LUCE, HENRY R. 1898-1967

Publisher, time, life, and fortune magazines

The American Publisher

Henry R. Luce was one of the most influential magazine publishers in the United States in the twentieth century. The magazines he began, Time, Life, and Fortune, had a profound impact on U.S. publishing and American public opinion. Time defined the modern newsmagazine, and Life established photo-documentary journalism. Moreover, the phenomenal success of these magazines gave Luce a platform from which to promote deeply held political and social ambitions. Wendell Willkie's internationalism was to some extent a product of Luce's influence, and the 1940 Republican candidate for president owed much of his popularity to Luce and his magazines. Luce championed U.S. assistance to China, intervention in World War II, and the escalation of the Cold War long before these issues became popular. His instincts both anticipated and seemed perfectly keyed to public interests. In a highly influential editorial of 1941 he argued that the United States should take advantage of World War II to subordinate economic competitors and restructure the world's political economy "for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." According to Luce, an "American Century" had dawned; after the war the public, heady with success and enjoying unprecedented prosperity, agreed. Luce seemed prophetic, and he was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost proponents of internationalism—the American publisher of the new American century.

Young Expansionist

The acclaim Luce enjoyed as a publicist for U.S. internationalism in the 1940s was the fulfillment of a lifetime's ambition. Son of a Presbyterian missionary to China, Luce adopted much of his father's crusading faith in the manifest destiny of the United States. Arriving with the first U.S. diplomatic and business missions, the elder Luce saw his task as not only involving the conversion of the Chinese to Christianity but also the expansion of U.S. political and economic institutions into Asia. It was a goal his son would never abandon, pursuing it, like his father, with an almost jingoistic zeal. Educated in China, England, and the United States, young Luce entered Yale in 1916, making a name for himself as a tireless and humorless journalist. Joining the staff of the Yale Daily News, Luce used the occasion of the entry of the United States into World War I to propagate his nationalism, advocating much the same international role for the United States as he would in World War II. Given his religious background, Luce found atheistic communism repugnant and also published the first of many anti-Communist broadsides in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Making Time

Following graduation in 1920, Luce took a series of editorial jobs, eventually relocating to New York. With a fellow Daily News alumnus, Britton Hadden, he set out to launch a newsweekly magazine, tentatively entitled "Facts." Unlike newsmagazines of the day, Luce and Hadden's glossy would be written secondhand, with the editors summarizing material appearing originally in newspapers and magazines around the globe. The new magazine, now titled Time, would also specialize in breezy, accessible prose, which became known among journalists as "Timestyle." Dropped articles and adjectives, inverted sentence structure, and a staccato punctuation that compressed the material for an intended audience of "busy men" were the main elements of Timestyle. Time also announced, in its 3 March 1923 first issue, that "complete neutrality on public questions and important news is probably as undesirable as it is impossible." From that moment forward, Time was not only a magazine intended to inform; it was a magazine intended as Luce's platform.

Advocate

Time, as well as later Luce developments Fortune (begun in 1929) and Life (begun in 1936), routinely championed the interests of eastern, Republican businessmen—a solid core of subscribers who weathered the Depression well. Luce advocated a laissez-faire policy as a solution to the Depression, backed Hoover in 1932, and opposed the New Deal. Luce also expanded his activities into new media, beginning a topical radio series, "March of Time," which featured sensational dramatizations of the week's events, complete with sound effects such as gunshots. Later he introduced a newsreel series with the same title. As the Luce empire grew, it became an important organ for international news, tilting the public toward Luce's particular conception of American internationalism by its presentation of events. Until the middle 1930s Luce and Time promoted fascism, especially that espoused by Mussolini, as a solution to the dangers of communism. As Hitler's regime spiraled to new depths of brutality, however, Luce followed his readership into Fascist opposition. Luce and Time were irate at the normalization of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1933 and continued to portray the Communist state negatively. China, in the midst of a civil war between Communists and Nationalists (as well as at war against the Japanese), in the mid 1930s earned repeated exposure in the pages of Time and Life, especially in the form of sympathetic articles on the Nationalist leader Chiang Kaishek.

Internationalist

After the Munich crisis of 1938, the Luce publications began to advocate U.S. intervention to oppose Hitler in Europe. In this Luce was bucking the tide of isolationist sentiment, especially within the Republican Party. He had strengthened his ties with the Republicans, backing Alf Landon in 1936. In 1940 Luce actively promoted a political outsider, Wendell Willkie, as the Republican nominee for president. Willkie, like Luce, was an internationalist, convinced that only the United States could impose order on a chaotic world. Luce was a trusted adviser, hoping to become secretary of state after a Willkie victory. His ambitions dashed with Willkie's defeat, Luce turned toward his second wife, Clare Boothe Luce, giving her the publicity she needed to win a seat in Congress in 1942. He also continued to press for a more expansive U.S. role in the world. Pearl Harbor greatly simplified his efforts. After the declaration of war he turned his publications toward the task of achieving victory, although he was unsettled that events had cast the United States and the Soviet Union as allies against Germany. By 1943 a Fortune poll found that 81 percent of Americans approved of the coalition with the Soviet Union and hoped to continue to pursue the alliance after the war. Luce, loathing Stalin and communism, was determined to prevent this.

Cold Warrior

Luce and his magazines were instrumental in promoting the Cold War by molding American public opinion against the Soviets. Time and Life accomplished this by subtle—and not so subtle—use of analogies and metaphors. For example, Life, in an essay on the devil, suggested he resided in Moscow. Both magazines were among the first press voices to suggest that communism and fascism—polar opposites in ideology—were politically equivalent and to make analogies between Hitler and Stalin. They consistently suggested that Soviet actions were filled with evil intent and advocated large-scale military build-up. They promoted domestic anti-Communists such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy (although later Luce would deny being a McCarthy supporter) and repeatedly attacked leading Democrats, such as Harry S Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, for being soft on communism. Some of this zealous anticommunism was due to Whittaker Chambers, a Time senior editor who would become famous for accusing a State Department official, Alger Hiss, of spying for the Soviet Union. Luce, however, was the main general of the anti-Communist crusade. His speeches to civic groups during this period are full sermons on the dangers of the Soviets and on God's choice of the United States as "a principal instrument of His will on earth." Luce was also the leader of the China Lobby, a group of conservative organizations that funneled millions of dollars in U.S. assistance to Chiang Kaishek in China. Luce featured the Chinese generalissimo repeatedly on the cover of Time, giving the public the impression that he enjoyed widespread Chinese popularity. This was not the case, and Chiang's corrupt and inept Nationalists fell to Mao's Communists in 1949. Luce was livid, and his magazines were among the first to echo the Republican charge that the Democrats had "lost" China. The charge, coming after the Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb and right before the Korean War, was fatal to the political prospects of the Democrats. They were crushed in the 1952 election. Luce was no doubt a political force.

Establishment

In the 1950s and 1960s Luce's influence and power were substantial, and his magazines became, more or less, organs of the American establishment—a term often used to describe the elite of conservative, corporate, anti-Communist internationalists centered in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Winston Churchill labeled him one of the seven most powerful men in the United States. His magazines, including a new recreational title, Sports Illustrated, were read by nearly 50 million people weekly, and his company had branched out into book publication, recordings, and entertainment. The 1963 fortieth anniversary of Time was the social event of the season, featuring over three hundred distinguished guests who had graced the cover of Time. With age his militant anticommunism mellowed, but he retained a keen interest in Asian affairs and was foremost among those advocating U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. In 1964 he turned over the management of the Time publications to Hedley Donovan, but he never really retired, continuing to applaud U.S. intervention in Vietnam and U.S. confrontation with Communist China. He died of a coronary occlusion on 28 February 1967.

Sources:

John Kobler, Luce: His Time, Life and Fortune (London: Macdonald, 1968);

W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Scribners, 1972).

LUCE, HENRY R. 1898-1967

Editor and magazine publisher

Magazine Empire

As the most powerful American media figure during most of the twentieth century, Henry R. Luce through his publishing empire dominated the magazine industry during the 1950s and wielded strong political influence. The cofounder (with friend and partner Briton Hadden) of Time, the first modern news magazine, Luce affected the way in which many Americans received their news. His other magazine ventures, including Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated, helped secure a media empire that in 1959 grossed more than $271 million.

Background

Luce's parents were Presbyterian missionaries, and he was born in China, where he lived until the age of fourteen. He arrived in the United States at age fifteen, enrolling at the prestigious Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. He met Hadden at Hotchkiss, working with him at the school newspaper and creating a journalistic vision they would continue to develop while at Yale University and afterward.

Launching Time.

Luce and Hadden graduated from Yale in 1920. Luce first went to Oxford, then to work for Ben Hecht at the Chicago Daily News. In 1922 he rejoined Hadden, then a reporter at the Baltimore News. A year later the two resigned from the News to launch Time. Selling stock in the new enterprise, Luce and Hadden began the magazine in 1923 with an investment of eighty-six thousand dollars.

Hadden's Death

The first issue was dated 3 March 1923 and sold twelve thousand copies. Luce handled the business aspects of the operation, while Hadden was the editor. In 1929 Luce and Hadden planned the start of a business magazine, to be called Fortune. Before the first issue, however, Hadden died. Luce was shaken, but he persevered in putting out the first monthly issue, which appeared in February 1930. Its expensive one-dollar-per-copy price was unheard of Despite the stock-market crash of the previous October and the incipient Depression, the magazine was a success.

Political Power

Luce continued to build his empire, expanding it into book publishing, radio and television-station ownership, and television programming. But the media power of the Luce empire expanded inevitably toward political power. Luce was an ardent Republican and a staunch cold warrior. He used his editorial power at Time and Fortune to circulate his views on capitalism, labor, communism, and, especially, Communist China. His support of Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader, after World War II in the Chinese revolution influenced U.S. foreign policy for almost thirty years. He was regarded as controversial due to the stands he and his magazines took, but he never claimed to be totally objective. "Show me a man who claims he is objective," he once told an interviewer, "and 111 show you a man with illusions."

Launch of Sports Illustrated.

The decade of the 1950s was the pinnacle of Luce's political influence. It was also the decade that saw Luce's last big magazine launch, that of Sports Illustrated. Although not a sportsman himself, Luce perceived a market for a recreation magazine in a postwar society that promised more leisure time. To prepare himself to publish such a magazine, Luce took courses in baseball, boxing, and horse racing. Sports Illustrated was an immediate success, with sales of 550,000 copies for its first issue, which was dated 16 August 1954.

International Influence

The raw numbers associated with the phenomenal success of Luce's media empire tend to understate his cultural import. The German magazine Der Spiegel summarized in 1961 Luce's influence in the United States and the world:

No man has, over the last two decades, more incisively shaped the image of America as seen by the rest of the world, and the American's image of the world, than Time and Life editor Henry Robinson Luce.

Every third U.S. family buys every week a Luce product, 94 percent of all Americans over 12 know Time. Luceferic printed products are the intellectual supplement of Coca-Cola, Marilyn Monroe and dollar diplomacy.

No American without a political office—with the possible exception of Henry Ford—has had greater influence on American society. Luce was the first-—-between the wars—to use the term American Century. Recently, at a party on board [Aristotle] Onassis' yacht Christina, Winston Churchill counted him among the seven most powerful men in the United States, and President Eisenhower, while still in office, called him "a great American."

Last of an Era

In a society entering a period of revolutionary change brought about by the new medium of television, Luce was the last U.S. print-media figure who commanded worldwide power.

Sources:

John J. Abele, "Publisher Stepped Down in '64 as Editor in Chief," New York Times, 1 March 1967, p. 33;

Noel F. Busch, Briton Hadden: A Biography of the Co-Founder of Time (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949);

W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Scribners, 1972);

Alden Whitman, "Created the News Magazine," New York Times, 1 March 1967, pp. 1,33.

Henry Robinson Luce

Henry Robinson Luce (1898-1967), American magazine editor and publisher, was the most powerful journalistic innovator of his generation because of his insatiable curiosity and consuming sense of moral purpose.

Born of American Presbyterian missionary parents at Tenchow, China, Henry Luce attended a British school from the age of 10 to 14 and then went to Hotchkiss Academy in the United States as a scholarship student. He entered Yale in 1916 and joined the Army in 1917. He graduated from Yale in 1920 summa cum laude and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He had formed a close friendship with Briton Hadden; editing the Yale Daily News, Hadden and Luce determined to found a weekly newsmagazine.

Luce studied for a year at Oxford University and then worked with Hadden on the Baltimore News. They left in 1922 to raise $86,000, with which they launched Time magazine in March 1923. By 1928 Time's profits came to $125,000. In 1929 Hadden died of a streptococcus infection. His obituary in Time concluded: "To Briton Hadden, success came steadily, satisfaction never."

Time was successful because its creators had captured the growing college-educated public with a frankly biased combination of news reporting, interpretation, and departmentalized coverage of a dozen other fields—all in a distinctive writing style, originated by Hadden, that featured brevity, brashness, and shock. Luce excelled as the editorial executive.

In February 1930 Luce's new project, Fortune, appeared, addressed to business executives. He encouraged talented writers to develop civilized expositions of America's business world. Archibald MacLeish, J. K. Galbraith, Dwight MacDonald, and Louis Kronenberger contributed to Fortune, while Fortune contributed to their own professional development. In 1932 Luce purchased Architectural Forum.

Few journalistic executives of Luce's generation could match his ability to organize and to gratify his curiosity and ambitions. None possessed the sense of moral purpose that sustained Luce in his Americanism, Republicanism, anti-communism, and anti-McCarthyism. In 1935 Luce divorced his first wife to marry the brilliant, talented Clare Boothe Brokaw. It was said they planned Life magazine on their honeymoon. Luce bought the name and subscription list of the humorous weekly Life and transformed it into a fresh and stunning experiment in photographic journalism. Life took only 2 years to reach a circulation of over 2 million.

Luce had pioneered new techniques of team journalism—in Time, the reporter-researcher-writer team; in Life, the photographer-writer team. In 1954 he launched Sports Illustrated. Retiring as editor in chief of all Time, Inc. publications in 1964, Luce remained the company's principal owner.

By the time of Luce's death, Life had a circulation of 750 million and Time a circulation of 350 million. Life had more than twice the advertising revenue of any American magazine; Time ranked second.

Further Reading

Background on Luce is in Robert T. Elson, Time, Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 (1968); John Kobler, Luce: His Time, Life and Fortune (1968); and John K. Jessup, ed., The Ideas of Henry Luce (1969). See also Noel F. Busch, Briton Hadden: A Biography (1949), and T. S. Matthews, Name and Address: An Autobiography (1960). □

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

Henry Robinson Luce 1898–1967, American publisher, b. Tengchow (now Penglai), China, the son of a Presbyterian missionary. After studying at Yale 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 second wife, Clare Boothe Luce , were influential in national politics.

Bibliography: See R. T. Elson, Time, Inc. (1968); biographies by J. Kobler (1968), W. A. Swanberg (1972), and A. Brinkley (2010).