Henry Luce and the Launch of Time Magazine
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Just out of Yale, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden staked their golden-boy reputations on a presumptuous, prophetic challenge to a recession-weakened media establishment. In an excerpt from a new biography of Luce, the author recounts the grueling, chaotic, exhilarating 1923 launch of Time magazine.
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In 1921, with the economy mired in a postwar slump, two former classmates just a year out of Yale accepted junior-reporter positions for $40 a week on the staff of The Baltimore News. In their spare time, the young journalists, ignoring the warnings of several skeptical friends, began to hatch what to many seemed a foolhardy enterprise. “[The] two of us,” wrote Henry Robinson Luce, aged 23, in a letter to his girlfriend, Lila Hotz, in Chicago, “are showing signs of pernicious insanity and will probably undertake a new publishing venture in a few months.”

Luce, known to everyone as Harry, was the son of Presbyterian missionaries. Raised in China, he was lanky, socially awkward, and phenomenally ambitious. His former classmate and frequent rival, the equally driven Briton Hadden—nicknamed Brit and, occasionally, Bratch—had been born in Brooklyn Heights. A gifted writer and editor, he was prone to lose himself in drink. The two young men moved into a Baltimore residence with a fellow Yale alumnus—Baltimore News colleague Walter Millis—and within no time, Luce confided in one of his frequent letters to Lila, he and Hadden were “the pets of the office,” developing reputations as “star men” by writing feature pieces and imaginative columns.

And yet their newspaper jobs, despite the promise of rapid advancement—$4,000 a year, Luce wrote Lila, “will be about as much as any class-mate is making (with a year’s start on me)”—were only expedients. Luce and Brit were quietly planning what Harry called “the gamble of our lives on which everything depends, everything . . . the crazy half-romantic thing that has ruined thousands before us.” They were, he insisted, going to start “a weekly called ‘Facts.’ It will contain all the news on every sphere of human interest, and the news organized. There will be articles on politics, books, sport, scandal, science, society, and no article will be longer than 200 words. . . [It would] serve the illiterate upper classes, the busy business man, the tired debutante, to prepare them at least once a week for a table conversation.”

Luce and Hadden usually finished work at three P.M.—the News was an afternoon paper. They then returned promptly to their apartment, on the shabby top floor of a Baltimore mansion (rented out by “nice people” who were in financial difficulty), to plan strategy and experiment with formats. “We were groping toward . . . the practice,” Luce later recalled, “by actually chopping up The New York Times, and reorganizing [it] on a weekly basis, and then trying to put these stories together.” Stopping only for dinner, which they took with another “ ‘society’ family, slightly impoverished,” they worked for hours every night.

They typed out sample stories, experimenting with styles and layouts. Millis, who had the greatest literary talent of the three, actually did most of the writing, but Hadden and Luce were clearly in charge. They were trying to catch the fatal flaw in their idea and, they claimed, failing to find it. While their notions of when to launch the magazine, where to locate the offices, and how to structure their business plans changed constantly, the core idea of a weekly news journal remained fairly constant. “The thing is very largely Hadden’s idea,” Luce confessed to Lila, about his former student-newspaper partner and competitor at Hotchkiss and Yale, “but he swears that without me he cannot put it over. Personally I think I am dashed lucky to be teaming up with him again.”

By February 1922 they had decided they were ready to take what Luce called the “great leap into the unknown.” Although they had as yet raised very little money and had still not hired any staff, they negotiated a seven-week leave from the News and moved to New York to begin bringing “the paper” to life. “I am confident,” Hadden wrote his mother, “that in the seven weeks prior to April 1, we shall be able to determine whether or not the paper, Facts, is going to be brought into existence.”

Drama for a Dime

They were nothing if not presumptuous—two 23-year-olds, with no money and less than two years of professional journalism experience between them, setting out to start a magazine at the tail end of a severe recession. And from their earliest conversations about Facts—at Yale and at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where they had been stationed during World War I—their vision had been shaped by their sense of the inadequacy of existing sources of news. Both men were critical of the daily papers of the 1920s—the impassioned Brit far more outspokenly than the methodical Harry. Hadden particularly faulted the Hearst and Pulitzer offerings, whose sensationalism, he said, pandered to the ignorance of their working-class readers, whom he scorned as “gum-chewers.” But he and Luce were almost equally contemptuous of the “serious” newspapers, bemoaning their wooden prose, their obedience to the mechanical style of the Associated Press, and their excessive length. “People have to think too hard as they read [the newspapers],” Luce observed of the dry, fact-laden broad-sheets. Hadden had particular disdain for the most respected newspaper of his day, The New York Times. It was, he liked to say—throwing the paper dismissively down onto a table—“unreadable.”

“Taking” the Times was for many New Yorkers a symbol of membership in the educated class, something close to a social obligation. Few people read the Times for pleasure, however. Its dense eight columns of small type, only occasionally relieved by pictures or illustrations, was daunting enough. But the sober language, the statesman-like, nonpartisan conservatism, the dutiful reporting of obscure political and diplomatic events, the vast transcripts of speeches and press conferences, the scrupulous resistance to analysis or opinion—all contributed to the *Times’*s other, less welcome reputation. It was not just the “newspaper of record.” It was also the “great gray lady,” or, as A. J. Liebling described it, the “colorless, odorless, and especially tasteless Times, . . . a political hermaphrodite capable of intercourse with conservatives of both parties at the same time.”

Luce and Hadden found only a little more inspiration from the magazines of their era. There had, in fact, been something of a revolution in American magazines beginning in the late 19th century. The dominant journals of earlier decades—such as Harper’s Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Century—were written explicitly for educated Protestant elites and usually expressed their readers’ provincial literary tastes and their class and ethnic prejudices. But the newer magazines (among them McClure’s, Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and Munsey’s—whose owner, Frank Munsey, had hired Luce and Hadden at The Baltimore News) sought, as one publisher put it, to convey the “whirlpool of real life,” and to do so in a more vivid way than the reserved publications of the past. Some charged only a dime, and many had more accessible writing and engaged the concerns of the emerging middle class. The result was a dramatic increase in magazine circulation, which more than doubled between 1890 and 1905—four times the corresponding growth rate of newspaper readership.

There were other periodicals that were also catching on: *Vanity Fair—*re-introduced by publisher Condé Nast in 1913 and reconceived the next year by editor Frank Crowninshield as a sleek monthly covering “the things people talk about. Parties, the arts, sports, theatre, humor, and so forth”—which acquired a relatively small but devoted readership among what was soon to be known as “the smart set”; Hearst’s Cosmopolitan, a lively mélange of high and low culture and popular fiction; and, most important of all to Hadden and Luce, The Literary Digest, which was modeled on several earlier titles, among them the London-based Review of Reviews. Such magazines aspired to present a wide selection of news items from other publications and, in an age before strict copyright laws, were both cheap and easy to assemble. The Digest, in effect, was a news aggregator. It did not really synthesize the material it collected but simply reprinted it, mostly unsigned and unattributed—often at great and redundant length.

The success of the Digest proved that there was an appetite for a summary of the news beyond the daily papers. It also suggested that Hadden and Luce would face stiff competition. Even so, they were not intimidated. The Digest was, they believed, a staid relic of an earlier age—with its Christian earnestness (it was founded by one-time Lutheran ministers Isaac Funk and Adam Wagnalls), essential humorlessness, and dreary design. Their “paper” would be better.

Facts-Founding Mission

Back in New York, without salaries or any immediate prospects of them, they moved in with their families. Hadden returned to his mother’s home in Brooklyn, and Luce settled on the Upper West Side, where his missionary parents, temporarily back from China, were living during one of his father’s arduous fund-raising sojourns. Both men also led active social lives in the circles to which their Yale experiences had given them entry. While Hadden preferred late-night excursions with colleagues and college friends to restaurants and bars, Luce was more likely to attend lunches and teas, go to the theater or the opera, and meet friends for dinner at the Yale Club.

Mostly, they worked on their brainchild. Luce wrote confidently of their prospects a few days after arriving in New York: “This next month . . . will probably be pretty crucial. The first 10 days we spend marching from expert to expert, until we have convinced ourselves that there is no obvious, potent reason why Facts cannot succeed. We then spend a week or 10 days amassing the necessary capital, and having done that, we hold our breath and jump!” Days, however, turned into weeks, weeks into months, and still they had failed to raise the money they needed. They alternated between periods of great optimism, even elation, and stretches of supreme disillusionment. “We were never surer of our idea than at this moment,” Luce wrote in March. “The only question is whether we are old enough, etc. etc., to put it over.” The fear of failure—of ceasing to be the dazzling golden boys they had been since boarding school, or, as Hadden once put it, of losing the “respect of my friends and acquaintances”—drove them forward almost as much as the dream of success.

Even in their lowest moments, though, Luce and Hadden stuck to their plan. The first step was drawing powerful and influential people into the orbit of their venture—asking advice from editors, publishers, and potential investors, and soliciting endorsements from the famous. The pair understood instinctively how social connections could open doors, and their paths soon radiated outward from fellow Skull and Bonesmen to the parents of Yale friends, to others who remained loyal to the university, to a wider circle of prominent men up and down the East Coast. Not everyone was impressed. The well-known advertising executive Bruce Barton dismissed their plan as unfeasible; The Literary Digest, he said, already had a monopoly on magazine news—a warning they heard frequently. The former Harvard president Charles W. Eliot (himself the ostensible editor of the Harvard Classics, a popular compilation of great books) huffily dismissed the idea of condensing the news as “disgusting and disgraceful.”

Such were the perils of courting the rich and famous. Privately annoyed, Luce and Hadden were publicly deferential. And they eventually attracted endorsements from a remarkable roster: esteemed theologians and financiers; the renowned critic Walter Lippmann; Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the ex-president; the presidents of Yale, Princeton, Williams, and Johns Hopkins; the editors of The Saturday Review (their old Yale instructor Henry Seidel Canby), the Springfield Republican (where Harry had worked during the summer after his graduation from Hotchkiss), and the New York World (where Brit had worked for a year after college); and Edward Bok, the retired editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. The editors of the Hartford Courant, The Century, and Harper’s also gave their public blessing—but not, significantly, anyone at The New York Times, nor their former boss Frank Munsey.

“Our Name Is M-u-d”

Raising the money was far more difficult. Luce and Hadden drew up a budget that required them to find $100,000 in order to put out their first issue, after which, they believed, circulation and advertising revenue (and additional investors attracted by their presumed success) would keep them going. Renting a tiny office in a converted town house on East 17th Street with money borrowed from Hadden’s parents, living abstemiously at home, deferring salaries for themselves and most of their tiny staff, they began by seeking funds, confident that they could quickly find 10 wealthy acquaintances, each of whom would invest $10,000. But it was an agonizingly slow process.

“Every day,” Luce wrote in May 1922, “we see one or more ‘rich young men’ with the idea of getting them to come in with us on a proposition in which we expect to give them a pittance and take all the rest ourselves.” (Their plan was to offer investors “preferred” stock, while retaining for themselves the majority of the “common” stock, the only stock that conferred voting rights.) “On the face of it,” he confessed, “this is not the easiest job imaginable.” His mood was not helped by a meeting with a “smart young vice president down at Bankers Trust,” who “as much as called us a bunch of crooks” and insisted that the entire financial plan was unrealistic, verging on fraudulent. “This is an awful month,” Luce moaned. “If we fail, our name is simply M-u-d mud.”

The laborious process fueled Harry’s envy, bordering on resentment, of his contemporaries who had inherited great wealth—and particularly of those who refused to part with any of it to help his cause. He took sardonic note of the lavish homes, expensive cars, polo matches, and smug self-satisfaction of the young men he visited. And working so closely with Hadden, he occasionally—and atypically—echoed some of Brit’s vague, class-bound prejudices as well. “Bratch and I are going to Philly tomorrow to see Gimbel (Jew store),” he wrote in early June. A few days later he reported a “raid upon ‘Charlie’ Rosenbloom—the Jewboy we missed, stupidly, at Pittsburg[h].”

By July they had made only modest progress—“38,000 in hand.” Then, suddenly, their fortunes changed. At the suggestion of a friend, Harry rode up to the Yale Club for a meeting with a recent graduate, William Hale Harkness, class of 1922, and his wealthy mother, Mrs. William L. Harkness, hoping at best for a $5,000 investment. To his astonishment, Mrs. Harkness pledged $20,000, and her son $5,000 more, which brought the total up to $63,000. Two additional $10,000 investments came quickly from other members of the Harkness family. “That means,” an exultant Luce wrote, “that by the end of September at latest we will be capitalized. So the end of a very long and arduous and trying job is now at least within crying distance.” In late October, they decided to move ahead, and a few weeks later—as carpenters banged away in the new and larger offices they had rented at Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street—they filed the papers that would create their new company.

A Subterranean Epiphany

Hadden and Luce always claimed that they had never intended to stick with “Facts,” the working title for what they were half-mockingly calling between themselves “the world’s greatest magazine.” In the spring of 1922, they began to experiment with alternatives, including “What’s What,” “Destiny,” “Chance,” and “The Synthetic Review.” But one spring morning, Luce came into the office to propose another name*.* He had, he said, been riding home on the subway the night before, exhausted and glassy-eyed, mindlessly reading the advertising cards above the car windows. For some reason, he focused on an announcement—TIME FOR A CHANGE, or something like it, he would later recall—and became convinced that Time was the right title. Hadden immediately agreed, and they never reconsidered.

Time was attractive to them because it captured something of the dual purpose of their enterprise—to chronicle the passage of time and to save readers precious time. They also experimented with various subtitles, using such words as “chronicle” and “digest” and “weekly-newspaper,” but they finally settled on a term of their own invention: “news-magazine.” (The hyphen disappeared in the late 20s.) It reflected Hadden’s delight in creating new compound words and phrases.

Yalies and “Stenos”

The early staff was drawn almost entirely from their own generation and from their own social world: recent graduates of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, all of them, unsurprisingly, white male Protestants. “We didn’t hardly know anybody else,” Luce plaintively explained years later. The few young women they hired were brought on as secretaries (“stenos,” they called them, short for “stenographers”—a term usually applied to office assistants who could transcribe dictation).

One of their first important recruits was Manfred Gottfried, an aspiring novelist, who had heard about the Luce-Hadden venture through the rumor mill at Yale, where he was a senior. He showed up at the office one day in February to find Harry and Brit, alone in a room, sitting at matching, end-to-end desks under a large, grimy window, an iron kettle between them to catch cigarette butts. Luce spoke energetically about their plans and grilled Gottfried about his modest experiences. Hadden, who was oddly shy with strangers, remained unsettlingly silent. A few months later, Harry traveled up to New Haven to offer Gottfried the job—even if in a typically distracted way. He asked Gottfried to accompany him to see a tailor. Talking all the way, Luce finally made his proposal standing pantless in a shop stall as his trousers were being pressed. Gottfried (who soon became known within the office as “Gott” and who remained with the magazine for decades) immediately accepted. Eager and capable, he did everything from writing copy to fetching coffee. He even persuaded his father to invest $1,000 in the magazine.

Not long after that, the two founders met Roy Larsen, a 1921 Harvard graduate and former treasurer and business manager of the university’s literary magazine, The Advocate, who was trying to find a place in New York publishing. Taking his undergraduate achievements more seriously than other employers would have, Hadden and Luce pursued Larsen aggressively, perhaps because they recognized something in him they badly needed. He was competent, certainly, but he also exuded an air of solidity, maturity, and competitive tenacity (“a grim but smiling terrier,” in the words of a colleague) that, for all their self-confidence, they feared they still lacked. In a company staffed entirely by people in their early 20s, Larsen (although a year younger than Luce and Hadden) seemed the most securely adult. They offered him a salary of $40 a week to be *Time’*s circulation manager—more than they were paying themselves. In return, they got a talented and energetic partner, who struggled to build a subscription base for a magazine no one had heard of, and who would become one of the most important figures in the company. Using multiple mailing lists and enthusiastically written circulars, Larsen managed to build up a base of about 8,000 subscribers before the first issue appeared—a disappointingly small number to Luce and Hadden.

Then, based on a reference from a friend, they hired a young Oxford student, Thomas J. C. Martyn, by cable, without ever meeting him, because they had heard he was an experienced journalist. They discovered when he arrived that he had no experience at all. “It was a stupid thing for us to do,” Luce later conceded. But Martyn turned out to be a talented writer of exactly the kind of stories Harry and Brit wanted. (Ten years later, he became the founding editor of Newsweek.) Alan Rinehart and John A. Thomas rounded out the writing staff.

Keeping Mr. Busy Abreast

As publication drew near, Luce, Hadden, and Larsen began promoting the magazine by emphasizing their original concept, best exemplified by a foldout postcard distributed to potential subscribers. It featured a character named “Busy Man” sitting disconsolately in his living room surrounded by discarded newspapers. “I bought this mass of printed matter to find out what is going on in the world,” he complains, “but it’s no use! I am not abreast of the news in anything outside of my business.” His wife, “Busy Woman,” agrees. A knock on the door signals the arrival of a third character, “TIME,” who presents to them “a new idea in journalism. In my twenty-six pages is every fact of significance in all those newspapers and periodicals on your floor.”

Hadden and Luce had come to the conclusion, instinctively, that saving busy people time could be a successful and lucrative enterprise. Indeed, Time was almost perfectly designed to respond to several of the era’s most important social changes: the increasing pace of modern life, the growing pressure on professionals to devote more time to their jobs, and the volume and variety of information that people believed they needed to know about the wider world.

Time was also a response to the nationalization of American commerce and culture. The era following World War I saw a rapid standardization in the way many Americans lived, worked, and understood modern life. So, too, emerged a homogeneous, middle-class mind-set, one re-oriented toward national issues, events, and institutions. In addition, a new kind of consumerism, born of prosperity and urbanization, reflected a more secular, pleasure-seeking society—what another Time advertisement called “a younger generation accustomed to things of beauty and convenience.” The standardization of culture for such people was a result of many things, among them commercial radio (born in 1920) and movies (elevated in importance by the new urban movie palaces and, beginning in 1927, by the introduction of sound). But Time played a key role as well. No newspaper, at that stage, had a reach very far beyond its own city. Radio news consisted of an announcer reading headlines a few times a day. Sound newsreels had not yet been born. And with the exception of the big wire services, Time—which had subscribers in every state, even in its early, frail years—was for a while the only genuinely national news organ.

Heavy Pencils, Lively Prose

Hadden and Luce, now co-owners and managers of the new Time, Inc., struggled to mold the product itself. To some degree, the concept remained remarkably unchanged from the original idea, as the 1922 prospectus made clear. “No publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend on simply keeping informed,” they stated in bold letters on the first page of the document for potential investors. They followed quickly with a claim of “COMPLETE ORGANIZATION”—six departments (“National Public Affairs,” “Foreign News,” “The Arts,” “The Professions,” “Sports,” and “People”) and 14 sections (among them, “Books,” “Theatre,” “Music,” “Education,” “Religion,” “Business,” and “Law”). There would be approximately 100 short articles each week, “none of which are over 400 words in length,” each placed “in its logical place in the magazine, according to a FIXED METHOD OF ARRANGEMENT.”

Into this rigid structure, they would pour the results of what they described as a comprehensive search through “every magazine and newspaper of note in the world.” The cover of their first advertising circular was framed by a list of almost 90 newspapers and periodicals, which they promised to read weekly. Unlike The Literary Digest, they pointedly claimed, they would cover “EVERY HAPPENING OF IMPORTANCE.” And while they would not have an editorial page and would not write “to prove any special case,” neither would they strive for “complete neutrality on public questions.” They even presented a slightly fussy “catalogue” of their own, largely conservative “prejudices”—which included “a belief that the world is round,” “a general distrust of the present tendency toward increasing interference by government,” and a “respect for the old, particularly in manners.” In this, they were drawing in part from H. L. Mencken, whom Hadden greatly admired.

Not until November 1922, with their start-up funds secured, did they begin the serious work of turning these plans into an actual magazine. In their Eighth Avenue offices the slowly growing staff began squeezing into newly built cages and cubicles. The few walls were paper-thin, so no one—including Luce and Hadden—could easily have a private conversation. Desktops were piled high with magazines and newspapers, and the floor was littered with the scraps of periodicals from which useful articles had been cut. Neophyte writers struggled to condense complex news stories into a few hundred lively words, while Hadden and Luce sat at their desks reading the results, marking them up with pencil, and sending them back. (On weekends, there was so little heat in the building that they often retreated to the cardroom of the Yale Club and spread their stacks of papers out on tables there.) Hadden, in particular, was a tough critic, snarling and growling at prose he considered dull or obscure, penciling in adjectives and phrases that he thought would enliven the story, and intimidating the writers, none of whom was much younger than he was.

It was slow going. “We publish the first issue of Time the last week of January or the first of February,” Luce wrote that November, acknowledging that the date of the inaugural issue had continued to slip.

But first we have to make Time good enough to publish and that means eight weeks of writing, editing, and printing “practice issues.” The writing of the practice issues will be carried on by a full staff just as if we were publishing. . . If they do not meet with our expectations, we will stop, having failed to produce what we said we would produce. If they meet our expectations, then the only thing that stands between us and certain success is that unknown quantity “luck,” absolutely unguessable.

But while Luce and Hadden had often worried about the financing and marketing of the magazine, they rarely expressed real doubts about their capacity to write it successfully. “TIME is doing very well,” Luce wrote early in December. “In fact a most unusual spirit of optimism seems to pervade the ranks.” A few weeks later, with the first “fairly good complete [sample] issue of TIME” in hand, he claimed to be in “a sort of soggy pleasant frame of mind.” There were, to be sure, moments of concern. “Things are going very badly,” Luce wrote after the second “specimen issue” appeared. “We have yet to find the ideal assistants.” Hadden once returned deeply discouraged from a meeting with Walter Lippmann, who had been harshly critical of yet another sample issue. They postponed publication three times. But, little by little, the magazine began to approach their image of it.

The Grecian Formula

Throughout the process, Luce and Hadden struggled in their attempts to fine-tune a literary voice for their new publication. Over time, in fact, the most visible and famous idiosyncrasy of Time would be its language—sometimes admired, often ridiculed, never as pervasively distinctive as its critics claimed, but a defining element of the magazine nevertheless. And as with most other editorial innovations in the early years, Hadden took the lead. Both men had studied Greek at Hotchkiss. But while Luce was by far the more serious Greek scholar, it was Hadden who proposed the Iliad as a model for the language the magazine should use. He carried around a tattered, heavily annotated translation and kept a notebook filled with lists of words and phrases that would, he believed, replicate the energy and poetry of Homer. The Iliad used such phrases as “much-enduring Odysseus,” “wine-dark sea,” and “fleet-footed Achilles.” Time adopted or created its own compound adjectives to describe people in the news: “snaggle-toothed,” “coffee-colored,” and “bandy-legged.” In the Iliad were inverted sentences such as “Up to his side he dashed and flanked Great Ajax tight.” Time countered with “Up to the White House portico rolled a borrowed automobile.” (*The New Yorker, Time’*s fellow upstart and rival, ran a hilarious profile of Luce in 1936 by the wickedly clever Wolcott Gibbs, written entirely in a hyperactive version of *Time’*s own dialect, as in this now famous quip: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.”)

But Hadden did not stop with the Iliad. He made exhaustive lists of other techniques that he proposed for the magazine as it evolved. Occupations, origins, and personality types became titles: “Teacher Scopes,” “Editor Mencken,” “Demagog Hitler.” Most of all, Hadden would encourage staffers to use vivid words. People in Time were “famed,” not “famous”; “potent,” not “powerful”; “blatant,” not “obvious.” They “ogled” rather than “looked,” “strode” rather than “walked.” And rhyming and alliteration were always popular, as in the frequent use of “late, great” to describe the recently deceased.

Especially in its first years, Time could be sophomoric, pompous, irritating, pedantic, even ridiculous. But if its preposterous stylistic excesses were all that Time had to distinguish itself, the magazine would never have succeeded. To most of those who would become *Time’*s large and rapidly expanding readership—even many who were annoyed occasionally by its idiosyncrasies—the publication was also witty, entertaining, and informative.

Speaking “Time-ese”

Hadden would use his oversize pencils and his gruff, booming voice to browbeat the staff into meeting his literary demands*.* And this standardization of style was often stifling to serious writers. John O’Hara, the soon-to-be-famous novelist, spent a few months writing for Time in the late 20s and then fled to The New Yorker. Such departures, although usually after longer periods of service than O’Hara’s, were common. But other writers settled comfortably into the Time system, came to value its distinctive kind of writing, and remained for years. “Time-ese” or “Time-style”—as the magazine’s writing was often called, sometimes mockingly, sometimes affectionately—was, if nothing else, contagious, and not just within the magazine itself. Words that Time invented, retrieved from obscurity, or borrowed from foreign languages became enduring parts of modern English: “tycoon,” “pundit,” “socialite,” “kudos.”

As singular as *Time’*s language, and closely related to it, were the magazine’s opinions and attitudes. Luce and Hadden had promised from the start that Time would have “no axe to grind,” and in many respects, particularly in the beginning, they kept that vow. Time did not clearly favor any political party, and Luce, at least, was unsure in the 1920s of whether he preferred Democrats or Republicans—although later he would use his magazines to support Republican presidential candidates, promote China’s pro-Western leader Chiang Kai-shek, and christen the era “The American Century,” the title of Luce’s famous 1941 Life essay.

Time, finally, was also distinctive for its fascination with powerful men and women. “People just aren’t interesting in the mass,” Luce once said. “It’s only individuals who are exciting.” For decades, beginning with the first issue, virtually every cover of Time carried a portrait of an important man or, on rare occasions, woman (and once, in 1928, a basset hound). The magazine chose a “Man of the Year” annually beginning with Charles Lindbergh for 1927. (A “Woman of the Year” was named only twice in *Time’*s first 50 years: Wallis Simpson in 1937 and Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.) Cover portraits—black-and-white drawings and photographs (which were first surrounded by the Time “red border” in 1927)—were gradually replaced by color images starting in 1928, becoming a signature feature of the magazine. For three generations, being selected for the cover of Time became a career watershed among the famous—and infamous.

For Harry Luce, the last weeks of 1922 were doubly stressful as he hurtled toward producing the first issue. Not only was he working with Hadden to shape the content of the magazine, Luce was also working more or less alone to ensure that Time would be able to function as a business. This was an area of the enterprise in which Hadden took almost no interest. Luce, however, proved to be a very good businessman, somewhat to his dismay—since, like Brit, his original interest had been primarily editorial. (“Now the Bratch is really the editor of TIME,” he wrote, “and I, alas, alas, alas, am business manager. . . . Of course no one but Brit and I know this!”) He would write to Lila that December:

My new steno arrived. Put her to work on 78 letters. . . . Then dashed to the Lotos Club where a disappointed printer gave me a drink and lunch . . . Saw Hadden for a second and then began series of interviews with artists (commercial). Threw them out in time to dictate a few belated letters and then rushed out in pursuit of taxi and Helen [one of Lila’s friends from Chicago]. Arrived at Helen’s at 5:45, made profuse apologies . . . and then sat down to tea. . . . Skidded under the 7 o-clock wire at home for dinner. . . . After dinner back to work.

“The whole staff felt the pressure,” Gottfried remembered years later. “For a couple of months nobody had any regular days off, and now [in January 1923] nobody had any days off whatsoever.” One by one, staff members succumbed. Gottfried “was the first to weaken” and announced he was going to take every Wednesday off. Nancy Ford, whose job as fact-checker for every article was one of the most arduous on the magazine, seemed constantly to be battling exhaustion. (She left Time several months after it began publishing, unable to take the tension.) “I’ve a splitting headache,” Luce himself wrote in the midst of one of these frantic days. “If there were only 20 Bratches and 20 ’me’s, we might have a chance of making good.” But for the most part, these young pioneers—as they sometimes saw themselves—persevered, and as the publication of the first real issue approached, they grew increasingly excited. “After this week,” Luce wrote as the publication day approached, “it’s head-on either to glory or perdition!”

Fried Eggs and Ink

In mid-February, Hadden and Luce decided they were ready to publish and began aiming for the last week of the month. Their lives grew even more frenzied as they raced to meet their self-imposed deadline. And finally they delivered the last of their copy to the printer. Virtually the entire staff, launching a tradition that would continue through the first year of the magazine, crowded into taxis for the trip to the presses—to proofread copy once it was set into type and to write new stories as the morning papers arrived. After a few hours, they sent out for fried-egg sandwiches and coffee. People stretched out on the long tables at the back of the shop and slept. Everything—sandwiches, copy, clothes—became covered with printers’ ink. At last, in the early-morning hours, they stumbled out and headed for home, crossing paths with Wall Street workers on their way downtown.

The first issue of Time appeared in late February 1923 (with an official publication date of March 3). It was 28 pages long, entirely in black and white, printed in small type. It had 15 ads, mostly from banks and book publishers. The cover displayed a black-and-white drawing of the former Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon. “Uncle Joe,” as he was known, had been a strict, even tyrannical politician for decades, and the editors of Time made no secret of their disdain for the Old Guard he represented. He was, they said, “no mere voice crying in the wilderness, but a voice that forbade anybody else to cry out—out of turn.”

What was most striking about the inaugural issue, however, was how disciplined it was. Three stories were more than 400 words, and most were 200 or fewer. There were 22 sections, including one called “Milestones,” which presented news of significant marriages, divorces, and deaths. Perhaps most illustrative of Luce and Hadden’s commitment to sharing even their most trivial opinions, passions, and prejudices was a pair of features at the end of the magazine—“Point with Pride” and “View with Alarm.” In the first issue, for example, they “pointed with pride” to an effort by the Yale Corporation to retain the requirement that all students study classics, and “viewed with alarm” the literary regard given to T. S. Eliot’s great, despairing poem “The Waste Land” and the high percentage of “Orientals” in the population of Hawaii. On virtually every page of “Vol 1 No 1,” the enduring core of the idea for the magazine—organization, brevity, and comprehensiveness conveyed in a vivid, engaging voice—was clearly apparent.

With the first issue finally in print, most of the staff went home to sleep. Luce, however, returned to the office—where he found Larsen on his knees on the floor, frantically burrowing through a pile of papers. They were the mailing wrappers for subscription copies. Larsen had hired a group of young women—“debutantes,” as he called them—to write the addresses on the wrappers and prepare them for the arrival of the actual magazine. Now he discovered that many of the addresses were wrong and some of the wrappers were too small to contain the magazine. Some copies of the first issue, in fact, would not get into the mail until after the third issue had been published.

Luce, uncharacteristically, ignored Larsen’s panic and went to his desk in the back of the office. Putting his feet on his desk, he picked up the newly printed magazine—his already ink-stained fingers getting blacker still as he held it—and read it cover to cover. He had seen everything before, three or four times. But, as he recalled years later, “I had this sort of surprising feeling that it was pretty good.”

Time’s Long March

Five years after Time’s debut, the magazine was making healthy profits and becoming a staple of middle-class readership across much of the nation. Luce was still managing the business side of the company, and Hadden—with only brief and occasional absences—remained the editor. But in the last months of 1928, Hadden began to weaken, due to his hard-drinking social life and to what seemed to be increasing bouts of depression. That winter he was hospitalized for a strep infection. On February 27, 1929, six years to the day from the publication of Time*’s first issue, he died.*

Luce, whose relationship with Hadden had become difficult in his last months, was shaken by Brit’s death. But Luce moved quickly to establish his own control of the company. He bought out most of the stock of Hadden’s family. And only a little more than a week after Brit’s funeral, he changed the top of the magazine’s masthead so that it contained only one name: “Henry R. Luce, Editor.”

In subsequent decades, Luce’s power, wealth, and fame steadily grew. In 1930, he founded Fortune, the most lavish and innovative business periodical in America. In 1936 he launched Life, the weekly picture magazine, which became one of the most popular publications in history. In 1954, he introduced Sports Illustrated, which in time would become the nation’s most prestigious and well-read sports magazine.

Luce divorced Lila Hotz and in 1935 married Clare Boothe Brokaw—the playwright, former Vanity Fair managing editor, and eventually congresswoman and ambassador to Italy. Her celebrity significantly raised Luce’s public profile as well. By the end of World War II, he considered himself, with justification, the most powerful publisher in the world. His magazines were important not only for their commercial success but also for the way they helped create a media sea change, going on to provide information and entertainment for a national and then a global audience.

By the time of Luce’s death, in 1967, his great empire was already beginning to weaken. Life, always popular but no longer lucrative, suspended publication in 1972. In 1989, Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications, making the new Time Warner (subsequently allied with Turner Broadcasting) one of the three largest media companies in the United States. A decade later, Time Warner was acquired by America Online, an ill-fated merger but one the company survived, although the profitability of the magazine division (Luce’s great creation)—and of newsweeklies in general—was rapidly declining. Many of the company’s employees by then had little idea of Henry Luce’s profound impact on their lives and livelihoods.

Excerpted from The Publisher, by Alan Brinkley, published by Knopf; © 2010 by the author.