Word: luce
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...writer is Robert T. Elson, for 25 years a correspondent and editor for TIME, FORTUNE and LIFE, who has had access to all company archives and to the memories of almost all of the people involved. What emerges is in part a portrait of Luce's working life, with a few reflections of his private life. More than that, what emerges is the art, craft and business of a particular kind of journalism. Elson opens his account at a point when TIME was a brash, almost absurdly ambitious experiment. He closes it when the magazine, now the eldest...
Perhaps to provide a better "text" about himself, but also to contribute a chapter to the history of American journalism, Luce commissioned a history of Time Inc. In 1964, three years before he died, he charged the author "to be candid, truthful, and to suppress nothing relevant or essential to the narrative." The result is TIME INC. The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 (Atheneum; $10). Can the account of a company be intimate? It seems like a contradiction in terms, but readers may decide that this book is indeed reasonably intimate...
Currents of the Times. Elson constantly describes the play of ideas that took place among the principals, often in office memoranda. Luce and his associates wrote a great many of these-indeed it seems remarkable that they had any time left over to get out the magazines. In these memos they struggled with each other, tried to convince each other, often about procedural matters (Who is responsible for accuracy?) but, more often, about the main political and intellectual currents of the times...
Elson's book points up the interesting origins of the two founders. Henry Luce: son of a devout Presbyterian missionary, born in China, his fondest memories of Fourth of July celebrations when the Americans clasped hands in the "hush of eventide" and sang My Country, 'Tis of Thee. He never could forget "a shameful, futile, endless two hours one Saturday afternoon when I rolled around the unspeakably dirty floor of the main schoolroom with a little British bastard who had insulted my country." Such experiences, he later felt, gave him a "too romantic, too idealistic view of America...
...kept objecting to the Prince of Wales' loose living, inciting other letter writers to object to her narrow views. Since readers have sometimes discerned in TIME a special mixture of seriousness (not to say portentousness) and levity, it was easily assumed that the first quality stemmed from Luce and the second from Hadden. As Elson shows, that explanation is too simple. Luce had his share of irreverence, which he encouraged or at least permitted in his magazines; Hadden, on the other hand, was deeply serious beneath his frivolous exterior. They were both earnest about the need to inform America...