By John Rodden.
The Man of TIME’s Century
Who was the most influential journalist in American history? Benjamin Franklin? Horace Greeley? Joseph Pulitzer? William Randolph Hearst?
How about Edward R. Murrow? Walter Cronkite?
Sufficient grounds exist for all of them to stake a claim. Franklin a.k.a “Richard Saunders,” the author of Poor Richard’s Almanac, founded the most successful newspaper in colonial America (The Pennsylvania Gazette) and became the most respected journalist of the eighteenth century. Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, was the most important journalist in mid-nineteenth-century America, in addition to founding (and naming) the Republican Party in 1854—and helping elect Abraham Lincoln president six years later. The Hungarian-born Pulitzer became a leading national figure in the Democratic Party and a self-righteous crusader against Big Business and corporate corruption who established a series of prizes in his own name, a group of awards that immediately became synonymous not only with journalistic excellence but also with accomplishment in other fields of artistic endeavor. Hearst built a press empire of newspapers and magazines while becoming the most unscrupulous practitioner of so-called “yellow” (sensationalist) journalism, influencing significant political events ranging from the Spanish-American war to pre-World War II isolationism, and serving as the model for the title character in Orson Welles’s famous film, Citizen Kane.
Murrow and Cronkite became national figures in broadcasting. Murrow set the twentieth-century standard for courage and integrity in broadcast journalism, first in radio during the London Blitz as head of a CBS team of war correspondents (known as the Murrow Boys) who transmitted live reports as the bombs fell (“This is… London”) and a decade later in television as the See It Now host whose outspoken criticism of Senator Joseph McCarthy led to the latter’s censure by Congress. Cronkite, also at CBS, started out in radio as a war correspondent (a “Murrow boy”) and later in TV was celebrated as “the most trusted man in America” as the CBS-TV nightly news anchor for two decades from 1962-81 (“And that’s the way it is,” ran his signature sign-off).
All these men are worthy candidates for “most influential journalist of America.” Yet an even more powerful and persuasive case can be advanced for a different press baron and empire builder, the founder and publisher of the most famous magazine ever launched in America, which boasts a remarkable history of publication that continues to this day: Henry Robinson Luce (1898-1967), co-founder (with Briton Hadden) and guiding genius and impresario of TIME.
The story of TIME—the flagship of a magazine empire that included Fortune, LIFE, and Sports Illustrated—cannot be told apart from the life story of Luce himself, its main founder, business manager and publisher, and presiding visionary. Luce’s publications became fixtures in the nation’s life and changed Americans’ lives. TIME marches on—or is it staggers on?—into its second century. In March 2023, it celebrated its centennial. Its status as a venerable centenarian is a rare journalistic feat, and its longevity merits a round of congratulations. What a remarkable, unprecedented, and indeed staggeringly influential odyssey through the decades it has been! And I would argue that attention must also be paid to “The Man of TIME’s Century”: Henry Luce, the man who built TIME and Time, Inc., the first and greatest magazine empire that America has ever witnessed.
Brainchild of an Odd Couple: 5,200 Weeks Ago…. and Counting….
For readers past the age of sixty, TIME—always and insistently capitalized, as if to shout out its claims on our attention—was once a fixture in our lives. You could hardly walk past a coffee table without noticing its bright red-bordered cover. It was indeed “The Weekly News Magazine,” as its cover had blazoned throughout its early years. Week after week, decade after decade, you opened TIME and encountered not just a “news digest” but a cavalcade of ideas and images collated by the magazine’s staff and circulated to an audience in the hundreds of millions throughout the globe. Multiple spinoff publications spread its style, sensibility, photos, and illustrations. (TIME had no less than nine international editions by the 1980s, headed by TIME Europe and TIME Latin America, which have since spawned TIME International in its Atlantic Edition and South Pacific Edition.) In fact, by mid-century, TIME was no longer just a “magazine.” At the height of its prominence seven decades ago, in the aftermath of World War II and throughout the early Cold War era, it was nothing less than a guidebook to breaking events, a crib sheet for social and political literacy, a compendium of “What Every Informed Person Needs to Know.”
How did it all begin? The most famous weekly ever published in America—which was launched more than 5,200 weeks ago on March 3, 1923—was co-founded by two brash 24-year-old Ivy League grads: Briton Hadden and Henry Robinson Luce. The pair had met at Hotchkiss, an elite preparatory school, and then had gone to Yale together. Bright and ambitious, they hatched a plan for something entirely new in American journalism, a newsmagazine that would summarize the big (and sometimes the bizarre) stories of the week. It would not just report the news but also comment on it—and thereby shape public opinion. As Luce and Hadden envisioned it, their publication, which they originally proposed to title “Facts,” would combine the irreverence of college journalism with a strong dash of insult and injury to inflated egos, presenting both events and personalities in absorbing and amusing prose. How TIME might have fared with the name “Facts” is hard to say: both Luce and Hadden had no interest or commitment to objectivity. “Show me someone who pretends to be objective,” Luce once said, “and I’ll show you someone who has illusions.”
Hadden and Luce were friendly rivals as students who decided to combine their skills and become partners. The partnership was sometimes stormy—we might today term them “frenemies.” Throughout the 1920s, Hadden was the main editor; Luce served as business manager. Despite some tensions and differences in vision and priorities, they complemented each other well. TIME prospered. As it entered its fourth year in 1927, it was firmly in the black, having doubled its circulation every year to a total of 180,000. They also evinced a nose for newsworthy stories often missed by the daily press, especially in foreign affairs, validating their aspiration to show readers that people don’t just make news: they make history. For example, just seven months after their launch, they published in November 1923 an informative feature on an obscure, rabble-rousing Austrian war vet who was jailed for attempting an amateurish putsch: Adolf Hitler. (Weeks before the Hitler feature, TIME put a foreign woman entertainer on its cover: Italian actress Eleonora Duse.)
Charles Who?
Sometimes the editors nosedived, as when they blindly flew into print with their May 23, 1927, cover touting the new book by André Tardieu, France’s Minister of Public Works, “a statesman able to lay bare the citizens of France and the U.S. to one another… far more deftly than Sinclair Lewis can rip the breeches off a Gantry.” Buried in a section called Business News, in the sixth paragraph of page 37 (“Aeronautics: Atlantic Events”) was a brief ten-sentence story about their generational peer, 25-year-old Charles A. Lindbergh, who was already world-famous before TIME subscribers received their copies. Apparently unembarrassed by the oversight and convinced that the hullaballoo over “Lucky Lindbergh” was much ado about nothing, TIME nonetheless continued its plummet by relegating the ongoing international uproar over the May 27 flight to Business News: Aeronautics.
As the months proceeded, however, Hadden and Luce recognized their editorial gaffe. In an ingenious maneuver, they shifted gears and headed true north, transforming an editorial blunder into a stroke of branding genius: they invented a Man of the Year Award, whereby they could belatedly shower Lindbergh with kudos. For the January 3, 1928, issue, Hadden and Luce inaugurated a TIME section invented specially for the boy adventurer: HEROES. Likewise, they inaugurated an irresistible guessing game for readers, with the Man (later Person) of the Year Award becoming an annual national pastime, just as firmly entrenched in American lore as one of the Christmas season’s traditions.
Little more than a year later, tragedy struck Hadden—and opportunity struck Luce. Hadden died in October 1929 at the age of 31. Luce took over full control of TIME. He soon proceeded to mold TIME in his own conservative image. During the next four decades, TIME became a prime outlet for his prejudices and causes as well as his quest for social and political influence. (Luce also proceeded in the next half-dozen years to launch a number of other ventures to which Hadden had been resistant, ranging from magazines such as Fortune and Architectural Forum to film and newsreel projects such as the March of Time.)
A son of Christian missionaries to China, Luce possessed an almost missionary belief in what was best for America: admiration for capitalism, big business and its leaders, faith in America’s destiny, and a hatred of Communism. TIME would become Luce’s personal vehicle for promoting—or proselytizing (and propagandizing)—all these tenets, especially in foreign policy. For example, guided by some of his staffers, particularly Laird Goldsborough, an outspoken right-winger, Luce and TIME cultivated a flirtation with fascism in the 1930s, especially with the Italian Duce, Benito Mussolini, who received five TIME cover stories before World War II began.
Luce’s biggest political infatuation—and delusion—was with Chiang Kai-shek. Luce’s infatuation with Chiang exceeded all others and knew no bounds. Luce had been born in China in a missionary compound, spent his first fifteen years there, and retained lifelong a warm spot for China and a deep concern about its future. His love affair with Chiang and China was certainly the supreme political passion of his life. It blinded him to Chiang’s limitations and, given TIME’s general influence and Luce’s connections with Republican policymakers, distorted American policy in the Far East. Chiang outdid even Mussolini, appearing on TIME’s cover six times. (Madame Chiang also merited three cover features.) During the 1940s, more than any other publication, TIME promoted the misguided notion that Chiang was a great man and that China should be granted equal status as a great power alongside with the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—seriously flawed positions that damaged American standing in Asia and denied realities that should have been calculations that were incorporated into any assessment of American interests.
Presidential politics also drew Luce’s attention, and he did not hesitate to push his preferences. He was an avowed, public enemy of Franklin Roosevelt—a leftist just a few degrees away from the Chinese Communists—and backed Republican Wendell Willkie in the 1940 elections. After the war, although Luce initially preferred Senator Robert Taft for the Republican nomination in 1952, political savvy triumphed over ideological compatibility. Luce supported Eisenhower, only to discover, quite soon and simply: “I LIKE IKE!!” It was an easy choice between Ike and another hated liberal, Adlai Stevenson, both in 1952 and 1956. Luce esteemed both the president’s quiet firmness and the war hero’s distinguished record.
Generally speaking, Luce tended to lionize leaders whom he could project as his ideal Big Man, straddling the globe and battling communism, safeguarding capitalist democracy, and/or defending the Free World. To Luce’s credit, he drew the line at Hitler, whom he condemned as a cruel thug and race-obsessed maniac. Likewise, Luce abhorred the Nazis’ unconscionable brutality and obsessive anti-Semitism. By contrast, General MacArthur was a Luce favorite, succeeded later by Eisenhower, who became Luce’s last and dearest American darling.
Eisenhower won Luce’s heart, but it was a British statesman who captured his imagination: Winston Churchill. Luce had been a Churchill fan for decades. (Churchill had already appeared on the magazine’s fifth cover, in April 1923.) Yet Luce’s embrace of Churchill did not fully commence until the Battle of Britain in 1940, which he treated like a twentieth-century St. Crispin’s Day battle, with Churchill playing Henry V and saving the day. In 1949, Luce proudly celebrated Churchill, who had suffered electoral defeat in July 1945 and was out of office, naming him TIME’s Man of the Half Century.
The Invention of TimeStyle
Hadden and Luce each made distinctive and defining contributions to the magazine’s identity and success. Hadden set the tone of TIME and introduced its gimmicky penchant for creating neologisms and hyphenated characterizations (“cinemactor,” “snaggled-toothed FDR”) that became known (and satirized) by the late 1920s as Timestyle—or, more acridly, as Timese. Meanwhile, Luce’s business acumen established TIME as the top newsmagazine in the world by the 1930s. Luce also turned TIME into the foundation of a foursquare journalistic empire. In 1930, he founded a business magazine, Fortune, and in 1935 added LIFE, a photomagazine staffed with the best photojournalists in the world, among them Margaret Bourke White, Robert Capa, and Carl Mydans.
Timestyle had its tics. For example, countless politicians and news columnists were described in Timese as “pundits”—a term that, though Hadden and TIME did not invent it, the magazine certainly made ubiquitous as a characterization of public voices. Quiz question: Who was the first person dubbed a “pundit” in the magazine? Surprisingly, it was the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder, who certainly would be described today in terms far more elevated.
Speaking of “elevated,” it will also come as a surprise to many readers today that the aforementioned hallmark of Timestyle—its neologisms such as “hair-tousled Lindbergh”—were modeled on the classics. Specifically, Hadden’s passion for hyphenated compound noun phrases was indebted, as he made widely known, to an attribute identified with the prose style of none other than the father of Western literature, the immortal Homer, whose colorful descriptors in The Iliad include phrases such as “the wine-dark sea.” Both Hadden and Luce had received a classical education at Hotchkiss and Yale; they sought to pass on a middlebrow version of it (complete with “Homeric” locutions) to their busy readers, who after all just wanted a smattering of knowledge suitable for middlebrow chatter at the Friday night dinner party.
In truth, the New Yorker and most other American publications were probably envious of the upstart young publisher, who by 1936 was also captaining Fortune (1929), the March of Time newsreels (1935), and LIFE (1936). (TIME’s circulation stood at 640,000 in late 1936 and was still climbing; Fortune boasted a healthy 130,000.) So, partly from highbrow envy of the young upstarts’ astonishing success within a dozen years, and partly from fellow middlebrow anxiety that TIME was usurping their readership and their midcult turf, not just regurgitations of TIME stories but also satires of Timestyle was another mainstay of Friday night bourgeois dinner parties. A favorite dinner party game was to parody TIME’s trademark syntax (e.g., its bullet-list, reverse-order sentence structure, with verb first, noun following, as in its January 1928 cover story on “Aviator Charles Lindbergh,” who was described in an opening paragraph: “Habits: Smokes not; drinks not.”
The most famous parody was the still-quoted New Yorker dressing down of TIME’s prose. Published in November 1936 and penned by staff writer Wolcott Gibbs, the piece, titled “TIME.. FORTUNE… LIFE… LUCE,” was a running, sustained caricature of Timestyle. The sendup profiled Luce, who would now pay the price for Hadden’s infatuation with The Iliad. Gibbs’s lampoon included a photo of Luce with the caption: “Baby Tycoon Henry Robinson Luce.” If Gibbs had limited himself to Timespeak, Luce might have kept his cool. But as the New Yorker headline made clear, the piece’s “shotup”—an ingenious Gibbs neologism that mocked Time Style’s inversions in morphology and syntax—culminated in a hilarious skewering of Luce himself. Addressing Luce’s recent acquisition of a name, LIFE, for his planned photo magazine, Gibbs wrote:
Behind this latest, most incomprehensible Timenterprise looms, as usual, ambitious, gimlet-eyed, Baby Tycoon Henry Robinson Luce, co-founder of Time, promulgator of Fortune, potent in associated radio & cinema ventures…. At work today, Luce is efficient, humorless, revered by colleagues; arrives always at 9:15, leaves at 6, carrying armfuls of work, talks jerkily, carefully, avoiding visitor’s eye… In an article on Bernard Baruch, the banker was described as calling President Hoover ‘old cheese-face.’ Protested Tycoon Baruch that he had said no such thing. Shotup of this was that Luce, embarrassed, printed a retraction; now often removes too-vivid phrasing from writers’ copy.
Already sensitive that charismatic Playboy “Brit” had been far more popular than sober, buttoned-up Presbyterian “Harry,” Luce was annoyed by the attention that Gibbs gave to their comparative merits—at Luce’s expense, of course.
Strongly contrasted from the outset of their venture were Hadden, Luce. Hadden, handsome, black-haired, eccentric, irritated his partner by playing baseball with the office boys, by making jokes, by lack of respect for autocratic business. Conformist Luce disapproved of heavy drinking, played hard, sensible game of tennis…
It was all good fun, but it got under the staid Luce’s skin. On his far-flung travels for months thereafter, Luce complained that he seemed to hear incessantly and everywhere about Gibbs’s parody. Luce’s antagonism partly derived from the fact that he was paying, as it were, for the verbal exuberance and editorial excesses of his late partner, Hadden, the poète maudit of Timespeak. Although Luce had enjoyed (and encouraged) TIME contributors to be Timestylish, he now regarded its indulgence in Homerisms as a Haddenesque tic that pervaded (or perverted?) the magazine’s pages. The New Yorker spoof prompted the puritanical Luce to extend his asceticism to his writers’ prose, restraining their Hadden-inspired, Lindberghian flights. Still, though Luce lowered the temperature of select instances of overheated Timespeak, that hothouse style remained a conspicuous—and sometimes farcical—feature of the magazine’s prose for decades thereafter. Although Hadden had died of heart failure induced by a streptococcus infection at the tender age of 31, Timestyle would live on to become the most notable (or notorious) feature of the magazine.
Newsgathering, Collaboration, and the Invention of Group Journalism
After Hadden’s death—and after Luce the business manager judged that the magazine had become sufficiently prosperous to finance it—TIME also introduced to magazine journalism another bold innovation: a new style of research and writing: group journalism. Initially TIME rewrote stories in its unique style that appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. By the early 1930s, it had developed a collaborative form of journalism in which “correspondents” and “commentators” (staff members were no longer termed “reporters”) jointly worked to research and write the magazine’s stories, with editors in New York overseeing (and often rewriting) the results.
Group journalism, along with Timestyle and design innovations introduced in the late 1920s (such as the red border on every cover), gave TIME its distinctive brand. Whereas the opening issue of TIME in 1923 ran a mere 32 pages of newsprint and had a black-and-white drawing for its cover, the magazine’s covers by the 1930s featured the highlighted word “TIME” in a box bounded by a red border and the portrait of the celebrity of the week. Circulation grew steadily throughout the decade, topping one million in the early 1940s and more than three million two decades later.
Interestingly enough, whereas the Politics, National, and International sections of TIME reflected Luce’s conservative politics, one department remained insulated and tended to tilt leftward: the Culture section. In addition, Luce implicitly acknowledged that group journalism only went so far: The Culture section remained untouched, at least insofar as book and movie reviews were concerned. (By contrast, a major feature on a cultural figure—say, the cover story on Yevgeny Yevtushenko in 1962 and on James Baldwin in 1963, respectively—would gather together the efforts of a team of reporters and contributors, including those from departments outside Culture having expertise on Soviet affairs or the civil rights movement.)
Why did Culture remain immune from Luce’s heavy political hand and his penchant for group journalism (and an author’s anonymity)? Luce had sufficient respect for (or fear of) the cultural establishment—of which he was a part—not to mandate that TIME reviewers collaborate and pool their impressions of works in the creative and performing arts. He might dictate the line on, say, the 1940 election (Willkie, not FDR, he insisted), or his fantasy future for China (under the “heroic” Chiang Kai-shek), but he was not about to tell James Agee how to write movie criticism and not to lean on drama critic Louis Kronenberger to pan the featured theatrical productions of the week. Luce had only intermittent interest in literary and cultural matters. Still, he was willing to grant that personal taste partly governed artistic judgment about belles-lettres or cinema. He also had enough good sense to realize that group journalism, if applied to cultural topics, might very well lead to judicial criticism that reflected the lowest common denominator, i.e., a consensus norm. (Luce realized that such group journalism would also open him to derision for mirroring the “editorial collectives” then prevailing in most Marxist-Leninist regimes, where artists and critics were employees of the Ministry of Culture and generally hewed to M-L orthodoxies and the party line.)
A few talented writers made careers as news editors at TIME. T.S. Matthews, who had edited the New Republic for a decade, stayed more than twenty years at TIME, eventually becoming managing editor and succeeding Luce as day-to-day editor-in-chief in 1949. Whittaker Chambers was not in Culture but rather ran the International News desk in the 1940s, earning the then-princely salary of $30,000. Others, such as Theodore White, John Hersey, and Dwight Macdonald did depart, either for other publications or to establish freelance literary careers. Nonetheless, they seldom spoke badly of Luce and TIME. For example, the ex-Trotskyist Macdonald, who left Fortune after six years to help edit Partisan Review and then found his own short-lived little magazine, politics (always lower-cased, as if to tweak the pretensions of TIME and LIFE), told Luce’s son that Luce Sr. was an “interesting and sympathetic” publisher who always listened even when his opinions ran counter to his literary-minded staffer. “As they invariably did,” added Macdonald. Joseph Epstein took a dimmer view of Luce’s apparent broadmindedness and tolerance of opposing philosophies, noting that news editors such as Matthews and Chambers shared Luce’s opinions. “He may have allowed the critics to have their own points of view,” wrote Epstein a few months after Luce’s death in 1967, “for the simple reason that he did not believe that the power of art could move men’s minds.”
The Rise of the Luce Empire
The expanding journalistic empire of Henry Luce in the 1930s became known by the corporate name of TIME, Inc.—and later, TIME-LIFE, Inc. As those names suggest, TIME remained Luce’s flagship publication. Already by the late 1920s, TIME was well on its way to becoming an American institution. The prep school boys had possessed the mettle and moxie not only to achieve their proximate aim—to launch the world’s first weekly newsmagazine—but also their longer-range goal, namely to compete with America’s other top magazines of opinion and news, such as The New Republic, the American Mercury, and The Literary Digest. Their strategy had been a simple one: to appeal to people like themselves. They set their sights on winning the burgeoning demographic of educated American youth: young, college-educated men and women, who were becoming a powerful force in American life. With a mix of arrogance and derring-do, TIME quickly overtook H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury as the middlebrow magazine favored by the would-be-well-informed classes. (Hadden in particular was a huge admirer of Mencken.) Yet one wonders if Hadden and Luce, even in their wildest boyhood fantasies, ever imagined that copies of TIME would one day be found in every doctor’s and dentist’s office, even in every college dorm and every sorority parlor room—not to mention your neighborhood barber shop and local hairdressing salon.
As we have noted, although TIME ran in the red during its first three years, it was solidly profitable well before October 1929, when it not only survived the stock market crash but flourished in its wake. The magazine’s firm bottom line was assisted by Luce’s shrewd business decision in 1925 to shift the fledging magazine’s headquarters from New York to a Cleveland office near the printer and distributor. (Hadden hated Cleveland, opposed the decision, and insisted on moving the company back to New York early in 1929.)
After Hadden’s passing, Luce bought out his heirs to acquire full control of the magazine. He quickly proceeded to build his publishing empire, launching ventures that Hadden might have opposed and certainly would not have proposed himself. Indeed, within a decade of Hadden’s death, Luce had established an empire of Alexandrine proportions. TIME was followed in 1930 by Fortune, which—despite (or because of?) its appearance in the middle of the Great Depression—immediately turned a handsome profit. It cost—gasp!—$1.00, a lavish price. (TIME was only 15 cents.) In 1936 came LIFE (also in caps), a glossy photo magazine, which was staffed by some of the best photojournalists of the age, such as Margaret Bourke White, Robert Capa, and Carl Mydans among others. It broke all circulation records, selling 466,000 copies in its first press run. Because Luce had underestimated its appeal and guaranteed low prices to advertisers for the first year or more, however, it ran in the red until 1939.
After a gala fortieth anniversary party in March 1963 celebrating TIME’s history, which featured 284 of its cover story personalities as guests, Luce turned over the day-to-day operation of the magazine to Hedley Donovan in 1964. Luce died in February 1967 with his personal holdings in Time, Inc. valued at $109 million. For the next three decades, TIME continued to prosper. In the mid-1980s, the magazine’s circulation stood at 4.6 million and reached a worldwide audience estimated at 30 million, with annual profits reportedly above $70 million. It was telling that, on coming to power in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR president and head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, gave his first Western interview to the editors of TIME. The magazine’s continued success after Luce’s death owed in large part to the effective executive team that he had put in place long before his retirement, led by Donovan and above all by Roy Larsen, who had been with TIME since its founding. They were joined by several other superb editor-journalists, such as Henry Grunwald, John McManus, Otto Fuerbringer, and Walter Isaacson. Their shrewd guidance of TIME maintained its reputation as America’s greatest newsweekly into the twenty-first century.
Marching On…
In the 1990s, TIME’s decline became obvious. Staff turnover, even at the senior levels, signaled the downturn. For example, the magazine went through three managing editors in less than a decade, something that never happened under Luce in the past. In hindsight, the seventy-fifth anniversary soiree, staged in Radio City Music Hall in New York City—which even managed to outdo in size and splendor Henry Luce’s fortieth anniversary bash—represented the last hurrah. Held on March 3, 1998—exactly seventy-five years to the very day of the inaugural issue—its all-star lineup included heads of state, movie icons, and supermodels.
The A-list included President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton, former USSR head Mikhail Gorbachev, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Muhammad Ali, Bill Gates, Walter Cronkite, Steven Spielberg, Claudia Schiffer, and Sophia Loren. Other TIME cover guests included Tom Hanks, Jodi Foster, Billy Graham, Tom Brokaw, John Glenn, Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, Imelda Marcos, Louis Farrakhan. A few guests, such as Joltin’ Joe, were back for a second glitzy gala. In his 2023 memoir, The Noise of Typewriters, veteran TIME columnist and editor Lance Morrow, now in his mid-80s, devotes a chapter to (a)musings about the guest list, including conjectures regarding the interactions among Jerry Falwell, Jack Kevorkian, and the Clintons. In a more formal and fulsome report on the gala event, Amsterdam’s Volkskrant toasted TIME as “The Magazine of the American Century.” The Volksrant headline represented a salute to Luce’s most famous and influential piece of journalism, his LIFE essay, “The American Century” (February 1941), a summons to American leaders to step up to the nation’s manifest destiny to save the world for (capitalist) democracy.
Ave Atque Vale! (“Hail and Farewell”) might have been a more accurate headline from the vantage point of today. Certainly, on the occasion of its centenary, TIME did warrant kudos for its pioneering achievement as a news digest that did indeed bring “informed opinion” to millions of Americans and help shape the public conversation. The magazine’s remarkable history of publication as a newsmagazine continues to this day, both in print and digital versions. Nevertheless, TIME has suffered an ever-steepening decline as the twenty-first century proceeds, and its durable and distinguished record of accomplishment should not blind us to the reality of its present condition.
Some observers may rationalize that TIME is still marching on, pointing out that its editors publish several monograph-style magazines per year, charging $10-15 per copy. Or that its online monthly audience exceeds 100 million visitors. To highlight such details is, however, largely an exercise in how to mislead with statistics. The reality is that TIME’s fall is clear for all to see—and if not yet fallen, it is in free fall: just two issues per month, an anemic 50 pages, a circulation total barely over 1.3 million. That figure amounts to less than a third of its sales total twenty-five years ago: TIME no longer even makes it into America’s Top 25 in circulation figures, far down the list from its sister publication People, which is still invariably among the top three. Thus does the child born from a single TIME rib—a brief section in the middle of the magazine devoted to newsy items about personalities or celebrities of the moment—come to overshadow its aged parent in popularity and pertinence to the glitzy infotainment age. In 2007, on the eightieth anniversary of its introduction, TIME’s trademark red border on the cover was reduced, as if to symbolize the reductions everywhere else in TIME—and likewise the contracting post-Lucean empire itself.
“Die Zeiten ändern sich—auch für TIME” (“The times have changed—for TIME too”) declared Germany’s Die Presse in a commemorative feature devoted to TIME last March. Amsterdam’s newspaper daily de Volkskrant agreed: “The iconic TIME is celebrating… but little remains of the glory of its past.” Indeed, “The Weekly News Magazine”, its old cover subtitle, has been reduced (since March 2020) to a biweekly. Nowadays, the magazine is living off TIME’s past. Or as the editorial director of the Dutch weekly Elsevier—which has long modeled itself on TIME, even mimicking the red border—allowed: “TIME will benefit…for a long time to come” from its “fantastic name,” a “brand” “in the category of Ford and Coca-Cola.”
Like all other magazines, TIME has struggled throughout the twenty-first century with steep declines in print advertising and newsstand sales. Successively owned after the Luce family by Warner, American Online, and Meredith, the magazine was privately purchased in 2017 by Marc Benioff, owner of Salesforce, in a fire sale. The bargain basement price was $190 million.
Observing these signs of TIME’s decline and from across the Atlantic, a British journalist could observe after the 2017 sale with an equal measure of both glee and justice:
The Person of the Year thing is about the last attention-grabbing gimmick that TIME has left. It’s like the news nerd version of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition calling out, ‘Hey there, remember when we were a big deal? Remember when you couldn’t wait for Fridays, when the edition that appeared on the newsstands on Monday would finally hit your mailbox?’
The erstwhile coup de genie now seemed a tired gimmick; the onetime cynosure of national preoccupation now attracted just ho-hum attention. Aware of the decline in interest, TIME sought to compensate with its TIME 100 list of “the most influential people in the world.” Xi Jinping has made the list thirteen times, Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey eleven each. Other spinoffs have followed, such as the 100 Next list in 2019, which “spotlights 100 rising stars” around the world, along with numerous other TIME 100 innovations.
As if to mock the futility and even fatuousness of these stopgap stratagems, in February 2016 TIME floated yet another ranking survey: the TIME 100 Most-Read Female Authors in College Classes. Yet it contained a name that not even the trans community would venture to include: Evelyn Waugh (at #97). With a touch of post-colonialist satisfaction, The BBC News soberly reminded the Yankee editors: “Evelyn Waugh Is A Man.” TIME’s blooper triggered hoots of derision (“Who knew E.W. was a dude?!”). Still, objections about the retraction also arose: “TIME is sexist, heteroassumptive, and transphobic!”), and the list attracted waves of satirical barbs (“Groomshead Revisited, Anyone?”) not seen since the chattering classes chattered about Wolcott Gibbs’s critique eight decades earlier.
A specter is haunting TIME. Is the fate of Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and lesser, now-defunct newsmagazines soon destined to be its own? TIME’s up?
The coffee tables are already bare. The clock is ticking on TIME.
The Man of the Century? Luce’s Legacy
And what of history’s judgment of the empire builder himself?
In his later years, Luce occasionally betrayed more than a touch of megalomania. Luce had once observed, according to one of his biographers, that he was “smarter than Albert Einstein” because, whereas the physicist Einstein was just a “specialist,” Henry Luce was a “generalist.” Whatever one makes of such anecdotes—Luce’s superiority to Einstein takes on a special ironic cast, given that TIME’s editors named Einstein “Man of the Century” in December 1999—it is nonetheless undeniable that Henry Luce exerted substantial influence on the American mind and temper.
Even the wartime tribute of the former editorial director of Simon & Schuster, who rhapsodized in the 1940s that Luce was the “most influential editor” of the century, does not at all seem outlandish from a certain angle: Luce as an inventor-impresario of the publishing world bears comparison with some of the giants of the last two centuries in their own respective fields. For the founders of TIME single handedly invented the weekly newsmagazine, and then Luce alone transformed it again by implementing group journalism. He then invented the modern business magazine with the debut of Fortune, the modern photojournalism magazine with the launch of LIFE, and the modern sports magazine with the premiere of Sports Illustrated.
While TIME was the Luce Empire flagship and LIFE was its biggest money maker, Fortune was Luce’s dearest love among his magazines, for it heralded the greatness of business in American life. (And because, unlike in the case of TIME, it was his own baby, his own newsmagazine—and he didn’t have to share credit with anyone for its creation.) People, inspired by the “People” section of TIME (and the most popular of the company’s magazine chain today) was launched long after Luce’s death in 1974. Proud of all his creations, it remains doubtful as to whether he would have cited People in his list of accomplishments.
Yet Henry Luce was far more than that. From the standpoint of the twenty-first century, he stands as the single most innovative newsman of this nation’s history, creating and branding a magazine format that has never been bettered—and popularizing a concept of the “news digest” that has shaped infotainment and the presentation of news in the digital age—for better and worse.
Unlike some of the other candidates for “America’s greatest journalist,” Luce did not exert great impact on national or world events: the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, civil rights, the Space race. Luce did not so much influence public policy or political developments as he reshaped media formats and practices (group journalism, “digest” reports) and the modern mindscape. No other journalist has ever presided over an empire that came to dominate so many diverse spheres of journalism, ranging from general news to business, entertainment, and sports. By the mid-1930s, he had transformed the magazine industry and recast it in his own image. Nor has any press baron ever approached his circulation totals and the international reach of his magazines, especially TIME and LIFE at their peak.
As TIME “goes on,” therefore, and we commemorate its achievements, the career of Henry Robinson Luce, the “Man of TIME’s Century,” deserves recognition. In March 2023, Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung pronounced Luce “the most powerful publisher of the twentieth century.” Indeed, if he was not America’s “greatest journalist,” he was greatest American publisher of his time, as his biographer Alan Brinkley made clear years ago in Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (2010), a judgment recently seconded in The Noise of Typewriters by Lance Morrow, who wrote no less than 150 cover stories for TIME across a half-century.
For Luce did nothing less than alter our consciousness of current events and our connection to them.
John Rodden has taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Texas at Austin.
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