Henry R. Luce

American editor and publisher

• Born: April 3, 1898
• Birthplace: Tengchow (now Penglai), China
• Died: February 28, 1967
• Place of death: Phoenix, Arizona

Luce established a powerful journalistic empire with magazines such as Time which took survey of all the world Life, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune, and used this power to influence American politics and foreign policy for almost four decades.

Early Life

Henry R. Luce (lews) was born in China, the son of American Presbyterian missionaries. His early years were spent in the relative isolation of a missionary compound, where he lived with a few dozen Westerners and their Chinese servants. In 1900, the Luce family and other missionaries fled to Korea because of the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising of the Chinese who despised the foreigners because of their negative influence on China and their arrogant attitudes. After European and American troops suppressed the outbreak, the Luce family and other missionaries returned to China.

As a boy, Luce was extremely intelligent and remarkably serious. He was an avid student, and all of his life he was a passionate collector of facts and information. Sent to a British boarding school on the Chinese coast, he developed an intense, sometimes belligerent patriotism that he expressed freely and forcefully.

In 1912, young Luce was awarded a scholarship to the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, where he met Briton Hadden. Hadden, Luce’s equal in intelligence, was also popular, charming, and socially graceful qualities that eluded Luce then and later. Although the two were soon close friends, their relationship held a constant, hardly muted air of fierce competition.

This competition continued when the two entered Yale in 1916. Both coveted positions on the powerful Yale Daily News, and both were selected to serve, although Hadden took the more prestigious post of chair, while Luce ranked below him as editor. On a campus whose older students had already enlisted in World War I, Hadden and Luce early gained considerable authority; both of them clearly enjoyed the experience.

Hadden and Luce planned to start their own magazine following graduation. After working for a series of newspapers, the two moved to New York in 1922 and began raising money. They were aided by their excellent Yale connections the mother of one classmate invested twenty thousand dollars and within a relatively short period of time had amassed eighty-six thousand dollars. With this, they launched Time magazine, the first issue rolling off the presses on March 3, 1923.

The two young editors were largely responsible for writing the early issues and needed endurance and energy. These were qualities Luce possessed in abundance throughout his life. Restless, tireless, endlessly curious, he relentlessly interrogated companions, associates, and complete strangers. He was tall and strongly built, with brilliant, piercing blue eyes and shaggy brows. Balding as he grew older, he had hearing problems that increased his tendency to bark out his statements in sharp, powerful staccato. His staff was cowed by his dogmatic assurance and insistent commands.

Life’s Work

Time was not completely novel in journalism: There were other newsmagazines that offered a broad survey of national and world activities. The difference was that Time presented the week’s events in a bright, colorful prose style. Hadden and Luce used newspaper accounts and items from wire services for their content and rewrote these for the magazine. Two devices, introduced by Hadden and perfected by Luce, marked Time: the use of epithets and an inverted sentence style.

The first device, which Hadden probably learned in his Greek classes at Hotchkiss and Yale, used highly descriptive adjectives for persons. Those who appeared in Time were likely to be beetle-browed, tough-talking, even snaggletoothed. The second method rearranged the expected order of English sentences to startle and provoke the reader. Its effect was best captured in a parody by Walcott Gibbs when he wrote, “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.”

While the new, breezy writing style made Time pleasurable to read, there was a darker side that became increasingly prominent. Time seemed to be objective and factual, but its reporting was carefully loaded to favor Luce’s causes. Politicians whom Luce admired were likely to be steely-eyed and firm-talking; opponents were more likely to be snaggletoothed or potbellied. These and other, more serious, distortions were present in the Luce press from the beginning.

While not an immediate sensation, Time soon began a steady upward climb in circulation. Its compressed news stories appealed to businessmen; its clever style was prized by the sophisticated; schools and libraries valued its coverage of cultural and artistic events. By 1926, the magazine was firmly established, the founders were becoming enormously wealthy, and Luce was the youngest man to receive an honorary Yale degree.

In 1928, eager to expand, Luce began drafting ideas for a new magazine to be a celebration of American free enterprise. At first titled Power, it would later be known as Fortune . Hadden was cool to the idea, but in 1929, he died suddenly from influenza. Luce quickly bought up enough shares to take control of Time; he would keep that control until his death.

Once in charge, Luce directed his press into three causes that dominated his entire career: his vigorous support of American interests worldwide; his desire to see China united as a Christian and democratic nation; and his absolute and unalterable hatred of communism. In a sense, the enormous power generated by his publications was created to accomplish these goals.

As an opponent of communism, Luce was prepared to overlook the excesses of its opponents. The July, 1934, issue of Fortune, for example, was devoted to Italy and showed open admiration for Benito Mussolini and his fascist regime. In 1935 and 1936, Time clearly sided with Mussolini during his brutal invasion of Ethiopia, and Time writers mocked Emperor Haile Selassie in terms that were both belittling and racist. During the Spanish Civil War, the Luce press was predictably pro-Franco.

Time’s attitude toward Adolf Hitler was colored by the dictator’s avowed anticommunist stance. The German reoccupation of the Rhineland received favorable notice, and when Hitler announced the creation of the Luftwaffe, an action specifically forbidden by the Versailles Treaty, Time lightly compared him to a boy caught sneaking out of a jam closet. It was not until the advent of war that Luce and his publications discovered the full extent of the Nazi menace. By the war’s end, Luce had already declared his own cold war against the Soviet Union; he made it clear that he would have preferred open hostilities.

The lifelong obsession with China was a constant theme in Time and other Luce magazines. Although Luce did not meet Chiang Kai-shek until 1941, he had been a supporter of the Chinese leader since the mid-1930’s. Chiang was a convert to Christianity and a fierce anticommunist, both essential traits to Luce. Time featured Chiang on its cover often, and its articles urged closer American support and greater American aid for Chiang’s Nationalist Party. Even after the Communists had swept Chiang from mainland China in 1948, Luce still dreamed of and worked for a triumphant return for his hero. In the United States, this meant fierce, often brutal attacks in Luce publications on those responsible for the “loss of China” and any who showed signs of being “soft on communism.”

Luce’s third great theme, his intense Americanism, embraced the other two and merged them into a transcendent whole. After World War II, he called for an “American Century,” in which the United States would have no equal in the world but would be the supreme arbiter of events. Naturally, to Luce, this meant the eventual destruction of communism, a struggle he preached with apocalyptic intensity.

To obtain these ends, Luce could call on an imposing media empire to influence opinion. After Time and Fortune proved successful, he launched the picture magazine Life in November, 1935, with his wife, journalist and playwright Clare Boothe Luce. An immediate success with the public, Life would be a mighty force until vanquished by television and speciality magazines in the 1970’s. Until then, however, it had enormous impact on Americans, both public and private.

Other Luce ventures included newsreels (Time Marches On), radio programs, and the magazine Sports Illustrated. At the height of its power, the Luce press may have reached as many as one-third of the total adult literate population in the United States.

Although Luce was devoted to this empire and its works, there was a personal side to his life. As a reporter in Chicago in 1921, he had met Lila Ross Hotz; they were married in 1923. Nine years later, Luce met and quickly fell in love with Clare Boothe Brokaw. Abruptly, Luce informed Hotz that he wanted a divorce; in 1935, he remarried.

Clare Boothe Luce, as she is inevitably known, was a remarkable woman: a playwright (The Women, 1936), politician (two-term Republican congresswoman from Connecticut), and diplomat (ambassador to Italy after World War II), she matched Luce in intellect and ambition.

Henry R. Luce also had political yearnings that were never satisfied. Hesitant to seek elective office, despite the massive power of his magazines, he hoped for appointment as secretary of state under a Republican administration. Harry S. Truman’s stunning upset over Thomas Dewey in 1948 robbed Luce of his best chance for the office. He thereafter offered his forceful advice through the pages of Time and Life and was a powerful influence in the Republican Party.

Unable to relax, a compulsive chain-smoker, and almost utterly humorless, Luce drove himself all of his life at a relentless pace. In February, 1967, he suffered a coronary occlusion at his home in Phoenix and died immediately.

Significance

For a free press to function in a democratic society such as the United States, there are two requirements: The government must be tolerant and the media must be impartial. Certainly no newspaper or magazine ever published has achieved total objectivity, but all responsible journals strive consistently toward that goal. It was the great failing of the Luce press that it rejected this search for objectivity and instead imposed its own view on its readers. This was particularly damaging in three ways.

First, the slanting of news was done covertly. Time articles seemed to be objective news reports, but their use of adjectives, their turns of phrase, and their juxtaposition of quotations all created a carefully designed viewpoint for the reader, without his or her knowledge. This viewpoint was demanded by Luce, who was passionately convinced of his views and who seemed to believe that the traditional impartiality of the press would only be an impediment to the larger truth as he saw it.

Second, the techniques used were often destructive. Careers, lives, even national events were adversely affected by the Luce press’s editorial bias. At home, Time supported the activities of communist-hunters such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, despite the wrecked careers of innocent persons and the dangers to traditional American liberties. Abroad, Luce advocated the forceful extension of American interests. During the Korean War, for example, he called for an open confrontation with Communist China, arguing that this stance would not necessarily mean the commitment of U.S. troops; only the use of nuclear weapons could have achieved this end.

Finally, Luce’s media empire was so large and reached such a vast audience that its negative effects were magnified. For millions of Americans, Time and Life were the sole or major source of news; when this news was slanted or distorted, a huge segment of the American public was robbed of its ability to reflect seriously and decide responsibly on matters of great importance.

Neither Luce nor his press was completely malign. There was much that was good in Time and the other publications: a brisk, lively writing style; a wide, if fleeting, review of world events; and greater attention to cultural, artistic, and literary items. Life became justly known for the exceptionally high quality of its photography, many of the photographs becoming indelible images of the twentieth century. If, on balance, it must be said that Luce was more concerned with the power of the press to influence, rather than inform, it should be added that he created and sustained a mighty media empire that was capable of both.

Bibliography

Elson, Robert. Time Inc: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise. 3 vols. New York: Atheneum, 1968-1986. This is the “official, authorized history” of Time, as told by staff writers. The three volumes are filled with an enormous amount of detail (especially financial) and a wealth of historical anecdotes (usually favorable) that demonstrate clearly that Time was a world-spanning enterprise.

Halberstam, David. The Powers That Be. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. A study of the rise and influence of the major news media in the United States during the twentieth century. Luce’s empire is placed in perspective alongside such media giants as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Columbia Broadcasting System. Extensively researched and excellent in exploring the relationship of the media to American politics.

Harrison, S. L. Twentieth-Century Journalists: America’s Opinionmakers. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. “Henry R. Luce: Time, Life and the American Century” is one of the chapters in this collection of biographies.

Herzstein, Robert E. Henry R. Luce, “Time,” and the American Crusade in Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Describes how Luce used his publications and his influence to advance his own ideological agenda for Asia.

Kobler, John. Luce: His Time, Life, and Fortune. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. Although written by a veteran Time staffer, this biography retains much of its objectivity and fairness. Provides a good introduction to Luce’s life and career but should be used along with W. A. Swanberg’s more complete (and critical) biography.

Shadegg, Stephen. Clare Boothe Luce: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. A favorable, even admiring biography of the talented Clare Boothe Luce, interesting in his portrayal of the relationship between husband and wife, with its own undercurrent of competition and rivalry.

Swanberg, W. A. Luce and His Empire: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. A lengthy, well-researched biography of Luce and his press that does not shirk from pointing out the many journalistic faults that press had. Swanberg had access to many in the Luce organization and used his sources to give a fascinating review of Luce’s career.