Word: luce
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...Luce spent the next seven 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...
Such men did not often choose journalism as a career. To most of them, it remained a slightly disreputable profession, attractive to people of less elevated backgrounds--what the press critic A.J. Liebling once called "a refuge for the vaguely talented." But when Luce and Hadden set out in 1923, three years out of Yale, to create a journalistic institution of their own--a new weekly newsmagazine that they had begun envisioning while still undergraduates--they did so not to break from the norms of the world they had known at Hotchkiss and Yale; they did so to bring those...
...success fanned Luce's idealistic passions. His journalistic judgment could be clouded at times by his own commitments. On the issues and people he cared most about--China, American foreign policy, the Republican Party, Chiang Kai-shek, Winston Churchill, Wendell Willkie--he personally directed coverage at critical times with a feverish and occasionally suffocating intensity. And on those subjects his magazines could be startlingly biased, even polemical. On most issues, however, Luce was relatively open-minded, deferential to his editors, receptive to many conflicting views, eager to attract the talents of gifted writers whatever their ideologies. His own politics were...
Brit Hadden, who had grown up in Brooklyn and was, much more than Luce, a true product of middle-class America, wanted TIME to be the witty, sophisticated, even cynical voice of his generation--something like a newsman's version of H.L. Mencken's popular magazine The Smart Set. But to Luce, TIME had a different purpose. It was to be a vehicle of moral and political instruction, a point of connection between the world of elite ideas and opinion and middle-class people in the "true" America hungry for knowledge...
...Hadden died unexpectedly of a blood infection. Luce, though stunned, took the magazine in his strong hands. From then on, Time Inc. was his company and reflected his view of its mission--a view that intersected, much more successfully than Hadden's probably would have, with the character of the age. So prosperous did the company become that even during the Depression, it could successfully launch two expensive new magazines--FORTUNE in 1930 and LIFE, the most popular magazine in American history, in 1936. By the end of World War II, Time Inc. was one of the largest and wealthiest...