Speaker You know, we were actually speeding. Speeding. Good. OK. It is today. Wednesday, March 19, 2003, we are interviewing two Bachmann for the loose project for American Masters. This is tape, one of that interview and. To go right to the heart of it, which is what you talked about before, what would you say? It’s important for us.
Speaker I think you, more than any single individual, invented modern journalism by modern journalism. I mean, he invented a journalism of summary that was also it was also interpretive. And if you consider the body of Lucie’s works, you look at all the publications. They that he helped to found or found it. You will see one common pattern and that was that Lewis is trying to create a a a journalistic technique that told you what happened or effective, tell you what happened and explain it at the same time.
Speaker That was it, was it?
Speaker It really was. There were predecessors to two time in particular 19th century magazines that affected to do what time did. But none had the the confidence, the arrogance to to interpret what had happened in the previous week as assuredly as. As Times editors did beginning in the 1920s and 30s.
Speaker Now, when we talk about what is his significance, he just talked about his significance as a journalist. Are there other ways in which he was an American?
Speaker Let me let me back up, if I may. But when want talk about significance of journalism, if you consider the fact that we live in an information age, we really don’t. We live in an age of guided summaries. Most of the information that is delivered to us in broadcast form or print form really is interpreting information, summarizing news for us. And I think Lou’s anticipated that development. In 1910, news was less mediated than it would be in 1930 or 1940. You had that you were more likely to have more quotes. From a speech today, if you consider a news, a news report of a president’s speech or of an event, you are you are getting more of it summarized for you and explain for you. And that’s what Lou’s anticipated.
Speaker I guess go back, I’m sorry, go back to that other two point. No, that’s okay. But the push that push it a little bit. Sure. What importance did he have to say in the American cultural and or political?
Speaker Well, with the cultural landscape, I think Life magazine developed a series of missions, and particularly after World War Two, life became very self consciously, I think, a cultural instrument such that their route would routinely appear in Life magazine stories about that that were intended to publicize art, popularize history.
Speaker And it was, again, a mission that that life took upon in a very self-conscious way. Your other question, though, involved in politics and again, I think loose began in the late 1930s to consider how he might change American politics, what role his magazine should play in changing American foreign policy. And it became an increasing preoccupation with him.
Speaker Some people have, I think, mistakenly attributed to loose, great influence among his readers and among Americans at large. I think the influence was there. But I think we have to be very careful, understand something about readers who actually read the magazines, what their views were when they began leafing through a loose publication and not to invest too much authority and lose. Lose had more frustrations than successes in terms of trying to manage American politics and American foreign policy.
Speaker You know, it’s interesting you say that because that’s tough for me. I mean, just put that because. When you’re doing. You’re doing a show about somebody you really want to invest now with this influence, with this power, and I find myself fighting, yeah, constantly fighting that battle, love of understanding the nuances of that. And just because a lot of people read time, that doesn’t mean the man behind it was.
Speaker Let me say that, I mean, I think my my argument I lose is very I think is is very straightforward. He had an immense influence on journalism. And and I think that’s unmistakable, Time magazine in particular, but also life deeply affected journalistic practices in the 30s, 40s and 50s. But I think it’s a you know, I think that alone makes him very important person in American cultural history. But I think it is possible for him to have great influence without it, without our inflating that influence.
Speaker Yeah, as long as I don’t look as bad as I did on C-SPAN.
Speaker That’s our. I do have those Jerry Lewis nutty professor glasses, but I forgot. As they always say, some actors do their best work in rehearsal.
Speaker In recent rolling.
Speaker OK, what was?
Speaker Well, I think it’s I think it’s tempting, particular for people who were journalists to inflate loses influence and the influence of the publication of influence as it is. It is a tricky thing. And it’s it’s real important that we give readers, whether they were in 92, whether it was in 1940 or 1960.
Speaker Their integrity and not assume that they were sheep waiting for the shepherd Harry, to show up and tell them which way they were supposed to go. But Luce’s publications were influential in the sense that they were they were so well assembled and so cleverly done. A family in in a middle western city in 1940 was also listening to the radio and was also getting a newspaper. Time was not their only source of information, but time was the best packaged source of information. It was. It was the smartest sort of summary of what had happened the previous week. It was the one with the best pictures. And that’s why you know, why one must understand or come to terms of Luce’s influence in that regard.
Speaker But also why it was so devastated by television in the long run, because television ultimately not right away, but ultimately was able to match so much of what what time was able and in life where it was able to do.
Speaker The other point about influence, if you consider that Luce’s readers were likely to be middle class and probably Republican, although Luce claimed half as readers were Democrats. He was at times preaching to the choir and not, you know, challenging very many of their assumptions. It’s something we can talk about more. More later.
Speaker And. Sort of relating to that again. Excuse me.
Speaker How, if at all, did lose effect or change the media’s role? American society.
Speaker Well, I think what would Lou show the success of time and to a lesser extent, that the success of of life.
Speaker Was that consumers of information wanted more of their news, interpreted and summarized that they were making choices in terms of how they acquired information and they were making them with their subscription renewals or startups to loosest publications.
Speaker Gradually, what you begin to see are daily newspapers offering more interpretive news, offering more pictures than they had before. All to some degree or another in response to the success, first of time and then of life. Those changes would not have occurred. Newspapers are very tradition bound.
Speaker Enterprise, those changes would not have occurred if if if time and life weren’t creating a buzz, weren’t creating an interest among among particularly better educated, more well-to-do readers.
Speaker Now, you were you did. Yes. Did you get life from our family?
Speaker Yes, our family got life.
Speaker And. And Time magazine both. And and they were on the coffee table, you know, an hour in our home. And. And then you could also what many people will tell you my age is that you, of course, also read it at the at the barbershop or at the beauty parlor. When you when you went there and or at the dentist’s office. So you didn’t have to be a subscriber to be exposed, particularly to life. That was a publication.
Speaker People read.
Speaker Did you how did you. I mean, did you read life or did you look at life?
Speaker Heavens, yes.
Speaker I mean, life is particularly and we have absolutely you read it when it arrived. And in fact, that’s something that that that Lucy’s very proud of. That he thought that the hallmark of a successful magazine was you looked at it when it when it arrived. You didn’t set it aside. I’ll get to this later. They didn’t give subscriptions away in 1955 or 1960. You know, people. They started two later, but people really wanted to read it. And it was just particular life was so much fun when you’re and it offered you such an array of of visual treats that nothing does today, I think, in terms of print.
Speaker Get more about what about then there are people that talk about kind of love hate relationship with TIME magazine in particular.
Speaker Well, if you are a more liberal in your politics or if you were a believer, not a very conservative Republican. TIME magazine could could annoy you immensely. The reason was that TIME editors, particularly with the front of the book, with the first part of the magazine, would make a series of decisions such as Willke is is outstanding person and would make a great president. Well, if you weren’t supporting Wendell Willkie in particularly for the Republican nomination in 1940, that was pretty upsetting. If you supported a conservative senator like Robert Taft while you were, as we said in Ohio, mad as a wet hen, because time would make a series of choices his life did to portray Taft as a bit of a social outcast is not a not up to the presidency and elevate Willkie make him perhaps a little smarter, a little better prepared for the White House than he than he was Democrats.
Speaker Heaven knows Nose went through the same experience of Harry Truman as president. Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats candidate, 1952 and 56, were quite unhappy with the way they were treated.
Speaker So people would read time, many people would read. But with this tremendous sense of frustration and an anger and that they didn’t really feel like they had an outlet. Newsweek. Newsweek was out there, but it wasn’t considered as smart as as as as real a competitor. And it would be rather like today if we had one news channel or or one network. And and the same sort of editorial’s decisions were being made.
Speaker OK, what we want. What was Harry Luce like? How would you characterize him as a. As a person.
Speaker Well, from what again, from what I have read, he was a he was a man who loved ideas. He loved to argue he didn’t love people. He could be a very difficult boss, a very difficult person in some ways to deal with.
Speaker But.
Speaker He could be a surprisingly gentle editor. He was respectful of reporters and his writers. A colleague of mine who worked, worked a time in life in the mid 1940s told me that when Luce would guest edit the magazine, he had the gentlest pencil. But he was not good at small talk. He was not good at chitchat. You’d invite him to a party, invite him a party to arrive, and he decided he wanted to talk about some major issue of tax, income tax or something or a tariff reform. And this is a cocktail party. And you go. But I won’t talk about taxes. And somebody wants to talk about the weather or or whether the Brooklyn Dodgers will finally win the World Series and lose wants to talk about some some global issue. We’ve known people like this, you know, but they weren’t necessarily people as that made great conversationalists.
Speaker Let’s talk about what his strongest beliefs were, sort of what are the what were the. Pillars by which he lived, his credos.
Speaker Strongest belief, I think. Journalistically, he was convinced that any intelligent man or woman could summarize information and interpret it. He was not intimidated by by information, by knowledge. He was convinced to his dying day that that what he had created was denoted that.
Speaker What else?
Speaker I’m thinking a lot of his personal convictions just convict. You. He was a he was a moderate Republican who believed in America’s that America should be the dominant power in the world. He had believed that since he was a boy in China, that that the 20th century was the it was should be the American century. It was he believe that we were better suited than the British to dominate the world. He believed in what was what could be called liberal capitalism or responsible capitalism. That is to say, he believed that the modern corporate economy would benefit Americans and people overseas. He was not necessarily. I think Lucy might have been very uncomfortable, I should say, with the deregulation of markets that we’ve seen in the last decades of the 20th century. I think he imagined that American enterprise would behave the way Luce behaved, which was to regard what he did as not just a business, but as a calling. That had responsibilities to employees and others.
Speaker And so he was a promoter of that kind of responsible capitalism.
Speaker But religious.
Speaker Well, he was religious.
Speaker I’m not sure in my own mind how religious he really was. I think it deeply affected his attitudes towards journalism. And a lot of other things. And and I would I would defer to others in terms of how much religion religious he was.
Speaker Why didn’t he say like capitalist for Christian first capitalism, you know?
Speaker I mean, I think that I think that religion affected him the way it affected a lot of American businessmen at this time, because some of the most successful American business people in the in the. Middle decades of the 20th century were that were the sons of ministers. And their decision not to go into the ministry was not casually made. And so if you were going to go into into, say, newspaper work or magazine journalism or advertising, it better be not just to make money, not just to be comfortable and with loose. Of course, what that meant is that is that he was going to take being a journalist very seriously. It wasn’t just about acquiring shares of the magazine art market. It was about, you know, doing good deeds for his country and that his magazine should have a mission. And I think that’s an attitude that’s all but absent today in American journalism.
Speaker This gets to, what, a little bit of what we were talking about before, how fair is it to say? Is it to personify his reflection?
Speaker It doesn’t work on a couple of levels. First of all, Luce did not ordinarily supervise the editorial production of any of his magazines. That was delegated to others, some of whom, particularly in the 30s, did not share his political views. The other point, Luce discovered this to his horror during the 1940 general election campaign fall of 1940 was that many of his reporters didn’t share his enthusiasm for some of his causes.
Speaker Specifically, the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie and Ann Lewis was quite upset about that. And and those who is so they lose had this kind of direct control over each story that appeared in this magazine. Simply cannot. It simply can’t be demonstrated. Now, what gradually happens?
Speaker That is to say the 1950s is that more and more of the editors are not only not only share Luce’s beliefs, but, as was commonly said, are more enthusiastic supporters of some of Lewis’s positions than Luce himself.
Speaker And and as one as one said in his in his oral history, more Catholic than the pope.
Speaker And by the way, a similar thing occurs at other other newspaper, other news organizations. You see this there’s this kind of phenomenon where the editor is anticipating what the owner wants more than the owner is.
Speaker And so you do begin to see this kind of of. Sameness in the message. And and greater consistency in the message and the in the 50s and early mid 60s.
Speaker Was he therefore happier with the magazine in those days than in the earlier days when he was getting more of a more of a. Party line going.
Speaker I’m not sure if he was happier people. It’s interesting that when he designated successor Hedley Donovan, he designated a man he argued with who didn’t share his views on some issues. Luce continued to like to argue up to his literally up to his last last days. So I’m not sure how happy he was by the editorial consistency. He was very troubled. There’s a there’s a point in the mid 40s toward the end of World War Two. Where he was very troubled by what he regarded as some of the arguments that are emerging in life and time about. About China and about. About Europe. Arguments that he thinks are naive, that ah ah that that are missing a larger or larger argument. But I’m not sure he was he was delighted in achieving a kind of ideological purity in the 50s and 60s. His critics certainly weren’t. They’re increasingly frustrated by what but what they were seeing in the magazine’s.
Speaker To follow that thread. When you say he was. Not happy with the direction that some reporters take. What did you do?
Speaker Well, he he brought in John Shah Billings to sort of supervise to to do to prepare a review of of what was going on in terms of the foreign correspondents and what they were filing. And there there was there were a series of changes made in terms of the foreign desk at time and life in rather short order and and with some delicacy. And in terms of the egos involved, loose in effect said we are the magazines must must convey, I think, a greater awareness of the threat of communism, both in China and and in Europe.
Speaker And that reporters who that that the editorial content of both life and times should be more mindful of that threat.
Speaker In Luce’s mind, the reporters were missing the story. Take China, for example. H. White was was filing searing critiques of China’s Shanghai Scheck’s government, heartfelt, beautifully written stories. But in Luce’s mind, they were missing the point that the alternative to Xiang Mao Zedong’s red communist forces would. Would. Were they to gain the upper hand, eliminate all freedom in China and whatever shortcomings there were to Shaggs regime? The alternative in Luce’s mind was worse, and that White was a reporter who was missing that that pointed.
Speaker It’s an argument, of course, they would have for many years afterwards.
Speaker We’ll pick that up later, too. OK. Well, I wanted to sort of. Retreat a little bit more specific thing. And go back to sort of more biographical information. Tell me a little bit about what his boyhood in China.
Speaker Well, he grew up in north China. First years in a in a compound in dominated by that by the British, relatively isolated from the rest of China. Like a lot of missionary and foreign children, spent most of his time with with his siblings and other missionary children and other other children, foreign nationals who were living in North China.
Speaker Was he? Well, then let me let me go back. What now? What.
Speaker What was his schooling like? What was it? What was it? Well, actually, before you we talked about that, I’m not sure I’m that drawing a blank. And I may need that. I’m trying to remember when he actually went to jail, when he would when he left Shifu. Nineteen. Well, I’ve got a timetable to back my tone, if I could him. I think. Didn’t he go?
Speaker Promise. It was. Does he have?
Speaker However, when he starts when he starts word for change, he moves quite a bit to what you get for that, which is probably what I think it is. I thought so.
Speaker All right. We’re rolling now. We are.
Speaker All right.
Speaker NBC, as you can get you can get a live. You can actually find the scripts for a lot of commercials in the 50s at the Library Congress that are in this awful microfilm. But they can actually find Masayo and things that Dave Garroway preparing amazing things like, you know, just instant sort of dessert, treat it so.
Speaker All right. Yes. Meanwhile, back to Harry. Yes. Let’s talk about Harry’s death. Yes. Yes. Yale graduate. OK, I need a complete set.
Speaker France, as opposed to fragments, I think, lose his father and officers, surgeons and of course, his mother were tremendously influential on loose Henry when his loose was a very dedicated missionary.
Speaker He was also an institution builder in China, anxious to develop Christian education in North China.
Speaker And as a father, I think was very anxious for his children to succeed. I think he instilled in Harry Luce a great deal of self-confidence and pride in being a loose. Even though the loosies were not particularly well off.
Speaker And actually they were very purposeful family. I think they had a measure, godawful pride in what they did.
Speaker And again, the one of the things that you notice about loose early on is a self-confidence and a an ambition. And I really think much of that was imparted to him by his parents, particularly by his father, that encouraged it. In other words, there was and I think the loose giving sermons as a little boy practicing, you know, and giving sermons and so forth. He was first born. I think that made a big difference in terms of his of his self-confidence and his drive. All of the Mercury astronauts were first born. You know, that sort of thing. So I think that had an effect.
Speaker What about this? You mentioned something about a rose.
Speaker Well, he would practice as it was one of those things that with his with his younger siblings, he would he would give sermons to them and they would they would pretend they were in church together and and he would actually give sermons and and pretend to be a minister, which which, of course, commented on his relationship to his father and his affection for his father.
Speaker But also very suggestive about about, you know, his own positioning himself as a as the leader of the congregation.
Speaker Was he precocious child?
Speaker He wasn’t, he wasn’t he wasn’t the sense that he had a stammer, rather a speech impediment that affected his relations, I think, with people and caused perhaps encouraged a certain shyness that he had and would have for much of his life. His inability to engage in small talk may have been in part, a casualty of that.
Speaker His seriousness may have been it may have been a byproduct of that, that speech impediment.
Speaker Did he ever did he overcome his stuff?
Speaker He did. He did it. He he saw a therapist as a as a young boy on his on his way to America and. And which was helpful. And he he was also one of those individuals as a public speaker who work, you know, mindful of his defect, worked very hard to overcome it. It would recur. It would recur when he was upset. On occasion, it apparently happened whenever anyone compared him to William Randolph Hearst.
Speaker In his person, he would get so mad and. And to him, Hurst was the journalistic Antichrist. What he did not want to be.
Speaker As a result, he’d start to stammer. I mean, he would you know, he he would lose control of his of his speech defect.
Speaker Did he have a did you have a pretty bad.
Speaker I don’t know if he had any. His temper was any worse than anyone else’s. I think what was more characteristic of loose was a kind of a moodiness or just a lack of buoyancy. He wasn’t, you know, wasn’t necessarily very cheerful person to be around. And that was as a young man and I think isn’t as an older man.
Speaker I don’t want to call him a grouch or a curmudgeon, but he just wasn’t wasn’t terribly charming and was he absolutely had to be.
Speaker How did his growing up in China, his boyhood teams in the Arab Spring?
Speaker Well, it’s actually it’s even better for him. Well, it’s harrowing because you realize some of them do die of lung related, like Gil Hodges had a heart attack. So I’ve seen some of that script, Skripal.
Speaker Let’s talk about how he’s being a mission influenced, it influenced in several ways.
Speaker One, I’m sorry you do this. People don’t know. My question is, OK. Use the pronoun to introduce it with the subject. Oh, OK. Go ahead.
Speaker The subject is the mission of being a missionaries child in the early, early 20th century affected Luce in several ways. He was taunted by the main British students. He went to school with and and some of the teachers who were British. This is a moment when the U.S. is, frankly, a ring or a level below.
Speaker Great Britain as a world power. And Luce doesn’t care for that. But it does a couple of other things.
Speaker One is it makes him very patriotic. Missionary children at that time tended to be very patriotic. Distance makes the heart grow fonder. And it was not uncommon for missionary children to develop a very idealized view of an America. Luce didn’t see until he was a teenager. But it was it was an idealized view that that wasn’t shattered, I should say, when it came to this country. One other aspect of being a missionary child, though, that’s worth keeping in mind. They tend to be over achievers when they they whether it was the factor of being abroad, the experience of being abroad, of where there was the influence of the parents, missionary children did very well as adults.
Speaker I mean, some of them did very well and upstanding careers as writers, business and so forth. There was something about that experience that made them more ambitious or just better prepared for adulthood than than many of the rest.
Speaker So specifically for Harry?
Speaker Well, I think in his case, it was it he came out of that experience, I think, with with a confidence to to proceed.
Speaker But one of the thing about being a missionary child is I think it inculcated him a nationalism that he patriotism that he never lost. And that was never, you know, never weakened pride in America and a belief that America should be the dominant power.
Speaker How did you know we. We talked about.
Speaker As well as father admired Roosevelt and and he was very much an OB, his dad and respectful toward his father, Theodore Roosevelt Reppert, it represented the kind of of, I think, muscular foreign policy that appealed to lose it would appeal to any American, certainly most Americans living abroad. The fact that that Roosevelt was trying to extend American influence throughout the world, very appealing to two Americans who were not used to seeing Americans of America’s power projected overseas.
Speaker And I think that loose overall was impressed by Roosevelt’s more progressive view of the role of the federal government and the economy and so forth put differently. There was no evidence that that loose or his father had much use for the more conservative old guard Republicans, some of whom were were more reluctant to extend America’s influence overseas. Certainly as an adult who said no, no interest in that. That wing of the Republican Party.
Speaker I think you think our viewers are gonna understand Roosevelt really was the first president to project, you know, to to have a sort of. Project American power. That the way we sort of think of it today, what he said.
Speaker You know, Theodore Roosevelt.
Speaker OK. OK. OK. Theodore Roosevelt was the was the really the first American president to attempt to project American power throughout the world. Two to two. His predecessor, William McKinley, in many ways deserves credit for establishing America as a world power. But it was Roosevelt who sort of keeps reminding everyone that we’re a world power, sends the great white fleet around the world and and is to a young man like Luce. This is this is the role model that he admires that that America will become a great power and not not settle for a kind of continental retreat.
Speaker What were some of the. Tell me again, maybe a little more detail, some of the torment of being the chief, what was the chief who was a British run school in North China and the British AAF that Schaffer’s school was a British run school.
Speaker And because Britain had next to the Germans that a very large presence in North China and and so loose would take instruction from from the British experience, which, by the way, other Americans have had in China or in Britain, was that the British condescended to us, as some still do today and regarded us as, you know, sort of poor relations.
Speaker Some of us, of course, can take it now and it doesn’t bother us. But as a young man who had pride in this country. It was an experience that I think made a deep impression on him and that he didn’t forget. He became, of course, very supportive of Britain during its time of need. But he came out of that, I think, resentful of of of instructors and others. And as British schoolmates who made fun of the United States and without necessarily understanding it or realizing what a great power it was and would be.
Speaker To understand why. If you’ve never laid eyes on the US, if you’ve never been there, why is there is this stirring sense?
Speaker I think I think Luce’s patriotism flowed first from his parents. I mean, I think they were you know, they were they were patriotic Americans. I think, you know, in a thoughtful way. But they were the thing was magazines they get that would would come to them. Many of them illustrated that would give them windows on on American Life, as well as books that that Luce’s parents brought with them that would allow them to sort of loose and his and his siblings, I should say, to sort of acquaint themselves or from the Iraqis themselves with their their native land.
Speaker So when he finally got here. Did you think how did you measure up?
Speaker Well, I’ve.
Speaker Looses attitudes, I think. I think the big test Lewis will encounter when he gets to this country will not be that America isn’t what he expected. I think that that from what I’ve read and seen, America doesn’t didn’t disappoint him the way it does disappoint some people who come here after after a fashion. I think he came here looking for confirmation and he found it rather quickly. He will find prep school, the Hotchkiss School, to be a frustration. But that’s another that’s another issue.
Speaker That’s OK. Tell me about when he was comfortable with you. I was going to yell.
Speaker I mean, he shows I hear a lot of people talking the present. Right. But it just I just threw it out there for consideration. In what way do moving to the where when you say he will. Oh, OK. Maybe it’s OK. I don’t know.
Speaker I think in this case where you’re kosher we’re from.
Speaker So we’re Hotchkiss Hodgkinson’s sort of what?
Speaker What was his experience?
Speaker Well, Lewis will we’ll discover the. I’m sorry.
Speaker OK, let’s say Lewis discovers that Hotchkiss, a class system that I don’t think he had quite endured before, specifically lose. We’ll have to wait tables. He’s he’s he’s he’s at a very fine preparatory school, but he’s having to support himself in part by various chores and so forth. And it’s a bit of a humiliation for him. And he’s also encountering, as people did at such schools, America’s class system. It doesn’t make him a socialist, but it it’s a very unpleasant experience for him. And again, may have reinforced a certain shyness and seriousness in him that that will persist at Yale. He also makes a great friend, of course, in Brighton, Hattan, very much his opposite. But the two of them become involved in various journalistic endeavors. First at Hotchkiss and then at Yale.
Speaker Is it pronounced Brighton in Britain?
Speaker I have no idea how it should be pronounced. Our others pronouncing it. Do we have a sense?
Speaker But when you say time archives, you mean they have tape where someone’s saying the people who run the everywhere in Britain now?
Speaker I would if I was always in Brighton. But for the purposes of this show to be, say, Britain votes Britain on any Britain. How did they do you know, how they met and how they became friends? I don’t know how they met and how they became friends.
Speaker I have I have no idea because they were very much separate polls.
Speaker It doesn’t make any sense that these two individuals lose was very serious. They they they were just such opposites loose with so serious and and was sarcastic and so forth.
Speaker Smart alec. And possessed all the qualities that Luce didn’t have, but they complemented one another. And I think that’s why the partnership worked. I think they knew that that elusive sobriety or loose was a sort of an anchor that they hadn’t had and lacked.
Speaker What what was Haddon’s back?
Speaker Hadn’t was from Brooklyn, New York.
Speaker I’m sorry. Near as I can. Can you take some water or something?
Speaker Yeah. Is there. Do we have any more Poland Spring Water thing? What has its been. We are ice.
Speaker And he’s from Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights, his father was a banker. OK, so we’re going to find that out if everybody will just. Oh, he’s still right. That’s right. Authorities said.
Speaker Tell us.
Speaker Hayden was from Brooklyn Heights, relatively comfortable family attends attends Hotchkiss School with with loose. What? What more do you need it about his father? His father was, I believe, was a banker. I was talking had his father was a banker and hadn’t had hadn’t had the life that Luce had not had. He’d grown up in the United States. He he knew the country at least least knew New York City and had a sense of place that Luce didn’t have always wanted to own the New York Yankees baseball team, that that was his dying and he was dying day. That was his goal.
Speaker And it’s just too much more spirited.
Speaker If Lewis wasn’t someone you wanted that go around with had was all you had to be very careful because he had kind of a recklessness about him.
Speaker But but but great fun. But again, I think that they complement each other in that sense.
Speaker Craig.
Speaker So at what point do they kind of get together in their endeavors?
Speaker Well, even at Hotchkiss, they they collaborate a bit on a on a student, on a student paper and literary. They trade off at that point.
Speaker I’m going to. Can we cut just for a second. Absolutely. Is No.
Speaker Yeah, the Hotchkiss record and then and then the Daily News. The Yale Daily News is. Okeydokey, yes.
Speaker Bob Dole used to say Ogilvy’s Kleenex for that.
Speaker So, I mean, actually, tell us about what you know, looking at the box office record.
Speaker Well, when you look at the Hotchkiss paper that that hadn’t edited, you will see that there’s a sort of hint of what of what time will be and TIME magazine will look like begin to look like in the 1920s. There is a kind of assuredness. It’s more pronounced when the two men go to Yale and hadn’t edits the Yale Daily News and and Luce assist him. The Yale Daily News will begin to assume this more of an attempt to summarize and explain news in a kind of a cocky way that it hadn’t before, because both men are quite sure they can do that. They’re quite certain that this can be done and should be done. Yale men are busy and need to have information, summarize and explain for them because they have to get on and do things.
Speaker So what did you see in me? Tell me again. Because he went right into Yale without. Sort of finishing up with Hodgkin’s. Tell me again what you what what the Hotchkiss record. What’s sort of the character of the writing? Were they.
Speaker I’d have to I’d have to look at my files. You know, I it was it was there was a hint of, you know, when I remember looking at course against case, where you looking and looking for something and it may not. Again, with the Yale Daily News, it’s more impressive. And they were they were quite upfront about that. They learned about the Yale Daily News. They in taking over Yale’s student paper. Hayden is is president and looses his is his chief lieutenant. We may want to backtrack on that because he’s an editor.
Speaker And now two of them clearly collaborate and.
Speaker Well, he was doing the Hotchkiss record, it says here it was, says here, this guy wrote me a dope.
Speaker You can plagiarize. Yeah, as opposed to Brinkley.
Speaker There there was more of an attempt when he was editing the Hotchkiss record to include more world and national news and more of, in summary form more of a synthesis of information.
Speaker But you also see that at the Yale Daily News sort of guided summary. Okay, I’m ready. I’m ready.
Speaker Rough and ready? Yes, we are.
Speaker All right.
Speaker At the Yale Daily News, Haddon and Luce decide to to reinvent the way information was presented. They want to provide more national international coverage in the student paper at the same time. To do so in a type of guided summary in which they’re not only telling you what’s going on in the world beyond New Haven, but they’re explaining it to you. And that’s a bit of a of a departure from the way that it’s a significant departure in some ways from the way the the Yale paper had been put together beforehand. And they were very upfront about it when they when they took over the newspaper. They said, we’re gonna do this. We can do it. And that that they’re capable of making judgments about. About what is going on and what.
Speaker News events mean.
Speaker What did what did? At what point do you think the idea of. Finishing college and going on and actually creating a magazine or a journal like that.
Speaker Well, I think that in Lucy’s case, he toyed with a couple of things, including being a novelist or a writer, and realized in his own mind that he didn’t have the temperament or the skills to do that kind of writing. The daily journalism deluce or journalism generally was it was a calling that he found interesting and and and compelling. And what’s interesting about Luce’s decision to stay to go into journalism was unlike most Yale men who went into journalism, he wasn’t doing it because he thought it would be a, you know, temporary job as sort of a way station for the vaguely talented. As one writer once put it loose, one of the journalism on the idea that this is this is going to be his career. And that was a little different from what Ivy League graduates were were doing at this moment and later. But in any case, the decision evolves over time. Hayden and Luce aren’t necessarily together after graduation, Lu spend some time in England doing postgraduate work. Hayden is banning about they’re working for different newspapers. But at some point in 1922, the two agree that they will put out a weekly newspaper. That’s their original plan. They’re going to call it fax or something like that. They’re going to give it some name, but it’s gonna be a weekly newspaper that gradually changes into a weekly magazine. That is time. And that comes out at the end of February 1923.
Speaker Right. Got to backtrack a little. Sure. Wipe all the makeup off my feet. You know. Accidentally, Weibel.
Speaker In what other ways do you think the experience at Yale shaped?
Speaker I don’t know how else to deal shaping. I did very well. Phi Beta Kappa. Skull and Bones, I mean, I think he came out of.
Speaker I mean, compared to Hotchkiss. Yale was a piece of cake. I mean, there were a lot of different a lot of transition costs to Hotchkiss compared to Yale. Also as a military service, I think was. I don’t I don’t see anybody of a certain age with similar experiences. That’s a positive benefit. But but he came out of that all the more confident.
Speaker It also is it also, I think, is worth wartime service of reasserted a certain conceit that he understood.
Speaker How the world worked. I mean, there’s a famous story when he was in the Army explaining why America entered the war. To his to some of the men serving under him.
Speaker And they didn’t all know and they didn’t know about the Lusitania sinking. And this sort of surprised him and and may have led to this kind of youthful sense of of mastery of information. But we’ll see ail affected in mind. You may have some I mean, you may be fishing or something.
Speaker I don’t know.
Speaker You mentioned that story about. As an army trained.
Speaker Yeah, but, you know, from. Exactly in Bob Elson’s book, I think. But what I think. Well, here’s a way to think about it. What? What I think Lou’s discovered is what sociologists and others will discover later in the 20th century. Is the different classes of Americans acquire and retain information differently? And for someone like loose of loosies, not necessarily social class, but educational attainment information.
Speaker He knew more about the world than many of the men serving under him in the army. And this is often a shock when you go from college or whatever and are suddenly with in a unit, a combat unit with with men from a farm or from from a factory who don’t acquire information or don’t retain information the way you do or you were trained to.
Speaker This is not to say this is what it is to say. I think simply enough that many Americans just didn’t take staying informed as nearly as seriously as more educated Americans did. And some of them had very good reasons for not carrying.
Speaker So then, do you think? This experience inspired, somehow contributed, I think.
Speaker I think it did.
Speaker I think it reinforced the experience being the Army. I think, among other things, reinforced to a kind of confidence Luce had in his own mastery of knowledge, his own, his own ability to convey information clearly and masterfully to to others.
Speaker What was his feeling about America’s intrigued?
Speaker Well, I think he supported it and and more than that, he wanted very much for America to remain actively involved in world affairs after the war ended. And it was an immense disappointment to him. He spoke at commencement, I believe, at Yale, imploring America to remain actively involved in foreign policy. And it was a great disappointment to him when, at least in terms of diplomatic activities, the United States withdrew from from the kind of global leadership that Wilson had promised.
Speaker Tell me about that. I think it’s the same speech, if I’m not mistaken, the deforesting speech, the one.
Speaker Now tell me about sort of. What was the significance?
Speaker The significance is that it anticipates Luce’s argument in 1950. Right. Right. It loses root, loses his address at Yale’s graduation address.
Speaker Is it is a start. OK. At Lucy’s graduation in 1920, he gives a speech declaring it imperative for America to remain a world power.
Speaker And that it’s not only our our destiny, but that we’d be very good at it and we should be the dominant world power. We’re better than the British. We have better institutions. We have more to offer the world. And it becomes, of course, an immense disappointment to him when we don’t play that role.
Speaker Do you think it anticipates in any way the, uh, the editorial The American?
Speaker Absolutely. It very much anticipates Looses American Century editorial Life magazine.
Speaker It again, it’s one of those documents. It was reprinted in the Yale Daily News and I read it and it’s it’s again, it’s hot, tingly. What’s in the way it does anticipate that that address. And there’s a certain please understand about this. There’s a certain idealism in Luce’s vision of America as a world power. It’s not an imperial vision. At least that’s not the way he would constructed it. It’s it’s a missionary son view of why America should be the dominant power, that we’re a democracy, that we offer a kind of liberal capitalism that that that other countries can offer. And we’re not a colonial power the way Great Britain is.
Speaker Now, did we. Did he actually give it a comment, was it actually commencement or was it like a senior? I think it was a senior class. I’m not sure.
Speaker To be on one of the at that time, probably three best universities. No country in an oration. So, I mean, that’s, you know, difficult, too, as well as what he said.
Speaker Well, sometimes I think I don’t know. I don’t mean to be a. I think that that in a sense, having a speech defect, you’re right. But, I mean, I think that that there are more there. I don’t know. They tend to win those kinds of concepts when I’m thinking about is precisely because they have to be more disciplined. I was always surprised, surprised as a high score able to interspeech contests. But I didn’t always take it seriously. I was sort of the hare, the talk of the hare and the tourism, the herek, as I knew I was good.
Speaker You know, as a speaker, you and I get whipped by somebody like Lewis, you know, who who went in knowing he had to control that. You know, that problem and it gave him the discipline I lack. Is I making any is I mean, isn’t.
Speaker Ed Murrow’s voice, you know, was he heard the speech from. That’s why he spoke so slowly.
Speaker Thank you. We’re rolling. OK. Let’s talk about the story. Take a drink.
Speaker Seven months. Yes, several months before his.
Speaker This is for the cameras. OK. What are you. Yeah. Let me just put that vodka down. Yes.
Speaker Several months before his commencement, his graduation from from Yale, Henry Luce gave an address. One speaking contest at Yale in which he and in which he.
Speaker Defended America playing a major role in the world. It was in many ways a profession that the expression, I should say, of America’s. The need for America to be the dominant world power. And this is a 1920. It will be an immense disappointment to him that in the coming years, America will not, in fact, be the kind of active world power that he wants it to be.
Speaker OK. OK. We can put all that together. So.
Speaker Among the things he did after he left college. And I’m wondering about this. The Apprentice with Ben.
Speaker Yes. Very briefly, you know. Well, through through a family benefactor in Chicago, he gets a job with with the Chicago Daily News. And he is a he is a leg man, as it was called for. For Ben Hecht, who is already a famous writer with with what was a very fine newspaper in Chicago, 1921. And Hecht realizes very quickly that Lucy has been miscast. This is not a role for him. He’s got more to offer. And Lucy does do some reporting and some writing. I’ve looked at I think I’ve found some of the stories that Luce wrote at the time and not they’re they’re they’re not a literary standouts or journalistic standouts, but they’re above the you know, they’re above the mean in terms of quality.
Speaker But what happens?
Speaker Well, it was it was one of several moved about and. It also ends up in Baltimore briefly.
Speaker But tell me what happened at the Detroit? Well, I had to act as it would be done. I think you do. One or the other you can’t do.
Speaker I can’t remember whether heck fire. I thought Heck told him to ask that he be transferred out was what I remember. But I can’t I can’t tell you what what actually happens, what I believe. Heck, I felt that lucid and miscast. So he should be doing something else at the paper.
Speaker What I understood to be the case in this, I don’t think this was actually earlier between Hotchkiss and Yale. He did an internship at a Springfield Springfield Republican. You don’t think it did?
Speaker That I remember. I mean, it didn’t do some to journalism. One of the things about Luce’s journalistic career is he never last very long at one paper. And I think that’s very important because if he had a lot of his creative, interesting ideas for journalism would have been beaten out of him, certainly verbally. Editors had a habit of doing that. At this point in American journalism, newsrooms were much more hierarchical than they are now. And the kind of creative instincts that loose and had both possessed for journalism would not have lasted very long.
Speaker So I think there is a kind of interesting quality, this kind of nomadic quality that Lucent had and keep moving from paper to paper because they’re not at one long enough to be discouraged from thinking in original ways. And and newspapers simply weren’t encouraging very original writing or or thinking.
Speaker Let’s talk about it in a more general way, because I think it is significant about that time in America. What was post-war? Talk about the changes in America. In the 20s after World War One. What was it going? Going how how is it becoming a different society?
Speaker I think that the American market for information and American culture was changing after World War World War One in a couple of interesting ways. One is that there were a lot of men and women like Loose and Hadon who who were in their 20s, young adults, many of the men, and served in the armed forces during World War One. They were chain smokers. They like to drink, although drinking liquor had been had been judged illegal by Congress.
Speaker A constitutional amendment. They had had some education. Many of them had gone to college or attended college. And they were entering the middle class.
Speaker They it was it was a different kind of attitude, a more sophisticated attitude, whether they lived in New York or Appleton, Wisconsin. They had a different view of themselves and their place in society. And they were also somewhat scornful, whether it was because they smoke cigarettes and dad smoke cigars of what they regarded as Victorian culture, of what they regarded as a as an older, excessive concern with propriety, with how long your skirt length is and so forth. And again, without always realizing it loose and had and were preparing a magazine that that would appeal to many of those those more Cosmopolitan readers. These were Americans who read H.L. Mencken or quoted Mencken, the great Baltimore journalist and sage who love to make fun of small town Prohibition’s supporting America and weren’t necessarily progressive in their politics. But they knew what they didn’t like. They didn’t like this kind of backward looking fusspot. And that was that wasn’t a sense of attitudes that Luzhin had and both shared.
Speaker Now, this is something I rehearsed. You can tell when you’ve even.
Speaker Well, I’m talking with the 20s and 30s, the demos are. Really interesting, I think it’s what matters now.
Speaker Anyway, everything was fine.
Speaker Yeah, it’s about a black and beautiful cover, you know. But there she gets a little crazy. Sometimes I’m dreading it. She’s going to do a post-World War Two book, which I’m just dreading. Why that? Cause she’ll get it all. She’ll get what I do all wrong.
Speaker Sort of like it’s sort of like when David Halberstam says that Ardeo displace newspapers as a news source.
Speaker And he’s just where my heart pills. I don’t even have them. And I need them. A Cleveland Browns helmet. That’s a better. Yeah.
Speaker So tell us again about sort of what was the ad that the journalistic landscape around that they can see daily journalism.
Speaker Was was buying large or organized around individuals stories. There was there was little attempt in newspapers or magazines to to explain what was going on in the world. It wasn’t, in the words of one sociologist, a profession that was caught up in event ism. People were very good at reporters, often did a very thorough job reporting what President Wilson said or what had occurred that day in Ireland, which was having a horrible revolt against Great Britain. But they weren’t very good at explaining what it meant. So that an American living in 1920 or 1921 felt overwhelmed with facts. This is not a new problem. Americans who complained today about the burdens of living in an information age have nothing on their on their grandparents in that regard, because, in fact, there was little or no attempt in newspapers or magazines to explain what was going on, except for some relatively small and smartly edited publications to which most Americans did not have access or did not read like The New Republic or the Nation. No one attempt to diffuse a kind of of summary and and interpretation into one. There were magazines that did offer Americans a summary of the week’s news, but they didn’t conclude anything about it. So you just knew that something happened. You didn’t know what it meant. And for Americans, the 1920s, whose lifestyles, among other things, are changing again in ways that will sound familiar to people today.
Speaker They wanted their information, I think, packaged differently. They were busy.
Speaker When Lucent hadn’t came up with the idea of their their first publication, they imagined their readers as themselves evil men who were busy with with activities, with hobbies, with with parties and so forth. They didn’t have time to read every story in The New York Times or read it carefully and then to make any sense of it. What they imagined was a publication that you could read in a half an hour that would tell you everything you needed to know, that it happened in the world the previous week, but would also tell you what those events meant, if anything. And that was that that was their idea. And what they didn’t understand was that there were many Americans who had not gone to Yale only and and found this this type of journalism very appealing and that many of them were women. Utter, utter shock, utter shock, in fact, there’s a there’s a charming exchange of charming letter in Time magazine and at one point the 1920s, a man indicates that he met his wife because they were both reading Time magazine on a train. But initially it was well, it wasn’t that that there were gonna be, you know, pinups in it or anything like that. That’s not what that’s not what they were talking about. But it was a case of two men, both possessed of a, you know, certain maleness, a sort of fixation that never occurred to them what women would would want to read this magazine. And they weren’t taking women seriously as a market. Very again, very quickly, they learn that women do read the magazine. The other thing that will all but shock loose is how much the magazine is right in other parts of the country because they imagined they were writing a magazine for really friends of theirs, a grown up in the northeastern states, the northeastern quarter, and looses and had an or just lose a particular surprised by how much appeal the magazine has to people who are far removed from their world, not necessarily in terms of education, but maybe maybe the reader went to the University of Minnesota and not Harvard.
Speaker Maybe his you know, his wife is from Iowa and not Belmont, Massachusetts. That’s what they didn’t expect. They were much more provincial than they realize, but they were provincial in a kind of East Coast way. And yet they were coming up with a formula that had appeal across the country, not necessarily everywhere, but across the country.
Speaker How did they how did they float? How did they how did they sell it to their investors?
Speaker Well, they were very careful. They put together a prospectus. They were Yale man. They were arrogant, but they were also capable of playing to their betters. And they showed the prospectus, for example, to the perhaps the single most important editor in United States, Walter Lippmann of the New York World, a man who deeply they deeply admired and who greatly influenced their thinking about information.
Speaker At that point, they they showed the prospectus to other prominent men and and in hopes of getting ideas for the publication, but also encouragement. Finally, they went about their classmates at Yale. And this was a point in the history of Yale University where classmates tended to come from money. So they were hitting up classmates and their classmates parents for contributions to begin. Time magazine.
Speaker What are the what, what, what what were some of the ideas featured in perspective?
Speaker Well, it really conveyed a I think, an ideology about journalism that that hadn’t bears the greater credit for than than lose, which was that they could summarize all the week’s news. You say that prospect of the prospectus, the the preferred stock. OK. When Lucent hadn’t present the prospectus to two potential investors, their promise is very straightforward, that TIME magazine will explain the week’s news in in a very condensed fashion, that it will also not only summarize, but explain the week’s news in a very concise fashion and that you can read TIME magazine and know what you need to know. And that’s a way of separating time from the publication that potential investors, potential patrons mentioned the most often, which was the Literary Digest, a very popular American magazine that reprinted, in many cases, articles in American newspapers and and and newspapers around the world, in some cases every week. And many people would look at Lucent hands prospectus and say was too much like the Literary Digest. But the Digest wasn’t wasn’t offering to be wasn’t offering judgments the way the way Lucent hadn’t were. It wasn’t offering the explanation, the guidance.
Speaker That here’s what it means tome that the time promised. Listen, and we’re quite sure they could do that. It’s remarkable when you consider how young they were.
Speaker All right, well, then.
Speaker What was that said with this, quote unquote, explanation?
Speaker What was their. What was their attitude, their stated attitude towards objectivity?
Speaker They they believed that journalism. Let me think about this.
Speaker That’s a good one. Thank you to.
Speaker They felt that journalism loosened, hadn’t felt that journalism was paralyzed by objectivity in so many words. They believe that American newspapers tried too hard to be balanced. To the point where the reader was left in the sea of information and didn’t know what to make of it to a certain extent. Having looked at American newspapers in nineteen twenty twenty one, I think they were right because American newspapers weren’t running any except on the editorial page itself, weren’t running anything we would associate with interpretive journalism. And the editorial page was often a pretty thin gruel.
Speaker Well, then. How did the journalistic establishment respond to that?
Speaker Well, I think the establishment, first of all, didn’t when Time magazine came out. A lot of the Journal’s establishment encouraged loose and had including men like Walter Lippmann, they were intrigued by what they were trying to do. The magazine grew very slowly, although radar hadn’t been invented yet. It was flying under the radar. And in that sense, its circulation was slowly growing. So some of the journalistic establishment didn’t realize what was going on and indeed not until the 1930s. Do you see signs that newspapers and others are beginning to realize maybe we need to redo some of what we do in response to the success of Time magazine? Many younger journalists were impressed by time. They liked its style. They liked its verve.
Speaker It’s no exaggeration to say that really into the late 1930s, time is a model for a lot of journalists in terms of how they wrote and or tried to write their stories. But the key thing is that while Luce and Hadden deny the primacy of objectivity, they didn’t reject it altogether. That is to say, they weren’t proposing to publish a partisan journal of opinion. What they were trying to do was to fuse opinion journalism and and straight reporting where necessary in their mind, where it was important to say what President Coolidge’s trip meant. If anything. And and that wasn’t necessarily that unsettling to at least the more thoughtful journalistic community. Walter Lippmann had, in a succession of books, been pointing out the necessity for more interpretive journalism. And Lippman was very much an influence on both Luce and Hayden and would remain so through the 20s.
Speaker Let’s talk about what we probably covered it, but if we can just kind of briefly talk about what your notion of the guided summary.
Speaker Well, let’s think about that. What is.
Speaker The traditional American newspaper story in 1921 or 1922 would would again tell you what President Harding had said to a veterans group. But there was there was quite self consciously no attempt to explain what President Harding speech meant or what it what it portended for for. For veterans or for the nation. Losen and perhaps even more. Hadn’t thought this was nonsense. We can explain what what Harding speech does. We can not only summarize that speech as any wire service reporter of any note could, but we’re going to be able to tell you what it really means. And and and you’ll come away from our story not only knowing what the president said, but knowing what the meaning was of what the president said. And that’s the guided, guided summary. That’s what they felt was sorely lacking in American newspapers, including The New York Times. And to a certain extent, to a large extent, they were correct.
Speaker Is that is that worth it? That’s what we’re talking.
Speaker There’s a wonderful line I buy A.J. Liebling we can use later about that. I sort of screw up, it’s about the smorgasbord, is it loose and hadn’t were the people who took Time magazine took you to the smorgasbord? And then pull the food for you?
Speaker Here’s what you’re gonna have.
Speaker It’s funny. Or in 1951, I guess.
Speaker OK, we’ll go ahead. OK. I thought we were going to work. But I want you to sit up and say that’s OK.
Speaker A.J. Liebling once complained of. Of Time magazine and Henry Luce that he was rather like the maitre d who not only took you to your table, but then ordered the food for you.
Speaker Great. That’s the quote. That’s the quote. OK. Because she’s let’s talk about let’s talk about the the other thing that they there’s a couple more things. It’s that I from my reading, I think are new that I want to talk about, which is. The department’s the back of the book and. How they conceived that working and know how that helped their man?
Speaker Well, one of one of the conceits of time when it was started and as it evolves over the 1920s, is that it will broaden the definition of news that that the back of the magazine or the back of the book will include departments that weren’t necessarily covered in a systematic way by American American newspapers.
Speaker For example, the back of the book will include a religion section. It will include education. There will be reporting in science. And and although these departments aren’t in the in the magazine every week, they’re in there with a certain regularity that will widen or extend the agenda of American journalism in ways that it hadn’t been before. And the back of the book will also encourage some of the some of the best writing in time or so, that will be where a lot of times most talent writers will will end up. But the other thing about time that we mustn’t forget is the time offered to summarize the world’s news and that most American newspapers, except during a time of war, did not cover international news very extensively. So if you were a reader in in in in a smaller city or town that was not served by a very good newspaper, time was up and you had a globe, you know, interests in the world. Time was a very important magazine to get because it told you what was going on in Romania or Greece and and that you would not have necessarily known from your local provincial daily paper.
Speaker Did they?
Speaker What I guess what I’m trying to with with regard to the back of the book.
Speaker Yeah, I’m why I didn’t run away from that question. Why did they think. No, you answered it fine. And I like that you went on. Yeah. Because I don’t think we should. I don’t want to lose that point as it is. But eventually, I think that would make that would help the magazine.
Speaker Readership or.
Speaker Expand its readership or that it was anything that its readership.
Speaker I don’t think they thought in those terms accuse me when when Lucent hadn’t developed the back of the magazine. I don’t think they were doing it in a particularly, Martin, a sense of this is how we’re going to market time more effectively and increase our our audience audiences and, you know, Detroit or something. I think they did it because they themselves had wide ranging interests. I think that they identified information in the 1920s as being more involved and involving more than than politics and foreign policy and so forth. I’ve never seen any evidence that it was a marketing decision to to expand that that section of the paper. I mean, it they thought of themselves as as Yale graduates as to having a liberal arts education, being interested in a lot of things. And I think they thought time should convey that kind of of omnibus quality to it, that that it did come to reflect.
Speaker What about, uh, as we as we sort of these new and different things about it? There’s also.
Speaker Is it something that that they. The thing is it loose in particular, had a great curiosity, which is the hallmark of a great journalist. You can’t stress that enough. It’s it’s a banality, but it’s true. I mean, Luce had a tremendous curiosity and I think the back of the magazine reflected that. I think that the range of things that his subsequent publications will convey reflected that.
Speaker And I and I think that that’s still anyone who wants to be a journalist has to possess that quality or go to law school.
Speaker There, you said there, there. You got them. You.
Speaker Let’s, uh, let’s talk about the famous, how they evolved, how they develop the time style.
Speaker Where did they How did that come? Oh, boy, I’d have to bone on that. I’m just trying to think. I mean, it was many influences. It’s a classic, you know, more than I do in some ways, I mean, now I’ve just I’m not sure I’m remembering that storyline. I mean, I can look.
Speaker Well, for example, there are multiple influences before I. Them. And was it something that they were thinking about? I mean, sometimes the Iliad is is cited as an influence on, you know, sort of how did they come up with this idea as a way to tell stories in a magazine?
Speaker I mean, hadn’t it hadn’t and and Luser practicing it in college?
Speaker I mean, practically. All right. What they’re practicing a kind of started to saké. I’m trying to, but I’m thinking to the sense I’m trying to help you say the greatest. Yeah, I know. I know. I know.
Speaker Loosen haven’t don’t just wish to create a new type of American magazine. They don’t just want to produce this kind of guided summary, but they want to write it a certain way, which carries with it a certain kind of authority. They want it to be different. They want to be distinctive. Successful publications, successful journalistic enterprises tend to be different. They don’t mimic the another established enterprise. And one of the things that that that that Lucianne Hadden had experimented with was writing news stories in a different way, backward running sentences. It was a style that had multiple influences, but it was a style that conveyed at the same time a kind of obnoxious. There will be different writing tricks and styles that they would use in constructing the magazine’s entries so that a time entry evolves over the course, the 1920s, into possessing certain characteristics, certain features that will make it distinctive, such that if you were I were on a train in 1930 and we read from two different magazines, you would know right away which story originated in time. It was that distinctive voice, not just the voice, but the way the voice sounded, the way the voice was constructed.
Speaker But what what what about this particularly backward reading synthesis, that sort of thing? What about that style? They think it’s their so-called reporting or story.
Speaker Well, I think there were a couple of motives. One is they wanted to be distinctive. I mean, they wanted to aim for something a different way to convey what they were doing. And they were both intrigued by the possibilities of turning sentences around, you know, throughout you know, throughout Italy, bells tolled sort of thing that would that they thought would would give a certain bounce. You have to remember. That newspapers in the early 1920s placed no prize on the quality of writing. That, in fact, it was actively discouraged. The most important thing, if you were writing a newspaper story was where the where the facts appeared and and newspaper stories could be very difficult to read. They were not literary and, you know, literary gems by any means. It was an exception, the sports section. And you’ll even see an influence on it on TIME magazine from the sports section. Because one thing that Time magazine will do is reinvent the news title instead of the the secretary of state, comma Charles Evans use comma time will compound titles and say Secretary of State Charles Evans use film star Clara Bow. They will. They will start to compact things in ways that sportswriters did when they said, you know, center fielder, trist, speak to speaker. That’s that sort of thing.
Speaker So that’s one device that they’re trying to convey. What’s interesting is.
Speaker They they don’t harken back to a 19th century literary journalism, which is a storytelling mode that is that is perfectly florid, although there’s there are signs of that and some of the entries and times and some couple of really gorgeous things. The stories that I’ve run across in the magazines first first decade, a decade and a half.
Speaker But it’s more just a generally different kind of tone. New words when possible, find unusual words to to describe somebody, invent words if need be.
Speaker In terms of finding a cent of them are up on a positive for a newsmaker, they will do different things that are quite different. They will use the middle name of a newsmaker even though it’s rarely used. And the idea here is twofold. If we start listing the full middle name of a newsmaker, even though he or she prefers it not be listed. Satisfied with the humble middle initial that will convey to our readers a dirty little secret that we’re in the know, even though we’ve actually done no original reporting in constructing the story. So we say Herbert Clarke Hoover. We don’t say Herbert C. Hoover, which was Hoover’s preference.
Speaker And what influence?
Speaker I’ve always been curious about this. Did Variety have any hint to do more? You know, sometimes I feel like it’s.
Speaker There’s a variety kind of catchiness where there is no I don’t think so, and I I feel I don’t like variety.
Speaker I I’ve looked at variety in that period and I have to tell you the variety stories. I have to pause and because there’s so some of the jargon is so thick. Also, I don’t think there’s any influence, any evidence that either Hayden or Luce ever looked at Variety and no. Hadn’t read the sports section. I haven’t looked at the sports section for the Brooklyn Eagle during the time that Hayden was a boy. And you do see that telescoped compound where they would they would stay started. GM also that we haven’t talked about it yet, but sportswriters were much more. And this is a throwback to 19th century. They were more likely to describe offer details that that a straight news reporter didn’t offer, for example, of whether.
Speaker The most famous lead in sports journalism is Granny Raices. And you know about the four horsemen. And you know how it starts under a cloud.
Speaker I mean, the first clue at the very beginning is references the weather. Now, most newspaper stories, it is page one stories. In 1920, that’s the last thing you’d mentioned, unless the weather was the news.
Speaker But if you look at Time magazine stories, perhaps the most one of the most famous ones written as The Death of Coolidge by John Shaw Billings, 1933. And it describes the weather. That’s how it begins describing Coolidge’s funeral. And it’s a beautifully written story. But time will throw in these kinds of little details that that.
Speaker That were common in mid 19th century American journalism, but had been stripped away because editors had found it just not economical. We all know what the weather’s like. Just get the facts and we have Artspace to sell. So in that sense, time is a throwback because it’s not just the inverted sentences and the senior Muppet and some of the other things that they they play with, but they’re also going back, although I don’t think they realize this, they’re going back to an earlier form of journalism that that talked about detail about the color of the dress that Queen Marie of Romania wore and things like that, that that, you know, that the modern journalist didn’t want to talk about that.
Speaker There’s one more thing that’s sort of a promise of time that we haven’t thought about yet. That is telling news people.
Speaker One of the one of the you know.
Speaker First trends at Time magazine was the was the cover story was using the individual as a way of explaining a trend or a development or fact.
Speaker It was a conviction that both, I think, loose and hadn’t shared.
Speaker And Time magazine really for that. For the next. Really? Fifty five years or so? Well, we’ll emphasize the the the individual as as as a way of explaining information. And men and women throughout the country, if not much of the world, will dream of making the cover of TIME magazine.
Speaker Right. Right.
Speaker And I remember that’s true, remember, there’s a New Yorker cartoon with a man as you could buy those mirrors, Man of the Year.
Speaker And what about the man that did that?
Speaker Nineteen twenty seven, I believe. Walter Chrysler, I think was the first one.
Speaker Let’s talk a little bit about.
Speaker It’s modus operandi. In the early days. First of all, what kind of people did they go after to work on?
Speaker They very much populated the magazine. They very much populate the magazine with with Ivy League graduates, primarily men there with some women were hired, but they tended to have less important positions. There were no reporters. Stories were written on the basis of a pile of newspaper clippings which were assembled for four each desk or each. Each editor.
Speaker And the writers, the staff tended to come from places like Yale and Harvard and Princeton and Amherst and so forth, that will remain the pattern through the 19th much, much of the of the magazine’s history really into the 1940s. It really has a kind of Ivy League, Oxford, buttoned down quality.
Speaker What kept it from sounding or looking like? If that’s the case, all of a sort of accumulation of a lot of the things you’re talking about. What kept it from sounding or looking like a college magazine, you know, sort of wisecracking.
Speaker It did read at times, though, like a college magazine. I don’t think I think if you look at it in the 20s, it does have this kind of sneering quality to it. Smart alec quality to it. A huge influence is H.L. Mencken, whose attitude towards much of his ostensible audiences is condescending and sneering. But at the same time, particularly in the national political reporting in Time magazine, and I’m thinking here in the first five or six years, surprising grovelling takes place whenever political leaders are brought up or certain business leaders, not all of them, but but certain ones. I’m not sure, for example, that President Coolidge deserve quite the respect that he got in Time magazine or former Speaker Joe Cannon deserve quite the respect that he received. Losen had and his and his writers weren’t political conservatives, but they were they were circumspect towards many of those in power. And and the magazine was a smart alec, but not toward all subjects. All right, I want to tell you what to do. But there’s a point in my book I talk about Lindbergh’s flight and how overreported that was an American newspapers and Times decision not to play that up.
Speaker It was a very important one because it was what it was in a sense that we’re in 1927.
Speaker Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic. It was the first person to do so successfully. And it was a major event. It was an event that that American newspapers, including the good gray New York Times, covered to death. When Time magazine’s issue came out about Linberg, it did cover cover that flight, but it wasn’t the lead story. Time was making an editorial judgment that I think was consistent with a magazine in its first 20, 30, maybe 40 years, which is it would tell readers what the most important news was a given week and not allow an event that others said was the most important is giveaway. That’s a major decision. It’s a decision of great editorial courage. And it’s one that was. Readers appreciate it. It is almost as if Time was was saying to its its readers across the country. This is what mattered.
Speaker That week in 1927. Was he on the cover that he did make the cover?
Speaker But it’s, again, a conscious decision. Other things were occurring that you need to know about. And that’s very different. If I may, from journalism today, including time, which is afraid it would wouldn’t would not, I think, convey that kind of editorial courage or hutzpah that just wouldn’t do it because they’re afraid that that’s all people care about. Time readers, I think, had different expectations for the magazine at that time.
Speaker It’s great. I like it when you come up with stuff and I’m going to ask you how.
Speaker But meanwhile, back to my. Yes.
Speaker Let’s talk about the editorial’s sort of modus operandi. OK. How how they kind of ran the place. OK.
Speaker At Time magazine in the 1920s, Luce was not directly involved, except for the very earliest years in the editorial production of the magazine, Luce was essentially the business manager of Time magazine. He did occasionally edit. He did contribute help out in the production and in putting the magazine to bed hadn’t deserves more of the credit for the product. But even more of the credit has to go to a man named John Martin, who was the effectively the managing editor of the magazine for for its first 10 years or so. And Martin, more than anyone, I think, was was responsible for the actual production of the publication. This is not to diminish Lewis or Haddon’s efforts because it did follow their basic guidelines. But as would be the case with everything Lewis created. There were other lieutenants about who were doing more of the heavy lifting.
Speaker And when I talk about the M.O. of the editorial, what was the process by which a story got into the mag?
Speaker Well, it was.
Speaker Which stories would their decision about the selection of stories, the writing of the stories, the final? Was there anything different about that than other places? Well, I think I’m getting it. Time is considered editors magazine as opposed to a. Yep. Yep, that’s it.
Speaker Stories were assembled a time on the basis of newspaper clippings. One has the sense that editorial judgments, with the exception of certain stories that were overreported like Lindbergh’s flight in 1927, the many the editorial judgments about which stories would appear in Time magazine were based in part on the newspaper they relied on the most, which was The New York Times, which was then, as now, the newspaper of Record. Now, in saying that they didn’t simply rewrite New York Times stories, they relied on multiple newspaper accounts. New York Times stories tend to be rather dry, dry, maybe giving dry a bad name. At that time. But so they would use other newspaper accounts to liven things up, to make the stories more vivid and storybook like. But that essentially is what it is. I think a lot of their editorial judgments about what was covered, I think were driven by by what The New York Times was writing.
Speaker So if they’ve got all these clips in front of. How did they how did they turn it into this lively, vibrant?
Speaker This new kind of begins with it, with the expectation that entries should only be so many words long 300, 400 words, and ideally less than no entries should run over a certain number of words. So. Right. Their length becomes a factor. The other was a decision that was made that whenever possible. And they didn’t do this all the time. But with any. Entry of any significance was to tell the story as a story, for it to have a beginning, a middle and an end, a trend which, by the way, anticipates the way TV news features are often presented today, so that a story about Germany under President Hindenburg might begin with a scene at his birthday party in which his granddaughters are present. Now, that violated in the most violent way a newspaper editors expectations view turned in a story written in that fashion to the editor of The New York Sun or the Cleveland press. He’d have you cleaning out your desk in rather short order, saying you should be writing novels. Young man. But time could do that. It could get away with that. And it was what it did, was it? It made the story more engaging. I think it engage more readers. It was saying to readers in so many words, the news doesn’t have to taste like overcooked spinach. It can be it can be interesting. The problem was and the time editors didn’t discover this for years. Was that often what people remembered about those time entries was not what was the most important element of that Hindenburg story?
Speaker But what color dresses his granddaughters were wearing?
Speaker Now, I’m going to ask you about this, and if you don’t know much about it, we don’t have to talk. I’m speaking German. Yes. Right. No, this is, you know, more of. And then this happened. Then this happened, which is, you know, why did they move to Cleveland? OK.
Speaker And how did Hadden react to it? Let me just check the time.
Speaker They were thinking of three months and still has a better symphony than some other cities I can mention.
Speaker But and and and of course, there was the acknowledgement of the Cleveland Indians and your woeful Cleveland how anyway. OK. So let’s talk about that.
Speaker Why did first of all, why did they move to Cleveland? And you know, how did that. Affect loose.
Speaker Always had very ambivalent feelings about New York City. He would occasionally suggest moving Times headquarters even up to the end of his life. Out of New York, one point to New Hampshire, I believe. In 1925, he came up with a bright idea that they could save money by producing the magazine in another large metropolitan area. 1925, Cleveland, Ohio, was one of America’s 10 largest cities. It was not the butt of jokes that it would become many years later. So they like to move. Time magazine. To Cleveland. Luce is quite happy with the move. He is recently married. He rather likes living among the Cleveland elect. He’s absorbed very quickly into the Cleveland gentry. And there was one very vibrant gentry class in Cleveland in the mid 20s, hadn’t hates it and is a bachelor. He’s a native New Yorker. He will have a few drinks, perhaps many, and drive around shouting Babbitt at people he sees on the streets of of of Cleveland, Ohio. But the move really fails, not because of Babbitt’s disdain for that noble city on the lake. It fails. Who did? What do they say?
Speaker He said, David Babis these days, too. He was living in Zeena. He was unhappy.
Speaker The move really fails, not because of Hayden’s distaste for for Cleveland, but because of a discovery that that they both make.
Speaker Really, everyone involved in the production of the magazine makes, which is their dependency on The New York Times. Cleveland at that point was served Bible three daily newspapers. At least one of which had a good reputation. But like most American daily newspapers, they covered local and state news at the expense of national international news and losing hadn’t realized that that they were, in a sense cut off, although they could get The New York Times delivered to them by train. I mean, that was not a problem. They quite simply could not produce the magazine as efficiently. That removed from what was still the journalistic capital of the United States. And that removed from The New York Times. There was a second lesson in the Cleveland woods. Sure.
Speaker A little speck of something. Oh, right. OK.
Speaker There is a second lesson that they learned.
Speaker Being in Cleveland, which was one that they had not understood fully, I think, which is that American newspapers weren’t The New York Times, that that perhaps many of their readers and perhaps much of Time’s appeal then and certainly later would be that the typical American daily, even a large city like Cleveland, didn’t give enough attention to national and international news. And that lesson was not lost on them. And that and again, can slowly lose begins to realize how much of their readership is removed from New York City.
Speaker And yet all the more dependent on time.
Speaker Why was he ambivalent about why was Lucy ambivalent about publishing?
Speaker I’m not I’m not really sure why Luce was was ambivalent about publishing New York. I think that Lucy’s family was from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I think he he might have preferred being a big fish in a small pond sort of thing.
Speaker And again, I’m not quite certain why that ambivalence was there. I think he was someone who sort of imagined himself living in a city of a smaller size. But but quite seriously, toward the end of his life, he was talking about moving time to to New Hampshire somewhere. It’s in Robert Elson’s book. And it’s just the staff was horrified by this prospect. I think he tried to make it sound like a Nash security issue, that if there’s a nuclear war, we’ll be able to produce the magazine.
Speaker That’s like ESPN being Bristol, you know, hate it up there.
Speaker But I’m not.
Speaker I mean, that’s that’s that’s the prelim question from hell, because I’m not sure why he was so ambivalent.
Speaker I don’t think he hated New York the way some some people do. But it was it was again, the picture of Loose in Cleveland is one of someone who’s pretty happy, is really rather enjoys living there and a comfort level.
Speaker So it wasn’t like Art Modell in the sense that hadn’t in the cover of night took time back.
Speaker No, I think mutual. I think it was a role it realization that it was just too complicated to produce that kind of magazine in in Cleveland. Time continue to have ties to cleaved to one. At least one. Cleveland back to the very end. I mean, it was providing them with some key credit at a difficult moment, the 20s.
Speaker Talk about the. Moose hadn’t working relationship with.
Speaker Mutual, listen, hadn’t respected one another, despite their immense differences in terms their personalities. I mean, I think they knew each other very well.
Speaker Hadn’t did more of the editorial work than Luce did. I mean, he was much more involved in the production of the magazine.
Speaker But so in that sense, the relationship, I think, was complementary, loose, extremely fond of Hadon. Again, I’m not sure quite where you want me to do.
Speaker But what I’m getting at is this person keeps going to be in trouble. That’s Haddon’s ghost, actually. Well, what I’m trying to get at that somehow, the fact that he did more of the editorial with the money, you think you’ve had more power to give him more influence over the magazine. Did it give him more credit?
Speaker No, I don’t. I don’t think so. No, I don’t think that. I think it true it was a true partnership. And I think that. Loose resented the idea that Hayden was the was the editor. Editorial genius in that loose was the bookkeeper. I mean, he resented that. And I think that that when he was called on to edit the magazine, he could do so quite capably, that it was just not a problem. Now, the point about Hadon that’s worth noting is Hayden was quite content with this little magazine that was becoming a success and a profitable venture. And hadn’t imagined himself. Buying the New York Yankees or something like that, and Lou’s had other ambitions, other goals, Luce wanted to produce new magazines, he wanted to expand his there their activities. And that was something that had and was very uneasy about lose that far grander ambitions for for them and for Time Inc.
Speaker So when Hadden died. How does that affect Lucien?
Speaker How did it affect Luce was devastated by Haddon’s death. They were they were very close. But Luce was also able to negotiate a broker, a deal with Haddon’s families so that they had control of the magazine was such that the loosest stake would. Would would would would trump Haddon’s and.
Speaker Luce was able to do what had and was very ambivalent about, which was to expand into a new venture, which was Fortune magazine. He’d broached the idea with, had and had and was very uneasy about it as as many were. Hayden’s ambitions had been. As I said it, I think had been instated. But but but Luce was ready to move on.
Speaker So was his death kind of a liberation for loose or did it at first perhaps? Scare him that suddenly he was you know, it was going to have to go it alone.
Speaker I personally I mean, aside from victims, lost freedom. What do you think?
Speaker I think I think Brinkley is going to be much better. He gave a wonderful discussion of that that I can’t get. He’s looked at some paper that I haven’t seen on that. In his you know, there have been all kinds of stories floating around about the death of Hadon and so forth that are deceased. I think without merit. So I won’t repeat them on camera, but it would have been less. But I think it would have been interesting, had hadn’t lived. And his death was a sort of a freak occurrence. If he could have frustrated looses ambitions because they were pronounced, they were there loose was was going to expand Time Inc. And it would it might have been a rather tricky business for for him to do so without hadn’t support. He might have also been able to buy him out at this point. They were doing well enough. And that does happen with partnerships in journalism and in other things.
Speaker What was in the air again in the early days? What was times political bias?
Speaker Time represented a kind of. Of young Republicanism, I think, in the mid 1920s. It was respectful of of many Republican leaders as well as some Democrats. It was not a very conservative paper. I think the more important divide, if you read TIME magazine during that time, was generational. Although time was respectful to some of its elders, it delighted in mocking others who had felt were imposing things like prohibition, which time opposed, in so many words, violently. It would be, I think, a mistake to dismiss Times politics as reactionary. They were not early on, for example, time opposed the lynching that was occurring in many southern states of black American males.
Speaker Time was quite forthright in its denunciation of that. And I think the politics, again, was not only generational, but regional. Time shared a Mencken esque disdain for for the worst excesses of small town America. Prudishness in the case of lynching, lawlessness.
Speaker Time champion to a more cosmopolitan America, self-confident but but benevolent.
Speaker But but time possess that kind of this and again, this kind of educated assurance that that we needed to be modern and we needed to to to remove from ourselves the worst excesses of small town provincialism, Victorianism, that sort of thing.
Speaker How did it. Convey its bias, given that it didn’t. Have editorials. How did it convey its its slant on things? And was it subtle? Was it overt? Was it.
Speaker Times bias most often demonstrated itself in how it treated a newsmaker. How flattering or unflattering it was.
Speaker If you were, shall we say, calorically challenged in time like you, that excessive weight was not brought up, but bit of time didn’t like you, or if you had an annoying habit that perhaps. Was unflattering, a time would would would be sure to bring that up, and that’s a that became a common time and then life mechanism for sort of beating down its going after its its opponents again, without an editorial page making a point of really humiliating or demeaning the newsmaker in question.
Speaker If it was a newsmaker most everyone disliked, that’s fine. But there were some times when it seemed they were there. Favoritism was was pretty blatant and pretty unforgivable.
Speaker I want to go back to something that you said, could you kind of tucked it in parents vertically and I want to caution you, by the way, that when you do sort of get into.
Speaker Certain.
Speaker Multiple reasons for things or explanations for things. It begins to sound like you’re listing them. And so when you talk something like lynching in the middle of it, is blacks a certain.
Speaker Yeah, how? I wasn’t sure what to bring on with that. Yeah. No, I never return.
Speaker You know, the ad was Muzzi of the time of Time magazine for Negroes. First of all, they had a Negro section from time to time. I wonder if that was unusual. And then, you know. Was there something different about their stance towards their overt stance against lynching and their recognition of, you know, Negroes in the new audience?
Speaker You know, Kurt Curtis, he his partisan titles, Southern readers objected to Time magazine awarding courtesy titles to to African-Americans. So the news made newspapers would not ordinarily do that.
Speaker TIME magazine shared, I think, a distaste which many really most enlightened northerners had towards the worst excesses of violence against blacks in the South. The great.
Speaker Courage, though, in times position was that the Times lost readers. It offended readers. It offended potential advertisers because unlike The New York Times or The New York World, the Time. Time magazine ostensibly had readers in the South. And they did lose readers as a result of their their position.
Speaker OK. Just because of the Times and.
Speaker Yeah, let me. I really, really think you’ve got to compromise. You to deal with that. This thing was done through the time.
Speaker You know the timing. All right. Let me back up. Let’s see. I’m sorry first. But first, I want to deal with women’s positions on these issues.
Speaker Right. And was that I mean, with these positions that were pretty strongly held. And was it unusual for a magazine to take this position? The snake?
Speaker I’m not sure why. Time magazine adopted position. It did. But I’ll I’ll I’ll try to do this in a more coherent fashion. TIME magazine early on made a decision, a collective decision. The origins are not clear to me why this happened, that it would it would treat African-Americans with a kind of rough quality, that not all potential readers would accept, that it would award them courtesy titles, for example, in a story. It would. It would more to the point, it would cover and in so many words, condemn the lynching of black American males in southern many southern states. This position was not uncommon to some. Perhaps most New York and Northern newspapers who had been critical of lynching for four decades. But New York newspapers and other Yankee papers didn’t have to worry about losing readers in the South by condemning lynching, which was within the south itself controversial. But but Southerners reacted with with with ire when Yankees began to to criticize their their their activities and so forth.
Speaker And time would go so far.
Speaker As to run graphic pictures of lynched victims, a realism that was very uncommon to American journalism, I think in the early 1930s. They took great courage. Again, I think that Time magazine was conveying a kind of a kind of liberalism, a kind of progressivism on race issues that probably flowed from the best instincts of not just of loose, but of many of those working foreign, primarily northerners, although one of his senior editors, senior writers, was from South Carolina. But it took an enormous editorial courage for for a time to do that. They received a great deal of mail from Southern readers complaining about the criticism. Southerners had a habit then, as they would in the 1950s and early 60s, of reacting defensively to wholly justified criticisms.
Speaker Was it unusual for.
Speaker Them, too. As I said, you know, periodically in the magazine, there would be a section called Negroes. And even to have that was that’s something that was particularly courageous editorial. I don’t I don’t know the answer to that. I know that.
Speaker That that later some of Luce’s worst detractors would credit him and his magazine for having been forward looking, having been courageous on on race issues, which from which I infer that other magazines were not so forthcoming when I see other magazines that clearly weren’t. Were were northern based periodicals like The Nation and The New Republic that had been critical of the Klan, of lynching and so forth. But they weren’t seeking the large, larger audience. The Time magazine was seeking. And that’s why Time’s position. I think was was so courageous. I’m not sure that they thought it was courageous. There’s a quality. To the magazine at that time that they sort of did what they wanted to do is kind of almost recklessness. And if they profited from it, so be it. But it was not a magazine drivelling driven by marketing. It was not a magazine that tested covers. I think that these were these were men and women who who put out the kind of magazine they wanted to put out and didn’t didn’t worry too much about that. I’m sure there were meetings in which ad representatives came in and said, we really have to do something about this.
Speaker Our Southern readers are mad. But there’s a little record of that happening.
Speaker What was the response? Well, we talked about journalists. Was there did time? What was the argument at times, detractors? Maybe that’s what time did have its detractors and then what was it that they didn’t like about it?
Speaker Times detractors. Ah, ah, ah. Fall into several categories initially. Time doesn’t have any detractors. When it first comes out and really into the middle late 1930s, most people who write or talk about time do so with admiration because they see hadnot loose as having carried out a great journalistic experiment, which is the guided summary.
Speaker The intelligent synthesis of young journalists admire the writing style and want to mimic it. The criticisms only slowly begin to emerge. And and it’s when that style that that assuredness takes on political ends. But many of Lucy’s targets, when you think about Time magazine during this period, are in many cases are very conservative or very, very liberal voices that don’t have access to too. Can’t can’t vent their criticism of prohibition. Prohibition supporter in Kansas who doesn’t have a magazine did that that allows for that kind of response.
Speaker They’re cut off.
Speaker So it isn’t until the 1940s and then, of course, in the 1950s that you begin to see systematically a body of criticism emerge that says loosies created a monster, that this magazine and all the devices that loose and hadn’t perfected over the years. Are now being used towards political ends then that wasn’t in that that wasn’t what we thought was going to happen.
Speaker That is true, by the way. It’s admiration in the 20s through puberty. This is amazing.
Speaker You know, and maybe I’m just going into a place that the Halberstadt place, OK, which is and maybe you have thought about it or not. But. Times place in the emerging what is often called in the 20s, the national culture such as Halberstam.
Speaker Oh yeah, no, I agree with that. I agree with that.
Speaker But I think it’s you don’t have to ask you to keep asking you to Ruzzo to refute Halberstam directly.
Speaker I’m just asking you if you have thoughts about times. Please.
Speaker Well, you may remember I have this I have this section in Chapter three, I think, where I talk about. About life, excuse me, about time representing this kind of new. There had been national magazines before Harper’s Atlantic. So we want to be careful, we talk about national culture, too, to recognize the fact that there were time was not the first national publication to come out. It was the first national publication to do what it set set out to do. It did what it did differently.
Speaker Well, I’m not asking you to. OK, first, I’m asking you to. We’re going to be right. So.
Speaker Well, let’s be setting a new national record. For this for this project, that’s you oh, very good. I want to ask you a question that we have been over before.
Speaker But this is the one about how. Being missionaries so influenced his call, his work and reason why I’m asking you to get, as I recall, that when you answered it before you kind of generalized about missionaries. Missionary kids in general. Right. Right. You know that generation of missionary kids. I’d like you to talk about it again. But just keep it focused on him.
Speaker OK. Now, as a teacher, I prefer the broader generalization. But I will. I will be right. I will obey.
Speaker Please. The conventions of hell. Right.
Speaker Without violating your principles or. OK. So the question is, how did his being a missionary effect affect?
Speaker Luce made a decision as a teenager not to follow his father in the ministry. He would become a journalist. But as a result of that, I think he didn’t let me start over.
Speaker He’s done what you can do it like loose. Like many missionary, if you can just throw away.
Speaker OK. Of his insurer. Again, I just my syntax day lapsed. And then keep it with. Right. OK, ready. I’m ready. OK.
Speaker Lou’s like many missionary children elected not to follow his father in the ministry. And.
Speaker It was a decision he made as a teenager.
Speaker But. That didn’t.
Speaker That didn’t mean that he wouldn’t care about his profession in ways that I think were distinctive. That is to say, he believed that journalism was a calling. That it meant more than making money or enjoying material success, which he delite then. But nevertheless, he felt that that his his life would ultimately be measured by by his deeds. And his deeds involve not only creating journalistic institutions, but trying to do good work.
Speaker OK, no picking up where we left off. Happy nice teaser for PBS. They had to show that to get people to watch the show. Yeah, I’m actually moving Billboard for rent. Um.
Speaker Where we left off. Yes. The big theme, you know, the big theme question about. Where lucid magazines, particularly time, that specific period, fit into this emerging national culture.
Speaker If you if you look at at American culture between the World Wars, one of the more striking generalizations you can cast is that there are a series of new organizations that are that are very successful. Time is one. Life magazine will be another. Things like the Book of the Month Club will be still another that will serve as mediators for the middle class.
Speaker It will help the middle class decide which books to read, what news is important. They will be, in effect, helping the middle class direct its taste, its decisions, not necessarily telling them what to read or or or what to think, but providing more guidance. And it’s this new and ultimately network radio will serve a similar purpose. Again, in the case of of Luce’s magazines and institutions like the Book Club, a largely middle class audience that benefits from this. And it clearly wants this kind of guidance.
Speaker Well, you know, often radio during that time, radio was pointed to as something that kind of. Created or helped create a national culture in the sense that everybody was hearing the same thing. Right. Right. Can time be considered to be part of that of that evolution? Technology, information?
Speaker I would I would say yes and no. We have to understand that we’re nationally circulating magazines, some of which had large followings before time. Sandy is already being post would be one very good example of that. But Saturday Evening Post, the old Literary Digest had different audiences, I think, than time and life to time, had a younger Middle-Class Audience. I think it’s somewhat smarter in terms of educational attainment. Audience Hello. Occasionally I think it was more urban, although not intensely urban.
Speaker And I would argue a more influential audience than than did a lot of previous national national media.
Speaker Right.
Speaker I don’t know if we’re gonna go there, but I think it’s it’s real important to allow for the probability that a person who read Time magazine in 1940 or Fortune magazine was probably more influential in his or her community than someone who read the Saturday Evening Post and someone who read the local paper. It that’s where it looses influence, I think can be.
Speaker You know, can be traced.
Speaker The people who read his magazines in 1940 were or more influential. They weren’t necessarily the most influential Americans, but they were influential in their own communities.
Speaker What was when did this time start putting cause it’s actually actually becoming more than just a week.
Speaker They began and they began to place correspondents in the 30s. I think the real acceleration occurs, though, on the eve of World War two when it becomes most apparent that they have to be have to answer. Well, I’m sorry. They don’t know. You know, it’s good because I screwed up.
Speaker Time is largely a rewrite sheet for its first 10 years or so of Operation Middle and late thirties. It begins to hire more chorus begins to hire correspondents. Places like Washington begins to set up euros in different communities and begins to report overseas news on the even during the Second World War. And what had been a rewrite sheet become something else.
Speaker Craig.
Speaker How is it that so many liberals worked on such a conservative on a not such a on a conservative magazine? And why did he hide?
Speaker Harry Luce used to say that he tried to hire. More conservative writers. But that they couldn’t write. There is an old joke. Find me a Republican who writes folk songs and it sort of applies to the people who worked it at a time and fortune and life. People who wanted to journalism certainly aspired to work for national publications like Time, Life and Fortune tended to be more liberal than the general population that holds today. The other thing is that. Loose, prized, being a good rider, far more than being ideologically consistent. This was especially true when he was a younger man. Quality of writing really mattered to him and the potential of a writer in the case of someone like James Agee, who had real trouble adjusting to the expectations of Fortune magazine. Nevertheless, was say he was such a talent that Luce was determined to make him a staff writer.
Speaker So how did he reconcile?
Speaker The ideological differences or the political differences with these, initially, he didn’t care too much, although from the almost from the beginning of time it was and and life were heavily edited publications. So there was always the assumption, I think, that editors would would try to rein in some writers. But in fact, some of Luce’s most famous editors during this period were far more liberal than he was. But again, loose into the late 1930s is has a set of political views that are probably more to the right of most of his writers. But he’s very tolerant of that. And he understands that and respects that. The talents that he has to work with. His expectation over time, however, is that the wayward writer will be reined in by the editor, and he believes very much in the premise of group journalism. Time stories, for instance, did not carry bylines ordinarily. And the understanding was that they would speak with one voice of a man on the moon at the end of the 20th century.
Speaker Is that a quote?
Speaker It’s great, may not it may not have been Harriet may have been John Martin who said that. But it’s it’s in. You can check. It can be checked.
Speaker So was there tension in the workplace? I mean, this time, good place to work? Or was it, you know, was it rife with tension? What was. Because he had these town people sort of see them again in the early years, I’d say the first 15 to 20 years.
Speaker I think time and loses other magazines develop great reputation of being a very good place to work. Benefits were very good. The deadline pressures, the pressure to write to space could be intense. To meet to meet a word limit. Could be very intense. Agee struggled with that at Fortune when he wanted the sentence to run on an entire page. And Fortune had big pages. But so. So there was generally. It worked. It worked well enough for a while. If there were tensions, it was sometimes between individual editors and writers over how a story was handled. But there were no ideological divides that were that apparent until the Second World War or even late in the Second World War. When it becomes clear that the writers as a group are moving in one direction and the editors and Luce are stepping off in another.
Speaker We’ll get to that a little later. Let’s move on to Fortune. How did. How did fortune come to be? What was the genesis?
Speaker Lucy’s premise with Fortune was, and it was true of most every successful magazine that he started, was that there was an opportunity. That the existing business publications were awful.
Speaker He never quite put it that that straight away.
Speaker Instead, let’s try to fashion, but that they were. And that at the same time, Luce was convinced that American enterprise was changing. The entrepreneurial family owned companies were giving ways to to corporations which were run not by family members, but by managers, managers who were likely to have gone to college, possibly even done some graduate work, who were, in other words, not self-made men with the Andrew Carnegie’s and so forth. But college men, perhaps a bit like loose men who had a liberal arts education, and that this class of business managers, again, that Luce imagined needed a very different kind of business magazine, one that was was more thoughtful, more thorough and maybe even a little fun that would carry stories that you would never see in the Standard Business periodical published in in 1930 1931. At the same time, Luce imagined this. This new manager to be rather well off. So he charged a lot for fortune and he wanted Fortune to be worth it. Gorgeously odd, gorgeously illustrated. And and so the whole package was very impressive to lose. But he thought it would be worth it.
Speaker How did he sell this or. I’m starting from. Valid. Did he have to sell this to his board or did he have to sell it to the investors or did he have the money to do it? You know, within tiremaker, what’s it like? You have a prospectus like he he did.
Speaker But he did.
Speaker The skeptic the great skeptic about Fortune magazine was was. And we’ve hadn’t gone. He could proceed.
Speaker There was not. To my knowledge, difficulty raising the capital internally for the magazine. When Lewis, however, tried to recruit writers for Fortune, he encountered resistance. He did what any anyone trying does to start such a periodical would do. He went to newspaper business writers, people at the New York Herald Tribune and Times and so forth, assuming that they would be his. His staff, they just didn’t think Luce’s magazine would take off it, didn’t think it would succeed and and loose ended up hiring very different people, many of whom had never covered business before. Many of whom politically wanted nothing to do with business. But as it turned out, constituted, I would say, in the first six years the most extraordinary collection of writers that any American magazine ever had.
Speaker Why did he do this? I mean it it’s published in February 1930. Interesting time. Let’s hear it.
Speaker The depression is just under way. There’s a terribly dirty secret about the Great Depression. That that for all the suffering this country had, if you were well off and some Americans were, your standard of living actually improved over the course of the decade because of deflation, so forth. Yes, many workers and some in the middle class lost their jobs and suffered all kinds of deprivations. But there were there were still a managerial class. There were still professionals who were making nice incomes during the 1930s and could afford the kind of lavish publication that Luce was producing, just as they could afford to buy Packard automobiles.
Speaker What, as I ask about all the magazines. What was? New indifferent about fortune.
Speaker Besides, physically, it was I’m sorry.
Speaker That’s right. I know you know. In fact, you know, to I’m gonna I’m going to give it to you now. And you think, OK, what’s new and different and what. OK. Gotcha. Ready. OK. Try to hold it up as best you can. Yeah. So what I say is you’ve already characterizing this Christmas story as something, whatever it is, we need to see, you know. So.
Speaker Yeah. So.
Speaker Was loving. Years. The things that somebody will do just for a free lunch anyway. So tell me what.
Speaker What was new and different about Fortune magazine, fortune was lavish.
Speaker The way it was laid out was illustrated the thickness of the paper. That was that was used to produce it. It was very different from existing business periodicals. It wasn’t just about business. It would cover stories about Brend ma, would cover stories about art. It would cover stories about the king of England. Although most of the stories involved American enterprise. Luce’s imagined audience was a corporate manager who wasn’t just interested in American enterprise.
Speaker And again, it was it was an enormous success, a success that no one expected the degree to which it was.
Speaker So why why did he make such a lavish book?
Speaker One was he wanted I think part of it was loose wanted fortune to be lavish because he thought that that would be a selling point, that that would distinguish it from other business periodicals. He also planned to have a heavily illustrated and knew that a thick paper would would convey the illustrations much more effectively, not just in illustrations, which, by the way, were both photographic, but also involve drawings.
Speaker So forth. Within the magazine itself. Tell me about the quality of the physical details.
Speaker These stories were longer.
Speaker I’m sorry. Go ahead. More thing, because he didn’t mention that it was unlike any other business magazine. Was it pretty much what unlike any other magazine?
Speaker I think it’s fair to say that now.
Speaker I think it’s fair to say that Fortune was unlike any other magazine in the sense that it was the extent to which it was. It was bigger. It was more lavishly illustrated.
Speaker The the quality and range of the writing and topics made it distinctive, but still had a primarily business focus, but not exclusively one. And it made it just that much more effective as an instrument. It was sometimes said that by by the critics of of of the magazine that Luce was producing a better magazine than the business class the United States deserved. The writing was that good, that the illustrations were that gorgeous? Some of the photography that was used in the magazine anticipated what will be seen in Life magazine beginning in 1936.
Speaker What? OK. Hang on for a second. We gave you a reason by having him on the magazine, or should we just forget? I kind of like it.
Speaker I wouldn’t use be. I mean, we’ve never we’ve never seen him holding a man.
Speaker But I think that it’s interesting. We need some physical detail as well.
Speaker And that’s why I like you like this. You need to share. Too. Well, we will. But will you. Will you turn back more towards the beginning? Sure. Sure. And just kind of page through it. And you don’t have to necessarily talk about this specific blog. Right. Right.
Speaker Just tell me about some of the things that you’re seeing that strike you as being kind of different about how its approaches work visa vs some other magazine.
Speaker Part of the difference you’re seeing is, is the the amount of space an individual story gets and the length allows for a greater depth. It allows you to explore a company more seriously. A typical business story in 1930, 1931, 32 might be several pages, might BS so many hundred words in fortune. Ten thousand words might be the length of a story. And the other thing about Fortune was, although you had thick detail, writers were very carefully instructed not to assume too much of the reader. A banker might not understand how the copper industry works. A copper miner might not understand how banking works. And they were. And that’s another reason why, I should say Luce’s decision to hire so many amateurs, so many people who didn’t do business made them better business journalists. There’s an insider quality to business journalism then as now, that really spoils it for the rest of us who are involved in free enterprise. But, you know, you didn’t have to be a business person to enjoy fortune at this time. Gorgeous photographs and illustrations in this case of resources that a child could leave through. A friend of mine who was growing up in Arkansas said he would go on some Saturdays to the to his public library just to leaf through the publication and to enjoy it. In that spirit.
Speaker What about the advertising?
Speaker Well, variety and Fortune was able to tap into a variety of advertisers. A lot of institutional advertisers of companies that were that were targeting business leaders, but also their goodwill. It was it was attractive in that in that regard. Institutional ads, for example, for four fisher bodies of General Motors. Here’s a two page spread here. Sample that a one page ad for J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency. These ads, many of them were laid out with the understanding or the assumption that that leading business men and women were reading this publication and not my friend in Arkansas at the public library.
Speaker But with regard to you, what about the physical quality of these production high production standards and cost a fortune allowed one, as in the case of this, Welch’s tomato juice ad here allowed one to spend more on advertising to run thicker illustrations, color illustrations than you could in in a typical periodical. You weren’t limited to black and white. The quality of the reproductive quality of integrity of the ad was going to be higher.
Speaker And the covers during this period consisted of original artwork, sketches, quite dramatic. Very much an art deco or modern look. Gorgeous.
Speaker And in some notorious outlets, retail outlets in Michigan sell them for a strip the covers off now and sell them for artwork.
Speaker What else what else can I tell you?
Speaker Typically, the the. Well, in the early years of fortune, this is one of.
Speaker This is one of the great stories about the magazine, although it’s ostensibly written and targeting the business class, the upper reaches of American management. Fortune magazine will run some of the best journalism about the Great Depression that will appear in any American newspaper or periodical, it will it will run stories about the housing crisis, whether Americans are starving.
Speaker They’re beautifully written, but also. Very sensible stories that give you a lot of facts and data that don’t rely just on the poetic license of the writer, but are very moving at the same time. It’s powerful journalism. Whether the business leaders really read them or not is is not to be known. But there are serious, serious articles. Perhaps Fortune’s most honored article during this period was an examination of the arms race or the armaments industry, Arms and the Men, a spectacular series or article that that Fortune ran that explored the armaments industry.
Speaker One more question, which is how was this? I’m sorry, sir. How did he hit upon making this such a visual?
Speaker I think that’s been said of of loose and and those around him from the beginning of Time magazine. That they always had an eye for illustration that some of their competition did not possess that that loose and others always appreciated the value. Of a photograph or an illustration to advance the story.
Speaker Oddly enough, people out of newspapers didn’t always appreciate that, certainly those who wrote for the more prestigious newspapers were always thought to to hold photography and illustrations and in some contempt it got in the way of the printed word. Luce never suffered from that handicap. The earliest issues of time, I think, convey in an effort to use illustration and fortune, of course, by the way, it was laid out and the size allowed allowed for a generous use of illustration to play into that. And Luce’s first hire. One of his very first hires at Fortune is a photographer, an industrial photographer, Margaret Bourke-White. And arguably one of his most successful hires ever.
Speaker How did he find her? How did he come to hide? Well said.
Speaker He I believe he was in Cleveland to check this story out. But I believe he wasn’t in Cleveland in twenty nine and saw as an array of her displayed for photographs quite by accident. And again, Bourke-White was a particularly good fit for Fortune because she really did like photographing inanimate objects, machinery and so forth. And she she was also able to experiment in fortune because again, of the size of the publication with what came to be known as the photo essay, which was a group of related shots intended to convey almost in a cinematic sense, a story. When Time magazine did one. Excuse me, when Fortune magazine would do profiles of companies. And one of them, I believe, was a swift company, meat packing company. She did the photo essay showing pigs being led to slaughter. And it’s very effectively done and not a little moving.
Speaker And how how did he hit upon the idea of the Fortune survey? What was its importance?
Speaker Well, it comes in the late night. The Fortune survey comes in the late 1930s and loses, mindful as our others simply loses, mindful of strike tried again. The fortune made the Fortune survey is is, I think, reflects the growing awareness of business leaders like loose of the possibility of survey research of public opinion surveys. 1936 is as well-known because of the possibility some pollsters are able to correctly predict the outcome of the 1936 election. And and there is there’s growing realization, although it’s originally a marketing tool. That polling can do more, that they can help us understand more about ourselves and our attitudes, and it’s superior to guesswork.
Speaker It’s superior to to assertion about what public opinion is, even though, heaven knows. Time did a lot of that. And life as well.
Speaker And so the Fortune survey will grow and allow allow this kind of systematic evidence again. It’s part of this confidence in in scientific management, part of this past. This confidence that things like polling can make business better, can make society better, make the country better.
Speaker OK. Let me move on.
Speaker Let me ask you something about. We’re done with Fortune. OK? We’ll take that big, heavy, gorgeous girl boy. It is gorgeous. I mean, it’s it’s it really was astonishing.
Speaker When you’ve never seen an old Fortune magazine. Well, let me ask you something. Are you comfortable talking about March of time?
Speaker Absolutely. Although I’m not prepped, but I think I’m ready. Started out, as you know. Go ahead. Date dating may be a little little muddy, but it wasn’t important.
Speaker We take care of dates, OK? Dates are sets up even though. As far as the evolution is taking place in the photo essay. So let’s talk about how the march of time.
Speaker Originally, it was a radio. The March of Times was originally a radio.
Speaker Wait a minute. First time you’re telling it shows that it is just start clean, OK? Catch up. OK.
Speaker The March of Time was originally a radio series that one of Luce’s. Colleagues came up with a quote. Time magazine and there were plenty of cross references. It was painfully synergistic in that regard. It was it was painfully a promotional platform for Time magazine.
Speaker It was a weekly summary of of the world’s news in which actors would re-enact events and so forth, always in English.
Speaker By the way, whether it was someone in Latin America or Russia, it was always the person was always, by the way, speaking in English. And it caught on. It caught on. More than Lewis could imagine. Indeed, there more than once. There were times when Luce was genuinely annoyed that the March of Time’s radio program was that popular? Was that successful because he really didn’t take it that seriously?
Speaker Yes.
Speaker So how did how did the MLT radio show evolve to lose again, was persuaded to buy one of his one of his colleagues to launch a newsreel service of the march of time again? The idea was different. It would it would be different from the conventional movie newsreels, which might show bathing beauties in a ship landing in New York. The March of Times will try to march of time, will try instead to offer a sort of on the competent view of the news of events organized, not unlike the magazine with the voice of God that would it would sort of tell us what was going on and so forth. And it was it was structurally different from the newsreel limited. It told news stories differently.
Speaker Did it also have. Carry with it the voice of times.
Speaker Yes, that several different different individuals play the voice of time.
Speaker And when I say the voice, I mean more I’m speaking more the style.
Speaker Initially, the march of time. NARRATOR had the unissued voice that one saw in Time magazine in 1935 or 1936 a tone of finality. This is what happened because I’m the voice of time and conveying that kind of authority, organizing the news, not again, not as a string of scattered events, but with coherence that other newsreels did not affect to offer.
Speaker And what about its use of recreation?
Speaker Was it something that was different, that was more of a problem with the radio program where they would they would re-enact events they have just started? That was. But I’m trying to remember the recreation issue with them, with the film version. I’m drawing a blank. Well, it was an issue with the radio.
Speaker What about. What about cheating now? Do you recall the uproar over inside Nazi Germany?
Speaker Not well enough to talk about with any authority. Sorry about the ramparts we watched, things like that. But this again, it’s a blank. I thought I thought Ray was coming in. So that’s why I didn’t.
Speaker That’s OK. It’s always nice.
Speaker What about Rand Paul’s very famous March of Time’s new march of time? The ramparts we watched was a very famous march of time, Newsweek, perhaps the most famous, produced on the eve of our involvement in World War Two.
Speaker And what was its premise?
Speaker I can’t remember that.
Speaker This is like a general exam for me. Right.
Speaker You’ve only got one guy who’s got too high now on toes to answer to. All right. Let’s move on to life. Yes.
Speaker And let’s talk about the genesis of life. What his vision. You know what? How his vision was reflected in his prospectus. What did he. How did it how did it sort of percolate in his mind and how did it come to be?
Speaker Henry Luce was convinced early on in his career, that is to say in the early 1920s, that photography could be an instrument of journalism or much more of an instrument of journalism than most of his colleagues in in the periodical press and daily journalism believed. He was convinced that photographs could tell a story as well, or nearly as well as words. Again, that wasn’t unorthodox in some cathedrals of journalism. And life was, in his mind, a way of advancing that argument, that photography could be a nuf new form of journalism. He had an eye for the visual. Not just photography, but illustrations that was conveyed in time. It was very well conveyed in Fortune. But Fortune was a pretty expensive meal for most Americans and not everybody could get to the public library on Saturday. So the advantage of of of life, Luce’s vision for life was to produce a publication that aspired to the visual richness of fortune but was affordable. That only cost a dime. That was tricky because there were many technological problems finding a way of reproducing on good quality paper, good quality illustrations. And there were a number of technological issues that had to be straightened out, glitches that almost ruined the enterprise. By the way, it was not just Luce’s idea. Others, including William Randolph Hearst, had been working on such an idea of the British and Germans. Both had comparable publications under way and they were a partial inspiration to loose.
Speaker What were some of the technical challenges?
Speaker Finding a way of reproducing illustrations. On paper, so that the. So so that the photograph or whatever didn’t smear you could do that on the high quality, thick paper that fortune used and not run that risk. And then so the magazine together, if you were trying to produce over a mass circulation magazine like life. You had to you had to figure on someone, a certain type of paper that was affordable and they were able eventually to find a publisher who was able to do that in Chicago.
Speaker What was new and different about?
Speaker Well, it was my life was was different in the sense that. The use of illustration was. Was extensive.
Speaker But until the publication of Life Ethically Illustrated journalistic vehicle, whether it was a newspaper or whatever, was identified with the lower classes. The working classes. Life, what she didn’t lose would brook none of that. He he believed that. That everybody enjoyed photographs as some people were more willing to admit it than others. Again, it had long been thought that the tabloid press that carried a lot of photographs that the respectable newspapers and magazines did not. And if they did, they ran illustrations like The Saturday Evening Post. So part of it was to to create a magazine, a picture magazine that the middle class would read. And he did. And he did. Price was low, but magazine reading was still primarily a middle class hobby. It wasn’t something working class at the time or the income to engage in unless they were having their hair cut.
Speaker So how how is it that it caught on so. Quickly and so. Emphatically.
Speaker There been research since the early 1930s. If not earlier, that consumers, regardless of socio economic status, liked illustrations and wanted more of them in the newspaper and in magazines. But editors had held back and part of it was the cost of production. Part of it was their stubbornness. Loose was proven to be a better marketer than he could possibly imagine. Life magazine had such tremendous success initially that newsstands ran out of them. People would have Life magazine parties if they bought a copy. They would invite their friends over to to leaf through it. The only comparable thing is the introduction of radio or television in the 20th century, where the first TV set owner suddenly realized how many friends he had in his neighborhood life had that kind of appeal lose it. Always known photography was popular. He didn’t realize was that popular as a journalistic device or or development. In fact, life was so popular that the circulation was passing the guarantee that Luce was making to advertisers. And Time Inc. actually was losing money because it was producing more magazines than it could afford to. Given the charge, it was it was assessing consumers and the what turned out to be bargain rates. Advertisers were receiving.
Speaker OK. But.
Speaker The way you’re telling it. It was really popular because there were a lot of pictures. What I want to know is what is it about? This picture. And the way this picture book was put together that made it such a hit. Is it just that there were pictures? Or is there something about the way the pictures were? Put together that choice of stories. That’s where they started.
Speaker Well, first of all, season, when one looks at the success of life, clearly the heavy use of illustrations was was part of its success. But there was other nothing casual about that. The diary of the first editor of Life can be examined. And they agonized over every photograph and every photo spread that they put in in the magazine. And the magazine itself will go through a period of about five years where they will try different things. They originally had a section about the president. They were going to run every week photographic spread on President Roosevelt. Well, they drop that rather quickly, even though he was still a tremendously popular president. But there their hope was to mix it up, to run a different photo essays that were interesting, that were fun to use what was called at the time, Candid Camera work, which were photographs of newsmakers and everyday Americans caught unaware, often embarrassing, potentially or mildly embarrassing situations to run photographs of that of that order. Pay some heed to a celebrity, but overall give Americans more of a visual representation of news than they’d they’d received anywhere else in their lives.
Speaker What influence do you think the sort of documentary movement, the FSA photographs of the thirties? How does life fit into that whole.
Speaker Emerge Life magazine advantaged as well from what is called the documentary movement, the Farm Security Administration. In that there was this new movement affecting to a kind of realism that photographers for the federal government practiced in their attempts to document the Great Depression and its effects on the American people. Many of those FSA photographers end up working for life and or influencing writers at the magazine, photographers at the magazine. Their attitude towards photography is more natural.
Speaker It’s less posed. And and in that sense, the magazine gives you, you know, gives you a visual representation that’s very different from a staid family portrait or a state political smile. Now the camera’s on approach that news photographers ordinarily made. There’s one of the development of life that’s that that Luce and his photographers took full advantage of. And that is the like a camera which allowed for more shots allowed or did not, I should say, did not like a camera, did not require one to set up your shot with the same care that you did with the older standard issue cameras and life photographers routinely had like is on top of everything else. And some of some of life’s most famous photographs were used were taken baila using like a cameras.
Speaker What?
Speaker How did Luce use sex to sell my.
Speaker Lose himself and many of those who who are involved in putting the magazine together.
Speaker Didn’t take what they were doing too seriously. Loose may have been a minister’s son, but he understood the value whenever possible of showing attractive women in the magazine. And indeed, there’s one famous conference in which Luce comes in and looks at the makeup of of Life magazine and sort of, Tetteh says, a rather abrupt way to his editor that you need it needs more fun. It’s too dull.
Speaker And he promptly found a photograph of a attractive young woman to run in the magazine life never until the very end took itself too seriously. It always understood that it was kind of an omnibus, that it was carrying a lot of different things and. What was then called cheesecake was was one of them, there was usually always some on the plate, and it was worth noting that life’s readership included some. Usually in barbershops who only looked at the dessert tray.
Speaker How did he. Well, you know, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Go ahead. Poland Spring Water in. I mean, that’s a bonus for me. It’s like, how did Lucy embrace life and time differently like these are?
Speaker Two of his sort of general magazin general popular magazines. How did he lose his feeling about Hitchin?
Speaker Among Luce’s productions, his periodicals time was always the most important publication to Fortune, carried a special place in his heart as well because of its achievements, particularly in the 30s, for what it could do that the other magazines could not do. LifeA always understood to be a platform that that that surpassed any other. It was his most popular magazine. Indeed, some some contemporaries of Luce thought the popularity affected him and made him take himself, in his opinion, leadership possibilities to seriously that. As one wrote with with some exaggeration, that life was too popular. He went mad and suddenly thought he was a mass communicator. It hadn’t been before that he was reaching a much larger percentage of the of the American population than he ever had before, that he never envisioned reaching quite so many Americans as he suddenly was doing.
Speaker Which brings me to. Something like this plane. Oh. Oh, hello. Oh. I had seen in my wallet my.
Speaker By the 1940s. How big was his reach?
Speaker Luce’s audience. Was always middle class. There were working class Americans who encountered Life magazine in various public places. But his audience was always middle class. I’d say at one point a fourth of the adult audience regularly read one or more of Luce’s publications. That’s very high for American magazine publishing company Americans. In the 1940s, we’re still far more likely. To listen to the radio and to read newspapers, but among the middle classes, reach was was quite substantial. And among the middle class, in cities and smaller towns, very large.
Speaker So at what point did he began to emerge as what you call a public?
Speaker Lose, lose politics had always been, I think, more moderate than that of much of the Republican Party to which he belonged to the 1930s, although he had not always voted for Republican presidential candidates. But like some moderate Republicans. Roosevelt’s re-election in 1936 was the beginning of a transformation for him. That and changes in his personal life may have figured in this as well. Luce is concerned that Roosevelt is going too far, that the New Deal is failing to end the Depression. That Roosevelt’s anti business rhetoric is being taken too far an extreme. In retrospect, I think who’s Luce was overreacting. But Lewis was not the only sort of moderate Republican to come to this conclusion.
Speaker And he began to believe that he himself should begin.
Speaker To engage in the conversation about America’s future. And in 1937, he begins giving speeches, something that a man with a speech problem didn’t normally do. But he begins to define himself in ways that he had not before as a public leader. And his initial array of speeches involves criticisms not not harsh or bitter of the Roosevelt administration.
Speaker And the feeling that there must be a sort of a middle way, preferably a moderate Republican way out of the depression that is less hostile to big business and business generally.
Speaker So. How?
Speaker How did how did the Willke, the 40 election. Right. Well.
Speaker Lewis’s involvement in public life, though, I think, took on a new force with the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. His major concern in 37 and 38 had been domestic policies and the economy and the failure of the of the depression to end. But the war in Europe distressed him enormously and ending loose concluded that a German victory in Europe would be a calamity not only for Western Europe but for the United States, and that it was vital that the United States become involved in the war.
Speaker Indeed, he will be one of the earliest advocates, although not publicly, that the United States actually declare war on Germany. He felt that strongly about Hitler and his his success. However, as a as a loyal Republican, he realizes that there is a very real possibility that the Republican presidential candidate, 1940, will be an isolationist, will be somewhat adhering to the party’s.
Speaker Recent opposition to two getting involved in the war, either Senator Taft of Ohio or New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey, later governor of New York.
Speaker Lou’s together with a number of friends and publishing and some in business find a substitute. Wendell Willkie, a very charismatic attorney, a Wall Street lawyer from Indiana, has an accent. Indiana accent schemes. I just just a good old boy, but totally committed in his own way to aiding the allies, much more so than Dewey and Taft. And Lose Lose will encourage his publications to promote Willke not only as a viable alternative to Taft or Dewey, but as the people’s alternative, as the real choice of the of the Republican rank and file. And there will be some inflation of Wilkie’s actual support. He’s a new figure. A lot of Republican voters have never heard of him. But various efforts will be made to promote Wilkey, and he does win the nomination on the sixth ballot. And as is the Republican nominee.
Speaker So to what degree do you think Luce is? Responsible or contributory to the emergency?
Speaker Well, I don’t think that Luce’s involvement. In politics, backup, Luce never had a greater political success, if one can call it that, than in helping to engineer Wilkie’s nomination in 1940. You cannot attribute his support of Dwight Eisenhower 12 years later to his influence because Eisenhower had a lot else going for him. Lewis was not the only person to be promoted to be hyping Wilkie’s candidacy. But it was extraordinary measure of of his power that he was able to help catapult his dark horse into into prominence and. And it and it worked, at least in terms of nomination. It’s also an indication, though, who is reading or consuming Luce’s publications that tend to be perhaps younger or younger, middle age Republican voters who are most likely to be to be moved because in the fall election, Wilkie is unable to defeat FDR.
Speaker What was Luce’s early take on fascism?
Speaker Was he a supporter and was leaning loose, was momentarily enchanted, as were some other journalists by Mussolini. Italy seems such a disappointment to foreign observers that Italy failed to be modernizing its economy to the to the extent that some other European nations were. It was it was seemingly in need of a stronger leader than it was being served by. And and Luce did momentarily think Mussolini was was was effective again. He was not alone in that. I understand that the Studebaker motor car company offered potential buyers a model which it called the dictator. There was a certain appeal to to Mussolini. And he and Woosley also played the American press like a drum, very charismatic in his own way. They never knew, for instance, how lazy was. You’d never know that when you met with him and thought all it was fruit. And so Mussolini does enjoy a very nice story that Luce himself and fortune ginned up in ways that made Benita look even better than than than the story originally proposed with with Hitler and Germany.
Speaker We have the complicating factor that Luce’s chief foreign news editor is, if not sympathetic to Hitler, does suffer from a measure of anti-Semitism.
Speaker And indeed, that will damage Time magazine’s reputation and in the minds of many people long after this particular editor is removed. Luce seemed less averse. I think. To fascism than to just simply the specter of Germany dominating Europe. And what that would mean for France and especially for Britain, Luce understood, is as many American opinion leaders, particularly in the East Coast, understood, that if Britain fell, the United States would, in fact, have some serious security issues and economic issues. Could we consider or rely on Germany to be a trade partner? What if Germany took control of the British fleet?
Speaker So the opposition to Hitler initially was more strategic than ideological. Certainly we had much more in common with the British and the French before it fell than than we did with the Germans. But one doesn’t sense. A full appreciation. By loose and others as to just how evil Nazi Germany is. They’re certainly aware that Hitler is not someone they would want to go camping with, but they don’t understand just that the degree as Franklin until the end of the war, I should say, did did Hitler’s did many of Hitler’s opponents here understand just how evil he was? What turned him around about Hitler?
Speaker Well, I think he was turned around by what? By what? Whatever one was turned around by which was the opening of the death camps and so forth.
Speaker I mean that no one understood just how monstrous Hitler was until the end of the war, although there were certain things that Germans were doing during the campaign and in 1940 that suggested, such as the bombing of Rotterdam, that this was not a regime to be to be trusted. At the same time, Britain was able to reassert its ties to us quite marvelously in the form of Winston Churchill, a figure time and life embraced in a long, sustained bear hug until Churchill himself dies in 1965.
Speaker So. I mean, you’re talking about till the opening of the defecates. Are you saying that? He really didn’t see Hitler. I mean, he saw sort of the economic and strategic problems, perhaps, but then he didn’t see Hitler as a menace in the 30s.
Speaker It’s not clear to me to what extent he saw Hitler’s.
Speaker It’s simply I’ve simply I’ve never seen any indication that he understood quite how evil Hitler was.
Speaker He certainly understood that Hitler was not a Democrat, that he was he was doing things to to Jews in Germany that were to be deplored.
Speaker But I don’t think that he, like most of the the pro-war voices in 1940, 41, understood quite how evil he evil Hitler was. Just as we understand, just as the opponents of intervention. Primarily in the Middle West, didn’t understand and need to be given a pass in that regard. It’s easy in retrospect to condemn them for their seeming moral blindness, will they? No one could see just how evil Hitler was.
Speaker Was loose, accused or perceived as an anti-Semite?
Speaker No. Not not really.
Speaker The fact that some anti-Semitism, a lot perhaps seeped into into time hurt his reputation.
Speaker And it never recovered in the minds of some readers. But he didn’t suffer as someone like he himself was never, never charged with engaging in that kind of language.
Speaker You seem surprised with the answer that I gave you about the degree of evil with with him. I mean, I think it really. I don’t mean it. I mean, no one knew. You know, the death camp news didn’t get out. It really didn’t get out.
Speaker But, I mean, you know, here Lucy’s criticizing. Roosevelt for being slow to aid the allies. But I think it seems to me that Roosevelt had a more. You know, perceived Hitler as a as a as a menace. And I’m surprised that Lucy didn’t see him.
Speaker Well, it was again, it was you know, I think that that this is a generation that lived through the First World War, when shall we say the evil of Germany had been oversold. So I think most people certainly conversation we’re having at lunch.
Speaker Most people were talking about. Were were some. There was some element of skepticism about characterizations of Hitler that they knew he was bad. They do know is this bad sort of thing, and I think that’s why I want to be careful what I say. There was tremendous fear the British fleet would fall into German hands.
Speaker Because then our security would be at risk. And there was there were economic considerations as well. Hollywood lost its ability to export films to Europe when when when Hitler took over. So, again, I don’t mean to be cynical about that, but I think that we need to.
Speaker You know, we shouldn’t let let him right.
Speaker The American century, in many ways, Luce understood when he wrote the American Century editorial, something he’d understood as a much younger man in 1920. And that was that this country had to come to terms and reject over a century of isolationism. That it was no longer in the national interests of the world’s interests. For the United States not to be not to play a dominant role in world affairs. If you look at that editorial. It is really an argument, I think, much of it with an America that doesn’t exist anymore in the sense that it’s people who are very reluctant to see America play a large role in world affairs, who are reluctant to see, for example, a permanent large military establishment. These were Americans, again, primarily in the Middle West and some Western states. Who dreaded R? Playing that role. Who thought it wouldn’t invariably lead to mischief, that it would, among other things, enhance the power of the president, Republican or Democrat? Luce felt these arguments just didn’t carry water, that it was our obligation. There is even, I think, a religious tone in the essay. That that the burden has fallen to us. He’s careful not to say that. Say, say this, but it’s rather clear that Britain is no longer up to the burden of maintaining the world’s peace. As Britain to a certain extent had through much of the 19th century, that that. The American century was was necessary for that, for only for our sake, but for for the world that the world would benefit. From this expanded role that it would lead the lives of people throughout the world would be better if we played this role. It’s a very idealistic. Belief in America and America and the possibilities of American power. Reading it now, it’s you you realize, you know, this sadness that has come in that wake. But.
Speaker OK.
Speaker He coined the term American Century and what was the impact of this, Ed?
Speaker That term had Luce’s use of the expression American century may not have been his alone.
Speaker Luce borrowed heavily, I think, from several essays that Walter Lippmann had written for Life magazine, in which I know Blueseed had had seen had been involved. They originally were a series of lectures which Lipmann, at this point as a syndicated columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, had written in the late 1930s. And again, it’s this in Lippmann’s cases is very joyless and dower expression of the need for America to to assume a large role in world affairs. And so there’s a certain connection between the arguments that Lippmann’s making and the ones that lose will make in 1941.
Speaker Loses, I think, have more of a religious emphasis. To a certain extent, they feel more hopeful, but he’s addressing a different audience.
Speaker Let me put it another way. Did he popularize the term become more widespread?
Speaker The expression American century takes on a sudden popularity as a consequence of the editorial appearing in life?
Speaker Indeed, it sparks a certain amount of argument because there’s some particularly on on the left, who believe that the American century is imperialistic, that it’s it’s inappropriate, even if you you want American to play a larger role. You seem to be implying that America should play the large role, a role comparable to Rome in ancient times or Britain in more recent history. So individuals like Vice President Wallace and others suggest alternative centuries that are more more politically correct at that at that moment. There’s an element for all the religious tones that one sees in the in Luce’s editorial of realism about it and sort of resigned realism that one certainly saw in Lippmann’s the term.
Speaker Was it considered significant then, or is that only with?
Speaker I’m not sure that we may not have attach more significance to it. In retrospect, it had a certain bounce, the argument that it set off in 1941, 42 was not contrived because Luce did spark some some real debate and argument.
Speaker And it wasn’t a bad thing for American leaders, at least to journalists and others, to have a discussion about what should America’s role be in the post-war world. After the war, I think the expression rather died away. I’m not sure that it continue to have the same currency until the 1960s, late 1960s, especially when many Americans began to question our our involvement Vietnam and our role in the Cold War and wonder its origins or the origins of American globalism. And and many turn back to that issue in February 1941 and wondered if if Loose hadn’t been one of the chief. Cheerleaders for this. This is mood swing because something really extraordinary is significant in American foreign policy and public opinion does occur to this country, which is that we don’t do what we had habitually done as a people when World War Two ended after a short pause, smoke break. We accept the argument of the American century, whether Luce was its primary publicist or not. Americans agreed to a permanent military establishment, something we had rejected since the revolution. Americans who would agree to a large standing professional army. To a large Navy, to things that we had, we had.
Speaker You know, for saken after World War One. We agree to play a major role in the rehabilitation of Europe. We agree, in other words, to play the role. Henry Luce wanted this to play in the early 1920s. Lewis was again one of many people on the left and the right who applauded that.
Speaker Would you say it was?
Speaker A prophetic statement.
Speaker The American century may have been a prophetic statement to what extent one can draw a link between America’s emergence as a as a global power after World War Two and Americans acceptance of that is harder to make. But you could make this argument, and that is that at least some of Luce’s readers in the Middle West and the West and maybe parts of the South had been skeptical of American globalism, that they were part of the isolationist tradition. Maybe their parents were isolationists. Maybe their parents didn’t like spending money on the army or a battleship. But the Luce was converting them, sort of pushing them into his tent. And that’s where I think Lucy’s influence is a bit more subtle than some of imagined. But that’s where I think Lucy’s influence may have been felt.
Speaker That’s not in my book either. I think I should have acknowledged it.
Speaker No, I think it’s one of those. No, it’s one of those things. And it’s happened to you.
Speaker It’s one of those things. After you finish that, you realize I should have said a little, left this out because I was so busy arguing with certain journalists and others like David Halberstam that I didn’t realize, you know.
Speaker You were possessed together? No, I’ve heard he’s a nice guy, isn’t it? Yeah. Talk about the sort of the relationship with the symbiosis, if you will, between life and World War Two. How did World War two affect impel influenced life’s mission as loose? Well.
Speaker Life very quickly committed itself and loose, committed life. To covering World War Two in a serious way, there remained other things in the magazine to distract and entertain people. But life became the foremost sort of visual. Representation of World War Two for four Americans, certainly for those Americans who took or saw life, and and it was probably Life magazine’s finest hour to borrow from someone else who benefited from life’s publicity capacity. But it was it was probably life’s finest hour photographers and correspondents covering the war and giving us, again, a visual representation of war, which which it had not been available before.
Speaker Certainly not photographically.
Speaker How did.
Speaker Did did life’s coverage of the war have a certain propaganda? Nothing about a propaganda intention, but a propaganda benefit for the government.
Speaker I don’t. I don’t know that it did. I think that life’s coverage of the war, though, was much more realistic than people realize. I think you got a picture of battle.
Speaker And of war’s horrors or their possible horrors in life, you got a better picture of that than, for example, you got on the networks during the Vietnam War. Part of it was that life reached didn’t didn’t reach every home. The way conceivably a television network did. There was a great deal of self-censorship on the television networks during Vietnam.
Speaker They did not, despite claims later, show much battle, actual battle footage. The reasons for that. But I invite you to look at Life magazine, particularly in after about mid 1943, and look at some of the photo essays about battle. And you will you will see wounded man. You will see you will see well, you know, dead soldiers. You’ll see a photo essay on an American G.I. in Germany near the very end of the war, who is eventually killed at the end of the photo essay. And I challenge you to find comparably graphic. Visual representations on the networks during the Vietnam War. That’s not to say that they didn’t do a noble job in many other ways. But they later, but they later claim much too much. By comparison.
Speaker I can document that by anything I say that raises a question.
Speaker Well, like with the Sam Waterston and Law and Order.
Speaker So did the government use life’s photographs at all to further the government realized early in the war relatively early that it had to lift restrictions that it originally imposed about the graphicness of war coverage?
Speaker Specifically, there was concern stateside. That American support for the war might lag. Many Americans underestimated how long a war would take. And the degree of casualties that would transpire. And there were many in the federal government who concluded. That only by a more realistic treatment of battle scenes would Americans understand how serious this this issue was. And so when the government came to them and said, we want you to continue rationing. This product and that product, and no, you can’t go over 35 miles an hour when you drive because of the war. People will understand that they’re being asked to make a relatively small, small sacrifice. So there were still restrictions.
Speaker You couldn’t show the face of someone being killed in the photo essay in life early in 45. That shows the American G.I. Dying contains a black box over his eyes. So you don’t actually identify. You can’t actually know that it’s your son or your your brother who’s who’s about to get killed. That was a privacy issue that the government insisted on in that life in other publications honored. But the government was very mindful that morale might slide not. Now, the point where people would seek a negotiated peace or anything like that. But just in the everyday sacrifices Americans are going to be asked to make. And so there was this was a conscious policy.
Speaker George Roder has written wonderful about the censored war. Beautiful book, which actually be a special interest to you because it’s so much of it’s about photography, ROV, D-R. He’s at the Chicago Art Institute or something like. Yale published in.
Speaker What about World War two and Tom?
Speaker The time to sort of did the Times.
Speaker Coverage of World War Two have a similar sort of. Amplifying effect in terms of its influence.
Speaker Well, circulation continues to go up during this period. It’s clearly still a very important magazine to too many Americans. The amount of original reporting goes up there. They’re investing in original reporting. If they’ve committed themselves to that, it would have been easy enough. No one ever mentions this would’ve been easy enough for for loose to have cut back in that way. But he didn’t do it.
Speaker And there’s more. More reporting. But the tone doesn’t really change until the end of the war. Toward the end of the war, when.
Speaker Luce is beginning to think about the post-war world and who are potential rivals will be.
Speaker Um, do you want to follow up thought now about how about his. His power and influence, his thinking changed, evolved.
Speaker The war isn’t over yet. In 1944 looses already like many American opinion leaders, people who are think doing planning, whether they’re business people or publishers, are beginning to imagine a post-war world.
Speaker And Luce is increasingly convinced, as are a few people around him, that America’s postwar rival will be the Soviet Union. And that the Soviet Union will be a serious rival and not a friendly rival, the way the United Kingdom presumably was going to be, that the Soviet Union would, in fact, replace Hitler as a potential threat to American security. This is a conclusion that that loose reached sometime in 1944 and he became increasingly.
Speaker Concerned about this? Forty four, forty five and forty six to the point where there are some real editorial conflicts between loose his editors and some of the correspondents in the field. Who he feels aren’t appreciating this threat enough, this, this this new rivalry.
Speaker So tell me about the sort of the. Does this begin a period of increased division between the editors in New York and reporters and correspondents in the field? How does this come, you know, come about? And how come the correspondents aren’t as tuned into the editor to the thread that as the editors are, etc.? So.
Speaker Loose and had hired some extraordinarily talented reporters to cover the war in China, the war in Europe and the war on the eastern front. And many of them were filing very good stories, very often about about the war’s progress. But in Luce’s mind and that of some of the people around him, they were missing certain things. The most famous example occurs in China, where America is ostensibly allied to the government, is allied to the government of Shanghai, Sheck.
Speaker Chiang Kai shek is opposed while the war is going on by communist forces led by Mozarteum. And Luce’s correspondent in China will begin to attack the way Shinkai Sheck is conducting the war or not conducting the war. While praising the Communist Party forces led by Mao. Back in New York, Luce is hysterical about this for several reasons, emotionally, because of his attachment to China. His dread, the possibility. That China would fall to the communists. To him, white is naive. Brilliant, but naive. He doesn’t understand that once man assumes power. If he were to assume power, he would make to make China a dictatorship and that whatever the failings of Shenkar Scheck’s regime, China would be even more repressed and even would be would suck. The Chinese would suffer even more repressive regime. The paper on this is quite clear is it is it was feels that that Shanghai check has made false or the lucid Myers and likes him very much, but that there’s hope under Xiang and there won’t be under Hermel for for political freedom.
Speaker And there is a falling out over this. I’m sorry, but there is a falling out at about this time.
Speaker A former member of the Communist Party, Whittaker Chambers, becomes foreign news editor at TIME magazine. Chambers, like a lot of ex party members, like a lot of cigarette smokers, becomes a rather bigger anti-communist than anyone else on the block. And he is even more suspicious than loosies of any copy that reaches him from whether it’s from Chongqing or from from Moscow. That to him is soft on on communism. And stories are written in a way that convey Chambers’s conviction that the Soviet Union is our next. Our next assignment is at WERE and why it is is is furious about this, about the treatment of some of his dispatches that they are being rewritten, being violated, ignored by someone who’s not even on the field, lose his taunt because he has tremendous respect for and for the writers who are are being slighted in this way. Wounded in this way. And there’s some give and take that takes place in 44 and 45.
Speaker If you were subscribing to time at that time and reading it religiously one week, you think Russia was bound for Bergen County, New Jersey. And then the next week you’d think that that, you know, Stalin really is our friend. But put gradually white and some of the other senior writers realize that that the anti-communist policy of of Time magazine is going to predominate and it’s going to affect the way they report news. And they begin to leave. What’s worse? Time magazine begins to get a reputation among senior correspondents in the field of not respecting the material, is being sensitive. And of altering it. Of not running it. Or reversing or turning the results inside out. And in forty five, forty six, Lewis learns that they’re having some trouble hiring people, a problem that they had never faced. In the previous 10, 15 years.
Speaker Who is the. Was John Hersey. John Hersey was was the Moscow correspondent. John Hersey was. Was. Let’s start with you. Nothing for now.
Speaker John Hersey was was one of Lewis’s correspondents. A correspondent in Moscow. Someone that Lewis admired very much, just as he admired Teddy White. But Hersi was one of those who ran afoul of the of the the editors in New York and was quite angry about the way some stories were being written or what was being filed about about the Soviet Union.
Speaker And Hersey was like white, soon to leave the magazine.
Speaker What?
Speaker Why was Lou so gung ho about checking?
Speaker Well, change core is loose. Went back to China in the early 30s. Yes, he visited China. He turned since he was a kid.
Speaker Believe so. And I want to say about 32 or something like that. And he he returned again, I think, when the war was just starting. I think there were there was at least one of the trip. And then there was one right at the end of the warrant, November two. There’s some paper here about that November, December forty five, right after the war ends.
Speaker Well, was there. What at what point did you begin to embrace change?
Speaker I think it was a long embrace. I mean, I think fashion loose. Identified Shang as as the hope of China, in part because excuse me, in part B Loose identified Chang is Opeth China because Xiang had in fact, beginning in the late 1920s, asserted his dominance over most of of China.
Speaker The invasion by Japan in 37 seemed to upset that.
Speaker And Xiang, at the same time, together with some of his influential friends and in-laws, will court lose and cultivate his goodwill. Luce was capable of being flattered in that regard.
Speaker And so Shang minded loose and sought his favor and and loose and found himself quite charmed by by by showing gushing.
Speaker Did he first meet him in 1930 when he would you’d have to check.
Speaker I’m not sure when they actually first met, but it was I know that they. I’m virtually certain they met. I want to say was forty one or something when he was over there was it was pretty early in the game, but I know they left him back in the third back in early 1930 when he was I.
Speaker It could have been. It could have been.
Speaker Lou said it was set loose at a couple of problems with China. One, in this sense, I think he was prepared to give Shanghai shark a lot of room in terms of in a couple of ways. He understood the Shacochis was not a politician, that he was a soldier. Lewis also made a kind of cultural argument that China isn’t. Isn’t Indiana and that you can’t impose democratic institutions on China or expect them to flourish the way they would perhaps in other parts of the world.
Speaker And his hope was that shark, a shark was capable of of being a transitional figure, of leading China into modernity. Both, both politically and economically. And indeed, he will continue to believe that after the war. And that will be his argument. By the way, against against Mãe and against the Communists is that is we know what they are saying as this. There is this hope around Shang. And he will he will bet a lot of capital on that. That hope that argument that that Shang is is is is not perfect. He’s mindful of that. But they’re possibilities. They’re.
Speaker Was he? Was he? Loose that. Sort of instrumental in the Who Lost China argument after the revolution.
Speaker Many Americans. When China fell, we’re shocked. China had not been expected to fall quite as rapidly or as completely as it did when you went in.
Speaker There had been there’d been some argument by China watchers that what was going to happen in 48 49 was. Was continued civil war. And the idea that Chang would be largely be driven off the mainland was I don’t know how many people were actually anticipating that. So that was one shock that public opinion was not prepared for.
Speaker Lewis was very angry about about what transpired.
Speaker I’m not sure to what extent lose himself or his publications promoted the Who Lost China issue, but Lose will be adamant about the fact that the United States should not recognize. The mainland regime that the United States should should should keep China isolated from, it should not be allowed to vote in the United Nations and things like that.
Speaker And that the United States should continue to stand by Shinkai Scheck’s forces who have escaped to Taiwan and loose was again, this was just a major issue with him. This is he just felt this was to be to be maintained. But there were a number of Americans, although most of them were more conservative than loose, who were championing the China lobby and and arguing that that the U.S. should unleash Shinkai Sheck and that the mainland should be liberated by nationalist forces. The extent to which Luce himself was directly involved in that, I don’t know. But he was he was quite angry about what happened.
Speaker Well, when you say he was angry, who was he angry at?
Speaker Well, I think a combination of things, I think he was angry at the Truman administration and Secretary of State Acheson, he wanted he believed United States should have continue to give aid to Shank’s forces. The Truman administration understands the Changs situation is deteriorating so quickly. That the only way to salvage Shank’s position would have been for the United States to intervene directly. And that was it. That was not going to be done.
Speaker I mean, that was not an option that Truman would would accept.
Speaker Luce, in effect, didn’t care. You know, he wanted. He wanted something done to save to save China. But he was not prepared, I think, to go as far as some on the right who suggested that the fall of China was a conspiracy, that there were people in the State Department who had allowed this to happen. I mean, he was angry, but I’m not sure he was as much into conspiracies as some.
Speaker Some were in the late 40s and early 1950s.
Speaker Why do you call in your book? Why do you call the 50s the Lucy and Decade?
Speaker The 1950s were a great decade for for Henry Luce and a couple of ways his magazines flourished in ways that they had not before. Despite the introduction of television, Life magazine is doing very well in the 1950s. Time continues to be.
Speaker Very prosperous, although it’s getting getting criticized more often.
Speaker More than that, for the first time in a long time, Lewis is able to see a Republican elected president, 1952 Republican whose nomination he had favorite and indeed his wife is appointed the Basser to Italy.
Speaker And Lewis will spend the next four years there in Rome and.
Speaker So it’s a it’s a time when the kind of global role for the United States seems to be asserted, another loose someone loose admirers immensely, John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, during much of that period.
Speaker And they just you know, the country seems to be the kind of capitalist order that that loose like seem to be sort of predominant.
Speaker You know, just it just just seemed a great time to lose, to celebrate the. First for the nation and that sort of thing.
Speaker Well, what role do you think?
Speaker His magazines, especially life, kind of played in terms of that. Lucy indicate that that time of boom and. American dominance.
Speaker Well, life is a great publicist for for the post-war post-war prosperity, post-war technology, post-war business life will will, of course, attend to foreign affairs. But when it does, it’s always clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
Speaker Again, it’s immensely powerful often that the bias in life, by the way, will be very detected in the captions for the photos and the way the way different foreign leaders are described. Give life’s hand away. But life will celebrate technology in a variety of things that were you know, in retrospect, I might have invited more skepticism. But it was not a decade in which things like that were.
Speaker Were questioned.
Speaker Does it also celebrate consumers celebrates consumerism?
Speaker But a lot a lot of things. A lot of sort of mass media were celebrating consumerism at that time.
Speaker And.
Speaker I’m not as engaged by that argument as some people are. I mean, I may because I grew up during that period. Answer. What’s the support that you know what your question caller sort of observationally is the kind of fatuousness to it. You know, I mean, you can look at an issue of life and see and point to and say. Consumer culture. But I’m not sure how different that is today. Let me other let me put it another way.
Speaker To what degree? And in what way did Luce and his magazine’s. What’s your do you want to talk about my spin on it or your spin? My spin being his. Sort of hidden is helping to foster a certain American self-image.
Speaker I think if you read certain issues of life, maybe many issues of life in the 1950s, you would think that America was white, that it was middle class that was moving into a big home. You know, that sort of that sort of thing. And. That was not uncommon with what you sometimes saw other other mass media were giving you at this time, and I’m thinking specifically of some television programs were presenting the same kind of image of their Life magazine covers in Americans family. That clearly is a Middle-Class Look about it. Upper middle class look as as it may be. And this may, in fact, reflect a couple of things. Although white life was not ignoring African-Americans or civil rights as issues, civil rights is an issue. But it may reflect the fact that life’s editors or confusing their readers with America because their readers weren’t American, their readers were more middle class. Then it may also reflect they were confusing themselves with their readers, because that does happen in the news media.
Speaker What’s your what’s your spin on all, or is that close enough to what you’re looking for?
Speaker Well, I mean, that’s your spin of it. So that’s essentially what I’m looking for, you know, in a sense. Holding for holding for the implying that there is a unity or a vision of. Structure of juxtaposition of story, choices of that kind of thing. Maybe conscious, maybe, maybe not. But it’s part of the start of the thing. For example, you’ll see a story on communism and, you know, sort of bleak, black and white. And your next to it, there will be this fabulous color ad for a car. So that’s what I’m trying to sort of explore. And have you any thoughts about?
Speaker You know, it may be that I look at the news media as a business, so the color ad with the automobile or the the pink refrigerator. Doesn’t, doesn’t. To me, it doesn’t doesn’t strike me as as any different than a large display and you might see in the New York Herald Tribune in 1953. The more interesting editorial issue about life was how mixed up it was because you’d have the story about the Hungarian revolt, followed by a feature on swimsuits, followed by a feature on Toulouse Lautrec. That’s what drove some people batty today, of course. All we have are features about swimsuit. You know, today’s journalism has no cultural aspiration.
Speaker At least the mast journalism doesn’t doesn’t begin to try to effect of that kind of of cultural ambition that you saw in life at times during that period.
Speaker But I mean, I know what I know what you’re thinking. I know it. But you say it doesn’t. It doesn’t. Yeah, it doesn’t. It doesn’t resonate with other people.
Speaker Tell me about. But tell me about this. Culturally affects the series, the search for national writing art. Right.
Speaker I mean, after the war, Luce makes it very clear and is getting advice about this that life needs to be somewhat serious, that it needs to play an educational role. It wasn’t necessarily playing consistently in its first 10 years of of publication. And life embarks on a series of what, in retrospect, are somewhat middlebrow and pedantic exercises to inform the great American middle class about modern art or, you know, religious art or English history. With Winston Churchill writing some of the some of the stories, again, we can look back on it 40 years later is as as hopeless attempts at pedantic or whatever. But if you were living in certain parts, the United States in 1955 or 1960, that was a nice window on a world you didn’t necessarily see. And this is a world before public television, a world before cable, when when life was an educator that maybe you didn’t have in your hometown. And so it was easy for New York intellectual or a college professor to decry what Luce was trying to do. But it was the self-conscious and I think. Somewhat noble effort on his part, however awkwardly managed sometimes.
Speaker I noticed in your file there was some discussion about this series on the search for Nash National Park. Yes. Yes. Was this part of his missionary? Was this part of the missionary? Well, the.
Speaker The search for national purpose had had at its origins and in wide concern among among among opinion leaders in and out of the Eisenhower administration, in publishing and so forth, that America in the late 50s were becoming too materialistic, to which you think about that critique and ask, boy, if you think they were materialistic in 1959, if I got a decade for you. But but there is this, I think, genuine concern, even within the ICE administration that something’s wrong, that Americans might need to be rededicated to larger goals.
Speaker One of them now ultimately is the space program for good, for good or ill, but that we needed to think about a larger purpose than than material satisfaction and material want. And again, one of the ironies is that many of those promoting the search for national purpose were were people who produced magazines that promoted consumption and manufacture television sets, which promoted consumption and buying expensive appliances. But be that as it may. There is a certain, again, I think a certain nobility and in the self-consciousness of the enterprise.
Speaker OK, let’s jump back a little bit and talk about the brouhaha that came within life, about the about the 52 election and the treatment of Vike versus the treatment of at least his time.
Speaker Primarily young black. Better you than me.
Speaker Tom Matthews, you know, in 1952. Time magazine will make it will present the Eisenhower Stevenson campaign in ways that lay observers felt were unmistakably biased toward Eisenhower and indeed, it may be the first time there will be others when time will will take this. This is political slant will be so clear. And. There’s just tremendous unhappiness because time includes times, writers are includes some some of times writers and others are themselves. Democrats had supported Stevenson or liked him, and some of them just professionally thought it was inappropriate for a time to have so ostentatiously tilted its coverage toward General Eisenhower.
Speaker At the end of the campaign, Eisenhower wins. But in the minds of many, including some at time itself, led by its editor Tom Mathews, time has embarrassed itself and gone too far in advancing the owners agenda. That said, it may be the first time in a general election campaign time has shown its hand so clearly.
Speaker Now, there was a I guess, a meeting or a dinner shortly after that in which Lewis declared sort of. Was effusive in his pride at what happened. It didn’t go down all that well with everybody.
Speaker Right. Right. I don’t remember the details. There is that wonderful quote by Tom Matthews when now, Harry, that you’ve got the country or something like that. What are you going to do with it? But but I do remember that that banquet, but not well enough to reconstruct it for. Now, I’m sorry, but but it was pretty embarrassing.
Speaker So but can you reconstruct or do you recall why Matthews resigned?
Speaker I think he’d about had it. But to what extent? I’m not sure how thick a line you can draw between the 52 campaign and Matthews decision to quit. I think there was a cult of accumulation of grievances for Matthews.
Speaker And I’d have to go back and look at his memoir to know we’re not going.
Speaker Three questions.
Speaker What about the one you asked me at lunch? Why does Luce matter?
Speaker She that this woman is you, OK? OK, so let’s talk again. OK. What about. No, I wasn’t saying we were done. No, no. Running out of questions to the chagrin of everybody sitting over there. Well, but let’s just say I don’t think this is going to be this exhaustive.
Speaker Neither did I. I thought this is easy. I talk all the time.
Speaker Right. But what about why does this matter? Why does it loose matter to people who never heard of.
Speaker In another era, in an era without cable television, in an era without all news networks, in an era without national distribution of publications like The New York Times, you waited for Time magazine to come to your home. And when it did, you read it that night? It was that important in some American families as a source.
Speaker Of information as a way of understanding what was going on in the world. It was full of all kinds of prejudice and bias, but it was. Depending on where you lived in a country the best packaged news medium you could you could have access to, and that extended as well to life to Life magazine in a pre television world or certainly a pretty color television world. Life magazine offered you a lot that you just didn’t necessarily see, again, depending on where you lived, what kind of life you lived. It it it was a window on a lot of things you didn’t experience.
Speaker Let us talk about, because we don’t have many people who do what inspired him to publish Sports Illustrated.
Speaker Sports Illustrated was there was.
Speaker Was started in 1954 after some deliberation, Luce had wanted to start another magazine after World War Two, and he just couldn’t decide on, you know, on on on the one he wanted to start. It had been suggested, for example, that he started an opinion magazine like The New Republic or the Nation.
Speaker But Luce was aware, as were some of those around him, that in the postwar world, Americans had more time to entertain themselves, more leisure, more and more time for leisure. Luce was also aware of something that he experienced as a man, which is hanging around individuals whom he respected and liked and discovering that they were interested in sports and that they were interested in fishing. And he had not the slightest idea what they were talking about and most of the time. But Luce realized that quite possibly there was a magazine to be started for this kind of of individual.
Speaker And again, I think it was primarily considered constructed as a male reader. I think, obviously, Essi will acquire female readers in time.
Speaker But again, I think Luce realized that there was a kind of. Educated reader that wasn’t being served by existing sports publications.
Speaker He also understood something else that Sports Illustrated could be a national sports publication that would appeal to this more educated, more well-to-do reader. And although it lost money for many years, it would prove to be one of his better franchises. One of his more successful franchises.
Speaker How did his colleagues, his editors and publishers react to?
Speaker I’m not sure how they did or how much how much enthusiasm or lack thereof, some felt that it was unnecessary because Life magazine had a sports covered sports to a certain extent. I’m not remembering maybe you are to whether there was objection to it at this point.
Speaker I think Lou said a lot of what I’m not sure that mattered within the company. The biggest problem they faced was deciding how they were going to define sports.
Speaker And for a long time, Essi seemed to be preoccupied with, shall we say, sports of leisure classes of the very well-to-do polo or things like that, and not the bread and butter sports that that that that most American men are most interested in. But again, you may know, if there was more dissension at the organization, I made it there.
Speaker The truth is, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer.
Speaker I don’t know if you’re up on this one either, but there’s the whole.
Speaker Charlie Moore affair. Yeah. Is this how is it similar to or different from the Teddy White?
Speaker Painfully similar. Painfully similar in the sense that got to start. Yeah.
Speaker OK. I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to go ahead and you just see your father. You know about this. Yeah.
Speaker And you know, in 1963, the the America’s earliest involvement, Vietnam is not going especially well. And the few correspondents in Saigon are saying that back in New York there is resistance to running such pessimistic reportage. And indeed, one of one of those who will will encounter this is Charlie. Is Charlie Moore, who is the Saigon bureau man for time. And he will see his stories being rewritten or abused in ways that will cause him to resign from from the magazine. Very embarrassing. It’s very reminiscent of what was what was going on in the in the late last year of World War Two. Lose at this point is not direct, is not as directly involved in the production production of the magazine as he had been. But he is pretty confident about America’s need to be involved in Vietnam. And and the editor, I think, is is carrying out what he construes to be Harry’s preferences.
Speaker Why, what is his is?
Speaker Well, Lewis is quite convinced that the United States needs to shore up the South Vietnamese government and not allow it to fall to North Vietnam. And it becomes a conviction that he is. That he just doesn’t lose up to the end of his life. He’s not sure, like some other supporters of America’s intervention, that it’s being fought correctly. He’s not sure that that.
Speaker Tactically, we’re going about it in the right way.
Speaker But he’s quite certain that we need to be involved. And he’ll have nothing to do with the worrywarts who are saying, oh, no, this is you know, this is a wrong war at the wrong place.
Speaker He just will not accept that that argument and believes that we do need to. To remain and prevent the fall, the south.
Speaker And when you look at some of the things he said and wrote at the time, one of the more distressing things is his utter confidence that we can.
Speaker When there that we will. We will be successful. There’s no. There’s no doubt it’s 1920 all over again. There’s no doubt in his mind. We will we will prevail.
Speaker One thing we didn’t cover.
Speaker Is and we talked about earlier was his.
Speaker Torment has been taken over his divorce.
Speaker How is that?
Speaker When when Luce met Clare Booth Broca, he was just. Fell, fell head over heels for and he was a married man with children. But according to different versions. Very quickly determined to to marry her and divorce his first wife. From every account I’ve seen, this was just a terribly difficult. Moment for him. Divorce was still a bad thing in many, many American homes. And if your parents were missionaries and your father an ordained minister, it was worse in nineteen thirty five. Thirty six was not something that you you did or did lightly. Indeed. One of Lewis’s editors thought he was going to commit suicide. He was that traumatized by the prospect that there’s this need. Two to two obtained divorce and then two to marry Claire Lewis, another editor chronicle just the agony that Lewis was was going through during this period. He was madly, madly in love with Claire and. It was extremely difficult for him to. To to do this, but he felt he had to. Such was his love for her.
Speaker But it was a it was a real struggle and a really difficult.
Speaker Decision. OK.
Speaker Anything you want to say that we haven’t talked about any area that living hit. He gets rid of collapse? No, I’m not radical at. Anticommunism. OK, stop. OK. Is that OK? Fresh. We’ll take it fresh. We’re rolling. Everybody rolling. OK.
Speaker It may be very difficult now because the Republican Party. That loose belong to is such a more conservative body than it was 40, 50 years ago.
Speaker But to start that, yeah. As you said, yeah, I know. Loose can start. Ready? Let’s let’s start with the cold. Just with the Cold War, forget about redefining the Republican Party. Yeah, the public. And for the heck with it, how they’re destroying themselves.
Speaker Lose more than anything, wanted to see America win the Cold War, and nothing I think would have brought him greater joy than had been around in 1989, 1990, 1991, to realize that we did win after all. To borrow from Churchill. But although loose was a strong.
Speaker Cold Warrior. He would not embrace a new, more militant anticommunism, which was which was taking over the conservative wing of the Republican Party in the late 1950s and an early and mid 1960s, even as his wife, Claire, became actively involved in the.
Speaker Crusade of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, Luce rejected that that was too far there. Even as a cold warrior, there was a certain degree of reasonableness that he was not prepared to go as far as some of the more militant cold lawyers were. And that needs to be understood that many of those who embrace the Cold War.
Speaker Four Democrats were otherwise moderate in their politics.
Speaker But but but loosies loose drew the line. He would not allow his his magazines to endorse Goldwater. And they did, in fact, endorse life, in fact, endorsed Lyndon Johnson. Such was their concern that Goldwater just wasn’t up to the job.
Speaker So he was a Cold War, but not that militant at one.
Speaker So as an anti-communist.
Speaker And I’m going back to an earlier picture of the post-war period. I think I know what he’s doing is running amok. How did he fit into that?
Speaker Cut loose and loose and his people did not support the kind of I think.
Speaker You know, loosen his people had serious, serious issues with Senator Joseph McCarthy and those members of Congress who they felt went too far in seeking to identify and shame individuals who either had been communists or were alleged to have been involved in Communist Party or communist front activities.
Speaker Part of this, I think, was cultural lose considered, as did his editors and reporters, McCarthy, to be a sort of crude and and, you know, vulgar sort of individual that, you know, you wouldn’t you know, you wouldn’t entrust power to. They didn’t deny, as as many did not deny that there had been a threat of subversion from some. But Ballou’s was was very uncomfortable with with the excesses that some anti-communist committed during this period. And as bitter as he was about China, he wouldn’t play that game.
Speaker He really wouldn’t.
Speaker And why?
Speaker Ready, Ready?
Speaker I like this, and it’s years before before we were ready. Here we are.
Speaker The beginning of the 20th century, what what is commonly called the progressive era. There were many Americans who believed in the power of citizens to stay informed that Americans would dedicate hours to following public policy. That they believe themselves to be of incompetent citizens. But things happened in that in the first, second, third decade of the 20th century.
Speaker Things that both journalists and observers of journalists note journalism noticed.
Speaker And that was that Americans didn’t have the time they thought they did for citizenship. And we went from an age of Aamna, competent citizens to Aamna, competent editors led by Henry Luce. Editors who would make a series of decisions citizens had once thought were theirs.
Speaker What matters? What it means.
Speaker Just staying informed.
Speaker Americans complain routinely in the early 1920s, you see, I mean, middle class Americans were complaining routinely in the early 1920s that they didn’t have enough time to read the newspaper. Why didn’t they have enough time? What what else was going on in their life that suddenly hadn’t beset challenges that hadn’t beset them before? Well, a lot of things, lot of temptations were emerging that weren’t there before. But when we decide. To invest power in. In others, when we decide we don’t have time, we were too busy. We’re surrendering a lot of what I’m saying.
Speaker We’re giving a lot away. And we best trust the ED. To do a fair and good job.
Speaker If there was a tragedy and there’s not really, but I mean, there’s this there is a downside to what Luce created. It’s that they sometimes abuse that power, sometimes horribly and ill served all.
Speaker But what do you think of something? Oh, OK. That citizenship looked at me. I know, I know. I’m just I’m thinking I’m thinking right now. OK. Right.
Speaker In the first three decades, perhaps for decades, the 20th century citizenship gets redefined, at least among the middle class. The beginning of the 20th century, there were middle class Americans, middle class reformers who believed in the capacity of citizens to consume vast quantities of information and render judgments on the basis of that. But something happened to the middle class in those first decades of the 20th century. And something happened to their capacity to consume information. And I believe what happened and what Luce discovered and profited from. Was the realization that some entering the middle class, the 1920s no longer had time to be citizens or no longer had the same time for citizenship. That perhaps their older brothers and sisters and their parents possessed in 1910 or nineteen hundred. They had no distractions. They had new new activities that occupy them. Sitting in the parlor and reading a serious magazine or adult newspaper was not to be taken as a as a choice. They were just too busy. My generation thinks it invented busyness. It didn’t. If you look back at what Americans, some Americans at least are saying in the early 1920s, no one has time to read anymore. Lose perhaps quite by accident, perhaps by calculation, tapped into that.
Speaker And and how to capture that need for information that would not, in fact, require much time. But a great deal of faith was being expressed in the ED.
Speaker Is that better? Yeah, that was that was cogens. And here’s the deal. It is. With that I tapped into when I did the Luce book, and that is. Not everybody agrees at Brinkley. I think Alan would agree is that is that the progressive era?
Speaker One of the theories, Progressive Era, was those those those early transit reformers was people would consume it from me. It really was. People will read this stuff.
Speaker Well, Lizelle Marceaux imitation just said because, you know. Position, which you don’t understand.
Speaker I mean, you can imagine what my election styles might be ready. OK. You were just John Kennedy once said.
Speaker Right. Oh, I know. I know.
Speaker John Kennedy once observed no start from. OK, OK. Standby. Oh, I see.
Speaker John Kennedy once said, I could do your work. OK.
Speaker John Kennedy was observed about what Stepto oh. John Kennedy once observed that Times influence could be felt overseas.
Speaker One of the reasons he cared what Time said about him and his foreign policy was that so many leaders abroad read his read Time magazine.
Speaker So that do it again. OK. And what’s that got to change? Yes. OK. Uh. OK. You know anything about this, okay?
Speaker John Kennedy once observed that one of the reasons Time magazine had to be taken seriously was that it was read and read closely overseas by foreign leaders and others and taken as a measure of. What America was and an America was about.
Speaker Why not?
Speaker Okay. You want more? Why he took it serious?
Speaker You know, one of the reasons I should say one. OK, ready?
Speaker One of the reasons John Kennedy cared about Time magazine and how it treated his own administration was that he understood it was read by foreign leaders overseas. And to cultivate their goodwill or their understand their construction of America. He needed to. Cultivate the goodwill of Time magazine.
