The Publisher (24 page)

As distinctive as
Time
’s language, and closely related to it, were the magazine’s opinions and attitudes. Luce and Hadden had promised from the start that
Time
would not be a “digest of opinion,” that it would have “no axe to grind,” that it would be “objective” and “unbiased.” And in many respects, at least in the beginning, they kept that promise.
Time
did not clearly favor any political party, and Luce, at least, was himself unsure in the 1920s of whether he preferred Democrats or Republicans. (He and Hadden voted for Calvin Coolidge in 1924; Hadden voted for Hoover in 1928, but Luce supported Al Smith.) Unlike in later years, when Luce’s own strong views on certain issues reliably shaped—and at times distorted—reporting,
Time
in the 1920s and much of the 1930s only rarely took clear or sustained positions. But the magazine was nevertheless filled with opinions, even if not consistent ones. Indeed, its insistence on expressing its own views on almost everything it reported, however random and varying those views may have been, was a fundamental part of its character.
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To some degree the opinionated tone of
Time
was simply a literary device, much like the magazine’s eccentric language. It reflected in part the generational irreverence of those who, like Luce and Hadden, had grown up during and after World War I and had been shaped by the skepticism and impatience with pretense of their time. Hadden, in particular, continued to emulate H. L. Mencken’s talent at ridiculing almost everyone of importance. The attitudes of
Time
, although not its literary style, had at least some things in common with Mencken’s the
Smart Set
, which he edited with George Jean Nathan and called “a magazine of cleverness.”

But
Time’s
outlook reflected more than a generalized irreverence. It conveyed as well the elitist cultural conservatism of its principal editors
and writers. On the one hand
Time
shared the contempt of Sinclair Lewis and others for the tastes and values of the lower bourgeoisie (or what Hadden, borrowing a term from Mencken, privately called on occasion the “booboisie”). The magazine only hinted at this contempt in its pages, knowing that its targets were, or could become, an important constituency for the magazine. But in the early years at least, there were many signs of condescension—the demeaning descriptions and nicknames assigned to people the editors considered crass and boorish, the sly anecdotes and dismissive phrases that made those they considered dull look pompous and ridiculous. (“It is the conviction of stupid people,” a
Time
review of an irreverent play stated, “that only that which is solemn may be profound and that to seem satirical is to be unsympathetic.”)
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Time
was similarly contemptuous of the iconclasts of its own generation who sought to overturn many of the canons of traditional high culture. Hadden and Luce were as hostile to artistic revolution as they were to dull conformity. In the very first issue of
Time
, the editors wrote witheringly of what they considered incomprehensible books. “Lucidity is no part of the auctorial task,” the editors wrote censoriously of modernist writers.
Time
was particularly contemptuous of what are now considered two of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century. “To the uninitiated,” the magazine described James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, “it appeared that Mr. Joyce had taken some half a million assorted words—many such as are not heard in reputable circles—shaken them in a colossal hat, and laid them end to end.” Of T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
, the writers dismissively noted, “It was rumored to be written as a hoax.” (The article was cryptically titled “Shantih Shantih Shantih,”
*
after the obscure last line of the poem.) Even less radical intellectuals attracted
Time
’s scorn. The witty, self-consciously “clever” writers and intellectuals who populated the Algonquin Round Table were, the magazine gratuitously commented, “the supposedly elect,” “log rollers and back-scratchers,” and really little more than “clever gossips.” Modern art attracted skepticism, too. Cubism, the magazine claimed, “is in danger of itself becoming a mere convention.” In the same issue
Time
ran a strong defense of classical education, because “Greek and Roman thinking is the core of our culture.”
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Time
was also distinctive for its fascination with powerful men and women. “People just aren’t interesting in the mass,” Luce once said. “It’s
only individuals who are exciting.” For decades, beginning with the first issue, virtually every cover of
Time
carried a portrait of an important man or, on rare occasions, woman (and once, in 1928, a basset hound, to draw attention to the Annual Dog Show of the Westminster Kennel Club in New York). The magazine chose a “Man of the Year” every January beginning with Charles Lindbergh in 1927. (There were only two “Women of the Year” in
Time’s
first fifty years—Wallis Simpson in 1937 and Queen Elizabeth II in 1953). Cover portraits—black-and-white drawings and photographs at first, gradually replaced by color images starting in 1929—became a signature feature of the magazine. For decades being selected for the cover of
Time
came to seem to many readers (and increasingly to the editors themselves) a very high honor. The magazine in fact attracted considerable criticism when on occasion it chose controversial or reviled people for the cover—for example, Al Capone in 1930 (smiling and elegantly dressed), which one reader called “an outrage to public decency”—as if the selection was by itself a sign of approval. But cover subjects were overwhelmingly people of relatively conventional distinction and respectability. Major public figures—statesmen, business leaders, generals, and the royalty of the worlds of art, entertainment, and sport—were the staples. Although most subjects were American, the Anglophilic Hadden and Luce included a heavy representation of English figures and a scattering of people from other nations. The profiles of cover subjects could be breathlessly admiring or, on occasion, bitingly critical, but they almost always had a heightened level of judgment and descriptive detail. (
Time
’s distinctive language could burnish a reputation as easily as it could tarnish one.) Cover stories were usually preoccupied with power, and so it was not surprising that the magazine focused on the world’s most powerful men. In the magazine’s first half century Stalin appeared on the cover twelve times, Roosevelt, Churchill, Franco, and Mussolini eight each, Hitler seven, and Chiang Kai-shek ten.
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The covers themselves were only symbols of
Time’s
deeper commitment to the role of powerful people in history. The opening passage of every issue was an account of the president’s week, no matter how trivial his activities. Receiving tickets to a World Series game that the president had no intention of attending was as newsworthy as signing legislation. Accepting the honorary presidency of the Camp Fire Girls attracted as much attention as his consideration of American membership in the World Court. The trivia of a president’s vacation—leasing a country house, getting “caught in a sodden, drenching shower” during a walk,
celebrating a son’s birthday—could occupy columns of text. Presidents were also, almost by definition, men of great virtue. Warren Harding, although “not a superman” like Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, was “important and successful as the embodiment of the American ideal of humility exalted by homely virtues into the highest eminence.” Coolidge, too, was a man of “genuine humility” and “flinty integrity,” who had developed a deep “kinship with his people.” Herbert Hoover, even at his lowest moments, was “a high-minded, able, industrious, conscientious individual who is devoted to his country, to the art of Government, to children,” with “unbounded faith in himself.” Only when Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House did
Time
begin to abandon its reverential tone.
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Like many Americans the
Time
editors were fascinated by Mussolini and by his apparent success in bringing order and stability to the usually chaotic politics of Italy. He was, the magazine noted, the “all-powerful,” “virile, vigorous” “autocrat of all the Italians,” a “miniature Napoleon.” The fascination was often indistinguishable from admiration—something
Time
also shared with many Americans, including many fellow journalists, in the 1920s. Mussolini,
Time
wrote, was a man with “remarkable self control, rare judgement, and an efficient application of his ideas to the solving of existing problems.” He was a person “of high moral integrity with a magnetic personality.” Looking back over 1925,
Time
concluded that there was “no doubt” that Mussolini had “worked wonders for Italy in the last year,” and that he deserved “unstinted praise and congratulations.”
Time
was, however, far from the most admiring journalistic chronicler of Mussolini. The Hearst papers were highly sympathetic (“He is a marvelous man,” Hearst himself said after being flattered by Mussolini in an interview). The long-serving
New York Times
Rome correspondent, Anne O’Hare McCormick, consistently idealized him. The
Saturday Evening Post
ran idolatrous stories throughout the 1920s.
Time
gradually darkened its view of Mussolini in the late 1920s and beyond, as his regime grew more brutal and militaristic, but the magazine was never as appropriately critical in those years as were at least a few other journals, among them Hadden’s former employer the
New York World.
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While Mussolini frequently seduced the editors of
Time
, Stalin had no such effect. To be sure, Stalin was of great interest to
Time
, as all great and powerful men were. But in most cases the magazine had great difficulty concealing its contempt.
Time’s
view of the Soviet Union itself—unencumbered by almost anyone’s firsthand experience of Russia—was
clouded in orientalist mystery. It was a “weird and mystic land, whose soul is steeped in the mysterious, the fire of whose eyes is sometimes fanatical, and whose life breath has been impregnated with flesh-creeping legends.” Stalin himself was a reflection of the darkness and mystery that characterized his nation: a man shrouded by a “taciturnity without beginning, without end.” The editors of
Time
, again like most Americans, understood him as the principal exponent of a radicalism they both detested and feared. Although the great “red scare” of 1919–20 was a largely discredited memory by the mid-1920s, hatred of bolshevism (as opposed to exaggerated fears of internal subversion) remained intense, even feverish. Soviet Russia was,
Time
noted, the self-proclaimed “graveyard of capitalism.” It was the enemy of Christianity, conducting an “anti-Religion crusade.” And it was a revolutionary power, whose “frankly avowed purpose is to foment in every land ‘The World Revolution of the World Proletariat.’” “Dictator Stalin,” as
Time
routinely called him, was a “coldblooded man of deeds” with a “mask of oriental ruthlessness.”
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The tenor of
Time’s
coverage of the world outside the United States was reasonably consistent with the attitudes of Luce and Hadden. But it reflected even more the views of one man: Laird Goldsborough, the talented and controversial Foreign News editor from 1925 to 1938. Goldsborough—five years younger than Luce and Hadden—came to
Time
almost immediately after his graduation from Yale, and he quickly solidified his power within the editorial staff through his virtuosity in writing the Foreign News section—almost entirely by himself—punctually and cleanly every week. In the pressurized world of the
Time
newsroom, causing no problems was a tremendous asset. Very early in his tenure, he became one of the few members of the staff whose copy Hadden, Luce, and later managing editors rarely edited in more than minor ways. And if Goldsborough frequently expressed views that were more vigorous or extreme than Hadden and Luce might have liked, they usually accepted that as the price of his skill and efficiency. (In any case Goldsborough’s views were infrequently very far from their own.)

Goldsborough was a strange, almost romantic figure. Partially disabled from childhood as a result of an accident, he walked with an elegant, gold-headed cane that was almost a part of his personality. His partial deafness added to his image of intimidating aloofness. He was an ardent admirer of Europe—its traditions, its culture, its aristocracy. He was skeptical of the modernist trends of his time. He was supremely confident in his own strongly held attitudes and opinions. He had a taste for
luxury, and in later years, during his extensive travels in Europe, he strained even
Time’s
legendarily generous expense accounts.
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His deep conservatism, both cultural and political, intensified his loathing of bolshevism, which shaped almost everything he wrote. His admiration for Mussolini, sometimes lavish, sometimes grudging, was primarily a result of his hatred of communism and Stalin, to which Italian fascism and Mussolini seemed a preferable if perhaps flawed alternatives. In the 1930s few American journalists were more hostile to the Republican cause in the Spanish civil war than was Goldsborough, who, not entirely inaccurately, associated it with communism. And few were more friendly to Franco, whom—like Mussolini—he viewed as a bulwark against bolshevism. Although Goldsborough expressed only contempt for Hitler, he failed to recognize the extent to which the Nazi regime endangered the world, and never showed much concern about the deteriorating condition of German Jews. He was not usually overtly anti-Semitic, but he clearly shared the belief of many Americans and Europeans that there was a special connection between Jews and radicals. In the mid-1930s he gave particularly virulent voice to this assumption in his attacks on French premier Léon Blum, who headed the nation’s first Popular Front government. Blum was a man of the Left but not himself a communist. According to Goldsborough, however, Blum’s “emphatic Jewishness makes the No. 1 French socialist thoroughly at home in Moscow.” He consistently referred to him as “Jew Blum” and claimed that he was “fired with religious fanaticism” (by which Goldsborough meant the combination of what he claimed was Blum’s ardent Jewishness and his hatred of fascism).
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