Henry Robinson Luce

Henry Robinson Luce 1898-1967, American publisher, b. Tengchow (now Penglai), China, the son of a Presbyterian missionary. After studying at Yale Univ. and Oxford, he worked (1921-22) as a reporter on the Chicago Daily News and the Baltimore News. In 1923, with Briton Hadden, he founded Time, a weekly news magazine that featured capsulated news accounts written in a brisk, adjective-laden style. After Hadden's death (1929), Luce became editor in chief (1929-64) of Time Inc. (now part of Time Warner) and subsequently founded Fortune (1930), a business monthly; Life (1936), a pictorial news magazine; and Sports Illustrated (1954). Through control of these magazines and a book division, Luce was generally considered the most influential magazine publisher in the United States since S. S. McClure , and also one of the most controversial. His critics maintained that Time reflected his personal leanings—Republicanism, anticommunism, and internationalism. He believed that objective reporting was impossible and encouraged his editors to express his own views in their articles, which were unsigned. Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce , were influential in national politics.

Bibliography: See R. T. Elson, Time, Inc. (1968); biographies by J. Kobler (1968) and W. A. Swanberg (1972).

Luce, Henry R. (1898–1967), magazine publisher and editor.Born in China, the son of Presbyterian missionaries, he graduated from Yale in 1920. With his college classmate Briton Hadden, Luce in 1923 founded Time magazine, the first and most successful news magazine. Possessing a knowing point of view, Time offered a weekly synthesis of news and culture in a distinctive style of compounded and invented words and inverted sentences. It appealed to middle‐class readers in smaller cities and towns whose local newspapers provided little national news or analysis.

Hadden's death in 1929 left Luce in control of Time Inc. He oversaw the creation of a lavish business monthly, Fortune, in 1930, and a spectacularly popular picture magazine, Life, six years later. Also in the 1930s, Time Inc., launched The March of Time radio news program and movie newsreel. In 1954, Luce started Sports Illustrated.

The expansion of his magazine empire coincided with changes in Luce's personal life. In 1936 he divorced his first wife, Lila, to marry the playwright Clare Boothe. Soon thereafter, he became more involved in public affairs. Although no reactionary, he opposed what he regarded as the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration's antibusiness policies. Together with other East Coast publishers and editors, he lobbied for American involvement on behalf of the Allies in World War II. In a famous 1941 Life essay, he contended that Americans had no choice. The twentieth century was, Luce wrote, “the American Century.”

To his frustration, Luce's magazines, up to the mid‐1940s, often expressed views at variance with his own. He replaced more independent‐minded editors, however, and by the 1950s, writers for Life and Time generally conformed to the publishers's opinions, notably his support for an aggressive stance against communist regimes worldwide. Only after Luce's death did his magazines begin to moderate their politics.
See also Anticommunism; Conservatism; Journalism; Luce, Clare Boothe.

Bibliography

James L. Baughman , Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media, 1987.
Robert E. Herzstein , Henry R. Luce, 1994.

James L. Baughman