Editors
f EDWIN MIMS,
1 WILLIAM H. GLASSON.
APRIL. 1905.
CONTENTS.
EDITORS' ANNOUNCEMENT - - - -.105
THE NEW NORTH - - - . ’.- . 109
' HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE.
SIDNEY LANIER : REMINISCENCES AND LETTERS - - - tf 5
DANIFX COIT GILMAN.
THE HAGUE COURT,.. 123
JOHN H. LATANE, Ph. D.
RUSKIN'S LETTERS TO CHARLES ELIOT NORTON - - - 138
HENRY NELSON SNYDER.
THE OVERPRODUCTION OF COTTON AND A POSSIBLE REMEDY 148
ULRICH BONNELL PHILLIPS.
MATTHEW WHITAKER RANSOM: A SENATOR OF THE OLD
REGIME.-.159
ROBERT LEE FLOWERS.
THE PEABODY EDUCATION FUND.*69
R. D. W. CONNOR.
SOME CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ESSAYISTS - - - 182
WILLIAM P. FEW.
IsOOK REVIEWS. *89
LITERARY NOTES.200
DURHAM , N. C.
$2.00 a Year. _ 50 Cents a Copy.
Founded by the “9019”
Trinity College
Entered May 3, 1902, as second class matter, Postoffice at Durham, N. C., Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.
THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY IN ITS FOURTH YEAR
John Spencer Bassett had just retired as editor, and in this April 1905 issue the new editors, Edwin Minis and William H. Glasson, introduced themselves. Nowadays brighter colors have replaced the gray and olive- green of earlier years.
280 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY
ernor Vardaman, of his native state,, in January 1908. Gilbert T. Stephenson, a Winston-Salem judge, discussed urban segregation in January 1914; and in the following two numbers he debated rural segregation with Clarence Poe, editor of the Progressive Farmer, of Raleigh.
Historical studies, which have been important throughout the whole of the South Atlantic file, were especially prominent in the first two or three decades. Its first editor was a historian; and he and his colleagues and followers were committed to the new Johns Hopkins idea of a more “scientific” history, drawn from sources and less diluted with sentiment and preconceived ideas. Bassett, William E. Dodd, James G. Randall, and Gamaliel Bradford, Jr., were conspicuous contributors. Bradford’s Robert E. Lee studies (1911-1912) were his first contributions to the Quarterly; but his later articles, and many by other historians and biographers, were non-southern.
In the early volumes, as in the later ones, there were many studies in literary history and criticism. The chief student of the South Atlantic file concludes that “The outstanding emphasis of the magazine has been on literature and literary criticism.” 17 These were frequently academic in tone, and even dull sometimes; but often they were valuable. Daniel Coit Gilman’s reminiscences of Sidney Lanier (April 1905), James Routh’s “Essay on the Poetry of Henry Timrod” (July 1910), and Albert Edmund Trombly’s studies of Rossetti (1919-1920) were notable studies of poets and their work.
There was not much about contemporary southern letters. Here was illustrated the recurrent dilemma of the journal; it wanted to be loyal to the South, but it resented regional separations and distinctions. It wanted to be at once southern and national. “That really pathetic phrase, Southern Literature, we are never allowed to forget,” wrote President Henry N. Snyder, of Wofford College, in the second number; yet “one never hears the books written by Longfellow, by Lowell, by Emerson, spoken of as Northern Literature.” Then Snyder goes on, in a fashion typical of commentators on southern literature, to call the roll of the romantic period of southern fic-
17 Cline, “Thirty-Eight Years,” p. 160.
SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 281
tion then drawing to an end; finally he saw, or hoped he saw, that the South offered the seed-bed of a rich literary growth in the future. 18 Professor Carl Holliday, a frequent and always interesting contributor, worked a similar vein in the issue for January 1910, offering a catalog of southern writers. But John Raper Ormond, reviewing three new southern novels in 1904, said that the formula of romantic southern fiction had been exhausted, and that it never represented southern society anyway. He had praise only for Ellen Glasgow, who had “a grasp on actual life.” 19 Aside from such rare articles, there was little about twentieth-century belles-lettres—northern or southern—in the first few decades of the South Atlantic. At first there were occasional notices of contemporary fiction and poetry in the extensive book-review section, but even these were abandoned after the fourth volume. The journal never printed original verse or short stories.
A leading theme in the first two decades of the review was the backwardness of the South in education on all levels. Kil- go set the pattern in the second volume, when he declared that the South lacked “an educational conscience”: it had “as much education as it wants.” 20 The next year Professor (soon to be President) Few wrote a definitive article about southern educational needs (July 1904) in which he declared that “the most ruinous waste of our civilization” had been a “gross neglect of the lower classes of the whites.” Later came other articles on these and many other phases of American education. Usually they were by professors—often by presidents—of southern colleges, and very often they got back to the basic matter of the needs of the South in this field.
Religion and philosophy also occupied some space in the earlier volumes of the journal. Notable was a series of papers by President William Louis Poteat of Wake Forest College, in 1907, on religion and science, which angered many readers in the author’s own Baptist denomination by its acceptance of the evolutionary theory. 21
18 South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 1, April 1902, pp. 146, 155.
19 Ibid., v. 3, July 1904, p. 288.
20 Ibid,., v. 2, April 1903, p. 137.
21 Ibid., v. 51, Jan. 1952, p. 18; Hamilton, Fifty Years, p. 14.
282 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY
Articles on economics and industry were not uncommon. Thomas F. Parker, president of the Monaghan Mills, of Greenville, South Carolina, presented in 1909-1910 a survey of the mills and their management that showed some feeling for reform. Contributions in this field were usually liberal in tone, as Lyman Abbott’s “Significance of the Present Moral Awakening in the Nation” (July 1908). Trinity’s Laprade a decade later (October 1919) advocated new democratic practices in labor-management relations. However, the official (but candid) historian of the South Atlantic admits that “by and large” the journal’s discussion of southern industrialism “has been inadequate”—though it was better in earlier volumes than in the later ones. 22
Although political theory was occasionally discussed in one phase or another, contemporary politics was eschewed; thus the South Atlantic has never made a practice of reviewing the issues even at the time of the national presidential elections.
Contributors to the journal were, first of all, members of the Trinity faculty; the editors themselves were leading writers for it. Bassett in history and sociology, Mims in literary history and criticism, Kilgo in education, and Few in theology carried much weight in the early years of the journal. Mims was outstanding; not only were his own articles on American literature readable and scholarly, but he became an industrious and ingenious editor. Was Charles W. Eliot about to make the key address at some conference or other? Mims wrote him and begged the manuscript. Did a northern editor ask Mims for a contribution? Mims sent him one promptly, and asked Hamilton W. Mabie or Bliss Perry for a piece for his own journal. It was somewhat ironical that Mims got paid and Mabie and Perry did not, but the scheme often worked; and it was all for the good of the South Atlantic Quarterly , 23 Probably the tables of contents of the journal during Mim’s editorship contained more nationally known names than they did in any other period.
22 South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 51, Jan. 1952, p. 20; Hamilton, Fifty Years,
p. 16.
23 See Edwin Mims, “Early Years of the South Atlantic Quarterly,” South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 51, Jan. 1952, pp. 33-63.
SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 283
In 1924 the Duke Foundation was organized, with its liberal provision for Trinity College, which now became Duke University. This generosity apparently extended to the South Atlantic Quarterly, which had, for a number of years, been receiving some financial help from the college and now was able to increase its size to 120 pages or more. The new Duke University Press took over, and by 1927 the Quarterly was even paying its contributors, at the rate of two dollars a page. 24 Size shrank a little during the early years of the depression, but from the later thirties through the early fifties there were at least 150 noble, well-designed pages in each issue. It retained its good pages, though commonly fewer of them, and these a little less lavish in margins, at the end of the fifties. The South Atlantic Quarterly has never circulated as many as a thousand copies an issue. For a long time it printed only four or five hundred; later somewhat more. 25 Many copies go to libraries and thus multiply readership.
When Glasson and Few retired from the editorship, their places were taken by William K. Boyd and William H. Wan- namaker, professors respectively of history and German, who served until 1930. When they completed their term of a little more than a decade, a managing editor was chosen to conduct the Quarterly with the aid of an editorial board. The lot fell upon a journalist and public relations director, Henry R. Dwire. A leading member of his board was historian William T. Laprade, who succeeded him as managing editor in 1944. William B. Hamilton, who had served as associate managing editor for a year, succeeded Laprade in 1958.
As the South Atlantic Quarterly approached its semicentennial, it became less regional, less controversial, and more definitely literary. By the late fifties, it published an occasional number without a single distinctively southern article, and many with only one or two of regional interest. It fell in with the revival of interest in the Civil War, and it was always friendly to the history of the southern colonies; but it also printed many historical and critical studies the subject matter
24 Cline, “Thirty-Eight Years,” p. 10.
25 Ibid., p. 6; also Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory and N.W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals. [The circulation in 1966 was over eight hundred.]
284 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY
of which was far removed from the Southland. Ever since the late thirties, it had given somewhat more attention to contemporary movements in literature. In the forties and fifties it attracted such contributors as Jay B. Hubbell, Charles I. Glicks- berg, Eudora Welty, and Julian Huxley for articles on such themes. But there was no reaching for big names, and most writers for the journal were comparatively obscure (though competent and often effective) academicians.
Many articles bearing on war and peace, and the social and economic concomitants of the war years, appeared during both great world conflicts. Occasionally half the articles of a single number during World War II dealt with war matters.
In political and economic theory the South Atlantic has followed the liberal side in more recent years as in the past. Two articles approving the National Recovery Administration were published in the successive numbers for October 1933 and January 1934, and one favoring unemployment insurance appeared in April 1933. Clearly, the journal was New Dealish. But the tendency to make peace with the conservatives was common, in the fifties at least. Kathleen Thayer’s “Socialism is Irrelevant” is an example; we already have enough of it in the United States, Britain, and Sweden, she says, and internationally it is “for the present out of the question.” 26
The Negro question has received some attention in the latter half of the South Atlantic file. In the thirties and forties there were several sentimental pieces by Archibald Rutledge, South Carolina poet laureate, about the old plantation Negro —“charming but antediluvian writings,” a later editor calls them. 27 There were occasional articles on Negro literature: a notable one by Harold P. Marley in 1928 repeated a statement made in the Journal of Social Forces to the effect that “a considerable number of white strains in this country would be greatly elevated by the infusion of some of the better blood of the Negro race.” 28 This point of view, cited to illustrate the attitudes of some intellectuals, might have brought the author a visit from the Ku Klux Klan in an earlier day.
26 South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 51, July 1952, p. 354.
27 Hamilton, Fifty Years, p. 11; South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 51, Jan. 1952,
p. 16.
28 South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 27, Jan. 1928, p. 31.
SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 285
School segregation was sometimes criticized; the outstanding example was an article by Elizabeth Stevenson, of Atlanta, in the number for October 1949. And the epochal Supreme Court decision on segregation was greeted with joy by James McBride Dabbs in the number for January 1956. In the bitter debate which followed, however, the South Atlantic took little part.
It has become, indeed, mainly a journal given to the criticism of literature and culture in general; to history, including that of recent times; and to philosophy and allied matters. It is rather less a regional journal than one with worldwide horizons, for every number has some articles dealing with foreign or international questions or conditions. The book review section remains, as it has always been, an extensive and important part of the magazine—almost never scintillating, but always solidly reliable. The reviews are written (as probably most of the articles are) by scholars to be read by scholars.
The quality that lifts the South Atlantic to a position of importance in the history of our periodical literature is not merely the unflagging effort over many years to present important ideas to thinking people, but also its ebbing and flowing liberalism, best illustrated in the famous Bassett episode of its early years.*
* This chapter was written in the late 1950’s and has not been updated, except for footnotes 1 and 25.
19
SUCCESS 1
O RISON SWETT MARDEN, having won an education and a fortune against great odds, lost the latter in the hard times of the early nineties; but in 1894 he started a new career which was to make him the prophet of the will-to-success philosophy which had suddenly become a cult. 2 He started this new career with a very successful book entitled Pushing to the Front, and in 1897 he succeeded, after an extended campaign, in inducing Louis Klopsch to finance a magazine to spread his gospel of getting ahead.
Klopsch was publisher of the Christian Herald, of New York, and was genuinely interested in the self-help ideas which Marden had derived from reading Samuel Smiles’ books and from his own experiences. There were two preliminary numbers of the new magazine—one issued October 1896 and the other just a year later—but the regular Volume I, Number 1 was dated December 1897.
Success was a large quarto of forty pages and cover, and sold for ten cents a number or one dollar a year. It contained a great variety of nonfiction material about techniques of success, illustrated by case studies of men and women who had won prominence and power. It was at once evident that Mar- den’s concept of success was a broad one, and that his ideal of a successful man, though wealthy and powerful, was also
healthy, well-educated, benevolent, and religious. There were departments of books, health,, science, and “The Young Man in Business,” as well as one for the juniors.
In the second number Theodore Dreiser began a series on successful men, with an article on Joseph H. Choate, entitled “A Talk With America’s Leading Lawyer.” Dreiser soon became a regular contributor, at twenty-five to fifty dollars an article; he sometimes had two pieces in a single issue, using a pen-name for the second one. 3 The magazine was full and overflowing with biographical material about famous personages. Many of the articles were by unknowns, but there was a good sprinkling of famous names in the Success tables of contents. George W. Cable, Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, Frances E. Willard, Edward Everett Hale, and Booker T. Washington were among the magazine’s early contributors. If New England names seem conspicuous, it must be remembered that for over two years the main editorial office was in Boston, though publication was in New York. Arthur W. Brown, of Providence, was an assistant editor for a time, and Margaret Connolly became the associate editor in New York.
Though there had been considerable fiction in the trial numbers, there was none whatever in the first two regular issues, and a short story by “Octave Thanet” in the third number was the first of that kind; after a year or two, however, there was usually a fiction story in each issue. Illustration was fairly copious and attractive, chiefly halftones from photographs. During the Spanish-American War there were many pictures and sketches from Cuba and the military camps. The cover usually carried a big portrait of a famous contemporary figure, or some picture suggesting the road to success.
After a year of publication, the magazine had a circulation of less than fifty thousand. It was then changed to a five-cent weekly, with sixteen pages and cover, for a year. At the beginning of 1900 the editorial offices were moved to New York, ending the divided management, and the magazine resumed monthly publication. Circulation began a slow increase.
3 Dreiser MSS, University of Pennsylvania Library. See also John F. Huth, Jr., “Dreiser the Successmonger,” Colophon, N.S., v. 3, Winter 1938, pp. 120- 33 ; Summer 1938, pp. 406-10.
In these turn-of-the-century years, Success printed much about the English war with the Boers in South Africa and other events of wide interest. There were short pieces by Joseph Chamberlain, Ballington Booth, Admiral George Dewey, General Nelson A. Miles, Arthur T. Hadley, David Starr Jor- dan, and so on. Some short fiction appeared, most memorable of which, perhaps, was Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey’s “The Magic Story,” with its formula for success, which was later very widely circulated in cheap editions.
In 1900, Klopsch was supplanted as financial “angel” of the magazine by James H. McGraw, well-known publisher of technological periodicals. Two years later the McGraw- Marden Company was incorporated for $1,000,000, 4 and from that time onward Success began to live up to its name. Mar- den wrote to Dreiser in October 1902 that they were then carrying $30,000 a month advertising. 5 Four years later Success had reached 300,000 circulation, and a good advertising patronage at $800 per page; and soon thereafter it had its own building on East Twenty-second Street, near Broadway, with its own printing plant. Robert Mackay was co-editor 1906- 1908.
But its prosperity in 1910 could not match that which had suddenly come to Hampton’s and Everybody’s as the result of their incursions into the muckraking field. And so in that year, blind to the fact that the surfeit of exposes had destroyed the public’s appetite for them and that the muckraking cycle was almost complete, Success plunged into the reformatory fray with vigor. For years, it had represented success as a virtue in itself, and the successful man as a paragon. When McClure’s was attacking Standard Oil, it had published its “Impartial Study of John D. Rockefeller” (July 8, 1899). Now its chief writers were the belligerent Judson C. Welliver and the socialist Charles Edward Russell. This made a great shift in the mood and tempo of the magazine; and the transformation was further emphasized by the introduction of fiction by big-name writers, under the associate editorship of Samuel Merwin.
inson Smith’s Latest Story
i
THE SUCCESS COMPANY, NEW YORK—PRICE 10 CENT'S
DID HE SUCCEED IN WINNING HER?
This bright cover of Success Magazine for July 1906, drawn by J. C. Leyendecker, was probably intended to illustrate one of the roads to success.
Samuel Hopkins Adams, Zane Grey, Henry Kitchell Webster, John Luther Long, James Oppenheim, and other popular mag- azinists, their work copiously illustrated, completed the changeover of Success into a general monthly of wide appeal. The single-copy price was raised to fifteen cents.
In making this change, however, Success lost its specialized audience and became a competitor in the class which was now aiming at million circulations. Within less than a year, it became evident that Success would not make the goal it had set itself. Marden’s biographer says the trouble was that big business did not like the muckraking policy and forced the bankers to call back their loans to the publishing company. 6 However that may be, Success was purchased in the summer of 1911 by the National Post Company.
The National Post w^as a fortnightly which had been founded by E. E. Garrison and Samuel Merwin three months earlier. It specialized in current news and comment, but contained articles, fiction, and verse. After the merger, and during the five months which ended with its suspension in December 1911, Success Magazine and the National Post published a serial by James Oliver Curwood, some household departments, a generous offering of news and comment of a prevailingly liberal cast, and a quantity of miscellany. But it belied its name; as a general illustrated monthly at 300,000 circulation, it was a failure.
Marden had been so long preaching the doctrine of never- say-die, however, that he believed in it himself; and he kept on the lookout for another financial “angel.” Frederick C. Lowrey, a Chicago manufacturer and a long-time admirer of Marden’s books and of his magazine, offered in 1917 to finance a new series of Success. The United States was already in the midst of a world war, and some established magazines were having trouble with the high labor and paper costs of the time; but it seemed to Marden and Lowrey that America needed Success now more than ever before. Accordingly, The
6 Margaret Connolly, The Life Story of Orison Swett Marden (New York, 1925), pp. 227-28. This work throws some light on other phases of the history of the magazine Success.
SUCCESS 291
New Success: Marden’s Magazine 7 appeared in January 1918.
The New Success was much like the old one in its first phase; even the title was shortened to Success before long. It was subtitled “A Magazine of Optimism, Self-Help, and Encouragement.” It was a small quarto of some fifty pages, selling at fifteen cents and containing much of Marden but little of the well-known writers of the day. Robert Mackay was back as associate editor. Personality sketches, success stories, war material, some fiction, and editorials about Americanism and ambition and the will to succeed furnished most of the contents. It was a handsome and interesting magazine, though its persistent optimism was eventually a little galling; and at the close of the war its circulation was about one hundred thousand.
Marden, his willpower unimpaired but his financial resources dwindling, kept at his desk until a few months before his death in March 1924. He was succeeded for two years by Walter Hoff Seely, who had been a newspaper man, writer, and lecturer. The new editor was apparently allowed funds to buy the work of some of the better magazine writers of the twenties; and names like E. Phillips Oppenheim, Charles G. Norris, and Irvin S. Cobb began to appear in the contents of the new Success. Circulation passed the 150,000 mark in 1925, but in the competition of the twenties that was not enough. After Seely left, Francis Trevelyan Miller, who had been managing editor under Marden and Seely, steered the magazine until relieved by David Arnold Balch in 1926.
Lowrey remained as president of the publishing company
7 Titles: (1) The New Success: Marden’s Magazine, 1918-20; (2) The New Success, Jan.-Sept. 1921; (3) Success, Oct. 1921 —Aug. 1926; (4) Success Magazine, Sept. 1926— Oct. 1927; (5) New Age Illustrated, Nov. 1927 —April 1928.
First issue: Jan. 1918. Last issue: April 1928.
Periodicity: Monthly. Vols. 1-2, semiannual, 1918; 3-12 (no. 4), annual, 1919— April 1928.
Publishers: Lowrey-Marden Company, New York, 1918-21; Success Magazine Corporation, New York, 1921-27; Central Magazine Company, Chicago, 1927-28.
Editors: Orison Swett Marden, 1918-24; Walter Hoff Seely, 1924-25; Francis Trevelyan Miller (managing editor), 1923-26; David Arnold Balch (managing editor), 1926-28.
until 1927, when the magazine was sold to A. C. G. Hammes- fahr, of Chicago. Its name was now changed to The New Age Illustrated, and it was printed in Chicago and mailed from that city, though the editorial office was still in New York. It was diversified and attractive, but it was still not a success, and with the issue for April 1928 it was abandoned.
The significance of the magazine Success lies chiefly in its embodiment of the cult of the will to win, which was so prominent an element of the national spirit at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is also important as a popular general magazine of its period, and as a participant in the last phase of the muckraking movement.
20
TIME 1
M EDIOCRE nor commonplace was never Time.
Lucelanted, now and then prejudiced, unfair was The Newsmagazine, but Timediting was always a smart art. Headman Henry Robinson Luce hired helpers of
1 Title: Time: The Weekly Newsmagazine. ( News-Magazine, with the hyphen, was used 1923-26. The Weekly News-Paper was given as a subtitle on p. 23 of the first number, but was soon discarded.)
First issue: March 3, 1923. Current.
Periodicity: Weekly. Vol. 1, March-Aug. 1923; 2, Sept.-Dee. 1923; thereafter regular semiannual volumes, except for 9, Jan.-July, 1927; 10, Aug.-Dee. 1927.
Publisher: Time Inc. (New York, 1923-25, 192 7-current; Cleveland, Ohio, 1925-27; chief office of printing and U.S. distribution 1928-current, Chicago, with branches in Philadelphia, 1940-1962; Old Saybrook, Conn., 1962-current; Washington, 1957-current; Albany, 1959-current; and Los Angeles, 1944-current.) President, Briton Hadden, 1923-25; Henry Robinson Luce, 1925-39; Roy Edward Larsen, 1939-60 (Chairman, Executive Committee, 1960-current) ; James Alexander Linen III, 1960-current. Business manager, H. R. Luce, 1923- 27; B. Hadden, 1928-29. Publisher, Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, 1937-40; Pierrepont Isham Prentice, 1941-45; J. A. Linen, 1945-60; Bernhard Machold Auer, 1960-66; James R. Shepley, 1966-current.
Editors: B. Hadden, 1923-27; H. R. Luce, 1928-43, 1947-49; H. R. Luce and Manfred Gottfried, 1943-46; Thomas Stanley Matthews, 1950-53; Eben Roy Alexander, 1960-66. Editor-in-chief, H. R. Luce, 1945-64; Hedley Donovan, 1964-current. Editorial chairman, H. R. Luce, 1964-67. Managing editors (for some terms two or even three shared this title): John Stuart Martin, 1929-37; John Shaw Billings, 1933-37; M. Gottfried, 1937-43; Frank Norris, 1937-40; T. S. Matthews, 1938-42, 1943-49; Roy Alexander, 1950-60; Otto Fuerbringer, 1960-current. Executive editors: T. S. Matthews, 1942-43; E. R. Alexander, 1947-49; Dana Tasker, 1952-53. Editorial director, J. S. Billings, 1945-54; Hedley Donovan, 1959-64.
Indexes: Readers’ Guide, July 1935-current; full indexes for each semi-annual volume.
References: Noel F. Busch, Briton Hadden: A Biography of the Co-Founder of Time (New York, 1949); T. S. Matthews, Name and Address: An Autobiography (New York, 1960), pp. 215-74; Thomas Griffith, The Waist-High Culture (New York, 1959), chap, vii; Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, Ill., 1956), pp. 219-24, 298-301 [see also rev. ed.; Urbana, Ill., 1964, pp. 234-44]; What Makes Time Tick (New York, 1956), a portfolio of folders issued by Time Inc.; Eric Hodgins, The Span of Time (New York, 1946), 14 pp. unbound, issued by Time Inc.; The Story of an Experiment (New York, 1946), 12 pp. Time size, issued by Time Inc.; Ellsworth Chunn, “History of News Magazines,” unpub. diss., University of Missouri, 1950; “Time at 40,” Time, v. 81, May 10, 1963, pp. 10-11; Robert Heady, “Now 40, ‘Time’ Notes Own Growth, Mushrooming Brother Enterprises,” Advertising Age, v. 34, March 25, 1963, pp. 35-36.
many talents, built amazing circulation, accumulated advertising, made millions. No piker he.
Having made our own strained effort to parody what was once known as “Timestyle” (a$ many before us have done), let us abandon such perversities of syntax and vocabulary (as Time itself laid many of them aside after the 1930’s) and try to tell the story of this important periodical as straightforwardly as possible.
Briton Hadden was born in Brooklyn in 1898. The twin hobbies of his boyhood were amateur journalism and baseball. His family was comfortably well-to-do, and when he arrived at prep-school age he was sent to the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. There he met Henry Luce, a boy of his own age, whose twin hobbies were journalism and books. Luce had been born in Tengchow, , China, the son of Presbyterian missionaries. Hadden became editor of the school newspaper, the Hotchkiss Record; and Luce edited the Hotchkiss Literary Monthly, for which he wrote essays and poetry.
From Hotchkiss, both boys went to Yale University, where Hadden became chairman of the Yale News and Luce its managing editor. They interrupted their college work in 1918 to enlist in the Student Army Training Corps at Camp Jack- son, South Carolina, where they found time for long talks about the possibility of founding a new national weekly devoted to a concise and orderly presentation of the news. They were back at Yale in time to be graduated with the class of
1920.
Following graduation, Luce went to Oxford for a year, then worked for a few months as a reporter on the Chicago Daily News. Hadden joined the New York World staff. Late in
1921, both men were offered jobs on the Baltimore News through the influence of Walter Millis, a Yale classmate. Both accepted, less for their modest salaries than for the opportunity to be together again for discussions of their magazine dream. After a few months they made a decision, resigned from the News staff, and set about organizing and financing their own publishing venture.
The name first chosen for the new periodical was Facts, but this was soon discarded in favor of Time. The original pros-
pectus, “for private circulation/’ is interesting not only because it shows what was in the minds of the founders at the beginning but also because it points up changes in policy that took place later. It began:
Although daily journalism has been more highly developed in the United States than in any other country of the world—
Although foreigners marvel at the excellence of our periodicals, World’s Work, Century, Literary Digest, Outlook, and the rest—
People in America are, for the most part, poorly informed.
This is not the fault of the daily newspapers; they print all the news.
It is not the fault of the weekly “reviews”; they adequately develop and comment on the news.
To say with the facile cynic that it is the fault of the people themselves is to beg the question.
People are uninformed because no publication has adapted
ITSELF TO THE TIME WHICH BUSY MEN ARE ABLE TO SPEND ON SIMPLY KEEPING INFORMED.
Time is a weekly news-magazine, aimed to serve the modern necessity of keeping people informed, created on a new principle of
COMPLETE ORGANIZATION.
Time is interested—not in how much it includes between its covers—but in how much it gets off its pages into the minds
OF ITS READERS.
Later in the prospectus, under the subtitle “The Process,” we are told:
From virtually every magazine and newspaper of note in the world, Time collects all available information on all subjects of importance and general interest. The essence of all this information is reduced to approximately 100 short articles, none of which are over 400 words in length (seven inches of type). Each of these articles will be found in its logical place in the magazine, according to a fixed method of arrangement which constitutes a complete organization of all the news.
One other section of the long prospectus must be quoted; it is headed “Editorial Bias”:
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 ques-
tions and important news is probably as undesirable as it is impossible, and are therefore willing 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 all the world.”
2. A 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.
6. An interest in the new, particularly in ideas.
But this magazine is not founded to promulgate prejudices, liberal or conservative. “To keep men well informed”—that, first and last, is the only axe this magazine has to grind. The magazine is one of news, not argument, and verges on the controversial only where it is necessary to point out what the news means. 2
The writers of the prospectus were at pains to explain that Time was not to be modeled upon the Literary Digest , then at the height of its success as a news weekly. The Digest presented its news chiefly through the editorial commentary of newspapers, while Time proposed to set forth the news more directly, as well as to cover more topics “in a brief, organized manner.”
Now our two twenty-four-year-old adventurers in the magazine field set out to sell $100,000 worth of stock to get their project going. They actually sold $86,000 worth, mostly to Yale acquaintances and their families. The largest purchase was made by the wealthy mother of a Yale admirer of Hadden and Luce. To her the two made their best “sales pitch,” after which, without asking any questions, the kind lady wrote out a check for $20,000. The young men congratulated themselves on their increasing skill as salesmen, only to learn later that their new stockholder’s hearing-aid had not been working well that afternoon and her purchase had been motivated by their own very apparent enthusiasm and her son’s recommendations of his friends. The stock the old lady
2 Quotations are from mimeographed copy furnished by Time Inc., but most of the prospectus is found in Busch, Briton Hadden, pp. 60-64. Many of the data given here concerning the early lives of the founders are also derived from the Busch biography
TIME 297
bought, however, was worth a million dollars long before she died. 3
*
Though stock sales had fallen short of the sum they had set for the capitalization of their venture, Hadden and Luce, depending on a promise of further help, if needed, from Grandfather Crowell Hadden, a banker, and assisted by a small editorial and management staff, brought out Volume I, Number 1 of Time under the date of March 3, 1923. It consisted of thirty-two pages, including the self-cover. Pages measured about eight by eleven inches and each was divided, in the editorial sections, into three columns—a format that became permanent.
The portrait on the first cover was made from a charcoal sketch of Joseph Gurney Cannon; and the “cover story,” less than a column long, celebrated the retirement of “Uncle Joe,” who was called “the grand old man of Congress.” The red margins of the cover, which were to become a distinguishing mark of Time, did not appear until 1927. Cover portraits in color began the next year, with one of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito; 4 but they did not become the rule until the latter 1930’s. The portraits chargees, to which backgrounds indicating the activities of the subjects brought an added interest, began to appear in 1941; paintings made especially for these covers became common in later years, and in the 1960’s came the “gate-fold” covers. But at the beginning all was black and white, including the dozen or so pages of advertising in each of the early numbers.
Eleven single-column portraits of dubious quality were found in the first issue, and this inadequate illustration was continued through Time’s early years. Pictures already used were repeated sometimes in connection with later stories. By 1928, however, the editors had become aware of the importance of their portraits; they were using more, and they were making a studied effort to avoid the stodgy conventionality of most news portraits by emphasizing the subject’s special characteristics and peculiarities. Mme. Schumann-Heink, for ex-
3 This story may be more or less apocryphal; but it is told in Busch, Briton Hadden, pp. 76-78; in a mimeographed biography of Luce distributed by Time; and in other places. Busch is also the source for facts given regarding other phases of the sales of stock.
4 Time, v. 12, Nov. 19, 1928.
ample, was pictured singing, with her mouth very widely open. 5 Such illustrations, stopping just this side of caricature, were in harmony with the personal descriptions that had come to characterize the magazine’s news stories.
The appearance of Time’s first number was greeted, says Hadden’s biographer, with “a burst of total apathy on the part of the U. S. press and public.” 6 The two young editors personally took a copy to Albert D. Lasker, head of the great advertising firm of Lord and Thomas, and asked his opinion of it. He looked it over and then advised them to let the first number be the last. “You haven’t a chance against the Literary Digest,” he said. 7 A further discouragement came from an extraordinary muddle in mailing out the first issues. Most of the original nine thousand subscribers 8 had been secured by a mail campaign on» a three-weeks trial basis; but the young ladies hired to prepare the copies for the post office managed, as they worked “in a spirit of good-humored sorority fun,” to mix the labels so that some trial subscribers received no copies at all, others received two, and still others three. Later distribution, as well as the entire business and editorial operation, ran more smoothly. Renewals were gratify- ingly large, so that by the end of 1925 circulation had reached a hundred thousand, about three-fourths of which consisted of mail subscriptions. Basic rates were five dollars a year, and fifteen cents an issue at the newsstands.
Gross advertising revenue for Time’s ten months in 1923 was only $14,635, but in 1924 it was $52,827 and the next year $129,074. It virtually doubled annually for the next three years. At the end of 1927, the magazine was clearly a success, with a circulation of about 175,000, gross receipts of nearly half a million from advertising, 9 and a small net profit.
5 Time, v. 5, April 27, 1925, p. 13.
6 Busch, Briton Hadden, p. 87.
7 Roy Quinlan in Magazine Industry Newsletter, March 4, 1958. Quinlan says he was present at the interview.
8 James A. Linen, in an address to the Poor Richard Club, Philadelphia, Feb. 25, 1958, p. 5 of mimeographed copy; and Busch, Briton Hadden, p. 87.
9 The source of these figures is the Magazine Publishers Information Bureau, as quoted in Business Week, no. 966, March 6, 1948, p. 94. They do not agree with those given by Busch, Briton Hadden, p. 186, which may represent net revenue.
VOL. I, NO. 14
JOHN L. LEWIS
The best poker face west of the Hudson, —See Page 4,
JUNE 4, 1923
JOHN L. LEWIS IN BLACK AND WHITE
Time was three months old when this issue of June 4, 1923, came out. The covers of Time have usually been portraits. For the first few years they were black and white only, and the decorative borders shown here were used until 1938. Red margins outside this border motif began in 1927.
299
MAY 7, 1945—HITLER IS CROSSED OFF
The first issue of Time after Hitler’s disappearance carried this cover by Boris Artzybasheff. The dripping X is dark red.
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JANUARY 13, 1967—MAO AND THE DRAGON
Portraits chargees —that is, with backgrounds indicating the activities of the subjects—brought additional interest. They began in 1941.
301
Hadden and Luce had begun by paying themselves salaries of thirty-five dollars a week, raised after a year or two to fifty dollars; 10 but now they found themselves wealthy, mainly through their comparatively small holdings of stock in Time Inc. When Hadden died in 1929, he left stock worth over a million dollars to his mother.
The founding partners complemented one another by their differing abilities and personalities. It may seem remarkable that extrovert Hadden, with his little mustache and trim figure, original, prankish, active, could work well in double harness with the serious, shaggy-browed Luce, solid, pragmatic, self-contained; but mutual respect made them a successful team. The original plan was for them to alternate, in short terms, as editor and business manager, but Hadden did the main editorial job for th$ first four years (except during a vacation of a few months in Europe in 1925) before trading with his partner and becoming general manager. Business was not Hadden’s forte, however; the upward curve of advertising revenue, for example, was halted in 1928, the first year of his business control. 11 A week before the sixth anniversary of Time’s founding, and not long after his own thirty-first birthday, Hadden died of a streptococcus infection. In a boxed announcement on the first page of its next issue, Time said, “Creation of his genius and heir to his qualities, Time attempts neither biography nor eulogy of Briton Hadden.” 12
Luce had become president of Time Inc. when Hadden left for his European tour and continued in that position until 1939. He was listed also as editor from 1928 to 1949, though he shared that title with Manfred Gottfried for a few years in the mid-forties. He was called editor-in-chief from 1945 to 1964 when he became editorial chairman, but whatever his title or titles, Luce was Tune’s suzerain after the death of his founding partner, and eventually he became chief stockholder in Time Inc.
The use of many title variants for members of Time’s staff,
10 Hodgins, Span of Time, p. 3; Busch, Briton Hadden, p. 164.
11 Business Week, no. 966, March 6, 1948, p. 94.
12 Time, v. 13, March 11, 1929, p. 9. However a brief biography occupies about a column in the “Milestones” department of this number, and p. 64 is devoted to eulogistic tributes from various persons of distinction.
TIME
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frequent shifts of personnel, discontinuances and later revivals of some titles, and lack of clear definition of the duties appertaining to each 13 combine to make it difficult to indicate the development of the magazine’s staff pattern. A few personalities in the group, however, stand out as significant in the early years.
John Stuart Martin was a cousin of Hadden. A sportsman, he had lost his left arm in a shooting accident, but was still good at golf and soccer. He was graduated from Princeton shortly before Hadden and Luce set out to sell stock in Time Inc., and he joined them in that enterprise with zeal, carrying the campaign into the country club sets in and around Chicago, his home city. Enterprising and genial, Martin helped to develop various Time Inc. ventures; and he was managing editor of Time itself for eight years after his cousin’s death.
Manfred Gottfried was also a Chicagoan. He was graduated from Yale in 1922 and immediately joined the Time organization. A hard worker, he handled the “National Affairs” department for several years, was managing editor (often in collaboration with others) from 1937 to 1943, then co-editor with Luce for three years, and later chief of Time and Life’s staff of foreign correspondents.
John Shaw Billings came to Time from the Brooklyn Eagle’s Washington bureau in 1929, edited the “National Affairs” department, and was later managing editor for a few years. He was then moved over to Life, and eventually became editorial director of all Time Inc. publications for some ten years.
T. S. Matthews, educated at Princeton and Oxford, also joined the Time staff in 1929. He was an intellectual, with a sharply critical mind. He had served four years on the New Republic, and later he wrote: “The contrast I felt between the New Republic and Time was a contrast between scholarly, distinguished men and smart, ignorant boys. ... In any case, I didn’t like Time. On every piece of copy I typed I could have written with truth, T do not like my work.’ ” 14 Yet he remained on Time’s staff (including a few leaves of ab-
13 See Matthews, Name and Address, pp. 261, 270.
14 Ibid., p. 222.
sence) for some twenty-four years. He served first as book reviewer and editor of the “Religion” and “Press” departments, and later as managing editor, executive editor, and editor. He had his quarrels with Luce, who seems nevertheless to have valued him highly, and with his friend Martin, who once accused him of looking down his nose at Time 10 —justly enough, it would appear.
Roy Alexander came to Time from the St. Louis Post- Dispatch in 1939, serving first as a departmental editor and then for a comparatively long term, 1950-1960, as managing editor. The title of “editor” was revived for him in 1960.
Roy E. Larsen, a Harvard graduate of 1921, joined the Time group during its planning period and became its first circulation manager. He succeeded Luce as president of Time Inc., serving in that capacity from 1939 to 1960, after which he was made chairman of the executive committee of that top organization. Robert L. Johnson, Yale T8, was the first advertising manager. He was an employe of E. R. Crowe and Company, advertising agents, but devoted himself wholly to the Time account. Crowe himself, Yale ’08, was a stockholder in the new venture. 16
The slogan of Time for many years was “Curt, Concise, Complete.” The first of these epithets had an unfortunate connotation of rudeness. The magazine was indeed occasionally rude, but the word as used in the slogan was clearly intended to emphasize the brevity of its stories. In the twenty-four editorial pages of the first issue appeared more than two hundred “items” (as Hadden liked to call its separate pieces), ranging in length from three to a hundred lines; and even the leading articles of the “National Affairs” department ran only to two or three hundred words. As to conciseness, in the early years Time generally cultivated a terse condensation in its reporting, except perhaps for its “cover stories” and critical articles; later, descriptive settings, dramatic narrative, and editorial commentary tended to change Time policy in this respect. If “complete” be taken to mean “comprehensive” (though the words are by no means synonymous), it is meaningful as a
15 Ibid., p. 231.
16 Busch, Briton Hadden, pp. 81-82.
statement of the magazine’s performance. Comprehensive Time was from the start, and comprehensive it remained.
This breadth of coverage, together with the fact that its orderly arrangement of content was from the beginning one of the chief virtues of Time, calls for a brief examination of the several departments and how they developed. The leader, nearly always in front-of-the-book position, was “National Affairs,” its title later shortened to “The Nation.” Usually the first section under this heading was “The Presidency,” followed often by “The Cabinet,” “Congress,” “The Supreme Court,” “Politics,” “Labor,” “The States,” and other sections suggested by leading topics in the week’s domestic news budget. In later years the order of these sections was likely to vary according to the editorial evaluation of the news. The second department was “Foreign News,” later called “The World”; it was divided into sections headed by the names of various nations and regions.
In Time’s first number “Books” was the third department, rather than the back-of-the-magazine division that it later became. And it is not strange that it was thus honored in the early volumes, for its reviewers were such distinguished writers as Stephen Vincent Benet, John Farrar, and Archibald MacLeish. For the first year or two the book reviews were expected to keep to rather definite patterns; thus the notice of a novel considered first “The Story,” then “The Significance,” “The Critics,” and “The Author.” Through the years, as the “Books” department was gradually shuffled backward in the magazine, it lost this rather admirable design and showed much unevenness in quality. When John S. Martin was its editor, books were picked up by various members of the staff, who did notices of them, as Matthews says, “with their left hands.” 17 When Matthews took over the department in 1929, he made it a more consistently planned and executed performance. Time’s book reviews, over the years, gave importance to long summaries of content and trenchant, positive evaluations. They were readable and informative; and they were often severe, making far more use of the hatchet than the honey-jar. Louis Bromfield had been a member of the
17 Matthews, Name and Address, p. 219.
Time staff in its early months, but his somewhat inferior novel, A Good Woman, was not spared when it appeared in 1927. The review began: “This book were better left unpublished. . . . Florid, artificial, repetitious, it is incredibly dull and sloppy work.” 18 On the other hand, no Time writer ever rode off on over-enthusiasm in a runaway review.
Other critical departments were “Art,” “The Theatre,” “Cinema,” and “Music.” “Art,” which began with a single column of items rewritten from the newspapers, varied from year to year under several editors but generally improved as a chronicle of developments in painting, sculpture, and architecture; it became more arresting and valuable in 1945, when full-color illustration was introduced. “Cinema” was a brilliant department at various times, and especially under the editorship from 1941 to 1955 of the poet and fiction writer James Agee. Here was a critic who was tart, witty, and knowledgeable in Time, for which he wrote his pieces anonymously, as did all the members of the editorial staff, and much more bitter and blistering in the Nation, for which he wrote at the same time, signing his name. After Agee’s death, his successors seemed to try to carry on the pattern he had set. “Theatre” was at first largely a guide to current New York plays; later it carried more ambitious reviews of dramatic and musical productions. Louis Kronenberger, drama critic for Time from 1938 to 1961, was a distinguished reporter of Broadway. In 1958 “Show Business,” devoted to both television and the theater, reduced the importance of the older department. In the same year began a page of “Time Listings” (a revival of an older “Time Table”) which catalogued current productions in the theater, the cinema, television, and books, with brief annotations.
Other departments that appeared in the first number of Time and became fixtures were “Education,” “Religion,” Medicine,” “Law,” “Science,” “Finance” (later divided into U.S. Business” and “World Business”), “Sport,” “The Press” (newspapers and magazines), and “Milestones.” This last was a column of paragraphs recording deaths, marriages, divorces, and births of prominent persons. Other departments
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18 Time, v. 10, Aug. 1, 1927, p. 32.
were dropped after a year or two, such as the rather pointless “Imaginary Interviews/’ “View with Alarm,” and “Point with Pride.” “Aeronautics” eventually became a part of “Transport” and then the “Aviation” section of “U.S. Business.” “Crime” became an occasional section of “National Affairs.” A department devoted to “Animals” was carried in the 1930’s.
When a European war threatened in 1939, Time published an excellent special section entitled “Background for War,” 19 later reissued separately. The conflict that began four months later was christened by Time “World War II,” and a new department was headed “World War,” to become eventually “U.S. at War.”
The department called “Letters,” in the front of the magazine, began in the second year and, stimulated by editorially planted communications, 20 became one of Time’s most interesting features for many readers; indeed, it attracted so much attention that for a few years (1934-1937) it was made a separate periodical. Letters was a fortnightly of twenty pages selling at fifty cents a year and attained a circulation of 21,000. Its motto: “Its writers are its readers are its writers.”
How did Time get the news reports that filled most of its pages? At first, it simply rewrote newspaper stories, using especially those of the New York Times. This was a process already made respectable by the Literary Digest, and the courts had made it clear that news itself had no protection under the copyright laws. But by the end of its first decade, Time had begun to feel a need for its own services; and besides, it could now afford the cost of such help. It became a member of the Associated Press in 1936, but by that time it had already begun to build its own network of bureaus and stringers.
Of course, a weekly publication must accept the handicap of seeming slow to the readers of the dailies, and moreover Time emphasized its tardiness by predating its issues for distribution reasons. For example, the Lindbergh baby was kidnaped the night of March 1, 1932; but the event was not mentioned in Time until its issue of March 14, and then it was
19 Ibid., v. 33, May 1, 1939, pp. 30-34.
20 Busch, Briton Hadden, pp. 122-23.
said to have happened “one evening last week.” 21 The “last week” device, with the actual time not mentioned, was used continually; but the magazine’s chief (and proper) method of making up for its lack of timeliness was to emphasize the colorful, supplementary, and often interpretive happenings and situations associated with the main event.
Coverage was enlarged gradually in later years until, by the early 1960’s, Time had a full-time staff of 17 in its Washington bureau (and this did not include Life and Fortune men), and 11 bureaus in other United States news centers (averaging four workers to each), besides 113 stringers scattered about the country. In Canada it had 4 bureaus and 34 scattered stringers; and in other countries it maintained 14 bureaus, with 40 staffers and a total of 145 stringers.*
Although it had begun by using newspaper stories as sources, Time made a studied effort from the first to avoid the stereotyped style of the dailies. It rejected the “lead” pattern in favor of an expository or narrative form. This was part of its effort to compensate for its lack of timeliness; it had to attract readers by fresh devices. Other techniques were used to this end. Early in Time’s career, Hadden wrote: “If a President dies, don’t run his picture—run the picture of the man who wrote the magazine article which drew from the President his last approving words.” Do not feature Edison’s birthday when it occurs; wait until the week of the Democratic national convention, “when readers will turn with relief to items on any subject other than politics.” 22 Also making up for the new magazine’s time-lag was its pungent style of writing—its use of word coinages, blends, puns, inverted syntax, esoteric words, and tropes and epithets of various kinds in nearly every paragraph.
These eccentricities of vocabulary and syntax came to be called u Time style.” They perhaps owed something to H. L. Mencken, and possibly something to journalists like Walter Winchell and Sime Silverman. Some of Time’s esoteric
21 Time, v. 19, March 14, 1932, p. 16.
* As of March 1967, there were 18 bureaus abroad and 133 stringers. There were 43 Time magazine correspondents outside the United States.
22 Doris Ulmann, A Portrait Gallery of American Editors (New York, 1925), p. 64.
words have found familiar places in the American language— tycoon, a Japanese word not unknown in English before Time’s advent but given currency by that magazine; pundit, a Hindu word of which the same may be said; and kudos, a Greek term used by Time mainly to refer rather sarcastically to honorary degrees. In listing some such degrees of the 1933 crop, Time declared, with much truth, under its heading “Kudos”: “U.S. colleges give honorary degrees 1) to honor the great and the near-great, 2) to get good commencement speakers, 3) to get benefactions.” 23 Fifteen honorary degrees had Headman Luce at last count.
Time’ s chief word coinages have been blends—scores of combinations of cinema, for example, with other words such as cinemactor and cinemagazine. Some blends were puns, such as politricks and sexational. 24 Others in the early volumes were far-fetched but funny—Menckinsults, Wodehumor, im- properganda, Hindenburglary, and tobacconalia. 25 Some seem to need a glossary—Parkavian, cinemanimator, and radiorating—but the context helps out. 26 Compound adjectives in the Homeric pattern were common; bald-domed, moonfaced, and white-maned were favorite Timepithets. 27 Famed, able, potent, nimble, and late great became trademark words of Time stories. Time also followed occasionally the Mencken style of multiplying epithets. Here is the first paragraph of its review of Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry:
BIBLE BOAR
Author Sinclair Lewis, whose position as National Champion Cas- tigator is challenged only by his fellow idealist, Critic Henry Louis
23 Time, v. 21 , June 12 , 1933, p. 31.
24 Ibid., v. 12 , Oct. 22 , 1928, p. 12 ; sexational was used frequently in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
25 Ibid., v. 4, Oct. 6 , 1924, p. 24; v. 7, April 19, 1926, p. 39; v. 1, July 30, 1923, p. 24; v. 31, Feb. 14, 1938, p. 18; v. 1, Aug. 13, 1923, p. 18 . Tobacconalia was used in connection with statistics of tobacco consumption.
26 Parkavian, ibid., v. 23, Jan. 8 , 1934, p. 34, related to Park Avenue, New York City; cinemanimator, v. 23, Jan. 1 , 1934, p. 34, applied to Walt Disney; radiorating, v. 28, Sept. 7, 1936, p. 54, applied to speaking over the radio.
27 For a competent study of Time’s use of esoteric words, blends, and compounds, see Joseph J. Firebaugh, “The Vocabulary of Time Magazine,” American Speech, v. 15, Oct. 1940, pp. 232-42. See also Busch, Briton Hadden, pp. 109-18; and Gerald Frederick Handte, “Some Aspects of Prose Style in Time Magazine,” unpub. diss., University of Missouri, 1949.
HENRY ROBINSON LUCE, 1898-1967
Luce, with Briton Hadden, conceived the idea of Time and made Time Inc. into the greatest magazine publishing success in history. Photograph by Philippe Halsman.
Mencken, has made another large round-up of grunting, whining, roaring, mewing, driveling, snouting creatures—of fiction—which, like an infuriated swineherd, he can beat, goad, tweak, tail-twist, eye-jab, belly-thwack, spatter with sty-filth and consign to perdition. The new collation closely resembles the herd obtained on the Casti- gator’s last foray, against the medical profession (Arrowsmith, 1925) and a parallel course is run, from upcreek tabernacles, through a hayseed college and seminary to a big-city edifice with a revolving electric cross. But the Arrowsmith plot is altered. This time the Castigator, instead of exerting his greatest efforts in harrying a fine-mettled creature to refuge in the wilderness, singles out the biggest boar in sight and hounds him into a gratifyingly slimy slough. The tale has an obscure hero, another Lewisian lie-hunter who, to purge the last bitter dregs of pity and fear, gets his gentle eyes and mouth whipped to a black pulp by the K.K.K. before he is released. But the boar is the chief sacrifice and its name has the inimitable Lewis smack, Elmer Gantry. 28
Word caricatures were by no means limited to the critical departments of Time, but frequently made their appearance in political commentary:
A paunchy, bald-headed double-chinned man, whose trousers seem never to have been pressed, smiled the smile of vindication. He, Roy Asa Haynes, bright morning star of the Anti-Saloon League from Hillsboro, Ohio, had suffered two years of nearly total eclipse. Last week President Coolidge had him appointed Acting Prohibition Commissioner. . . . 29
But Time style was not based on vocabulary alone; it had other eccentricities. Chief of these was the up-ended sentence, which has been satirized and parodied often. 30 Usually this was an inoffensive device, and it sometimes commanded special interest. President Coolidge’s visit to Pine Ridge, South Dakota, to announce the signing of the Indian Citizenship Act, began, with overtones from Hiawatha:
To his haughty redskin brothers, to the haughty strong Sioux nation, with his wife and son beside him, with big medicine in his
28 Time, v. 9, March 14, 1927, p. 38.
29 Ibid., v. 9, April 4, 1927, p. 12.
30 The most famous of them, and justly so, is the Wolcott Gibbs profile, “Time . . . Life . . . Fortune . . . Luce,” in the New Yorker, Nov. 28, 1936, pp. 20-25.
pocket, came the pale Wamblee-Tokaha, New White Chief and High Protector—otherwise Calvin Coolidge, 29th U. S. President, but first President ever to visit any Amerindians on one of the reservations set aside for them by their Caucasian conquerors. 31
Most famous of its preliminary phrases was the one Time used with death notices, “As it must to all men, death came last week to ...” A variation of this locution was sometimes used for birthdays: “As it does to many men, a 42d birthday came to Benito Mussolini, Premier of Italy.” 32 When this phrase had become a too familiar Time cliche, it was laid aside, as was the inverted sentence. “But nowadays Time editors do not think highly of backward syntax,” wrote Publisher Prentice in 1945, “except as an occasional way of emphasizing a point.” 33 Probably Matthews had much to do with reducing eccentricities of style in Time. 34
Not that the magazine failed in later years to maintain a notable individuality in its use of language. Latter-day Time style was sharp and shiny; it had the great virtue of fresh readability. It retained some old devices, such as using a descriptive word as a man’s title (Reformer Jones, Beatnik Smith, Frozen-Pie Tycoon Brown); inserting initial posses- sives (G.O.P.’s Fred Seaton, Iowa’s Bourke Flickenlooper, Harvard’s Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr.); the use of the ampersand for “and” (latterly found mainly in heads); and omission of articles and conjunctions (less frequent by the 1960’s). The insertion of bits of information to emphasize Time’s “research” was notable, such as always giving the middle name of anyone mentioned in the news; telling his age (Pope John XXIII, 80); dropping an identifying word or phrase parenthetically into the middle of his name, as He.iry Morton (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”) Stanley; eften supplying a paragraph of historical background in connection with a story; and introducing an occasional footnote.
Nor did Time lose its fondness for puns, usually clever but often too studied. A few from 1961 issues are reprinted here.
31 Time, v. 10, Aug. 29, 1927, p. 6.
32 Ibid., v. 6, Aug. 10, 1925, p. 13.
33 Ibid., v. 46, July 16, 1945, p. 9.
34 See Griffith, Waist-High Culture, p. 82; Matthews, Name and Address, p. 218.
In a review of two books of selections from the works of H. L. Mencken, always a Time target' we read: “His aim was to high- browbeat ‘the populace’ with a club: to fight American Gothic, Mencken became the great American Goth.” 35 Another book reviewer, or perhaps the same one, wrote: “Disciples are the undoing of holy men, and so it is with Richard Condon, a talented and satirical fantast whose fiercely proselytizing followers regard him as the fifth hoarse man of the Apocalypse.” 36 Walter Winchell is criticized for serving the purposes of “publicity seekers.” 37 In a notice of the motion picture “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” based on Truman Capote’s “peeka- resque short story,” we are told that the heroine comes home from work “in the whee hours of the morning” and is eventually induced “to give up mattress money for matrimony. . . . Holly isn’t the sort of girl who wears her rue with a diffidence. Holly is the sort of girl who thinks that guilt is less valuable than gold.” 38 And we must not omit the parenthetical exclamation in the story summarized from a recent novel: the versatile hero tries a little week-end sketching “and (here we Gauguin!) is startled to find that he is an artist of astonishing power.” 39
Almost from the first, pedant-purists have faulted Time more or less seriously for the aberrations of its prose, but the severest criticisms levied against the magazine have been based upon its opinionated reporting of the news. In 1922, when Time’s prospectus was written, newspaper spokesmen generally were talking about the “objectivity” in their news columns and the limitation of “opinion” to editorial pages. “Objectivity” as thus used was not a scientific word, however; it took little psychology to realize that the news report could never be completely objective, passing, as it must, through the minds and hands of a group of human beings each with his own conscious or unconscious prepossessions. But what the word meant to newspapermen was the quality resulting from an honest effort to see things clearly and report them without
35 Time, v. 78, Sept. 29, 1961, p. 89.
36 Ibid., v. 78, July 21, 1961, p. 70.
37 Ibid., v. 77, April 14, 1961, p. 81.
38 Ibid., v. 78, Oct. 20, 1961, p. 95.
39 Ibid,., v. 74, July 20, 1959, p. 104.
conscious bias and with as little comment as possible. However, by the mid-century editors realized that the world had become so complicated in its politics, economics, and ideologies that more commentary was necessary in order to present the news clearly; and so they swung toward what they called “interpretive reporting.” 40 Now, this was very like the policy Time’s founders had set out in their 1922 prospectus, in which, while renouncing an editorial page and at the same time scoffing at “complete neutrality” in reporting “important news,” they went on to promise that theirs would be a magazine of “news, not argument” and would “verge on the controversial only where it is necessary to point out what the news means.” 41
But it was not long before Time had gone far beyond its stated policy of merely “verging on the controversial in its comment.” By the 1930’s it had clearly gone quite over the “verge.” Much of its “slanted” reporting in that decade and the next one or two consisted of the use of emotion-laden adjectives and epithets—“lean, spidery Leon Blum, whose double hate of the Nazis is that of a Socialist who is also a Jew,” “Demagogue McCarthy: does he deserve well of the republic?” and “roly-poly George E. Allen bobbed around Washington like a pneumatic rubber horse.” 42 As Bernard DeVoto once observed, in discussing Time techniques, “there can be no appeal, by protest or rebuttal, to an adjective.” 43 Then by the mid-forties, while keeping up its adjectival attacks, Time launched more and more frequently into full- scale editorializing. In the fall of 1936 it said: “The Spanish Government, a regime of Socialists, Communists and rattlebrained Liberals had emptied the jails of cutthroats to defend itself. . . .” 44 Ten years later: “In the eyes of most U.S. citizens Harry Truman’s Administration had bogged down in
40 For full discussion of this point, see F. L. Mott, The News in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), chap. viii.
41 For a fuller statement of the prospectus, see above, pp. 295-96.
42 Time, v. 28 (Aug. 3, 1936), p. 15; v. 58, Oct. 22, 1951, “cut line” for cover portrait of McCarthy; v. 56, Oct. 16, 1950, p. 20, in cover story about Truman’s friends of the White House group. Later, when George E. Allen was a golfing companion of Eisenhower, he was referred to in more flattering terms.
43 Harper’s, v. 174, March 1937, p. 447.
44 Time, v. 28, Aug. 3, 1936, p. 18.
ludicrous futility.” 45 And in between and afterward, judgments were expressed with equal vigor in Time’s news reports. Secretary of State Dean Acheson was attacked, his successor John Foster Dulles was highly praised, and so on. 46 In the early 1960’s Time carried a eulogistic “cover story” on Senator Barry Goldwater, 47 and consistently disparaged the Kennedy administration.
Time’s attitude of omniscience, strengthened by its rule of anonymity among its writers, irritated many critics. “Each week the world is created absolute and dogmatic,” wrote one of them, “the good guys on one side, the bad guys on the other, with Time holding the only scorecard.” 48 And Norman Cousins, commenting on Time’s advertising campaign based on the idea of the people’s “need to know,” observed: “It is important to know. Especially is it important to know the difference between hard facts and sly innuendoes, between information and defamation.” 49 A little fable was going the rounds in New York in the 1940’s; here is the New Yorker’s version of it:
There is a man working for Time, Inc., who has a very dangerous idea. We met this renegade in a saloon the other night and listened to him for a long while as he talked of life in Luce’s clean, appalling tower. Looking nervously over his shoulder, he told us of an atmosphere as brisk and antiseptic and charged with muted suffering as a dental clinic, of a queer, lost race of men who have come to speak only upside down and backward, of vast and by no means impossible projects to remake the world beautifully in the image of Yale, of new schemes everyday to put the lonely, desperate art of communication on a business basis, with Timen on the top. Most of all, however, he was troubled by a terrible air of omniscience that seemed to him to mark every man, woman, and child on the payroll, from the tiniest Timan to the boss himself. His eyes were wide and wild as he told us this, draining the green stuff in his glass. “It’s all right, though,” he said at last. “I know how to fix them. One of these days I’m coming out of my office and I’m going to stand in the
45 Ibid., v. 47, June 3, 1946, p. 20.
46 Ibid., v. 57, Jan. 8, 1951, pp. 10-14, cover story entitled “The Fatal Flaw?” and v. 65, Jan. 3, 1955, “Man of the Year” cover story on Dulles.
47 Ibid., v. 77, June 23, 1961.
48 Ben H. Bagdikian in New Republic, v. 140, Feb. 23, 1959, p. 9.
49 Saturday Review, v. 41, May 3, 1958, p. 48.
hall and, as loud as I can, I’m going to shout, ‘I don’t know!’ ” He looked at us blankly, lost in his furious dream. “The whole damn thing will just come tumbling down,” he said. 50
By the 1960’s Time had become, in the main, a collection of editorial articles, filled with information about news events and situations, and emphasizing vivid narrative and description. Not all the “items” contained expressions of editorial opinion, but a large proportion of them did. Thus Time had become not only a newsmagazine but also definitely a journal of opinion.
Taking at random the number dated October 12, 1962, we find the lead story that of the mob violence attending the enrollment of a Negro in the University of Mississippi. This is preceded by an epigraph quoting a few sentences from Lord Mansfield’s famous opinion in the 1768 trial of John Wilkes, containing the Latin maxim, Justitia fiat, ruat coelum. Then the story begins, in the Victorian manner well established as Time style for introductions to major articles:
Beneath the rich golden-toned sky that October brings to the Deep South, a pleasant morning coolness lingered on the University of Mississippi campus at Oxford. A bell signaled the end of 9 o’clock classes, and students poured from the stately, white- columned buildings. They merged into a sea of laughing, chattering youngsters, milling about on spacious green lawns.
This is soon followed by a statement of the crisis, and that by a vigorous narrative, with a tendency toward the melodramatic when occasion offers, and by picturesque descriptive phrases—the “stony-faced U.S. marshals,” the reported “wild, dazed look” in the eyes of General Walker, the “frenzied mob [that] had fought a bloody, nightlong battle,” leaving the campus “a nightmarish shambles.” And before we have finished the article we find Time sitting in judgment and fixing responsibilities: Governor Barnett “was undoubtedly to blame, both for failing to help preserve order, and for bringing on the crisis in the first place.” But President Kennedy should have handled the matter more as President Eisenhower had handled “the Little Rock crisis”; “his timing was terrible.”
50 New Yorker, v. 20, April 15, 1944, p. 19.
The next article is headed “The Cuba Debate/’ which Time
thinks “might even lead to effective action some day.” Then
_ ✓ _
comes a report on “The 87th Congress: A Balky Beast”; it
begins, “The 87th Congress tried desperately to die last week —and could not even make a success of that.” The next “item” is about President Kennedy’s speeches in the congressional campaign; at Cincinnati he is said to have “scowled angrily, and declared in a voice made husky by a cold” opinions that somehow do not sound angry in quotation. In the Ohio campaign, “tubby, quippy Mike Di Salle,” who had “quarreled with everyone,” had “come out of his sulk” and is challenging Republican James Allen Rhodes, 53, weight 193, whom the reporter interviews as he is “dribbling a basketball in the church gym.” In California, Democratic Governor Pat Brown had discovered, when “lured reluctantly into a statewide TV debate” with Republican Richard Nixon, “That in a head-on clash he was a dub.” But the campaigner after Time’s heart was “Republican Horace Seely-Brown, Jr., 54, running for the Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Prescott Bush” in Connecticut. “Husky Horace” was campaigning by giving away pot-holders.
And so Time goes on in this typical number. The international news is just as good reading, just as information-filled, and just as opinion-loaded as that of the United States. In Great Britain, Hugh Gaitskell was “taking a shortsighted, narrowminded stand on the vital issue of British entry into the Common Market—a stand that ranges Gaitskell alongside the most abject left-wingers in his own party and the most bullheaded jingoists on the Tory side.”
The “cover story” in this issue deals with advertising and the leaders of that great industry understandingly and comprehensively. Time likes advertising, of which it has sixty- seven pages in this number. This informative, typically Time- researched article is six pages long. It takes occasion to ridicule mildly the concern of the admen over the footless criticism of a group of economists, sociologists, and historians, whom it names. It decries the “fretting over the attacks of fashionable critics such as Arthur Vance (The Hidden Persuaders) Packard, one of the nation’s most talented self-
advertisers, who pipes the old tune that advertising twists truth and debases public taste.”
To finish our leafing through this 112-page number of Time with our eyes peeled for editorialized opinion, we must note the consideration that in any periodical critical departments dealing with books and the arts have an inescapable function of opinion commentary, though they may be largely devoted to description and summary, as in Time. The department headed “People” often contains no little opinion, as witness the following from the issue we have been reviewing:
Sharing the bill in the Broadway debut of Liz’s estranged husband, Crooner Eddie Fisher, 34, was Frankie’s ex-fiancee, South African Dancer Juliet Prowse, 26, who displayed vast areas of skin and even more gall. She pranced onstage as a barely garbed Joan of Arc and slithered her way through a song that pictured the saint as a call girl; then she turned up in some Egyptian gauze and launched into Cleo, the Nympho of the Nile, ending with a belly dance that would have fazed Farouk. Snorted one of the critics giving the show a universal pan: “Aside from getting ‘A’ for anatomy and ‘E’ for effrontery, Miss Prowse should do herself a favor: forget her career and take Frank Sinatra up on his marriage proposal.”
A brief recapitulation of Time’s positions during ten presidential elections may be interesting. In 1924 it seemed to give Coolidge an advantage, though an effort to be fair was evident. Four years later the same desire for fairness was apparent, though Hoover received more and better space than Smith. In 1932 partisanship, if any, was reversed, and Roosevelt had the advantage in the “play” given to his campaign. F.D.R. was Time’s “Man of the Year” for 1932, 1934, and 1941. Clearly he had Time’s support against opposing candidates in 1932 and 1936; but his Supreme Court “packing project” alienated Luce, and Wilkie became Time’s favorite by October 1940. “For the first time in U. S. history,” said the magazine in that campaign, in a characteristically loose historical generalization, “citizens are being asked to judge between the State’s rights and the people’s.” 51 In 1944 Time was mildly pro- Dewey in “one of the queerest, bitterest—and closest—of all
51 Time, v. 36, Oct. 21, 1940, p. 36.
the Presidential races in U. S. history.” 52 Four years later the magazine was anti-Truman rather than pro-Dewey; it never could warm up to the New York governor. It later observed that it “was just as wrong as everybody else” in its certainty of a Truman defeat. 53 In 1952 it had “cover stories” during the campaign on both Stevenson and Eisenhower; but the latter was clearly its favorite, and it gave prominence to Nixon’s attempt to connect Stevenson with Alger Hiss. In the 1956 campaign, Time attacked Stevenson severely, saying, for example, that he “promised the farmers everything but the moon,” and it ridiculed his running-mate, “Estes-lestes” Ke- fauver. 54 Meanwhile Eisenhower was the “happy traveler” in his campaigning. 55 Its reputation as a partisan Republican journal, gained in 19 5 6, 56 clung to Time between campaigns and in succeeding years. In 1960 there were “cover stories” for both candidates, with fairly even treatment; criticisms of both were pointed out as well as their elements of strength, but the magazine was quick to show anti-administration bias following the election.
The question of Time’s factual accuracy is not easy to discuss. Probably no issue of any periodical was ever wholly without error. Weekly publication instead of daily issue gives little if any advantage in this respect when coverage is comprehensive. Only the small and highly specialized journals can expect to be comparatively free from error. Time, in its early years, made a point of its claim of presenting events “accurately chronicled,” 57 and this made it particularly vulnerable to fault-finders. By the mid-fifties Time was employing no less than seventeen full-time staff members to take care of the letters written by readers to the editors, a preponderant number of which were “discussion” letters, arguing points of opinion, and “critical,” letters, putting fingers on alleged errors. 58 All these letters were answered, in polite and sometimes even flat-
52 Ibid., v. 44, Oct. 30, 1944, p. 11.
53 Ibid., v. 52, Nov. 15, 1948, p. 19.
54 Ibid., v. 68, Oct. 1, 1956, p. 19; Oct. 29, 1956, p. 17.
55 Ibid., v. 68, Oct. 29, 1956, p. 18.
56 See the analysis of partisanship in UAW Ammunition, v. 14, Dec. 1956, passim.
57 Time, v. 5, June 29, 1925, p. 21.
58 See What Makes Time Tick, folio 4.
tering terms, but by no means always satisfactorily to their writers. As for all men, it has been hard for Time editors to admit errors, but they have done so not infrequently. In the letters carried weekly in the front of the magazine, occasionally one appears with such a note as an apology to Admiral Nimitz for saying that his fingers were “gnarled,” or the statement: “Misled by a correspondent, Time regrets implying that Mrs. Wing . . . hurt her knee at Dr. Shaw’s school, where he has substituted square dancing for football. . . .” 59 James A. Linen once acknowledged occasional slips, telling us in his weekly “Letter from the Publisher” that Time kept a black book in which its errors were entered, with the proper corrections. 60 He did not tell us how large the black book was. It can scarcely be forgotten that the President of the United States once announced to an audience of many millions in a televised news conference that Time’s account of the abortive attack on Cuba’s Bay of Pigs beachhead in April 1961 was the most inaccurate story of the event he had seen. 61
By the 1960’s Time was listing on its “Contents” page more than seventy “Editorial Researchers.” “Research” is a word much abused; in contemporary usage, it may stand for looking up a word in a dictionary or gazetteer, or it may mean critical, discriminating, and exhaustive investigation, based on a knowledge of backgrounds and of the most authoritative sources. Certainly the senior editors, the associate editors, and the contributing editors, placed above the editorial researchers in the Time staff hierarchy, have dug and delved for much of their material, as true researchers must; and doubtless some of the seventy-odd young ladies have looked up statements in books and even used the long-distance telephone to obtain offhand information from specialists. But in the main, the “research” staffers have been checkers rather than researchers. “Charged with verifying every word, they put a dot over each one to signify that they have.” More importantly, we are told,
59 Time, v. 45, April 2, 1945, p. 9; v. 38, Sept. 29, 1941, p. 2.
60 Ibid., v. 46, Dec. 10, 1945, p. 15.
61 Ibid., v. 78, Sept. 1, 1961, pp. 14-15. This was an “excerpt” from a forthcoming article in Fortune. The President did not point out specific errors, nor were the details of the government’s part in the operation ever fully revealed officially.
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“their job is to make sure that the story as a whole adds up.” 62
There is a certain fascination about the long lists of staffers that Time carried in its “flag” after the 1940’s. This is exploited in William Saroyan’s play, “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” in which a subscription salesman for Time visits a middle- class home (a term that would offend Saroyan) and in the course of his sales talk begins to name some of the editors. Cabot, the man of the house, insists on repeating each name after him, rolling it on his tongue, and asking if he is “a college man”; but Leona, his wife, interrupts him and says, “Cabot, let the man talk!” So the salesman repeats some fifty names and then goes on, “The Editorial Assistants of Time Magazine are—” and Leona encourages him, “Yes, tell us who they are!” The salesman, getting the swing of it, then names some thirty more; and when he stops, Leona says wistfully, “No more names?” The salesman, whose own name is Wind- more, replies, “No, that just about winds up the editorial department.” But Leona begs him, “What were some of those nice names again?” and Windmore obliges. Of course, the family takes a subscription. 63 If Leona still existed in the 1960’s, she would be pleased to know that the list consisted of 235 names.
In 1960 came some shifts among Time’s top names and positions, with younger men moving up. James Alexander Linen III, who had been publisher since 1945, became president of Time Inc. A graduate of Hotchkiss School and Williams College, he had begun as an advertising salesman for Time in 1934 and had been advertising manager of Life before becoming Time’s publisher. Succeeding him as publisher of Time was Bernhard Machold Auer, former promotion and circulation director of the magazine. Otto Fuerbringer, a member of Time’s editorial staff for the preceding eighteen years, suc-
62 For a description of Time’s editorial processes, see The Story of an Experiment, pp. 10-11. Busch, Briton Hadden, pp. 136-39, presents a favorable treatment of Time’s research and checking system in its early years. For a detailed account of the black and red system of dots used by the checkers, see J. Wendell Sether, “News Magazines Go to Press,” Quill, April 1959, p. 24.
63 William Saroyan, “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” pp. 72-75, in Three Plays (New York, 1940).
deeded Alexander as managing editor in 1960, when Alexander became editor. Hedley Donovan, editorial director of Time Inc. from 1959, became editor-in-chief of Time Inc. when Luce took the title editorial chairman in 1964.*
Time Inc. management was always active, enterprising, ready for new ventures, whether it was purchasing a television station or building a paper manufacturing plant. New magazines were begun: Fortune, 1930; Life, 1936; Sports Illustrated, 1954. These were uniformly successful; the only stumble was an advertising journal called Tide, begun in 1927 and sold three years later, when Fortune was started. Architectural Forum was purchased in 1932, and twenty years later House and Home became heir to a part of successful Forum’s content.! In 1961 Time Inc. established a book publishing division, and soon thereafter Time-Life International set up a Books Department for selling translations of Time-Life books abroad.
Another adventure—this one based on the magazine Time itself and promoted largely by Roy E. Larsen—was “The March of Time,” which began March 6, 1931, as a weekly CBS radio news program paid for as promotion by Time Inc. It had been preceded by a New York area quiz show called “The Pop Question Game” on WJZ, begun when Time was only a yearling; but the network show drew a large national audience. After about a year on CBS, Time Inc. refused to pay the network for air-time and the program was dropped for about six months, during which CBS received so many complaints about its lapse that it was resumed on the basis of free time and free use of the network facilities. The motion picture series “March of Time” was produced by Twentieth Century-
* See footnote 1 for post-1964 changes in editorial personnel.
t In the summer of 1964 House and Home was sold by Time Inc. to the McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. In September 1964, Time Inc. ceased its publication of Architectural Forum. Time Inc. gave the publishing rights “as a gift” to the American Planning and Civic Association, now called Urban America, Inc., a non-profit educational organization, and publication was resumed with the April 1965 issue, under the same general manager and managing editor.
Time-Life International had begun Life en Espahol in 1953, its only foreign language magazine. In 1962, as a joint project with a local publisher in Japan, the magazine, President, modeled on Fortune, was begun. The same year, in collaboration with Editorial Abril of Buenos Aires, the general monthly, Panorama, began publication.
Fox in 1935, and at the peak of their success these shows were presented thirteen times a year at over nine thousand theaters (some in foreign countries) to an estimated audience of thirty million for each showing. But when the motion picture business declined about 1950, “The March of Time” was transferred to television; it marched out in 1954.
An important factor in Time’s history throughout these years was the increasing use of color—a development shared by many leading periodicals but not by other newsmagazines. Though occasional full-color covers began as early as 1928, and advertisers began using such illustration more frequently in the thirties, it was not until 1945 that Time first placed color pages in its editorial sections. The art department was the earliest beneficiary of this development, but in the next decade full color was extended to other sections—“Theater,” “Travel,” “Science,” “Modern Living,” and so on. In the 1960’s a total of eight four-color editorial pages in one issue was not uncommon, and at least a third of the advertising was so illustrated. 64
Time’s “Man of the Year” feature, including a full-color portrait of the great man on the cover (painted in latter years by such artists as Boris Artzybasheff, Peter Hurd, and Andrew Wyeth) to accompany a long “profile” sketch in the body of the magazine, became a feature of much interest to readers, many of whom proffered suggestions as to the selection of a subject each December. The list of men so honored began in 1927 with Charles A. Lindbergh; his picture and that of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1934) were the only “Man of the Year” portraits in black and white. 65
64 See Bernhard M. Auer, “Letter from the Publisher,” Time, v. 78, Nov. 3, 1961, p. 7. A large part of this color development has been made possible through research on color-printing techniques carried out by Time Inc.’s subsidiary, Printing Developments, Inc.
65 Following is a list of those honored by Time's “Man of the Year” recognition: 192 7, Charles A. Lindbergh; 1928, Walter P. Chrysler; 1929, Owen D. Young; 1930, Mohandas K. Gandhi; 1931, Pierre Laval; 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt; 1933, Hugh S. Johnson; 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt; 1935, Haile Selassie; 1936, Wallace Warfield Simpson; 1937, Gen. and Mme. Chiang Kai- shek; 1938, Adolf Hitler (on May 7, 1945, Time gave Hitler another cover portrait, with a great “X” scrawled across it); 1939, Joseph Stalin; 1940, Winston Churchill; 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt; 1942, Joseph Stalin; 1943, George C. Marshall; 1944, Dwight D. Eisenhower; 1945, Harry S. Truman
Time could well afford luxuries in illustration in the years following the depression of the 1930’s because it was increasingly prosperous; and the more it expended to make an attractive and informative magazine, the more its prosperity grew. It sold more than nine-tenths of its copies through mail subscriptions, and its renewal rate was high. It reached a halfmillion circulation in 1934, in the midst of the depression. When it absorbed the Literary Digest in May 1938, it gained thereby only a small accession to its list; but it attained the million mark in July 1942. By 1950 it had a million and a half, ten years later two million and a half, and by 1964 almost three million in the United States. It raised its subscription price in 1946 from $5.00 to $6.50 (from 15 to 20 cents at the newsstands) and in 1957 to $7.00 (25 cents at the stands); in 1964 it was $9.00 (35 cents a single copy).* *
Multimillion circulations were proving disastrous to many magazines shortly after the mid-century, partly because management of these periodicals thought it necessary to direct their appeal to the mass audience on all levels, as television did. But Time aimed at the mass level of college graduates. 66 To use the lingo of some sociologists, Time did not expect the “upper highbrow” (or the self-styled “intellectual”) to like it; but the “middle highbrow” and the “lower highbrow” were expected to compose its audience, with the addition of some am-
bitious “upper lowbrows”. With the colleges and universities turning out some half-million graduates a year, here was a large field from which to reap. Of course, this was by no means a specialized audience, but neither was it the general mass audience.
In 1941 Time initiated its Latin-American edition, the first magazine ever to be delivered by air express. Editorial content was identical with that of the New York edition, though advertising was not; later four pages of regional news were added. All was in English. Beginning with twenty thousand copies (yearly subscription $10.00), the edition had over eighty thousand by 1964. In 1943 a Canadian edition was begun; it has long been the largest of Time’s foreign editions, reaching over 250,000 in the early sixties. This also had four additional pages of regional news, eventually edited at Montreal, where the Canadian edition had been printed from airborne film. The Atlantic Overseas edition began in 1944—before the end of the war—“in Stockholm—inside the German blockade and right under Adolf Hitler’s nose!” 67 After the war, Time-Life International’s Atlantic edition of Time was printed in Paris from film flown in from New York and distributed by air to various points in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The total circulation of this edition had reached over 200,000 by 1964. Time Pacific was established in 1946 for similar distribution from Honolulu, Manila, Sydney, and Tokyo; in 1960 this was separated into two editions—one for Asia and one for the South Pacific. Four years later these had circulations of about 80,000 each.
It will be noted from the above dates that Time’s growth as an international magazine was correlated with the global outlook growing out of World War II. Time was a leader in supplying magazines to U.S. troops abroad. It was the first to offer a miniature “pony” edition for fast transportation overseas (November 1942) and the first to print a “fly-weight” edition for distributions to the armed forces in South Pacific installations—produced in Honolulu and sent by V-mail March 27, 1944—and it claimed many other “firsts.” 68 Be-
67 Time, v. 43, Jan. 24, 1944, p. 9.
68 Time, v. 43, April 10, 1944, p. IS.
fore the end of that war it was printed in twenty editions, on every continent except Antarctica. 69 *
Time had trouble, as was to be expected, with foreign governments because of its free-spoken ways. In 1936 it was in difficulties in England because of its treatment of Edward VIITs abdication. In 1939 it was banned from newsstand sales in England, Germany, and Italy for various reasons and for various terms; in Germany it did not return until after the
war. Luce, visiting in Paris in that year, found himself sued for five million francs by the Paris Press Association for libeling its members. He got off by saying he was sorry for a “too general indictment of the Parisian press,” 70 but later the venality of many of these papers was disclosed as one of the main causes of the French national catastrophe. Later Time had trouble with foreign governments growing out of stories in its various international editions. It drew Peron’s wrath in Argentina, and in Bolivia a 1959 article on that country’s sad economic condition caused an “international incident” and mob demonstrations against the U.S. embassy at La Paz. 71 The magazine has long been barred from the U.S.S.R. and its satellites.!
Though the circulation of Time’s five international editions totaled only 621,000 in 1960, the magazine undoubtedly found its way into the hands of many influential leaders and was important in the arena of world thinking. Moreover, it
was, on the whole, a good interpreter of its own country to
69 Time, v. 44, Sept. 18, 1944, p. 17.
* In 1966 Time International still has the five basic editions: Time Canada, Time Latin America, Time Atlantic, Time Asia, Time South Pacific, but there has been great expansion in the number of regional editions within the five areas. Altogether there are now thirty-two regional editions, and in addition, four military editions. These international editions, excluding the military, have over 800,000 circulation. They are printed in Montreal, Atlanta, Ga. (for the Latin American editions), Paris, Tokyo, Melbourne, and Auckland.
70 Time, v. 34, Aug. 28, 1939, p. 45.
71 Ibid., v. 73, March 2, 1959, p. 25. The sentence that most offended Bolivia did not appear in U.S. editions. It quoted a diplomatic official at La Paz as saying that Bolivia might as well divide its territory and its problems among its neighbors.
f As of March, 1967, no newsstands distribute Time in the U.S.S.R., but Time reaches 157 subscribers, probably almost all, if not all, officials of the government. The satellite countries of 'the U.S.S.R. each have some subscribers. Thirty-seven copies go into Red China. Poland has actually allowed some limited newsstand sale.
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readers abroad. Publisher Linen, reviewing the story of these editions, once wrote:
The Latin American experiment also demonstrated a basic journalistic principle: most men and women the world over want to read honestly reported news, not propaganda.
Many have disagreed with this belief. Within a year after the air edition began in 1941 ... a few well meaning people in the U. S. took us to task for publishing in South America the same news stories we distributed at home. They felt that in the interest of hemispheric unity Time Air Express should sugar-coat its stories about the U. S. and print only “diplomatic” (i.e., bland and friendly) news about the republics to the south. We would have dropped the whole export project rather than hoodwink readers in any such fashion, but we passed the complaint along to more than 400 business and political leaders in this hemisphere. Ninety percent of them came back with firm support for our decision. 72
Meantime, the advertising revenue of Time outpaced its circulation in growth. Through the 1950’s it maintained a third-place position among American magazines in annual advertising revenue, and in 1960 it “became the fourth magazine in history in which advertisers invested more than $50,000,- 000 for advertising.” 73 Advertising rates then ranged from $11,650 for a black-and-white page when used every week in the year to $23,815 for a single full-color advertisement occupying the fourth cover page.
Time Inc. enjoyed a net income in 1936, when the country was recovering from the worst of the great economic depression of that decade, of $2,700,000. In 1960, in which a limited “recession” occurred, it was $9,303,000. 74
Time’s editorial and management staff occupied various headquarters in its early years. At one time it shared, not very happily, a suite of offices with the Saturday Review of Literature. In the fall of 1925 it moved to Cleveland, a more central distribution point; but it returned to New York two years later, shortly thereafter contracting with R. R. Donnelly and
72 Time, v. 57, May 7, 1951, p. 18; see also seven of these letters in v. 38, July 28, 1941, pp. 4-6.
73 Magazine Industry Newsletter, March 25, 1958, p. 3; Annual Report to Stockholders, 1960, p. 14. [In 1965 Time was in second place in advertising revenue with $80,691,000; see Annual Report to Stockholders, 1965, p. 11.]
74 Annual Report to Stockholders, 1936, p. 6; 1960, pp. 6, 9. [By 1966 Time Inc.’s net income was $37,253,000.]
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TIME
Sons, of Chicago, for its printing and distribution. In 1940 it began a similar operation in Philadelphia for its eastern circulation; this was transferred to Old Saybrook, Conn., in 1962. In 1944 it set up a printing operation in Los Angeles for western readers, using offset printing from cellophane transparencies flown from Chicago. Later, printing plants in Washington, D.C., and Albany, N.Y., also turned out Time™
Time Inc. moved its editorial and management offices to the Chrysler Building in 1932, and soon thereafter began the erection of the great Time and Life Building at Rockefeller Center. In 1960 it moved into a new Time and Life Building at the corner of the Avenue of the Americas and Fiftieth Street. This structure, erected at a cost of $83,000,000, was owned jointly by Time Inc. and Rockefeller Center. It was Time’s tenth corporate home. Sixteen floors of the building were occupied by 2,200 Time Inc. employees; and five more, sublet at first, would doubtless be filled eventually with more workers for the Time Inc. family of magazines.
This magnificent building, “the tallest and most modern magazine office building in the world/’ was topped by a ninety- foot sign which flashed alternately upon awed night-time pedestrians forty-eight stories below the blazing words Time and Life. 76 The structure stood as a monument to the greatest magazine publishing success in history.*
75 Time, v. 43, Jan. 31, 1944, p. 15. [Printing of domestic editions began in Atlanta, Ga., in 1966.]
76 See the four-page color insert in Annual Report to Stockholders, 1960.
* This historical sketch was written in 1962, with some updating in 1964. Because Time magazine and Time Inc. have expanded extensively in the past five years, this growth has been noted in starred footnotes. The information in these footnotes was furnished by Frank R. Shea, assistant to the managing editor of Time, or was taken from So We Went Abroad — 20 Years of Worldwide Publishing by Time-Life International (New York: Time Inc., 1965).
In 1966 Time's world-wide circulation was nearly 4,500,000. Time-Life Books became one of the ten top book publishers in the world on the basis of its sale of sixteen million books.
Since 1962 Time Inc. has bought its fifth television station (1963), has branched out into the record business with Capital Records (1965), has bought the New York Graphic Society publishing house (1966) ; and has entered, with General Electric, into a project to create and market educational materials in the United States and abroad (1966). As would be expected, the number of Time Inc. employees has leaped since this original sketch was written. There are now over nine thousand.
On March 3, 1967, Henry R. Luce died. See Time, v. 89, March 10, 1967, pp. 26-33.
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