Henry Luce

For more information on Henry Robinson Luce, visit Britannica.com.

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).

(1898-1967), journalist and publisher. Luce, the son of a Presbyterian missionary in China, felt an outsider among the well-to-do students at Hotchkiss and Yale. His answer in 1923 was to create Time magazine in an effort to make himself the arbiter of America's taste and destiny. The magazine was a distillation of twenties' journalism, but not a copy, for no one had ever thought of briskly summarizing the week's news. By the end of the decade the experiment was making money, and the untimely death of his partner, Briton Hadden, left Luce in charge. He built up the staff and led them to stories that had seldom been written about before. He subsequently launched Fortune (1930), Architectural Forum (1934), and Life (1936), which was the first successful weekly magazine of photojournalism. Sports Illustrated (1954) was the last magazine developed under his leadership. Luce also did innovative work for radio, newsreels, and television, and his Time-Life Books became a major publishing house. Until 1964, he supervised all of his enterprises personally.

Both the style and substance of Luce journalism was under constant attack. "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind," Wolcott Gibbs wrote in a parody of Time. Adjectives in Luce magazines were regarded warily by people in public life. Luce's objectives were clear enough. He believed in figures of destiny--politicians, entrepreneurs, spiritual leaders--and put them on the covers of his magazines and sought their company. Like his missionary father, he saw Christian purpose in global change and never doubted his ability to shape the outcome. (On the other hand, he never mastered simpler tasks such as driving a car or ordering in a restaurant.) Luce was attracted, at least for a time, by strong men, such as Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco, and he was loyal to weak men he hoped to make strong, such as Chiang Kai-shek of China and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. He fought the Democratic party domestically and, as a fierce anticommunist, counted on ex-radicals to spread his message. Luce exerted his greatest influence on U.S. policy toward China. His determination not to recognize the Chinese Revolution was not balanced by any comparable force in the American media and helped immobilize a generation of policymakers.

He liked the intellectual excitement of dissenters on his staff, but what they reported seldom got into his magazines. Theodore H. White, who lost his job with Time when he disagreed with Luce about China, admitted that "it was exhilarating to be working for a man who could discuss, all at the same time, the Bible, Confucius and the itchy gossip and color which sells readers on a magazine." No critic of Luce has underestimated his achievement on two points. He said that journalism should take in the full cultural life of the times (the "back of the book" in Time) and that America's reach was global: the "American Century" had begun. Luce made his fellow journalists accept both premises.

Bibliography:

Robert T. Elson, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 (1968) and The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1941-1960 (1973).

Author:

Thomas C. Leonard

See also Magazines and Newspapers.

Quotes:

"Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight."

Luce with wife Clare Boothe Luce (1954)

Henry Robinson Luce (April 3, 1898 – February 28, 1967) was an influential American publisher.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Alleged lovers 3 Further reading 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Luce, known to his friends as "Father Time," was born in Penglai City, China, the son of Elizabeth Middleton (née Root) and Henry Winters Luce, who was a Presbyterian missionary. He received his education in various Chinese and English boarding schools and at 10, traveled to the China Inland Mission Chefoo School, a boarding school at Yantai on the Shandong coast. At 14, he traveled to Europe alone, then to the U.S. arriving at the age of 15 to attend the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.

Luce split his time between waiting tables after school and editing for the Hotchkiss Literary Monthly, holding the position of editor-in-chief. In 1920, he graduated from Yale College, where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. During his senior year at Yale, Luce was tapped into the elite secret society, Skull and Bones. At Hotchkiss, he first met Briton Hadden, who would become a lifelong partner. At the time, Hadden served as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. Luce worked as an assistant managing editor. The two continued to work together at Yale, with Hadden as chairman and Luce as managing editor of the Yale Daily News.

Luce, recalling his relationship with Hadden, said, "Somehow, despite the greatest differences in temperaments and even in interests, we had to work together. We were an organization. At the center of our lives — our job, our function — at that point everything we had belonged to each other."

After being voted "most brilliant" of his class at Yale, he parted ways with Hadden to embark for a year on history studies at Oxford University. During this time he worked as a cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News. In December 1921, Luce rejoined Hadden to work at The Baltimore News.

Nightly discussions of the concept of a news magazine led the two, both age 23, to quit their jobs in 1922. Later that same year the two formed Time Inc. It is said that the two originally thought of TIME Magazine during their time in the "tomb" of Skull and Bones. Having raised $86,000 of a $100,000 goal, the first issue of Time was published on March 3, 1923. Luce served as business manager while Hadden was editor-in-chief. Luce and Hadden annually alternated year-to-year the titles of president and secretary-treasurer. Upon Hadden's sudden death in 1929, Luce assumed Hadden's position.

Luce launched the business magazine Fortune in February 1930 and founded the pictorial Life magazine in 1936, and launched House & Home in 1952 and Sports Illustrated in 1954. He also produced The March of Time for radio and cinema. By the mid 1960s, Time Inc. was the largest and most prestigious magazine publisher in the world. (Dwight Macdonald, a somewhat reluctant employee at Fortune during the 1930s, referred to him as "Il Luce".) Among media writers, Luce's cryptical editor's comment survives him: "Needs work."

Cover of TIME September 17, 1951; depicting the World Peace Council as a front organization of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin

During his life, Luce supported many programs like Save the Children Federation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and United Service to China, Inc.

Luce, who remained editor-in-chief of all his publications until 1964, maintained a position as an influential member of the Republican Party.^[1] Holding anti-communist sentiments. An instrumental figure behind the so-called "China Lobby", he played a large role in steering American foreign policy and popular sentiment in favor of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling in their war against the Japanese. (The Chiangs appeared in the cover of Time eleven times between 1927 and 1955.^[2])

Once ambitious to become Secretary of State in a Republican administration, Luce penned a famous article in Life magazine in 1941, called "The American Century", which defined the role of American foreign policy for the remainder of the 20th century (and perhaps beyond).^[1]

Luce had two children — Peter Paul and Henry Luce III — with his first wife, Lila Hotz. He married his second wife, Clare Boothe Luce in 1935, who had an 11-year-old daughter that he raised as his own. He died in Phoenix, Arizona in 1967. At his death he was said to be worth $100 million in Time Inc. stock. Most of his fortune went to the Henry Luce Foundation. He is interred at Mepkin Plantation in South Carolina.

Mr. Luce was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1977.

According to the Henry Luce Foundation, Henry Luce III died September 8, 2005, age 80, on Fishers Island, New York, of cardiac arrest.

Alleged lovers

Ralph G. Martin's book Henry & Clare: An Intimate Portrait of the Luces claims that Henry had extended relationships with Jean Dalrymple (a Broadway producer and theatrical agent) and Mary Bancroft (who, among other accomplishments, had been a wartime spymaster for the OSS). According to Martin, Clare also had many lovers. Henry's liaison that most seriously threatened his marriage to Clare involved Lady Jeanne Campbell, granddaughter of the British press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook. TIME in 1956 found a minor job in its picture department for Lady Jeanne. Luce became so openly smitten with this cheerful redhead, 31 years his junior, that rumors of the affair appeared in gossip columns. Lady Jeanne eventually married novelist Norman Mailer.

Martin's claims are controversial. An article in the August 26, 1991 issue of TIME states that "Henry & Clare is rife with errors, undocumented innuendo, non sequiturs and contradictions. Martin shows little understanding of how the Luce organization worked; the portraits of his principals are caricature-crude, especially in the case of Clare. In biography even more than architecture, God is in the details. By that standard, Henry & Clare deserves the scathing verdict that Luce often penciled on drafts of unsatisfactory stories: 'Needs work'."^[3]

Further reading

• Brinkley, Alan. The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (2010)
• Baughman, James L. Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (2001) excerpt and text search
• Elson, Robert T. Time Inc: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 (1968); vol. 2: The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History, 1941-1960 (1973)
• Herzstein, Robert E. Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia (2006) excerpt and text search
• Morris, Sylvia Jukes. Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce (1997)
• Swanberg, W. A. Luce and His Empire (1972), outdated popular history

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Henry R. Luce: End of a Pilgrimage". - TIME. - March 10, 1967
2. ^ Chiang covers at TIME
3. ^ Elson, John. - When Harry Met Clare . . . - TIME Magazine - August 26, 1991

External links

• TIME biography
• The Henry Luce Foundation
• Whitman, Alden. "Henry R. Luce, Creator of Time–Life Magazine Empire, Dies in Phoenix at 68," The New York Times, March 1, 1967.
• PBS American Masters
• Henry Luce at Find a Grave

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