LUCE, HENRY

(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.

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).

Thomas C. Leonard

See also Magazines and Newspapers.