Word: haddens
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Luce possessed a kind of clairvoyance about history, a journalist's instinct but operating in a higher orbit than journalism usually achieves. Along with Hadden, he saw that America after the Great War was in a state of change that would create a natural audience for the kind of magazine they had in mind. The nation's cultural center of gravity was shifting. A newly emergent, restless urban middle class--often intellectually and socially insecure--was getting into business, making money, buying things...
...automobile, the motion picture, the radio, Hadden and Luce detected a new consumers' appetite for motion, stimulation, variety. Traditional sources of information had become inadequate. Newspapers were local or regional and in any case offered only a patchwork of information. Magazines tended to be specialized, with a tendency toward fat and bloviation; they rarely offered news as news. None even set out to be comprehensive on a national and international scale...
TIME played brilliantly to the new American appetite. The magazine turned the news into saga, comedy, melodrama. The very compression of early TIMEstyle, invented almost entirely by Hadden, lent it an urgency of mannered telegraphese. John Martin, Hadden's cousin and an early writer and editor at the magazine, left this account of Hadden at work: "Brit would edit copy to eliminate unnecessary verbiage...If you wrote something like 'in the nick of time,' five words, he might change it to 'in time's nick,' three words...At all times he had by him a carefully annotated translation...
Today's TIME continues to evolve, as living things do. If Briton Hadden and Henry Luce were around, they'd recognize their progeny. It would be interesting to take them aside at the 75th anniversary dinner and ask them what they think of their work in progress...
...years ensconced in all-male, all-white, overwhelmingly Protestant institutions of the American upper class: first Hotchkiss, then Yale (where he joined that bastion of the Establishment, Skull and Bones). Luce was active in student journalism in both schools--and in the process formed an intimate relationship with Briton Hadden, the classmate, friend and frequent rival with whom he would found TIME. Having encountered America first as an abstraction, Luce encountered it after 1913 as a member of a self-proclaimed enlightened elite, among boys and young men trained from an early age to think of themselves as natural social...