The Publisher (17 page)

They were nothing if not presumptuous—two twenty-four-year-olds, with almost no money and less than two years of professional journalism experience between them, setting out to start a magazine at the tail end of a severe recession. But their youth and relative inexperience were in many ways advantages in the task they had embraced. If they had not still been cocky young Yale prodigies, if their outlook had been more tempered by the realities of the world, they might not have dared to imagine so bold a project. And because they were determined to create something, as Luce wrote, “totally different from anything now being given to the American public,” it was not entirely a disadvantage to have had relatively scant training.
¹⁶

From their earliest conversations about “the paper”—at Yale, at Fort
Jackson, South Carolina, during the war, and most recently in their apartment in Baltimore—their vision of their magazine was shaped by their sense of the inadequacy of existing sources of news, which were thus not models for their own task. Both men were critical of the daily newspapers of the 1920s—the impassioned Brit far more outspokenly than the methodical Harry. Hadden was particularly contemptuous of the Hearst and Pulitzer papers, whose sensationalism, he said, pandered to the ignorance of their working-class readers, whom he disdained as “gum-chewers.” But he and Luce were almost equally contemptuous of the “serious” newspapers—what they considered their leaden formulaic prose, their slavish adherence to the mechanical style of the Associated Press, and their excessive length. Anyone interested in lively or imaginative writing, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism wrote in 1922, “makes a nuisance of himself in the newspaper.” An eye for “objective facts” and “clean copy” were what editors should want. “People have to think too hard to read [the newspapers],” Luce observed of the dry, fact-laden broadsheets. Hadden, never afraid to attack sacred cows, was particularly contemptuous of the most respected newspaper of the day, the
New York Times
. It was, he liked to say—throwing the paper dismissively onto a table—“unreadable.”
¹⁷

The modern
Times
was the creation of Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the
Chattanooga Times
, who had moved to New York City just before the turn of the century to make his mark in the newspaper capital of the nation. He bought the floundering
New York Times
for $75,000 in 1896 and announced that he would transform it into a paper that would “give the news, all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is parliamentary in good society … impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect, or interest involved.” By 1922 the
Times
had long since established itself as the most serious and important paper in New York, and indeed the nation. “Taking” the
Times
was for many New Yorkers a symbol of membership in the educated elite, something close to a social obligation. But few people read the
Times
for pleasure. Its dense eight columns of small type, only occasionally relieved by pictures or illustrations, was daunting enough. But the sober language, the statesmanlike nonpartisan conservatism, the dutiful reporting of obscure political and diplomatic events, the vast transcripts of speeches and press conferences, the dry public documents, the scrupulous resistance to analysis or overt expressions of opinion—all contributed to the
Times
’s other, less-welcome reputation. It was not just the “newspaper of record,” it was also the “great gray lady,” or, as the legendary journalist
A. J. Liebling described it, “the colorless, odorless, and especially tasteless
Times …
a political hermaphrodite capable of intercourse with conservatives of both parties at the same time.”
¹⁸

Luce and Hadden found only a little more inspiration in the magazines of their time than they did from newspapers. There had in fact been something of a revolution in American magazines beginning in the late nineteenth century. The dominant journals of earlier decades—among them
Harper’s Monthly
, the
Atlantic Monthly
, and
Century
—were written explicitly for educated Protestant social elites and usually expressed their readers’ provincial literary tastes and their class and ethnic prejudices. But the new magazines sought, as one publisher put it, to convey the “whirlpool of real life,” and to do so in a livelier, more vivid way than had the staid, genteel publications of the past. The result was a dramatic increase in magazine circulation, which more than doubled between 1890 and 1905. (Newspaper readership increased by only about 50 percent in those same years.)
¹⁹

The new magazines achieved this impressive growth by charging less, by broadening the range of their stories, and by encouraging livelier and more accessible writing. As a result they reached beyond the narrow, elite audiences of their older competitors and engaged the interest of an emerging new, urban middle class, increasingly diverse in both background and interests. The highest-circulating genteel magazine of the late nineteenth century had been
Century
, with a readership of roughly 250,000. By the early twentieth century,
Munsey’s
—having transformed itself from a weekly to a heavily illustrated and slightly racy monthly, and having lowered its price from a quarter to a dime—was regularly selling seven hundred thousand issues a month, more than the circulation of
Century, Harper’s
, and the
Atlantic
combined.
McClure’s Magazine
, another low-price illustrated monthly, which specialized in heroic biographies and history before it turned gradually into the leading journal of the “muckrakers,” was selling nearly three hundred thousand copies an issue by the turn of the century.
Collier’s
, long a publisher of popular and prestigious fiction, added commentary on public affairs, war reporting by the famous Richard Harding Davis, muckraking investigative work by Samuel Hopkins Adams and others, and a heavy dose of controversial social gossip. Later it flourished by publishing lengthy excerpts from important books. Its circulation, about half a million in 1912, approached a million in the mid-1920s. The
Saturday Evening Post
, purchased and saved from bankruptcy in 1893 by Cyrus Curtis, became the largest-selling magazine in the country (its circulation
passed a million in 1908 and reached two million by the early 1920s) with its mix of Horatio Alger–like business stories, romantic fiction, Norman Rockwell covers, and conservative anti-immigrant politics laced with a vague anti-Semitism (one of its most popular features in the early twentieth century was a series of “funny stories about Jews”). Many other periodicals were also searching for an audience within the expanding middle class: Hearst’s
Cosmopolitan
, a lively melange of high and low culture and popular fiction, which had well over a million subscribers by 1920;
Vanity Fair
, reinvented by Condé Nast and Frank Crowninshield in 1913 as a sleek monthly “which covers the things people talk about at parties—the arts, sports, humor, and so forth,” and which acquired a relatively small but devoted readership among what was soon to be known as the “smart set;” and most important of all to Hadden and Luce, the
Literary Digest
, the only popular magazine that attempted to present real news.
²⁰

The
Digest
, which was to be
Time
’s principal competitor, was already a publishing legend by the early 1920s. Launched in 1890 by Isaac Funk and Adam Wagnalls—two Lutheran ministers-turned-publishers, best known in later years for encyclopedias and dictionaries bearing their names—it was modeled on several earlier efforts, in both Britain and America, among them the London-based
Review of Reviews
. Such magazines aspired to present readers with a wide selection of writing from other publications, which in an age before strict international (or even national) copyright laws was both cheap and easy to assemble. The
Digest
’s editors called it “a repository of contemporaneous thought and research as presented in the periodical literature of the world.” The
Digest
did not really synthesize the material it collected. It usually simply reprinted it (mostly unsigned and unattributed), often at great and redundant length. When it published straight news, it often chose the most detailed and extensive stories. A 1928 article entitled “A Free Hand for Coolidge in Nicaragua,” for example, sprawled over three densely printed (and densely written) pages: “A signal victory for sound principles and common sense is seen … in the vote of Republicans and Democrats in the United States Senate, fifty-two to twenty-two, in favor of keeping American marines in Nicaragua.” When it ran editorials from other publications, it tried to pair opposing views—an argument against the United States joining the League of Nations paired with one in favor of it, for example. It also cannibalized other periodicals for humor and advice columns, poetry, society items, and cartoons. It did no reporting, and very little writing, of its own—other than its eclectic
weekly quizzes on the contents of the issue (“What great European power has accepted the Kellogg plan to renounce war?” “What will take the pucker out of persimmons?”) and a gossipy feature called “Personal Glimpses.”
²¹

By 1920, its circulation well over a million, the
Digest
launched the first of its celebrated straw polls by sending out sixteen million postcard ballots to readers (and many others) all over the country, asking them to name their choice in the upcoming presidential election. The sample, although dramatically larger than that of any modern public opinion survey, had no real scientific basis; it simply reflected the
Digest’s
own subscriber list (largely middle class) and other lists it was able to acquire. Even so the
Digest
polls accurately predicted the outcomes (although not the margins) of four successive presidential elections starting in 1920, giving the magazine enormous publicity. The surveys also helped the
Digest
pick up subscribers—seventy thousand as a result of a 1932 straw poll on Prohibition alone.
²²

The success of the
Literary Digest
was both an inspiration and a challenge to Luce and Hadden as they contemplated a newsmagazine of their own. It proved that there was a large appetite for a “digest” of the news—that they were right in thinking that many Americans found most newspapers an inadequate or unsatisfying vehicle for learning about the world. It also suggested that they would face stiff competition. They themselves, however, were not intimidated by the
Digest
. It was, they believed, a staid relic of an earlier age—with its Christian earnestness (a legacy of its founding by theologians, who had envisioned it as a high-minded tool for “educators and ministers”), its essential humorlessness, and its dreary design. Their “paper” would be better.
²³

Back in New York, without salaries or any immediate prospects of them, they moved in with their families. Hadden went back to his mother’s home in Brooklyn, and Luce settled on the Upper West Side, near Columbia University, where his family was living during one of his father’s arduous fund-raising sojourns in the United States. At the same time that they were boldly launching new careers, they were also returning to the familiar rituals of family life—rushing home for dinner, going to family birthday parties and anniversaries, celebrating holidays. Both men also led active social lives in the circles to which their Yale experiences had given them entry, although they often had to make strained excuses to avoid events that would cost them money. But in many ways Luce’s and Hadden’s social lives were very different from each other.
Hadden preferred late-night excursions with colleagues and college friends to restaurants and bars. Luce was more likely to attend lunches and teas, to go to the theater or the opera, or to meet friends for dinner at the Yale Club (events mainly paid for by others).
²⁴

Mostly, however, they worked on their “paper.” Luce wrote confidently of their prospects a few days after arriving in New York: “This next month … will probably be pretty crucial. The first 10 days we spend marching from expert to expert, until we have convinced ourselves that there is no obvious, potent, reason why
Facts
cannot succeed. We then spend a week or 10 days amassing the necessary capital, and having done that, we hold our breath and jump!” But things did not go as smoothly as they expected. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and still they had failed to raise the money they needed. They alternated between periods of great optimism, even elation, and other periods in which they seemed almost to recognize the folly of trying to start a new national magazine at the age of twenty-four with no money and no reputations. “We were never surer of our idea than at this moment,” Luce wrote in March, one of many times when the project seemed stalled. “The only question is whether we are old enough, etc. etc., to put it over.” The fear of failure—of ceasing to be the dazzling golden boys they had been since Hotchkiss, or as Hadden once put it, of losing the “respect of my friends and acquaintances”—drove them forward almost as much as the dream of success.
²⁵

Even in their moments of greatest discouragement, however, Luce and Hadden stuck meticulously to their plan. The first step was drawing powerful and influential people into the orbit of their venture—asking advice from editors, publishers, and potential investors, and soliciting endorsements from the famous. It never occurred to Luce and Hadden that such people would refuse to see two unknown young men with no money or experience. For they understood instinctively how their social connections could ease their task. Their paths radiated outward from their fellow “Bones” alumni to the parents of their Yale friends, to other Yale alumni who remained loyal to the university, to a wider circle of eminent people to whom their Yale acquaintances provided access. They fanned out across New York—and up and down the East Coast—presenting their idea to prominent men, asking for advice, and, when the advice was encouraging, requesting a public endorsement. Not everyone was impressed. The well-known advertising executive Bruce Barton dismissed their plan as unfeasible: The
Literary Digest
, he said, already had a monopoly on magazine news—a warning they heard frequently from others as well. The former president of Harvard,
Charles W. Eliot (himself the ostensible editor of the
Harvard Classics
, a popular condensation of great books), huffily dismissed the idea of condensing the news as “disgusting and disgraceful.”
²⁶