorial responsibility to Luce. "Harry's a business genius," he told a friend by way of explanation. "And I mean genius."

Winsor French of Cleveland, who joined the staff there, remarked on how complementary the two were: "Brit was one of the few editorial geniuses I have ever encountered. . . . Luce was the business man, hard as nails, cold as ice and inclined toward arrogance. They seldom saw eye to eye, but as a team they couldn't be beaten." Yet Myron Weiss, a Harvardman who also joined Time in Cleveland, found Luce an innately kindly man. "Harry had a habit of focusing on his objective and brushing aside incidentals," Weiss said—a trait that could be unnerving to the man who sensed that either he or what he said was incidental. Gottfried, like Weiss an equable, even-tempered man, worked for Luce for years in positions of high importance. "Harry was easier to get along with than Brit," he recalled, without suggesting that either was the soul of agreeability or concord.

That Christmas it seemed possible that none of them would have to put up

Luce and His Empire

with each other much longer. Time's bank balance sagged to $1976.16. Survival depended on the success of Larsen's drive for Christmas-gift subscriptions, which turned out to be triumphant and saved the day. Despite a loss of $23,829 for the year, the worst crisis was over, for the circulation had risen to 107,000 and more than $100,000 had come in from advertising.

3. FRAUD AND INSULT

A bit of madness was helpful in appreciating Hadden, as shown by French's portrait of him: "His neckties were always askew, his trousers incredibly baggy ... He either ate voraciously or not at all, thought nothing of putting in 24-hour days when the pressure was intense and consequently saw no reason why anyone else, male or female, shouldn't and couldn't do the same. Hadden also had a quick, violent temper and his wild roaring, drifting down nine floors into the street, caused people ... to come to an abrupt halt and wonder if someone wasn't being murdered. . . . Yet, for all his eccentricities, I don't think there was a single member of his staff who didn't love him. [One day French checked the absent Hadden's desk calendar to see if he had a luncheon date open two days hence.] I saw the only appointment that day was one with me. It was for 12 noon and read 'Oust French.'

"The day and the moment arrived, the buzzer buzzed and I walked into the office and was offered a chair. It wouldn't be necessary, I told him. What I had to say would take only a second. I was quitting.

"HaddenVi"oars could have been heard for blocks. But he took me to a two-hour lunch of Martinis, during which he talked about nothing except baseball and possible candidates for my former job. . . . [I]t was impossible to get mad at him. The man had the kind of charm that could bring birds from the trees. ..."

Luce seemed unaware of these birds. French noted that "both Luce and Hadden were men of very strong opinions" and went on: "Socially they were poles apart . . . The Luces, raising a family, lived quietly on the Heights, entertained simply and were enormously in demand by, shall we say, the more conventionally minded groups."

Luce and Hadden stirred up a 220-member meeting of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce with a quiz on news events covered in Time, offering a year's subscription to members correctly answering twenty.out of twenty-five questions, among them, "At whom did Gridley fire, when he was ready?" and "In what state did Sinclair Lewis locate his imaginary village of Gopher Prairie?" Hadden, his news presentation vindicated by rising circulation, heightened his strategic use of fraud and insult. Never forgetting the sensation he had created at Yale with Divinity Student and Old Hatchet Face, he enlivened the Letters department in Time by drawing readers into fierce quarrels. He touched them off with outrageous screeds he composed himself and in-

W. A. Swanberg

serted in the name of mythical subscribers. One of these was George Schleiger of ChiUicothe, who brought interstate rivalry to a boil with a letter in purest Hadden style:

What's West Virginia but Ohio's coal bin? Just a dirty disheveled stretch of mine dumps, scraggly mountains, filled with a bunch of ignorants that only know enough to swing picks and drink moonshine. That's one reason you can't spend anything but Sunday on Sunday in West Virginia. Everybody is drunk or sleeping it off down there on Sunday.

What President did West Virginia ever produce—what big man has West Virginia got? Senator So-and-So, I suppose, and Senator Whozis. I never heard of them. They can't stack up against Fess and Willis [the Ohio Senators].

Genuine West Virginia readers rose to the bait with attacks on Schleiger and the whole state of Ohio, which were answered by counterblasts from across the river. The Clarksburg, West Virginia, Daily Telegram bitterly protested the smears on the state. The ChiUicothe paper deprecated Time's role in the dispute and announced suspiciously, "so far as we have been able to learn, there is no such person in this community as George Schleiger." Another Hadden invention was Mary Elizabeth Robinn, who traveled so much that her address frequently changed. She wrote letters to Time over a period of four years, usually in biting criticism of the Prince of Wales, whose popularity assured heated ripostes. Still another was Morris (Al) Epstein of Brooklyn, whose execrable grammar and strong opinions on controversial subjects drew scornful replies for many months.

The use of disrespect, this side of libel, was cultivated. The Washington Eagle, a paper for Negroes, said that Time's description of Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune would rankle "if, in the same issue, Mrs. Bainbridge Colby, Mrs. Edward Harriman, and Anne Nichols were not handled in the same flippant yet offhand manner." The magazine drew fire from upstate New York papers when it gratuitously described the home county of a politician:

This county in the Finger Lakes district is the stamping ground of the famed progeny of two sisters (Jukes) and two Dutch backwoodsmen. Sixty per cent of this hereditary strain are idiots, imbeciles, harlots, murderers, thieves, perverts, felons, loons, sots, paupers, maniacs, etc.

The Auburn Citizen retorted that the county was the birthplace of John D. Rockefeller, George Pullman and Millard Fillmore. Hadden hurled barbs at Babbitts in Cincinnati. An editorialist in that city's Enquirer denounced the "diseased imagination" and "scurrilous slanders" of the Time writer who not only spoke without deference of William Cooper Procter and James Gamble, the city's soap multimillionaires, but added, "Cincinnati has drooped, malnourished, industrially. It has become draggled and dirty." A funmaking offshoot of the Freemasons, the Mystic Grotto of Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm, was offended by Time's lampoon of its "pseudo-Islamic nomenclature" and a description of its convention:

Luce and His Empire

The Grotto technique of smile-spreading is to select a large city annually, have it hung with bunting . . . and for a solid summer week herd thousands of Prophets from all over the U.S. and Canada to the city and tell them to "have fun." . . . They slipped ice down pretty girls'backs and ogled them. . . . They bestrode taxi radiators, waved whisky bottles, assisted traffic cops, spit out of hotel windows. . . . They ran around in bathing suits, danced in hotel lobbies, stuck people with pins, shocked them with batteries.

These violations of journalistic canons entertained and provoked comment. Hadden knew how to irritate and incense to the right degree. He was the spokesman of the flask-on-hip Twenties, the creator of a style tailored to the era. Hotchkiss and Yale were watching. "Two Alumni Gaining Fame in Journalism," headlined the Hotchkiss Record. A newspaper in remote Hot Springs, South Dakota, commented, "It is surprising to see how the taste for 'Time' is spreading." The Hollywood Film Daily noted, "Our passing show: Adolphe Menjou carrying a copy of 'Time.' "

The magazine was catching on with young people. High schools began using it for the study of current events. It was actually cutting in a trifle on the Literary Digest, which nervously souped up its writing style. In mid-1926 a survey of magazines favored by college students showed the Saturday Evening Post in the lead, followed by the American Magazine, Good Housekeeping and the Digest. Time, unheard of three years earlier, had climbed to fourteenth place ahead of such old favorites as the New Republic, the Nation and the Outlookr—

Soon the Daily at the University of Minnesota would say editorially: "The heyday of H. L. Mencken has passed. . . . Sophistication no longer lies in that direction. Another literary idol has arisen to take the [American] Mercury's place. ... It is of course 'Time.' Its style is becoming the mode of college journalism."

As Hadden said with a twinkle, "They're beginning to take this thing seriously." By sheer cleverness and effrontery. Time was on the way to success.

J. THE ALL-AMERICAN BOY

In June 1926 Yale unaccountably went out of its way to wound Briton Had-den, the great man of '20 who had "done most for Yale." It awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree to Luce—the youngest ever to be so recognized —for "distinguished accomplishments in a novel and worthy field of journalism." Hadden who, a trifle more than Luce, had created this "novel and worthy" departure, was passed over, unmentioned even as Luce's partner. The incident caused a stir among the grads of '20. Those who knew them well, such as John Hincks, felt that Hadden's lack of dignity and his reputation for wildness had done him in. Luce in some ways was the perfect Yale graduate—loyal to a fault, punctilious in meeting class and society obligations, a conservative family man, the distinguished undergraduate who had become a successful alumnus.

If Yale's treatment of Hadden was surprising, Luce's own response when he was informed of the honor was as much so. He did not tell Hadden, who learned of it through other sources and was terribly hurt.

In 1927, on the strength of doubled advertising revenue and Time's first rise out of red ink ($8541 profit in 1926) Luce and Hadden persuaded the directors to raise their salaries to $10,000. In June, Luce and his wife sailed for a vacation in Europe. In Paris they visited the MacLeishes—MacLeish had long since quit Time and the law and settled with his family in a cold-water flat on the Boulevard Saint Michel to write poetry. The relationship between these two Bonesmates was unusual. Luce having given up poetry for more promising endeavors but admiring the poet loyal to verse. MacLeish, whose The Pot of Earth had been disparaged by Time's nameless but confident critic, regarded Luce with friendliness and interest and also with the judiciousness of

66

Luce and His Empire

the more experienced elder, the friend of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and many others.

"Harry was still careless about dress," he recalled. "He was quite naive, the all-American boy out to lick the world with his slingshot. He said everything twice, probably a relic of his stammering, and he said, 'How are you-how are you?' "

Luce was no gallant, his manners often unintentionally crude. They all dined at the Tour d'Argent with another ex-Timer in Paris soon to be famous, Stephen Vincent Benet. The Luces went on to Corsica, Luce having perhaps an empathic as well as a historical interest in Xapoleon. Lila remembers, "My greatest thrill of the entire trip was the day we arrived at a tiny hotel ... in Corsica and found a two-year-old copy of Time in the vestibule."

In Rome, the city of their unforgettable meeting, they celebrated that event and Luce endeavored to arrange an interview with Mussolini. Always the student of politics and government, he had an intense interest in the dictator strongly tinctured with admiration. But Time and Luce were unknown in Italy. Several days of solicitation of Fascist functionaries proved unsuccessful. The couple went on to London for a leisurely stay before returning to Cleveland.

At the Time office there, as Laird Goldsborough later recalled, an intrigue had been brewing. Doubtless because of the coolness between Luce and Had-den and the undesirabiUty of a rift in the Time command, John Martin and a few others had urged Hadden to buy Luce out. Hadden, loathing the business details which Luce handled so ably, decided against the idea. But he acted decisively in another direction. After praising Cleveland in the Chamber of Commerce magazine as a place free from "the booster style of city salesmanship that makes one blench as he reads the Babbitt books," and adding "Time is here to stay," he had committed Time to move back to New York. Babbitt was indeed much on his mind.

Probably there was a quarrel about this. There had been cruelty on both sides and it is unlikely that the partners were ever again really friends after the incident of the honorary degree. It turned out that Hadden was right, that Time needed the stimulation and the news sources of the metropolis, especially since Luce was able to work out an advantageous plan whereby printing and distribution would be done in Chicago.

Real riches stiU eluded them—Time would clear a puny $3861 in 1927— but this was partly due to increased salaries, moving costs and heavy promotion expenses. Luce had no doubts. He and his wife took a fairly grand town house with Itahan fountains in a backyard garden in Manhattan's Turtle Bay section at 234 East 49th Street, and rented a country house at Roxbury, Connecticut, seventy-five miles from the city. They wanted to buy a large country place with a view, and they would look around Roxbury for it. Luce was, as he later admitted, consciously aiming to attain the status of what Time called

W. A. Swanberg

a tycoon. Tycoons owned country estates. Sometimes his thinking could be astonishingly direct and simple.

Meanwhile, what had become of the globe-trotting Luce family?

Rev. Henry Luce had retired from Yenching University and returned from Peking for ulcer surgery, then settled down again with his wife in an apartment on Morningside Heights to take courses (at fifty-nine) at Columbia and Union Theological Seminary. "By the time I 'get off the earth,' " he said, 'Til begin to know something about it." Sheldon was now a student at Hotchkiss. The beautiful Emmavail Luce, a Wellesley graduate, had recently returned from five years in China, where she had been a YWCA worker, and had married Leslie R. Severinghaus, who had taught at the Rockefeller Foundation in Peking. The equally charming Elisabeth, who had often reviewed books for Time after her graduation from Wellesley, had married a young lawyer from Texas, Maurice T. Moore, who was a junior member of the eminent New York firm of Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood. "Harry asked if our 'important' firm would represent his 'unimportant' company," Moore recalls, "and of course we were glad to."

In New York, Time took small offices at 25 West 45th Street. Luce, so dynamic that he had energy to burn and was uncomfortable unless he burned it, could walk to work in fifteen minutes. On those occasions when he took over as editor, he was more permissive than Hadden, more sparing with the pencil but shrewd in his demands. Vagueness or a wandering story line never escaped him. He would pelt the writer with questions, some of them naive but always bearing on points important to the average reader. And since Time-style had become second nature to the small writing staff, the magazine still seemed to be written by one impudent man.

Luce had become so fascinated by business that the handling of ledgers was not irksome. His contact with such Time directors as Harry Davison, William H. Harkness and John Hanes had opened up the wonders of Wall Street to him, and Time's gradual acquisition of full-page advertisements from such companies as Prudential insurance, Fisher automobile bodies and Chrysler cars was proof of the greatest bull market in history. In one issue of Time, the "People" department contained paragraphs about seventeen individuals in the news, twelve of whom were tycoons such as J. P. Morgan, Charles Schwab, Julius Rosenwald, Walter Gilford and the same Fisher body brothers. Ted Cook, the newspaper satirist, included in his series of "interesting hobbies" that of a mythical citizen:

He buys old copies of Time magazine and looks for the word "tycoon." Every time he finds it he pastes a gold star in his scrap book, which now has 4,356 pages which look like the Milky Way.

Turning thirty in 1928, Luce was young enough to think Hoover stuffy, disapprove in principle of Prohibition and vote for Al Smith, although Time cautiously presented the two candidates without partiality. It was his last Demo-

I

Luce and His Empire

cratic vote for thirty-six years. At home, he Hked to perch his second son, Peter Paul, born May 18 of that year, on his shoulder at breakfast as he read the papers with such avidity that he seemed unaware of either breakfast or son.

Suddenly Time was catching fire. Its circulation was soaring, its advertising opulent. Smart people were talking about it. Businessmen found that its concision saved them time and innocently believed its claim to be "Curt, Clear, Complete." It was fashionable. People liked to be seen with it. At long last it was repaying the enormous labors of Luce and Hadden and the long forbearance of its stockholders.

And at last, newspapers long aware that Time was pilfering from them news it cost them and their wire services millions to gather, was reprocessing it and then reselling it a week later at fifteen cents a copy instead of the original newspaper price of two cents and was inaugurating a radio news program over thirty-three stations that would cover the whole nation, thereby reusing the stolen news twice—well, newspapers that had let it pass during Time's years of struggle were incensed now that the thievery was so obviously profitable. Editor & Publisher, journalism's trade paper, began a concerted campaign against Time:

Time puts this stuff on the air with credit to itself alone. The average person, listening to this flow of news at his fireside, might very well gain the impression that behind the little magazine Time lies a huge news-gathering organization, reporters scattered over the civilized world busily observing human action and dashing madly to telegraph offices to file the news to Time. . . . [W]e consulted the editor of the magazine, Henry R. Luce. We put the question: "Where do these news items which appear in your magazine and in your radio service come from?" He promptly replied, "We pick them up out of the newspapers." We asked how the magazine, in these circumstances, could accept responsibility for the accuracy or justice of the statements it blindly publishes about people and institutions, and Mr. Luce answered that his writers use their judgment, sometimes seek to confirm statements and in rare instances even get a news item on their own initiative . . . Mr. Luce sought to justify news lifting by saying that his writers contributed when they rewrote news from an "interpretative" angle. . . . [I]t must be said that Literary Digest is infinitely more fair than is Time in the matter of giving credit. But both are grafting on news organizations which pay their way and are truly responsible to their readers for statements of news.

Having bearded Luce, Editor & Publisher next went after Hadden, and reported:

The publisher of Time undertakes to justify the parasitical scissors, paste pot and rewrite job, even asserting that it is a "contribution" to the newspapers of the United States, the theory being that it makes those who read Time and hear its "news casting" on the radio more "news-conscious." Now isn't that perfectly splendid of Time? . . . Mr. Hadden says, with some show of indignation, that anyway he had permission, before he went into the Time enterprise, from Mr. Melville E. Stone to do what he is doing . . .

W. A. Swanberg

Editor & Publisher kept up the assault for a month, joined by a few protesting newspapers, but got nowhere. Time's practice was perfectly legal although hardly admirable. As E & P said, it was irresponsible. But the irresponsibility E & P referred to was its evasion of the newsgathering function. There was no complaint about the odd things that happened to other people's news when it appeared in Time. Luce's explanation that Time gave "interpretative" reporting indicated a Lucean attitude toward news which was not yet understood in its full proportions and was obscured by the argument over mere ownership of the news. This "interpretative " reporting would ultimately become the most questionable practice of all.

2. DABBLING IN FASCISM

Luce's long and semi-secret liaison with Fascism resulted largely from domestic political discontent. It appears that for a time he hoped to advance his own political career under the aegis of some version or modification of authoritarianism. His ferocious patriotism did not mean that he was wedded to the Constitution and his reverence for the founding fathers did not preclude the thought that their techniques might be outmoded. America, which should lead the world, was lagging. In a 1928 magazine article he described the Constitution as obsolete and called for "a new form of government." He was dissatisfied with the nation's performance under Coolidge, would be equally so under Hoover and (for different reasons) would reach the farthest frontiers of outrage under Roosevelt. A businessman to the core, he rather expected the government to inspire and exact the people's discipline and loyalty just as he exacted these qualities from the staff at Time Inc.

In his search for better government he naturally studied the models on exhibit elsewhere in the world, principally Communism and Fascism. Communism repelled him so strongly on each of several grounds that any one of them would have been enough to make him condemn it out of hand. The sum total of his detestation, which would come to dominate his life, included these factors:

Communism's contempt for religion struck at beliefs he held sacred.

In China, its spread seemed like that of a disease, attacking the missionary and "colonial" establishment that had his total loyalty.

The Marxian dogma that "business is theft" described him and the entrepreneurs he revered as thieves.

Russian Communism had destroyed the Romanovs, liquidated the aristocracy and the capitalists and substituted the vulgar commissar. Luce believed in the need for an aristocracy.

Communism in Russia seemed on the verge of failure, inefficient, unable even to feed all its own people.

Communism there was totalitarian and ruthless, though these quafities

Luce and His Empire

alone would not have offended him unduly if exercised in what he believed a good cause, as will be seen.

Fascism, on the other hand, was a new idea. New ideas of any kind, but especially in government, fascinated him. His speeches and reports for a decade would contain hints and outright suggestions that some features of Fascism might be useful in America. The negative aspect of Fascism—its undying enmity to Communism—won his instant approval, for he took the pragmatic attitude that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." But there were characteristics that attracted him even had no such thing as Communism existed:

The hero-worshiper in him responded to the Fascist superman who could inspire the allegiance and cooperation of the masses. The Nietzschean Uber-mensch stirred in him the nationalistic fervor of his Yale days and all his days. The Fascist submergence of the masses into the mystic unity of the nation created a seeming discipline and loyalty which, he felt, got excellent results in Italy—a national discipline and loyalty that was badly needed in America.

Fascism, however, abhorred the dead-level proletarianism of Communism, maintained an aristocracy and rewarded leaders of business and industry. Fascism was dynamic, militaristic, aggressive, imperialist—all of them qualities Luce admired.

While Fascism might quarrel with religion, it had not suppressed it and Mussohni would soon come to terms with it.

Although Fascism, like Communism, was totalitarian and ruthless. Luce persuaded himself that Mussohni had risen to power with a minimum of violence and compiled a record that atoned for his peccadilloes. A corollary of Luce's apotheosis of the hero was his dislike and mistrust of the inefficient and unpredictable masses. He detested pacifism with the combined detestation of the militant Calvinist and the practical man who regarded all life as competition.

Perhaps his beginnings in China—his identification with an elite American pohtico-religious establishment ministering to an ignorant and disfranchised populace—underlay his contempt for the masses. The half-dozen Chinese servants at his command during his boyhood could hardly have failed to nurture the mandarin image. His rudeness to servants was almost lifelong. The cheapness of life in China—the poverty, oppression and woe so inevitably the lot of the people—had to be accepted by missionaries and their families as normal. In order to function efficiently, missionaries felt they had to steel themselves against excessive sympathy, had to inhibit the very emotions of tenderness and compassion which the outsider would assume to be the basis of missionary work. Moreover, since the Chinese multitude were riddled by disease and vermin and had an outlaw element, they were dangerous. The high walls of the mission compound had not only divided the elite socially from the masses but had been necessary for safety. The masses had supported the Boxer Rebellion and sent Horace Pitkin's head rolling into the gutter— things Luce was not hkely to forget.

W. A. Swanberg

Now a new factor in China abetted his revulsion toward Communism. Sun Yat-sen's successor, the rising young warlord Chiang Kai-shek, had allied himself with the Russian Communists—a policy resulting in anti-foreignism that drove 5000 Protestant missionaries out of China and raised the specter of Communist rule from Canton to Leningrad, from the Pacific to the Baltic.

Thus, a high-powered combination of religion, family heritage, personal philosophy, historical study, political intuition and prejudice gave enormous thrust to his anti-Communist pro-Fascism. He passionately denied the axiom that there are no "indispensable men," saying that on the contrary Great Men (which he capitalized in writing) were indispensable and that American politics, though not American business, suffered a shortage of them. This was, he said in an early speech, the era of the tycoon, whom he went to some lengths to define:

He is almost inevitably a rich man, though not necessarily worth more than a million. . . . Secondly, a tycoon is a man of outstanding importance in some industry. . . . Now, of course, we see that it is not a seat in Congress but on the directorate of the greatest corporations which our countrymen regard as the greater post of honor and responsibility.

As if still stinging from Hadden's barbs, he criticized Sinclair Lewis for misrepresenting the American tycoon. "Mr. Lewis," he said, "knows practically nothing at all about business with a capital B." The businessman was no Babbitt or Dodsworth but the creator of a new "aristocratic principle" that should have wider recognition:

Business is what we [in America] believe in more than any other agency of society. . . . [Bjusiness will never be run on a democratic basis. . . . [Bjusiness must be aristocratic. There must be a top and, if possible, the best men must get there.

He pointed to the success of Mussolini in revitalizing the aristocratic principle in Italy, "a state reborn by virtue of Fascist symbols, Fascist rank and hence Fascist enterprise."

Luce admired strong regimes in which the "best people" ruled for the good of all, as he believed the Tories generally did in England. He deplored multiparty systems such as those in France and the Weimar Republic where the "best people" were unable to govern except in coalitions with the "worst people." Communism, in his view, was the deliberate elimination of the best to permit government by the worst. In Mussolini he saw such greatness and in Fascism such dramatic political innovations that he could not contain his excitement. He made his first of many public speeches to a group of businessmen in Rochester in March 1928. It was again proof of his courage and ambition that he would fight his lingering stammer and work to develop an adroitness that might advance his political hopes. He said in part:

America needs at this moment a moral leader, a national moral leader. The outstanding national moral leader in the world today is Mussolini. And I say

Luce and His Empire

this, heartily disagreeing with nearly all of his moral principles. Fact remains, he has pulled his country up by the pants; he has made Italy stand up, he has substituted self-respect for vanity, patriotism for greed, ambition for boredom. He has made the nation stand up, stand up. That is what a great moral leader does.

He was more complacent than such a student of free institutions should have been about Mussolini's methods—his destruction of liberty, organized brutalities, murder or imprisonment of political opponents, control of the press, and his black-shirt-and-fist-shaking fustian. Luce seemed absent-mindedly to forget that what made Italy "stand up" was tyranny visited on the masses. The element that appeared lacking in his contemplation of ideal government was any real warmth or concern for the great majority of humanity. The poor were simply the most inefficient members of society.

3. A GLACIER WITH FORGET-ME-NOTS

Lila spent the summer of 1928 with young Henry at the Roxbury country place while Luce-was so preoccupied with a new magazine project that he stayed at the town house and came out weekends. "Weekends" were Tuesday and Wednesday, the quieter period immediately after Time went to press. Far from resting from his labors, he expected company and spirited talk and he would play tennis with anyone who came along.

His tennis was unexceptional but—like his politics, business methods, religion and philosophy—dedicated to the idea of winning. At least one opponent was fascinated by the way Luce would rush to the net with racket upraised for the kill, his face as ferocious as an executioner's. WTien his holiday was over, Lila would drive him madly to the Ne\\' Milford station to catch the 6:42 to New York. From Roxbury she wrote him charmingly breathless letters reporting on their sons' activities, commenting on Luce's absent-mindedness—"Don't forget to get your suit pressed!"—his excessive devotion to work and his regimen of self-improvement. He was reading Count Keyser-hng's effort to combine the values of Eastern and Western thought—a study that inspired Lila to an interesting description of his varying moods:

Why do people resent his [Keyserling's] way of writing so? I think he's a very picturesque mountain in the literary landscape. I wonder what kind of a mountain you would turn into with a Uterary background. . . . Decidedly with a glacier near the top, and with forget-me-nots growing around your feet.

He would reply with a quick rundown of his efforts on Time, which he called "the great cosmic weekly almanac," and mention meetings in tow-n with the Moores and others. He could end gracefully after mailing letters for Lila to her mother in Europe: "But I shall special dehvery myself up there [to Roxbury] Monday—because it is a nice place and all. —Always Your Lover." Or he could address her as "Carissima," begin with, "If this day could have

W. A. Swanberg

been worse it was. And busy—Hadden off for three weeks," then give her the news and follow with an indulgent-but-serious lecture on what he regarded as her negligence in financial matters:

I do think there is something more than sheer drudgery in household accounts. The creation of an estate or even an estatelette is a sort of work of art (which is not to say, no not ever to say, that all millionaires are artists). In it all is tied up a good deal of "getting the most out of life" etc etc etc. Now, as a member of the Board of Directors of Luce Inc, I think you, the management, get an extraordinarily [sic] lot out of our meager pickings. You put on as good an act as many people with twice the wherewithal. My only objection is that your [sic] a httle too inspirational about it and not sufficiently Teuton-methodical. It's sort of hare vs. turtle—and I'm always afraid that in such races the turtle may win. Of course we're in a queer position. In a way it's siUy to worry over a penny when, we hope, the penny won't count much anyway. I guess I'm just a little superstitious about it—"If you don't look out for the pennies, the dollars won't" —although I certainly don't have faith in the original saw that if you do look out for the pennies the dollars will etc.

Anyway, I believe it's much easier to have fun with money than without, and I certainly want us both to have the biggest kind of fun in many a year to come. Selah, Preacher.

Incidently [sic], apropos your (somewhat belated!) worries as to next year's rent, I figure on salary of about $20,000—and furthermore, 1930 & 31 (the Ufe of the lease) should see some even further increases in income. Well, they say that Love & Money are the two great magazine themes. This issue has love all mixed in with the cash as maybe you can see.

Your— Harry

But for all his talk about wanting the biggest kind of fun, he never took time for it. He was too wound up, too ambitious, too preoccupied with the future to enjoy the warm delights of life as they occurred. She wrote him: "I am terribly anticipating . . . seeing you take a weekend off." She tried to slow him down:

Chicagoans go in for kidnapping . . . I am going to kidnap you and take you to some leafy sohtude (poetically speaking) to laugh; against your will and better judgment, to laugh. Or he and Usten to the sweet silences that one forgets about when living in big cities.

Not for Luce the sweet silences or lazy laughter. At thirty, an age when thoughtful men are apt to appraise their progress, he might have been well satisfied but for the scope of his ambitions. The grubby struggle for survival was over. He was making money so fast that he would soon be a milhonaire— a term still impressive in the Twenties. But money was only part of the goal. He sought influence, power. His pronouncement at fifteen that he was "not aiming at anything paltry" was if anything more determined at thirty. Some felt confirmed in the suspicion that he yearned for the Presidency not only because he took the trouble to correct an erroneous impression that his birth in

Luce and His Empire

China disqualified him but because there seemed White House hunger in his enormous fascination with pohtics and the moves he made to improve himself and become better known. He was working on a new magazine—his own, not Hadden's. Never Hadden's, for it was about business.

"Hard to realize," Lila wrote him from Roxbury, "that while me and my playmates idle away the hours in this pleasant place, men labor in the heat of a city, and that the best of them [Luce] is creating a masterpiece every week [Time] . . . Harder to believe that the same fertile brain is giving birth to a new magazine, wonderful in its way, another brain stroke."

Interestingly, he planned to call it Power. It would concern itself with the assumption of power by America's new royalty—businessmen and industrialists—and the engines of power they commanded. Time had been plugging them as the stock market soared. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Bernard Baruch, Captain Robert Dollar, Amadio Giannini, Vincent Astor, Harry Sinclair, George Eastman and other corporate giants had appeared on Time's cover in 1928^ But Time's department about Business was a small one that could not begin to suggest the struggle, excitement, romance, wealth and power which Luce saw in the business world and the men who controlled it. He wanted to capture it all in the most luxuriously beautiful magazine ever produced.

Hadden was opposed. It was not his idea. It did not seem either interesting or likely to succeed. It would be, after all, a journalistic hosanna to men who had to some extent the characteristics of George F. Babbitt. Hadden did not block the allotment of a modest sum for experimental work toward such a magazine, but his attitude was one of disdain and he disparaged the project to Time's directors.

The great problem of Luce's life was Hadden. The most alienated of Bones-men, they were lashed together in triumph as they had been in struggle. So long as Hadden was there. Luce's missionary use of Time was limited to issues on which they agreed. Two such kingly men could not forever stand the pinch of the same small throne. Just as Time had been chieHy Hadden's creation. Power was all Luce's—his way of asserting his own creativity and enforcing the Statute of Equality. Power was also a Luce vehicle for separating himself from Hadden within the organization. And it seems likely that Luce held in reserve the idea that if Power was successful and relations with his partner became unbearable, the two could sever their corporate connection, each taking one magazine.

4. A THOUSAND DAGGERS FLASHING

Time had shown admiring interest in Mussolini since 1923, when it spoke of his "remarkable self-control, rare judgment and efficient application of his ideas." Its reporting had grown more "interpretative " with success. Here was

W. A. Swanberg

an area in which Hadden and Luce agreed substantially. If Hadden's bias was less extreme than Luce's, the partners were alike in their inclination to embellish the news for greater drama and circulation. Another factor was the quick brilliance of Laird Goldsborough. Goldy, as he was called, had been rewarded with the supervision of Time's foreign news (known in the shop as FN, as the National Affairs department was called NA), which like everything else was rewritten from the papers. Goldsborough not only shared Luce's biases but employed such clever writing and skillful embroidery in this hard-to-check field that he turned an ordinarily soporific department into a thing with the color of a gossip column.

Time interpreted Mussolini as daring, brilliant, wise and courageous. The birth of a child to Donna Mussolini was reported in congratulatory vein. II Duce's forty-first birthday was celebrated by his first of many appearances on Time's cover along with a benign account of his early struggles, his war service ("His great personal courage won him general praise") and his political wisdom ("Bolshevism taught him his great lesson"). Time's interpretation of Stalin's obscure background stressed his "ominous past" which was "kept shrouded in perpetual mystery by his iron censorship ..." The regime was likened to hard metal by Time's invariable explanation for several years, when the names of Stalin and Molotov were used, that they meant "steel" and "hammer."

Whereas Mussolini was described in one account as "rubicund, jovial, beaming," the best Time could do for Stalin was, "His facial features suggest cruelty—a hard mask of oriental ruthlessness." Unlike the impeccably uniformed Italian dictator, he was "always shabbily dressed." The romantic Duce kept a lion cub named Italia Bella which "crouched, speed-stunned, in Signor Mussolini's lap as the Dictator stepped upon the throttle of his racing car and sped toward Rome." The lion loved him as did the people, said Time's second cover story on him: "To date II Duce has suffered barely a scratch or two from the claws of Italia Bella. Like her namesake, 'Fair Italy,' she appears to adore him." Stalin, on the contrary, "was never a dreamer or a romantic hero. He is a cold-blooded man of deeds, uneducated in manner . . ." He did not enjoy Mussolini's popularity and was "never overwhelmed with public adulation."

There seemed a disposition to overlook Italian brutalities and difficulties while stressing those in Russia. There, Time said, the revolution had meant "the substitution of one privileged class for another" with the result that "the workers are the aristocracy." This did them no good since "the population as a whole remains illiterate and characteristically apathetic." Orphans of the war "abound[ed] like alley cats" and became "skilled pickpockets and moral degenerates" who made civilized observers shudder "half with pity, half with revulsion." Even non-orphans were so blighted by Bolshevist education that "100,000 vicious ragamuffins roam the streets [of Moscow] today." Time was

Luce and His Empire

amused by the "scientific Communist planning" that made bread cost forty cents a loaf and butter two dollars a pound.

Time's pejoratives and approbatives could infiltrate sentences in subtle and atmospheric ways. A large crowd in Russia, for example, was a inob, whereas in Italy it was a throng. Russia was chill, drab, bleak, Italy warm, gay, genial. What was relentlessness or nithlessness in the Kremlin became firmness or resolution south of the Alps. Time often referred companionably to Mussolini as "Premier Benito " and pictured him as truly Italian in his warmth and sociability. His Russian counterpart was usually alluded to by his rather ominous name, "Josef Vissarionovitch Stalin," or sometimes by his true siuname of Djugashvili along with mention of his adoption of an ahas—a practice common among revolutionaries but associated with criminals in America. Time told of the "black secrecy" within the "thick, awesome walls of the Kremlin." Far from being either black or secretive, Mussolini was forever talking, and on one occasion when^he felt himself affronted, Time said, "his eyes flashed like a thousand daggers in the sunlight, his voice sounded like the bellow of a buU."

The running battle between the two dictators was won hands down week after week by Mussolini, whose "logic, reason and curt common sense" had inspired the nation: "Today the ceaseless unremittent work-fervor of Mussolini is triumphantly infused into Italians. From monarch to hod-carrier the nation is at work." The leader who had jerked Italy up by the pants had even yanked the breeches of the king, who "begins [work] at 8:30 each morning," and had more politely won cooperation from Queen Elena who, in addition to welfare work and gardening, was now sewing "garments for the poor." Alas, Stalin if anything had let Russia's pants down. Management was lacking, planning went awry and "50 'kulaks' (rich peasants) were executed" for failing to cooperate with the government program. Stalin could not elicit the cheers that greeted Mussolini when he spoke: "Across the Chamber floated 'Bravo!' in a shrill treble from a woman in the gallery. Instantly braves and vivas were engaged in mortal combat for supremacy."

"Throughout the Soviet Union," Time said, "it is a grim jest that neither the Voice of God nor that of the People can be heard above the silence of Comrade Josef Stalin." Every now and then Time translated in capitals the huge sign the dictatorship had erected near Red Square: "RELIGION IS THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE." The sinister force of atheism in Russia was a constant Time refrain. Mussolini, however, for all his quarrels with the Pope, had never tried to stifle what Time called "the spiritual veneration of Itahans for their quite literally 'beloved Papa' (the Pope)," and he ultimately came to amicable terms with the Holy See.

Time's rewriting of newspaper accounts brought out touches unseen by the newspaper correspondents themselves, for example, in its atmospheric description of the departure of Trotsky from joyless Moscow. The crowd seeing

W. A. Swanberg

him off was not only "sullen and docile" but "shuffling and shivering." It was "surrounded by agents of the Secret Police" and Trotsky was "wan and pallid" and "as threadbare as his cloak" as he got into a "drab railway car." Things were not so adjectivally sullen, docile, shuffling, shivering, wan, palhd, drab and threadbare in Italy. The custom of II Duce's bully boys of forcing castor oil down opponents' throats was interpreted as humorous and at any rate better than bullets, which Time suggested he used with commendable restraint: "Although the Fascisti cannot be absolved from using armed force against the civil population, Mussolini's coup d'etat of October, 1922, was largely effected by the potency of his castor oil . . ."

Time consistently permitted Mussolini to "announce," "order" or merely to "say," whereas Stalin either "growled" or "rasped" on those rare occasions when he spoke at all. The Dracula element in Stahn was most ably hmned by Time's Laird Goldsborough, although Goldy had not yet been in Russia. One one-paragraph tour de force about him contained the descriptives, egotistical, ruthless, inflexible, like tempered metal, cold, inscrutable, never interviewed, and ended scarcely recognized in his infrequent rides about Moscow in a closely guarded limousine.

The fact that many of these descriptions turned out to be true or even flattering to Stalin scarcely justified the good press given Mussolini. Since Time's denunciation of Bolshevism was so often counterbalanced with admiration for the Italian brand of enslavement, the inference could be drawn that enslavement per se was not automatically evil—indeed that enslavement effected by the right people, employing capitahsm and opposing Communism, could be glamorous, benevolent and chivalrous. Time, the defender of a "free and honest press," often lampooned the Soviet hne parroted by Pravda and Izvestia ("At long intervals the Dictator simply releases a statement with instructions that it shall appear verbatim"). Once it even criticized Mussolini's muzzUng of the press, at the same time evoking his heroic image:

Exact dynamic utterance is expected from the lips of Signer Mussolini. His capacity for being clear amounts to genius. He likes to be clear. Yet he can use weasel words. . . . Last week II Duce explained to U.S. newsgatherers why he had suppressed the liberty of Italian newsorgans. Weasel words fell from his hps . . .

Time's coverage of Italy and Russia since the beginning had comprised many thousands of weasel words. The young fellows from Yale really had not changed their early attitude toward news as something plastic and susceptible of improvement. Divinity Student, Old Hatchet Face and George Schleiger of Chillicothe were amusing and never did any measurable harm, but the Yale-men were in the big leagues now. Mussolini and Stalin were real people, important to Americans, who deserved to know the ungimmicked truth about them.

Luce and His Empire

5. THE DEATH OF HADDEN

The gentleness and warmth with which rehgion invests some communicants were absent in the dour, intense Luce, perhaps because he felt he had a calhng, that God had special work for him to do. The doctrine of the calling, which Calvin had stressed, encouraged the idea that God had appointed an occupation for everyone and that virtue led to success. Thus there was no conflict between the superman theory and Luce's Presbyterianism, which was so militant and aggressive that one could imagine him shouting his prayers at a God who might otherwise be inattentive and waste his time. The importance he placed on time did not encourage ease or fraternization. Yet when told something that ifiterested him he would respond with purest attention. As one friend put it, "Harry seemed in love with ideas rather than people."

Ideas were avenues to power. At social gatherings he could walk away in midsentence from someone boring him to seek out someone who could give him facts and ideas. He was skillful at framing questions that would ehcit them. He could ignore the woman at his right at the table if she proved devoid of facts and ideas and turn an aggressive scrutiny on the woman at his left because she seemed to have a fact or an idea. Food and drink were not only inconsequential but in a sense invisible and nonexistent to him. He positively had no knowledge of whether he was eating filet mignon or finnan had-die so long as he was devouring a fact or an idea, and he was a disappointment to the hostess who expected to be complimented on the dinner which he had eaten without being aware of it.

In October 1928 Time moved to more spacious quarters at 205 East 42nd Street—an event Hadden marked with an appropriate quantity of bootleg gin and an office party. In December he came down with influenza. He was moved from his East End Avenue bachelor apartment to the home of his mother and stepfather in Brooklyn—then, when he developed septicemia, to Brooklyn Hospital. Unlike Luce, he was fussy about food. Disliking the hospital fare, he had his meals sent in from a SchrafFt's restaurant, always including a huge bunch of grapes. He was constantly on the telephone with his friends, who included such Broadway performers as Libby Holman.

Toward the end of January he grew weaker and it appeared doubtful that he would live. On the twenty-sixth his apartment mate and old friend (Yale '19), WilHam Carr, who was a lawyer, visited him, took out paper and wrote, 'T, Briton Hadden, declare this to be my last will and testament." Hadden spoke so faintly that Carr had to strain to hear him. He owned 3,361 shares of Time stock, worth well over a million dollars (he had fulfilled his dream of becoming a millionaire by thirty) and representing the balance of control of the corporation.

Luce wanted those shares. There had been difficulties enough witli them in Hadden's hands—a divided authority and friction. If Hadden left them to

W. A. Swanberg

someone else, the division would be perpetuated and Luce's authority might be further impaired. With his strong sense of responsibility and proprietorship, it would have been surprising if, during a visit at the hospital, he did not urge Hadden to sell him at least a controlling block of his shares. It is said that Luce did so. If so, here in the odor of antiseptics they played out the mournful climax of the drama of rivalry that started at Hotchldss School, continued through Yale and then through seven years of struggle and eventual triumph with Time—Hadden always a shade ahead, now losing the race because of streptococci in his bloodstream. One only knows that Luce did not get the shares. In Hadden's interview with Carr he directed that they go to his half-brother and executor, Crowell Hadden III, whom he instructed to "hold my stock in Time Inc., and not sell the same until after the expiration of 49 years after my death." When it was finished he was too weak to sign his name. He scrawled an "X" at the bottom, his nurse, Lucy Wolinski, being called in to sign as a witness.

Hadden's will proved his faith in the magazine he had created. It did not seem to suggest his faith in Harry Luce. If its provisions were observed to the letter. Luce would have been deprived of the power he sought until he was eighty years old.

Antibiotics developed since then probably would have saved Hadden's hfe. At that time only blood transfusions kept him going, many of them donated by office associates deeply attached to him. Luce himself had his blood tested, though it seems unremembered whether he had the right type. Hadden lingered for another month and died on February 26, 1929, just eight days past his thirty-first birthday.

"I don't know what I'll do without Brit," Luce said to Manfred Gottfried.

In the hght of his thorough command of both the editorial and business sides of the corporation, it is possible that the remark was rhetorical, or that he referred to the shares rather than to Hadden. Yet there were times when his self-belief sagged a trifle, and this may have been one of them. He was deep in the preliminaries of an expensive new magazine that forcibly removed him from Time's editorship. He named John Martin managing editor of Time. He began negotiations with the Hadden estate.

As executor it turned out that Crowell Hadden was empowered to consider the interests of all members of his family and was not bound to hold the shares for forty-nine years. Seven months after Briton Hadden's death, the estate sold 625 shares to Luce (at $360 a share, worth $225,000), 550 to Roy Larsen and smaller blocks to other members of a syndicate Luce organized. It was more than enough to give Luce the unquestioned financial sovereignty he wanted and needed.

1. THE TYCOON AS HERO

An important effect of Hadden's death was its liberation of Luce the ideologist-missionary-propagandist. The derider of Babbitt would scarcely have agreed to the glorification of business and businessmen which Luce now indulged.

Time's Man of the Year in January 1929, while Hadden lay dying, was Walter P. Chrysler ("The doings of Walter P. Chrysler, already prodigious, now become fabulous "). Chrysler was pretty fabulous even if he was a Time advertiser and a friend and business colleague of one of Time's most influential board members, William V. Griffin, even if Time made an exception to its otherwise inviolable rule that middle names must be given. Chrysler, who despised his middle name, Percy, had promised that there would be no more advertisements if it was divulged. Time had capitulated to that extent. Chrysler was lauded for his introduction during the year of Plymouth and DeSoto cars, his purchase of Dodge Brothers for $160 million and his sixty-eight-story Chrysler Building now rising on 42nd Street just west of Time's office. He took solid rank among the business supermen who. Luce felt, were thrusting America into a golden age of power as well as prosperity.

Up, up went stocks. Luce's celebration of the tycoon soared to a record sixteen Time covers in 1929. Among the better known were J. P. Morgan ("The foremost financier on this round earth"), Myron Taylor ("The door of his office is lettered simply 'Mr. Taylor' "), David Sarnoff ("You cannot fool him about mousetraps"), Alvan Macaulay ("Cool, self-possessed, quiet, sure of his facts and figures") and Walter Teagle ("Standard Oil of New Jersey . . . has never passed a dividend").

That fall, at the very time the stock market reeled dnmkenly into the collapse that would bring years of disaster and would question the exaltation of

81

W. A. Swanberg

the tycoon, Time's covers featured five heroes of business in succession, with never an athlete or htterateur to break the chain: WiUiam Wrigley, Jr., Harry Guggenheim, Ivar Kreuger, Samuel InsuU and Thomas W. Lamont, the latter described as "this right hand of John Pierpont Morgan . . ."

The last issue before the crash carried a three-page announcement of Luce's new magazine Fortune (the title Power had finally been given up and the new name selected by Lila Luce from a group of other possibilities) at the staggering price of a dollar a copy or ten dollars a year. Fortune, it said, proclaimed the "generally accepted commonplace that America's great achievement has been Business."

As Eric Hodgins later described it, "Almost on the eve of Fortune's publication, the whole economy of the United States clapped a hand over its heart, uttered a piercing scream, and slipped on the largest banana peel since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations."

Luce, like more expert observers, thought the market reverse a temporary setback. Fortune went full speed ahead. Indeed, as market victims still leaped from windows. Time saluted several tycoons as heroes who had stopped the skid in securities. It was the financial resources of the House of Morgan, Time said, that effected the rescue. Its visible agent was Broker Richard F. Whitney. Whitney's entrance into the Exchange seemed to Time to have something of the reckless valor of Horatius taking his post on the bridge:

. . . Whitney strode through the mob of desperate traders, made swiftly for Post No. 2 where . . . the stock of the United States Steel Corp., most pivotal of all U.S. stocks, is traded in. . . . Having broken down through 200, it was now at 190. If it should sink further. Panic, with its most awful leer, might surely take command. Loudly, confidently at Post No. 2, Broker Whitney made known that he offered $205 per share for 25,000 shares of Steel . . . [Prices rallied.] ... the man who bid 205 for 25,000 shares of Steel had made himself a hero of a financially historic moment.

Time's next issue gave its cover to Lamont, the Morgan partner who had sent Whitney on his historic mission, "the man who steered the ship of U.S. prosperity through the storm, who at length felt the helm respond"—interesting reading a year or two later. As the ship of prosperity crashed sickeningly onto the rocks. Luce topped off his recognition of men of business by making Owen D. Young of General Electric his Man of the Year, because, "Never a morahst, he has said: 'In no other profession [besides business] ... is the need for wide information, broad sympathies and directed imagination so great.' "

2. HALL OF FAME

The founder of a magazine about business would be expected to gather a staff with degrees in economics, experience in business and acquaintance with

Luce and His Empire

important people in business. Luce forbade expertise. He had organized his staif around a small group of enthusiastic amateurs like Russell Davenport (Yale '23, Bones, Elizabethan Club), the craggy-faced poet who had worked briefly for Time. Davenport had recently married the once-divorced, darkly beautiful Marcia, daughter of the soprano Alma Gluck. Mme. Gluck, also divorced, had married the viohnist Efrem Zimbalist. The Zimbahsts, 49th Street neighbors of the Luces, became their good friends, and since Lila was a music lover and Luce himself not actively opposed, there were frequent gatherings of musical people. According to one observer, "That was about the only time Harry had a relatively normal social Ufe."

For Fortune, Luce wanted young people who had not worked elsewhere long enough to form habit-patterns and could observe phenomena with excitement instead of the old-timer's boredom. The amateur quality of the Time staff, with its imaginative and fancy-woven outlook on events, had proved out in profits, however dubious its standing as journalism. Fortune's first managing editor was Parker Lloyd-Smith, a witty Princetonian who had spent a year at Oxford and then worked briefly for the Albany Evening News. With him were such people as the brilliant Dwight Macdonald (Yale '27) and Margaret Bourke-White, a Cleveland girl who had created a specialty of photographing industrial scenes. The most seasoned amateur was Archibald MacLeish, back from Paris, now the father of three and in need of a stake to enable him to finish his narrative poem Conquistador. He was surprised when Luce asked him to write for his new magazine of business.

"I'm flattered," he said, "but I know absolutely nothing about business."

"That's why I want you," Luce replied.

MacLeish put himself in Luce's hands. He admitted that he needed money to finish his poem and that he would be of httle use to Fortune unless he could finish it. Luce was generosity itself.

"Well, then," he said, "you can work for Fortune as much of the time as you need to pay your bills and take the rest of the time off for poetry."

It was on this unusual basis that MacLeish joined the staff. He never forgot Luce's magnanimity, which indeed made possible the publication of the Pu-Utzer Prize-winning Conquistador in 1932. He was paid handsomely even when he gave half of his time or less to Fortune, and Luce got a bargain for such talents. As MacLeish observed. Luce's naivete was not a weakness but a strength: "He really thought there was nothing he could not do, so he often did it." Pretty soon MacLeish would be doing a piece about the Elgin watch factory "so imaginative," as he described it, "that the Elgin executives hardly recognized it."

A picture of Luce's dream of industrial paternalism appeared in his own Fortune article on Pittsburgh. It was "a gentle city," he wrote of this roughneck place, where "the brass-knuckled steel barons" had been replaced by men typified by the Mellons, kindly men all of them. Luce was insistent about

W. A. Swanberg

their gentleness: "Neither A. W. nor R. B. [Mellon] likes rough-and-tumble. The same is true of their associates . . . mild men . . ." Still another Mellon, James, was "a dehghtful and subtly humorous gentleman." Luce emphasized "the gentleness of spirit which is inescapable in modern Pittsburgh," paying tribute to the Mellons as a family to whom their city "has been motive, duty, devotion, and satisfaction," and saying that they were motivated by a "principle that makes the Mellon fortune racial in scope, with a feeling for the nation's destiny playing through it." Pittsburgh's windows were washed weekly by contented family servants, he wrote, and the workers were happy and prosperous—97,000 schoolchildren gave a dime each to the University of Pittsburgh, a millworker gave it $5000 and a Magyar woman gave it "the price of a month's meat." Luce's admiration for "the Mellon Raj," as he called it, was plain and his faith in a society so humanely controlled seemed complete. He seemed not to have visited the slums. The article angered the leftish Dwight Macdonald, who later volunteered one of the sayings of the gentle R. B. MeUon which Luce's research had failed to find: "You couldn't run a coal mine without machine-guns."

At this same time Luce came to the attention of Vanity Fair's beautiful fair-haired assistant editor Clare Boothe Brokaw. Assigned to interview him for that magazine's "Hall of Fame," she was unable to see him—too busy. Vanity Fair ran his pictiire anyway, and Mrs. Brokaw wrote the caption:

We nominate for the Hall of Fame:

Henry Luce. Originator of the news-magazine idea; because at the age of 32 he is the successful editor and publisher of "Time" and "Fortune" magazines; because he was bom in China; because he was a humble newspaper reporter on the Chicago Daily News; and lastly because he claims that he has no other interest outside of his work, and that his work fills his waking hours.

Mrs. Brokaw, who was twenty-seven and divorced, would in five years confront Luce with a moral dilemma when he fell in love with her. Now his fascination with industry was whetted by a trip to South Bend, where he carried Miss Boiu-ke-White's cameras for her and was moved to nostalgia by the huge Singer sewing machine factory.

"All through my childhood," he told her, "even in tiny villages in the interior of China, I saw that big S for Singer."

At the Studebaker Corporation he was impressed by the efficiency of the assembly Une. He talked with the young Paul G. Hoffman, Studebaker's vice president, and with the president, Albert Erskine. (Fortune's later story brought anguish to Erskine, an Alabamian, for its photograph of Erskine was overshadowed by one of a sweating Negro Studebaker worker.)

Luce, whose talents at promotion equaled his command of other phases of business, had made sure that Fortune's first issue (February 1930) was splendidly pubhcized. With its 184 antique-paper pages plus covers, its weight of more than two pounds, its 30,000 subscribers and scores of advertisements for

Luce and His Empire

luxuries ranging from Pierce Arrow automobiles to Chris-Craft yachts, it hardly seemed a harbinger of national privation and despair. The lavishness of its typography, art and color reproduction were of a piece with its dedication to tycoons and their works, among them Swift & Company, David Sarnoff and his Radio Corporation of America, and the Rothschilds. Its sketch of the multimillionaire Arthur Curtiss James ("Portrait of a Gentleman Funded Proprietor—This Civilization's Best Example") stressed the corporate abilities that had brought him yachts and palaces in New York and Newport. It even had a 10,000-word article on banking by Luce himself which he could not possibly have had time to write and yet did.

The Daily Worker assailed Fortune for "romantically attempting to disguise the rapacity and swinishness of American 'Big Business' ..." The Nation thought it too eager to "heap encomiums" on tycoons. The San Diego Union loosed a blast:

It has remained for Fortune ... to reduce American aristocracy to its final absurdity . . . Plutocracy's pride in the dollar is pitilessly exposed by the elaboration of concealment, and the pose that invective could not shake has been rendered ridiculous and self-conscious by adulation.

There was perhaps an unintended "let them eat cake" impression in bringing out this salute to luxury when national hardship was beginning. Less socially sensitive papers were more in agreement with the Omaha News, which called Luce "the miracle editor." Fortune got off to a good if not immediately profitable start, while Time's profits were enormous. By 1931, with the nation sinking deeper into depression and many corporations showing losses, Time's directors looked with benevolence on Luce. Time stock, which had reached its then high of $360 after the death of Hadden, was about to hit $1000 and to be split 20 to 1.

"Miracle editor" was a proper appellation for a man who could make his stockholders plump in the Thirties. Fortune was a thing of pride but it was Time that washed in a golden tide. It had become an admired part of the American scene. The smart red-bordered magazine which identified itself with God, the flag and business, was virtually unseen in ghettos or tanktowns, its habitat being in libraries, high schools and colleges, church studies, and living rooms with bridge lamps and the new wall-to-wall carpeting. It was read and enjoyed, as Time's own advertising research staff discovered, by people in the upper levels of both income and education. Bankers, sales managers, clergymen and professors not only enjoyed its lively pages but often indulged a quiet yearning that some day they might "make" the cover, or anyway win mention inside. Most regular readers were accustomed to Timestyle and unaware of hidden propaganda. They unconsciously appreciated editorial stands which simplified their own opinion-making, unlike the skidding Literary Digest, whose presentation of various aspects of issues took more time, was confusing and forced readers to make their own judgments. Only a few, such as

W. A. Swanberg

the left-leaning editor of the Beverly Hills Script, felt that they were being imposed upon:

The fellows who got up Time had a peach of an idea. ... As far as we are concerned, however, the grand idea is beginning to flop, for the reason that the narrator has now turned critic and is editorializing on his news as he goes along. For instance, any items about Russia are narrated with deep contempt; certain pubUc characters are sneered at, and others made ridiculous. The nifty purpose of giving us world news has deteriorated into an apparently young editor's opinion of that news. Ye Ed has returned to The Literary Digest where he reads both sides of important questions and thus is permitted to form his own judgments.

Confucius likened the truth to a virgin who, once violated, can never be the same again. In the Time office the hapless girl received such bruising weekly attentions as to forfeit all respect on the part of her manhandlers. She received further mistreatment in 1931 when the new March of Time radio series began under the sponsorship of Roy Larsen. Larsen's only previous news experience was what he had absorbed at Time. John Shaw Bilhngs, a South Carohna-born, Harvard-trained Time editor who had risen swiftly to high responsibility, noted in his diary:

Drove down to the Luces on 49th Street for dinner. Other guests were Tom Palmer and his wife, Bill Whitney and wife, Marcia Davenport, Washington Dodge and others. Halfway through the dinner we all dashed out and drove up to Columbia Broadcasting studio on Madison Avenue to watch the March of Time from a glass-fronted cubicle. ... I was amazed at the number of performers—20 or 25. Then back to the Luces for ice cream and coffee. . . . Luce confided to me he thought the March of Time was a costly bust . . .

Luce changed his mind. The program used Time's already transmogrified news as a basis for dramatizations of the week's more colorful events. Speaking their pieces from scripts one further remove from reahty were actors who mimicked persons in the news. Most of the actors could handle at least two voices. WilUam Adams spoke as both President Roosevelt and President von Hindenburg, using German-accented EngUsh for the latter. Ted De Corsia enacted both Herbert Hoover and Mussolini, Westbrook Van Voorhis "did" Hitler and Marion Hopkinson enacted Mrs. Roosevelt, Frances Perkins and Princess Marina. A twenty-one-piece orchestra led by Howard Barlow furnished a musical introduction for each episode. Sound effects were imaginative, a decapitation being suggested by the quick slicing of a cantaloupe which then fell into a box of sawdust.

The news-by-cantaloupe extremes of the March of Time would hardly have been attained but for the liberties with the news taken for so long by Time itself as to become custom. The reverse seemed as likely—that Time writers, after becoming indoctrinated with the buskined broadcast of MOT, would abate a shade more their regard for fact. Newspapers at the time—some

Luce and His Empire

whose own concern for responsible reporting was not always above question —were fearful and critical of radio as a dangerous competitor both in news dissemination and advertising revenue. There seemed a whiff of self-interest in the Rutland, Vermont, Herald's condemnation of the exaggeration and lu-ridity and its reminder of Time's own consistent sarcasm toward such sensational newspapers as the New York Graphic. Still, its editorial, "The Journalism of Fiction," had a point:

. . . [Tjhis "March of Time" is as yellow and sensational as any act of any newspaper so sarcastically jeered at by "Time" itself. Most of the dialogue is purely imaginary as are the accompanying sounds, created for a dramatic background. Listeners who recall "Time's" attempt to reproduce the freezing to death of little children in a school bus caught in a blizzard in Ohio . . . will still shudder at the dreadful and purely imaginary hokum uttered by the actors who sought to represent the victims.

Occasionally Luce now called in Edward L. Bernays to advise him on pub-hcity. Bernays, who was a nephew of Freud and had studied his uncle's work, felt that Luce had a drive for power and a simultaneous drive for good, that he rationalized the two but had guilt feelings as compensation.

"I always felt as if Harry were flexing his muscles," he recalled.

3. NEVER KILLED AN INDIAN

Around the continent, editors had varying opinions of Time but were seldom indifferent. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch said with tongue in cheek:

U.S. news-lingo seems set for a big change, due to spreading influence of nosy . . . vibrant newsmagazine Time. . . . Old flowing periods of classic writers Addison & Steele out of date in fast-moving peppy civilization, which craves something snippy, snappy, terse.

The Ottawa Evening Journal, its tongue in place, called Time "bright, readable, acute," but complained that in a recent Time story about Canada, "It would be hard to crowd more of ignorance and misinformation into any equal number of words."

The Fairmont, Minnesota, Sentinel complained about Time's errors in a story about Minnesota, adding, "Snobs hereabouts who think they are of the inteUigentsia are fond of stalking about with a copy of Time sticking out of the coat pocket."

The Baltimore Afro-American was indignant because Time's article about the jazz leader Louis Armstrong called him "a bullet-headed, satchelmouthed black rascal." But the Afro-American was so much less offended by this than it was pleased by Time's praise for Armstrong's artistry that it went on to reprint the whole Time story.

W. A. Swanberg

The Saturday Review, noting that different magazines had human characteristics, commented:

Time is a bright college boy, immensely and rapidly read, with a tongue in his cheek and his mouth open, while he pounds the news inside out in the attempt to make it exciting.

Marlen Pew, editor of Editor & Pubhsher, long exasperated by Time's habit of appropriating news from the papers and remodehng it, told of being stabbed in the back by his own legionaries:

At a recent meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors somebody wanted to know why it is that newspapermen will not write fresh and realistic stuff like that written for the magazine Time. It seemed to be the opinion of a number of editors in attendance that conventional and formula press writing has become quite deadly. This week I noticed the following paragraph in Time, taken from a story of a Maryland lynching:

"A stooped and toothless crone of 71 shuffled along a country road near Kingston, Md., one morning last week. Mrs. Mary Denston was on her way to see her daughter. Suddenly, from behind, black hands were laid upon her. Cackhng and kicking feebly she was dragged by a young Negro buck to a clump of bushes. There, amid a flurry orleaves dancing rustily in the autumn sunshine, she was raped."

Well, that's a piece of openwork news knitting, fairly typical of Time, but how many newspaper desks would pass it? . . . The "stooped and toothless crone" stuff might be libelous. The word "rape" is taboo. ... No nice newspaper editor would dream of dressing up such horror with flurrying leaves dancing rustily in the autumn sunshine. ... It is the sort of thing that makes Time jingle, but don't tell me daily editors really want it.

Slangy Variety, however, which had imitated Time's insolence, published a report suggesting that Pew and his nice newspaper editors might be a httle old-fashioned:

"Time," the weekly news mag, is now in second place in volume of advertising carried by an American periodical, the "Satevepost" being of course, the leader. "Time" nosed out the "Literary Digest" last month by 22 pages of advertising.

A mere want ad in the conservative New York Herald Tribune seemed to verify the thought that Pew's advice was not holding up well and that other publishers sought the same kind of jingle. It read:

Former "Time" Magazine writer wanted by Metropolitan publisher . . .

"The trouble with me," Luce told a Brooklyn Eagle reporter who asked about his hobbies, "is that I work nearly all the time. . . . My principal hobby is conversing with somebody who knows something. . . . I'm sorry that I've never done anything exciting," he went on, as if he had not seen more travel and excitement than many members of the Foreign Legion. "Never killed an

Luce and His Empire

Indian or rescued anybody from drowning—wasn't wrecked in the Titanic or anything."

The Eagle man noted Luce's restlessness and dynamism. Everybody who encountered him felt his enormous energy and noticed his nervous pacing and his chain-smoking, and the tension that made him repeat phrases as if the words were under pressure, shot out of a gun. He worked, as he said, nearly all the time. Laura Z. Hobson—she had married Luce's classmate Thayer Hobson (News, Bones)—noticed that the Luce evening schedule became tighter.

"Earlier," she said, "you could call Lila and Harry at eleven and have a good chance of getting them to come to dinner that night. "

Luce's evenings tended to become black- or white-tie continuations of his days, extensions of his business and his ambitions. His hobby of "conversing with somebody who knows something" meant that an increasing number of experts and specialists were invited to the Luce gatherings—people with whom the conversational preliminaries could be skipped in order to get at their facts and ideas.

"Harry could never really relax, " Mrs. Hobson recalled. "He couddn't just lean back, let everything go and enjoy himself."

One feels that on the Luce mountain, the forget-me-nots Lila had admired were receding and the glacier advancing. Luce was under tremendous tension, wound up like a spring, driven incessantly. In his efficiency, drive and imperial ego, he resembled the manic type fairly common in business who works at a furious pace, expects the same from underUngs and can achieve such wonders of creativity or production as to become a captain of industry, but occasionally has to be hospitalized for his own good. Luce, evidently a hy-pomanic, had these qualities without paying the full price of the manic. His personality was so strongly knit that it could operate at almost frightening velocity without flying apart. Grandiose as were his dreams of power, he was able to control them while he used his combination of brains, energy and aggressiveness to achieve them. He valued able men so long as they could adjust themselves to his fast pace and inordinate demands. Those who could, found him outrageous at times but often stimulating, a tonic, and generous in his loyalty as well as his rewards. He could even countenance inefficiency if enough talent came with it, as with Russell Davenport. Davenport was eccentric, easily bored, undisciplined, never an organization man, but so brilliant and so chock-full of facts and ideas that the impatient Luce kept him on.

4. BOLSHEVIKS VS. GOD

Hadden's death, in addition to liberating Luce's worship of business, opened the way for a heavier offensive against Soviet Russia. The machine-gun bursts of a few paragraphs or a column continued as Luce brought up the

W. A. Swanherg

artillery and air force. Time thereafter employed the occasional big bomb of a page or even two. The decision of Christian groups to join in prayer for the preservation of reUgion in the Soviet Union despite official hostility toward it was the newspeg on which Time hung a two-and-a-half-page cannonade, mostly representing a culling of pubhshed insult.

The article, titled "All Against Russia," opened with Pope Pius's denunciation of the "horrible, sacrilegious iniquities" going on there and his appeal for a world crusade against the Soviet Union. It quoted the animadversions of clergymen, statesmen and editors in America and capitalist Europe against the "Bolshevik campaign against God." It was replete with such phrases as "[Bolshevik] infamies," "nameless and disgusting Bolshevik atrocities," "the most unworthy and perhaps the most criminal [government] in the world," and "[Bolsheviks are] unattractive animals which, like boa-constrictors and alligators, accept food, only to show their gratitude by swallowing their keepers."

Luce also began a propagandist effort to isolate Russia economically. Time slapped at the pubhcist Ivy Lee, "peripatetic representative extraordinary of U.S. Business," for his Moscow visits in search of American contracts. United States corporations had done $108 millions' worth of business with the Reds in 1929. This tainted money was leading American business into a trap. Industrialists were warned that it would be to their long-run interest to join the churchly struggle against the common enemy:

Prayers must be numerous and fervent indeed to stop Stalin, "The Man of Steel," but he can be stopped the moment Business unites with the Church in an economic boycott of the Soviet Union. For Stalin's whole program is based on importing Ford tractors and U.S. technicians, exporting grain and raw materials. Nowhere, last week, was the economic weapon drawn, nor was any plan afoot to draw it.

In Belgium one of that little country's largest match factories went bankrupt last week, because the Soviet Government Match Works is now dumping matches in the Belgian market . . . When colossal Red Russia begins to dump automobiles in the U.S., Britain, France and Italy, the Church may count on Business for help in the Crusade—perhaps too late.

Three months later Time's cover went to new polemic lengths, showing a darkened room hung with a huge picture of a Mongoloid Stahn, under which were four whiskery conspirators plotting palpable evil. The bombs which were not literally shown were suggested with wonderful impact by the desperate and furtive attitudes of the conspirators. The cover caption read, "Stalin & Friends," under which was the line, "His business friends include Ford, International Harvester, General Electric, Radio Corp., du Pont, Standard Oil, Ivy Lee." The cover story showed Luce's courage in righteousness. While it did not openly attack these and other American firms which did business with Russia (and some of which were Time advertisers), it listed them as Stahn's friends and implied a lack of patriotism.

Luce and His Empire

This was in any case a refreshing departure from the usual magazine truckling to advertisers. Luce had the temerity to be especially severe with Henry Ford, a man before whom publishers ordinarily genuflected:

In return for an order for $30,000,000 worth of Ford products, the company is understood to have made available all its patents, blueprints and designs to Soviet technicians for one year.

Mr. Ford knows perfectly well that these patents and designs will be ruthlessly pirated—indeed pirated tractors copied minutely even to the pirated name Ford are already made in the Soviet Union—but $30,000,000 is $30,000,000. . . . Business, transcending all frontiers, stifling fear, mocking statesmen who refuse to "recognize" the Soviet Union, casting even patent rights into the discard, now assists the triumph of the very thing which western businessmen most hate—the Communist Ideal.

Time again broached the idea of "an international Capitalist boycott of the Soviet State." It agreed that a crackdown on the Communists and a suppression of trade with Russia "would mean a staggering loss to Business—cancellation of Soviet contracts by the tens of milhons. However, not all Congressmen are businessmen. Some think that to stamp out U.S. Communism now would be a national boon, cheap at any price." Time bitterly opposed an idea that had some backing—United States recognition of Soviet Russia.

"All Against Russia" and "Stalin & Friends" heralded Luce's intensified cold war, which was to last out his life with only a three-year pause dictated by expediency. His able ally was Foreign Editor Laird Goldsborough, whose copy was always hvely, gossipy and, as his colleague Dwight Macdonald put it, filled with every virtue "except such dull ones as accuracy and honesty." Goldsborough, now the highest-paid writer in the shop, drove a Rolls-Royce, hved on Fifth Avenue and went to Europe every year for local color. Critics said he got his Russian news from White Russian emigres in Paris. His gift for drama was so valued that his peculiar irresponsibility toward news events as yet vexed only the staff's liberals. He would Ump into the office on his cane, seize a pencil and write steadily by hand, seldom pausing for thought, turning out accounts as readable as they were unreliable.

Luce's increasing concern about Russia caused him to send Goldsborough there in 1931 to lay the groundwork for a triple-length, five-chapter article which filled about half of the March 1932 Fortune. While some Soviet advances were listed in the finished article, the predominating air of revulsion stressed Russian irreligion, terrors, inequities and failures. The masses were pitilessly ridiculed. The delegates to the Soviet Congress were described as men who "know more about the backside of a camel, polar bear, or cow, than they do about government." The chapter on "The Eternal Peasant" began, "Gross, sensual and greedy, the eternal Russian peasant is no more ashamed of, or inconvenienced by, these quaUties than a bear." There was a studied effort to equate Russians with animals, to emphasize their high rate of illiter-

W. A. Swanberg

acy, to suggest an accompanying stupidity, and to depict them as drunken, dirty and dissolute people inhabiting a land infested with flies, rats, bedbugs and snakes. A party functionary was described as "a six-foot gorilla," the orphaned children as "human rats" and "rat-children," and there was mention of how peasants would drive to market "with their calves and wives." Under the czars the peasant was a "work-beast," whereas, Fortune said, Stalin now seated "this whip-sore but astonished and delighted bear upon a tractor." It referred to "the baboon-like mating of aboriginal males and females in parts of the Soviet Union so remote that they have not yet even been explored." Russian drunkenness and immorality were suggested by emphasis on the flow of vodka, the ease of divorce, the free abortion clinics and the alleged commonness of illegitimacy. After visiting town, Russian peasants would ride home, "snoring, dead drunk, brought safely home by their wives." A huge colored drawing of a bedbug, showing top and side views, further questioned Russian fastidiousness. And at the end of the article was Luce's long, alphabetical list of American firms doing business with the Soviet Union and which (it was suggested without being stated) ought to know better.

1. OFF TO CHINA

In Haverford, Pennsylvania, Leslie Severinghaus got a surprise telephone call from his brother-in-law Luce in New York, who said he was planning a trip around the world. "I can't think of anyone I'd rather have with me than you," he said. The conversation, a typical Luce time-saver, took less than three minutes. Severinghaus, who was head of the Enghsh department at Haverford School, left Philadelphia on May 2, 1932, met Luce in Chicago and rode on with him to Seattle.

Here, awaiting the sailing of the Empress of Canada from Victoria, Luce investigated Time's local part-time representative and found him, as he put it, "a sap." Such stringers in the bigger cities handled circulation matters and were expected also to cooperate on occasional local newsbreaks.

"The fact is we do muff news from the U.S.A.," Luce wrote in a letter to Larsen and Martin. "I never leave N.Y. that I don't hear a great story which Time should have had." He urged (that is, ordered) that Time get "30 right editorial contacts in 30 key cities," adding, "So far as money is concerned, we ought to spend it." He noted, ". . . we haven't given much of a damn about news not appearing East of the Hudson. . . . There's a huge opportunity here—an opportunity to really be the national paper. If I and John [Martin] and Bilhngs and all the rest of the staff don't get out to the Mississippi Valley & West more, we ought to be shot."

Having thus punctured complacency back at the new offices in the Chrysler Building—something he did ably and regularly—he apologized for his criticism. With Severinghaus he visited the University of Washington, saw a baseball game with the University of Idaho, looked over the Greek-letter district and was photographed with five pretty coeds. When they sailed on May 7, they found two congenial shipmates: Dr. John Leigh ton Stuart, missionary

93

W. A. Swanberg

colleague of Luce's father and still president of Yenching University in Peking, and the naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews, already famous for a half-dozen expeditions into the remoter parts of China and Central Asia.

"Harry was relaxed, obviously confident of the future," Severinghaus observed. But the word "relaxed" as applied to Luce was purely comparative. He wrote advice on foreign affairs to Laird Goldsborough. He sent orders to Time's financial specialist to buy common stocks. He paced the deck. He discussed China and Asia with Andrews and Dr. Stuart. Although he was rundown from his efforts since Hadden's death and was supposed to be taking a rest, he was congenitally, helplessly restless.

In fact, far from being on a vacation tour, he was on one of the more important missions of his life. He intended to appraise politics, government and society as well as he could in the world's two largest nations, China and the Soviet Union. Out of his own investigations he would write reports for the guidance of his staffs back home. Rest indeed! He had already read considerably about Russia. Now he took copious notes as he read J. A. B. Scherer's Romance of Japan, H. B. Restarick's Sun Yat-sen and shorter material on Sun's posthumous brother-in-law, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Soong family.

From the start, the story of the Soongs had so excited Luce, the Protestant and the politician, that it would engross him all his life. Charlie Soong, returning from America to China as a Methodist missionary to his own people, then making his fortune as a merchant, had sponsored an even greater miracle in four of the children he had fathered. All four were now associated politically or familially with Sun's successor in the effort to unify China, the emerging man of power, Chiang Kai-shek. Time's attitude toward Chiang had of course reflected Luce's. While Chiang was a heathen and collaborating with the Soviet Union, Time had treated him coldly as just another warlord. But in 1927, a pivotal year in his life, he had broken with the Russians, slaughtered thousands of Communists, dismissed his concubines and married the Methodist Mei-ling Soong. Time had melted, granting its supreme recognition, Chiang's picture on the cover. The news emerged that he was studying the Bible and that Christian missionaries were welcomed in his home. In 1931 he was baptized a Methodist, voicing concern about the growth of Marxist thought in China. Time had honored him again. Only the previous October Chiang and his wife had been pictured together on the cover along with a sympathetic story about the double threat to him posed by the Communists and the Japanese. Luce now intended to investigate the Soongs at close range.

The genial, strapping Severinghaus, experiencing his longest exposure to his high-powered brother-in-law, found him agreeable. "Dr. Stuart, Harry and I are just about the last ones to leave the dining salon after every meal," Severinghaus wrote in the meticulous diary he kept of his ten-week journey with Luce. "We get involved in discussions [about China] that seem to have no stopping points."

Luce and His Empire

In Japan there was strenuous but observant Luce sightseeing—Tokyo, the Yoshiwara red-hght district, Nikko, the Meiji Memorial Shrine, the Gold Pavilion, Kyoto, Osaka. After crossing the lovely Inland Sea, they reached Shanghai May 29. It was Luce's first visit to China in twenty years, one that filled him with recollections of his departure from this same teeming port as a stammering fourteen-year-old schoolboy bound for England. He went to work at once. After talking with newspapermen, business leaders and bankers, he had an audience with the thirty-eight-year-old T. V. Soong, who paid him the compliment of flying in from Nanking to talk with him at the Soong Shanghai mansion. He had a touch of malarial fever and, as Luce put it in his notes, "He refused to see anyone—except the Editor of Time and Fortune, to both of which he subscribes." The tall banker-politician—Chiang's finance minister—was keenly conscious of public relations. Soong was welcoming an important ally, one he perhaps hoped was not immune to flattery.

Luce noted that Soong's children were attended by an amah "dressed just like the amah I used to have 30 years ago." "Soong started off with compliments for Time and Fortune," he recorded. One result of this interview would be an adulatory Fortune article about Soong, his family and Chiang and their combined "campaign to excise [the] cancerous growth" of the "insidious Communists."

As part of his constant program of self-education. Luce was interested in everything from agriculture to night life. With American friends they drove through alleyways of prostitution and visited cabarets. At one of them, La Dow's, there was a good orchestra and twenty-five pretty Russian girls who would dance with unattached males for a small fee. "I didn't dance," Sever-inghaus wrote, "but Harry did, several times—a stunning Russian girl, 26, in black evening gown. I went back to the hotel at 2:00 a.m. . . . Harry was still talking to the young lady when I left." "Harry's much sought after by prominent Chinese and Westerners," he added next day, "and I usually have my hands full keeping travel arrangements up to date."

In a creaking Loening amphibian of China Airways, Luce and Severinghaus flew to Nanking, where they called on Pearl Buck, visited Ginling Christian College and drove out to the tomb of Sun Yat-sen—the sight recalling to Severinghaus, an excellent baritone, "It's hard to believe that I sang the solo part at Sun's funeral in Peking in 1925!" They flew farther up the Yangtze to Hankow, where Luce met with bankers, Standard Oil men and churchmen, not to mention dancing girls.

They set out for Peking: "The train never exceeded 25 miles per hour; by nightfall we were deep in the mountains, the worst of the bandit country, but nothing exciting happened. Filthy dining car . . ." And next day: "All day we loafed across the plains of Honan in stifling heat—104 in our compartment . . ."A fellow passenger was a cultivated Chinese Communist who had spent time in Moscow and who spoke English. Inevitably he and Luce em-

W. A. Swanberg

barked on an intense but courteous discussion of Communist ideology in which neither gave ground. "I was ignored while this discussion went on," Severinghaus recalled with amusement.

Their arrival in Peking was a thrill to Severinghaus, who had lived there for five years and had many friendships to renew. Luce was now so preoccupied and so accustomed to servants that any hotel room he occupied (always the best, as in the Peking Hotel) became a shambles of underwear, shirts and neckties. Among other things he conferred with the United States Minister, visited the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven, went mountain-climbing near Montikuo with his brother-in-law, and dined with a group including the philosopher and classical scholar Dr. Hu Shih, educated at Cornell and Columbia. "Harry, as usual, kept plying questions to these knowledgeable persons about the progress of the republic and international relationships," Severinghaus wrote. "He is always the center of active conversation, and I am continually astounded at his grasp of facts in so many fields."

Luce's prime interest in Peking was Yenching University, which his father had done so much to finance and where Dr. Stuart now made him an honored guest. The thirty-four-year-old editor of Time was well embarked on what was to be the supreme but futile effort of his life—to finish the Christianiza-tion of China through such institutions as Yenching, drive out Communism and place the Christian Chiang Kai-shek in charge. This was a dream that glowed like the Grail. It represented the consummation of the work his father and mother had begun when they sailed for China in 1897. It represented also the nineteenth-century dream of that tough, practical Christian, Admiral Mahan, who had been similarly concerned with the state of China's soul and its eflFect on America's power, trade and well-being:

[Mahan] warned that one day China might well acquire power commensurate with her mass and would then demand her share of the world's goods. While there was still time, therefore, it was essential to instil Christian values so that "time shall have been secured for them [the Chinese] to absorb the ideals which in ourselves are the result of centuries of Christian increment." Otherwise the world might one day be faced with a dangerous, materialistic, and hugely powerful country unrestrained by either God or the Constitution.

2. SCENES OF BOYHOOD

Next, on what was becoming a test of brain and endurance, was the most nostalgic place of all. Shantung province, where Luce had spent his boyhood. He seemed intent on swallowing as much of China as he could hold. Though they had only an hour's stopover at Tientsin, he insisted on renting a car and rushing through the city. "The curiosity appetite of Harry is insatiable, " his brother-in-law remarked.

At Tsinan, the big provincial capital, it was not enough to see U.S. Consul

Luce and His Empire

Meinhardt and to call on Han Fu-chu, Chiang's governor of Shantung. (Luce relayed word to Goldsborough that Governor Han was a "rising star" who should be watched.) On the same hectic day they toured Cheloo Christian University, the leper colony, the hospital, the museum and, of all places, a flour mill that Luce could not bear to pass without inspection. A quick bath and change and they arrived breathlessly to dine with the Meinhardts, where the Luce-inspired discussion was cut short at 8:30 so they could hurry back to their hotel, pack and catch the 9:40 for Taian. ("Harry wastes no time!") Arriving late at Taian, they went to sleep at their hotel at 1:30 a.m., then rose at 4:45 to visit the Methodist mission before making a morning ascent of the famous Sacred Mountain. Luce's father had climbed its thousands of steps on foot years earlier. In view of their loss of sleep, Luce and Severinghaus succumbed to sloth and hired eight bearers, the diarist writing:

Walking some of the time and carried by our bearers at other times, we went up and up the endless steps, passing through the Nan T'ien Men at 9:30 and arriving at the top at 10 o'clock. For an hour we rested, looking over the countryside from our elevation of more than 5000 feet. . . . The trip dowTi was exciting. We rode all the wav, suspended in our chairs between the shoulders of our two bearers. From time to time, while maintaining a perfect stride, bearers would be shifted by simply tossing the chair skyward while two dropped out and two others slipped under the shoulder straps. Looking down the steep expanses of endless steps while descending at a trot was somewhat disconcerting, but the bearers never missed a step.

About halfway down, we encountered an international commission, led by Lord Lytton, enjoying the same experience. We stopped for a chat. Mr. Stim-son, U.S. Secretary of State [Yale '88, Bones, on Time's cover in 1929] was a member of the party.

Reaching the bottom, they called on the storied "Christian General," Feng Yu-hsiang who, after his conversion to Methodism, had originated the novel practice of baptizing thousands of his troops with a fire hose. Feng, once a powerful warlord, more recently a high official under the Methodist Chiang, had retired to an abandoned Buddhist temple near the Sacred Mountain to write poetr)'. He gave them fifteen minutes, although he had turned away the Lytton Commission. "No interpreter," Luce wrote in a letter to Larsen, "so Leslie Severinghaus was for the first time thrown completely upon his knowledge of Chinese to carry us through"—doubtless an emergency service the practical Luce had counted on in the first place.

Next stop, Weihsien, where they arrived hungry and tired at 10:00 p.m. The stationmaster warned them of bandits between the station and the town, so they slept, still hungry, on wooden benches. At 6:00 next morning, June 19, they got a ride in a cart to the old compound:

Harry was like a ten-year-old, recognizing all the turns in the road, pointing out mission buildings, showing me where he had played as a boy. ... By 7 o'clock

W. A. Swanberg

we were inside the compound—and Harry could not talk fast enough. Our cart pulled up before Mr. Reeder's house, the old LUCE homestead, and with a tremendous thrill I reaUzed that I was entering the legendary land of Frau Netz, Emmavail, Beth, and Sheldon.

They were welcomed by many old friends of Luce's parents, as well as by Grace Rowley, his old Latin teacher at the mission school. Luce, much moved by sentiment, showed his brother-in-law the bedrooms, the study porch, the donkey stall—even the chicken coop. They went walking, "scrambling over walls and into the cemetery where he had played so many games with his friends of yore." In bed that night, "long we lay in discussion of how missionary life has changed under changing world conditions."

At Tengchow, Luce's birthplace and the scene of the former college where Rev. Henry Luce had begun his service, Severinghaus wrote:

I felt as if I were treading on holy ground. There were the old college buildings, the renovated Buddhist temples where the first missionaries Uved, Calvin Ma-teer's workshop where he translated the Bible, and the old Luce house, where Beth and Vail were born, and where the three of them played as children. . . . Out toward the blue sea lay the hill with its temple, and all around me were the gardens where the Luce children had grown up—and even as at Wei Hsien, I felt what the early Ufe of a missionary family must have been Uke.

Then to Chefoo, where Luce had both loved and hated his British schoolmasters:

Harry's pleasure was boundless as he took me through the old buildings, showed me where he had slept, studied, and where his name was inscribed on the Pre-hm Oxford examination Honors Roll in 1910.

They met the present headmaster, dined with the faculty, then visited the Chefoo mission, where Luce was surrounded by interested people:

. . . Harry became the answer box for countless questions. For more than an hour Harry talked on present pohtical conditions to the dehght and close attention of the people. Time's future success will certainly be in large part assignable to this man's leadership and insatiable absorptive ability. It is fantastic to watch in operation!

Then on to Tsingtao, where they stayed at the luxurious Grand Hotel on the Bund, rented a Graham-Paige car for sightseeing, but also bought bathing suits and actually relaxed when they were not visiting the Presbyterian mission, climbing 3500-foot Lao Ting or nearby Lao Shan, inspecting the old German fortifications, or dancing at the Pavilion. They drove to Iltus Huk, "and again I reveled in Luce history as Harry pointed out the old summer house and other landmarks." Luce was in euphoria, writing, "it has been an absolute knock-out fine trip," and adding:

You've never seen an ocean, you've never seen a beach until you've seen the Strand and Iltus Huk. And it's got hills and mountains and woods and forests—

Luce and His Empire

everything! Such a satisfaction to know that all these years I haven't been harboring a false illusion of the charms of first-love.

He also read the newspapers, including the stock quotations, commenting, "I learn that Steel on Wednesday was 24. Good Lord! Isn't that damned depression over yet?"

On June 30 they took a coastal steamer to Dairen (which city was quarantined for cholera) and saw the sights hurriedly at Port Arthur before catching their train for Harbin. Manchuria had become Manchukuo, and Japanese soldiers were on the train. When they reached Harbin, Luce was as curious as ever:

At that late hour of 10:30 Harry and I went to the Harbin Yacht Club. Very fashionably dressed crowd. . . . There was a good Salome dancer. From there we moved on to the Fantasie Cabaret. Many Japanese military men there with Geishas. Not many whites. The Russian girls had very little dancing to do. . . . Harry danced three times; I none. To bed at 1:30 a.m.

3. INTO ENEMY COUNTRY

Luce's introduction to Russia in 1932 was almost as malign as Napoleon's in 1812. During their five weeks in China, he and Severinghaus had occasionally endured horrendous food, dirty accommodations and evil smells, but that had been transitory, always lightened by the certainty that at the next stop they would be in luxury. There had been freedom of movement, constant change, anticipation, nostalgia, the pleasure of meeting old friends. On the Trans-Siberian Railway, however, they would be trapped for six days and six nights— 144 hours of imprisonment, no change, no friends, no abalone and pigeon eggs, no cabarets. For Luce especially, with his genuine need to work off tensions, the durance was vile. Both men felt the effects of eight grueling weeks away from home. Both came down with miserable head colds. Their physical and mental conditioning for this Russian ordeal was inauspicious.

Ironically, it was July 4, Independence Day, when the two men changed from the Chinese Eastern to the Trans-Siberian at Manchuli and were in enemy country. Euphoria was over. Since 1928 Russia had been regarded as safe enough so that cautious Thomas Cook & Son would handle arrangements for travelers, but the long Manchuli-Moscow trek was nothing like the Paris-Venice spin on the Orient Express. The Trans-Siberian had a wood-burning locomotive and an all-woman crew. It made about twenty-five miles per hour, with frequent stops to fuel at wood piles along the way. At Manchuli, Soviet customs men were "remarkably decent" but the amenities dwindled as they rolled westward.

Since there were only fourteen first-class passengers on the deluxe train, and Luce had an almost maidenly concern for his privacy, he and Severing-

W. A. Swanberg

haus took separate double compartments. In the small hours of the first night, however, a stop was made at Chita, a crowd of passengers came aboard, there was a banging at Luce's door and after a flood of exotic language he discovered that a Siberian gentleman was to share his room. Although the room was large and the beds screened from each other, he wrote bitterly in the report he kept of the journey:

[The Russians] have an atrocious body-odor. It is not merely a pungent sort of barnyard odor. It is a decayed odor. It is everywhere the same. The nearest one could come to a definition was: the odor of rotten eggs in a damp ceUar.

Severinghaus did not find the odor necessarily linked with any one nation-ahty. He had drawn a young Greek mechanical engineer as his berthmate, but he noted, "My companion smelled so strongly that I got up at 4:.30 a.m. and stayed out of the compartment the rest of the night." By morning the train that had been half empty was packed. First-class accommodations meant little, for peasants were herded into the Wagon-Lits. Some were barefooted, all bearded, and all seemed to be sweating in the increasing warmth. "By noon," Luce wrote, "the entire train stank." Severinghaus conferred with him and found him ready to take a calculated risk:

Harry won't double up with me. He hopes to be given the compartment alone after Irkutsk. Therefore I am deserting my man and doubling up with Mr. Weber, a delightful German of 50. I don't care to ride all the way to Moscow with these people. If one could talk with them, learn something from them, it would be different, but all we can do is smde and smeU!

Luce's risk became even more than calciilated next day when his male companion got oflF:

Well, well! Harry has drawn a new sleeping companion, a Russian woman, and I'm glad I moved in with Mr. Weber. Otherwise I should have had as bedroom mate a 25-year-old mother and her 5-year-old son. She is above average height, and wears a flaring red-silk dress. I'm better off where I am. Harry is welcome to enjoy her company and to share the bathroom with that httle tot who goes wee in the washbasin.

Luce, always uneasy with strangers, ignored his roommates entirely. He wrote, "It [the car] continued to stink with that identical stink . . ." He lost the ephedrine that had given him some relief from his cold. Though they passed a train loaded with traitorous Ford tractors, poverty was evident at every stop, the diarist noting:

Platform crowded with the most dreadful people imaginable. Mongols in all their filth, bearded Russian peasants, Jews from southeastern Europe. Men sleeping on the wet dirt platform, frequently women holding year-old babies in bundles of rags . . . Barefooted women sticking their toes in the mud puddles between the ties of the tracks; fur-lined hats, bandanna scarves, felt boots . . . no shoes at aU, flies, dirt, dull expressions, and so on.

Luce and His Empire

The dozen-odd English-speaking passengers clung together, but a few days out of Manchuli "Everybody on the train is getting somewhat on everybody else's nerves. " Luce argued heatedly with Frau Ullstein, a German woman who had the nerve to criticize American capitalism. He joined a foursome to play auction bridge to pass the time, darting out at station stops to look around. The food, poor from the start, got worse, and the food on sale in station buffets was worse yet.

At Omsk they glimpsed an English-language Moscow paper with historic news: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

Alighting at Moscow at long last on July 10, they were met by a chauffeur-driven Lincoln supplied by Intourist and a pretty Russian guide, Miss Vasil-ieva, who spoke excellent English. Despite Luce's protestations that he had been promised rooms at the Metropol Hotel (where Rasputin had held his orgies), they were taken to the older National, where the plumbing was balky and "the main feature of the hotel is its slow service."

During their five days in Moscow, Miss Vasilieva escorted them on tours which avoided Soviet failures and stressed the triumphs. Luce conferred with American engineers and many news correspondents as well as editors of Iz-vestia and the Moscow Daily News, but evidently felt it impossible or useless to follow his usual custom of interviewing government officials. Every spare minute was filled with such things as a close inspection of St. Basil's, the Museum of the Revolution, a view of Lenin's tomb that showed him "looking as fresh as though he had died last week," a brisk walk completely around the Kremlin exterior, and a performance of a light opera based on a Gogol comedy, of which Severinghaus wrote, "The production was most excellent, but the air was so foul from body odors that we left after the first two acts."