BROOKE GLADSTONE: Columbia University history professor Alan Brinkley is author of the new biography The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century. Brinkley doesn't agree that Luce in the end betrayed Hadden. Rather, he says Luce was simply a businessman asserting his control.
ALAN BRINKLEY: It’s not as if he set about destroying memories of Hadden. It’s just that he was very insecure when Hadden died and was frightened that he would not be able to mobilize the staff around him. And so I think he felt that it was important to establish himself as the head of the company.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And, to do that, in part, launched Fortune Magazine.
ALAN BRINKLEY: I think there were two things that led to Fortune Magazine. One was that he felt that Time Magazine was Brit Hadden’s magazine, and he wanted a magazine of his own. And secondly, he wanted to create a business magazine that would be unlike any other business magazine. It would explore the character of capitalism. He believed in a kind of business success that would spread wealth widely among the people, both through labor policies that would elevate the wealth of workers but also through the growth of industry, which he saw as part of the great mission of American life. And that’s what Fortune tried to promote.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: He launched Life Magazine how many years after Fortune?
ALAN BRINKLEY: Six years, 1936.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What did Luce see as the mission for that magazine?
ALAN BRINKLEY: He wanted to create the most beautiful and riveting picture magazine ever published, and it was that. It was a magazine that could project a vision of what America was like, or at least what he wanted America to be like. Luce believed that under everything else there was a united America. There was a single culture that everyone was part of. And that’s what Life Magazine projected into the world, a sense of a kind of consensual America. That was not an accurate picture of what America was like. And by the time that he retired in 1964, this vision was collapsing around him, and Life became a very different kind of magazine as well.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So he launched Fortune in 1930, in 1936, Life Magazine – in 1935, another important acquisition, his second wife, [LAUGHING] Clare Booth Luce, an ambitious journalist, later an ambassador. But their marriage seemed to be more of a partnership than a love affair. Am I wrong?
ALAN BRINKLEY: It started out as a love affair. He was besotted by her, and it was sudden, very sudden. They met at a party in the Waldorf Astoria, and by the end of the evening he was proposing marriage.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] For such a cautious man, that seems to be uh-
ALAN BRINKLEY: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: - rather a rush to judgment, and a married man, no less.
ALAN BRINKLEY: He was a married man, and it seemed a happily married man. But suddenly Clare Booth Luce just shattered everything else around him, and he pursued her until she agreed to marry him. It was, in many ways, a disastrous marriage. They both had affairs. Luce twice tried to divorce her and marry somebody else. She fought back, and she won. In the late '50s he met a woman named Jean Campbell who was the granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, the great publisher in Britain. They had a torrid relationship that Clare eventually found out about. And the writings of Clare are [LAUGHING] really something to see. Let me just give you first an example of the titles of the essays that she wrote to herself: A Memorandum on Bitterness, Go in Peace or Stay in Peace, Suspicious of H.R.L.’s Motives, A Questionnaire on Love and Warmth, What Happens to Me Without You? And then here’s a letter that she wrote: “The wounds continue raw and bleeding. You also have wounded quite as badly my femininity. I do not own one acre or brick of any of our homes. The paintings Harry gave me for birthdays and Christmas’ were not really gifts to me but the property of Harry’s estate.”
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So the pains were both personal and practical.
ALAN BRINKLEY: Oh absolutely, yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: He remained throughout his life fascinated with China. Didn't Chiang Kai-shek appear on the cover of Time ten times?
ALAN BRINKLEY: He appeared often, including Man and Woman of the Year – the only time that ever happened – Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. The more unpopular Chiang Kai-shek became in China, the more support he got from Luce.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why?
ALAN BRINKLEY: He believed that Chiang Kai-shek was one of the great figures of history. And Luce cared so much about the future of China and of making China a sort of modern democratic nation, he saw Chiang Kai-shek as the only hope for that. But he ignored or dismissed all of the things that Chiang Kai-shek did badly, and there were many such things. Teddy White, the famous Time Magazine editor in China - they both believed in Chiang Kai-shek, but Teddy White lost that belief and began to write about Chiang Kai-shek as someone who had failed. And Luce was furious, and that led to his departure from Time, Inc.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In 1941, Luce published an editorial in Life Magazine called The American Century. Why did it become so important?
ALAN BRINKLEY: The American Century was in part a piece of propaganda to prepare Americans for their inevitable entry into World War II. But part of what he thought needed to be said was that this war was going to transform America into the great nation of the world, maybe the great nation of world history. So let me read just a passage of this, because it’s really quite extraordinary: “We are the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization, above all, justice, the love of truth, the ideal of charity. It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called ‘a little lower than the angels’.”
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Could have been written by Teddy Roosevelt.
ALAN BRINKLEY: It could have been. And, in fact, it was inspired by a valedictory address that he gave at Yale quoting Theodore Roosevelt.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And is it precisely therein where most of the criticism of Henry Luce centers, a kind of blinkered chauvinism, perhaps, a blindness to America’s own failings?
ALAN BRINKLEY: Well, to the left, in particular, especially in the '40s and '50s, when the Communist left was still a significant force, they hated these ideas that America would be the great capitalist leader of the world. But equally infuriating to readers of the magazine, who just wanted a magazine that would sound fair in the treatment of politics, in much of the '40s and '50s, Time Magazine was not fair. By 1952, there hadn't been a Republican president in 20 years, and Luce was desperate to see a Republican elected president. And he loved Eisenhower, and through the whole eight years of his presidency the magazine was constantly supporting and admiring Eisenhower. And it infuriated many readers, although not too many gave up their subscriptions.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think his magazines did for America?
ALAN BRINKLEY: Well, I think the part of Luce magazine that might be the most revealing is a feature that was very popular in the '30s and '40s called Life Goes to a Party – lots of glittering, wealthy people having parties in sensational settings, also, people having proms in high school gyms and people dancing in Harlem and people having reunions in fields in Iowa. Life Goes to a Party was consistently upbeat and embracing, and it gave you a sense that everybody has the same goals, to be happy, to be Americans. Life Goes to a Party was the epitome of what Life represented, I think.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Everybody has a party to go to in “Life.”
ALAN BRINKLEY: In “Life,” that’s right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Alan, thank you so much.
ALAN BRINKLEY: My pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Alan Brinkley is professor of American history at Columbia University. His book, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, is published by Knopf.
