Henry Luce's Half-Century
BELL, DANIEL
Thinking Aloud HENRY LUCE'S HALF-CENTURY BY DANIEL BELL WA. Swanberg's Luce and His Empire (Scribners, 529 pp., $12.50) is superficial, simple-minded, strident, and vulgar. It exemplifies...
...History seeks some identifiable skein in which the essential lineaments can be constructed from the multiple, obscuring details...
...Anyone who ever talked to him was subjected to an incessant barrage of questions...
...Luce was shrewd enough to realize this—so he would be back a few months later to press for another explanation couched, again, in another formula...
...Within the society, the momentum of the revolution spawned by American business has wrecked the Protestant Ethic, in whose name capitalism sought to create a distinctive character structure...
...Compare the leads in Time and the New York Times and you see the difference between a story and a report...
...Like all exercises in generalization, sociology is limited by the simplifications it is forced to make in the reduction of complexity...
...A lesser journalist would have stuck to the old one...
...He did this by fusing the nervous rhythms of the new expressive journalism, the language reflecting the new appearances, with the content of American destiny...
...There are differences not only in function and perception but in language as well...
...more than a hundred pages later he allows that "Luce gave considerable autonomy to editors he respected...
...Luceand not Hadden, who scorned these thoughts took the traditional American values (the belief in God, in work, in achievement) and translated them into the idiom of the coming urban civilization of the mid-20th century...
...As Dwight Macdonald has pointed out, Swanberg is a late-1930s "lib-lab" and a dreary one at that...
...The transition was successful...
...Journalism's virtues are vividness, immediacy, relevance...
...He is seen as molding American policy, particularly in foreign affairs...
...He was a journalist and a moralist, with a compulsive need to absorb every fact about the world and be morally certain about his judgments...
...Swanberg is quite wrong about Luce's ambitions...
...It is no accident that the successful magazines of the 1960s were Playboy, with its adolescent hedonism...
...Thus the vogue of Americanism began as a defense against modernity...
...The small town's fierce resistance to this change was symbolized by Prohibition, the effort to impose a definition of respectability through the political regulation of morals...
...He could print what he wanted...
...into world economic dominance...
...The language of journalism is denotative and expressive, deriving from particularity and dramatization...
...The American labor movement is pragmatic, not ideological...
...It will take a great historian to elucidate both...
...The expressive means of depicting the world was Time's contribution to the craft of journalism...
...The motion pictures of the '20s were as coarse and lewd as any of the '60s, lacking only the simulated fornication...
...But it is not at all clear that he would have liked what he wrought...
...The genius of Henry R. Luce was twofold: He joined fact and appearance together in a new expressive mode, exhibited by Time magazine...
...Though he never makes explicit his own historical judgments, he clearly believes that had America only been "good" to Stalin, the Cold War would have been averted...
...So the mishmash goes, for 485 pages...
...His drive for "omnipotence" was theological, not political...
...it selects a sharp edge (or hones one) and highlights it...
...It had to be an attention-getting narrative device that would pull a reader into the story (the point is that it was a story, not a report) while providing a set of facts within a context of verisimilitude...
...In the 19th and early 20th centuries the United States had been dominated by the small town, whose virtues of sobriety, respectability and work prevailed...
...legged animal...
...ultimately, moralizing betrayed even national interest, not to mention moral purpose...
...It was the fusion of moral passion with historical destiny that gave Luce his dedication to the idea of The American Century and a ferociousness toward any challenging power...
...In contrast, history and sociology attempt to provide a structure and explanation for events...
...in viewing phenomena, it seeks to cut across the literal and find some rubric that encompasses the differences...
...The technique quickly lends itself to parody...
...The world seems to be an extension of Luce...
...American business was the dynamic agency that was tearing up small-town life and catapulting the U.S...
...The impetus for Time came from Hadden, the idea for Life from Daniel Longwell and other Time editors...
...that is why Walter Reuther will have to trim his sails for George Meany...
...He compulsively wanted a philosophical or sociological explanation of events, and he would press the respondent until he found one...
...The language of sociology is conceptual and analytical, constructed for the purposes of comparison...
...In seeking generalization Luce was less successful...
...That has now lasted a quarter of a century, and it will be one of the great escapes from past destinies if the test—currently being resolved in a quasi-detente—does not explode into world war...
...and he intuitively sought to transcend the limits of journalism by mimicking generalization and explanation...
...And behind it all is the insidious intention of wielding power, an impulse that Swanberg traces as far back as 1928...
...The daily and weekly press especially are concerned with the world of fact and appearance, with emphasizing events in their particularity and variety?the elements captured by the French word actualite...
...Luce's life is intertwined with the complex history of the country...
...But there was more to it than that...
...For example: "At two o'clock in the morning, the equerry padded down the tapestried corridor of Buckingham Palace, knocked quietly on the door of the Queen and said in a soft yet choked voice, 'Your Highness, His Majesty is dead.' " Or consider what was probably the classic Fortune lead, for a story about the meat-packing industry (and what can be duller than that): "Every day in the United States, one two-legged animal eats one fourDaniel Bell's The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society will be published in January by Basic Books...
...Sociology searches for a pattern either by classification and typologies, in the older mode, or by some structural model, in the later methodology...
...A distinguishing emphasis of expressive Luce journalism was its use of the "lead...
...Psychology Today, which promises self-improvement but fosters narcissistic involution...
...But Swanberg is incapable of judging or debating ideas, and in the end he resorts either to derision or to suspicion about motives...
...swanberg makes much of Luce's using Time as an instrument for presenting his "image" to the world, when actually individuals like John Jessup (on "The American Century") or Russell Davenport (America as the "permanent revolution") were more important in giving shape and voice to Luce's philosophy...
...The singular fact is that Time (like the Reader's Digest) was founded in the 1920s, a period when American society was undergoing an extraordinary transformation...
...It was reinforced by fundamentalist literalism and loyalty oaths, particularly for teachers...
...The social revolution of the 20th century—the rise of the cities, the transformation of the standard of living by mass production and mass consumption—introduced a hedonistic way of life...
...It exemplifies journalistic biography at its worst, as Henry R. Luce's talent was journalism at its best...
...But his political jubilation was clouded by distress at a momentous decision of his wife Clare, the beautiful and astonishing Congress—woman from Connecticut...
...His dislike for Russia was not only ideological (and certainly did not derive from the discomforts of his first trip there, as Swanberg suggests) but stemmed from the Tocquevillian prediction (suggested to him as a "formula" by one of his intellectual advisors) that the two great land-mass powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, would inevitably clash on the stage of world history...
...Swanberg is viciously one-sided in ascribing some reactionary attitudes to Time (e.g., admiration for Mussolini, probably due to the influence of Laird Goldsborough, the foreign editor, who was pro-Fascist), while other, more liberal views are attributed to specific individuals, such as Ralph Ingersoll, Theodore White, or John Hersey, rather than to the magazine...
...Almost a half billion people about a fifth of all humanity ?were saved for Christianity and democracy...
...Luce understood them, even if he could not always overcome them...
...and it was doing so within the language and the cover of the Protestant Ethic...
...China had won...
...The contradictions, in the use of language and ideology, have only become manifest today...
...The old, tattered popular-front mentality reappears with a shrill and monomaniacal voice: Luce is seen as an evil man, carrying on a crusade of anti-Communism in order to enhance his own power...
...Yet a formula has only limited validity against the variety of empirical circumstances, and it soon breaks down under the burden of experience...
...What Luce strove for during his middle years and toward the end of his life ended in failure...
...Strangely, since despite his ties with China he had not a drop of Chinese blood, his eyes had a subtle slant that rendered his lean face striking if not quite handsome and made him seem doubly at home over the rippling Szechewan landscape...
...And Swanberg's portrayal caricatures the worst of Time style...
...What we have here is simple-minded liberalism without any historical sense, and to this extent Luce's conviction that a test of wills was inevitable was correct...
...Its drawback is that it has no method of generalization, no means of finding some overall direction in the string of facts, or of discerning a pattern underneath the world of appearances...
...Swanberg is unrelieved in his hostility to Luce's anti-Communism...
...The book opens with a "dramatic" vignette of Luce standing on top of Mount Pisgah: "When Henry Robinson Luce looked down on the muddy Yangtze on October 6, 1945, he had reason to feel exultation in the consummation of one of the great dreams of his life...
...It is no accident, in this context, that Luce's own magazine—his singular creation—was Fortune...
...Now he was riding first-class in the plane of Major General Robert B. McClure of the America China Command...
...Luce, the son of a missionary, growing up abroad, deeply believed in that destiny, and he wanted to use the classical virtues to establish America's moral claim to world leadership...
...Swanberg rightly attributes this, as have most writers about Luce, to an insatiable curiosity...
...There it is, statistic and drama, in one sentence...
...Although there has always been a sharp separation of church and state in American life, the idea of a religious destiny—the unfolding of God's plan on the American continent, as Jefferson expressed it—has streaked the writing and thought of almost every U.S...
...The Young Intellectuals—Van Wyck Brooks, Harold Stearns, et al.led the attack on provincialism...
...and Rolling Stone, with its raucous trips into the psychedelic world...
...However badly the United States may have managed the Vietnam war (and one of the errors was to see it, at the start, almost entirely as an arena for the great power conflict, like Korea), in the direct confrontation between the two superpowers, the steady nerves of the successive Presidents have led to the containment of Soviet power...
...But it was at this time that Luce came into his own, as an American, and it is a sociological quiddity that the Auslander often celebrates the native values more than the native himself...
...Repeatedly, he mocks Luce's deep belief in God and religion (including his habit of morning meditation as he took the elevator to his office...
...None of this is suggested in Swanberg's book...
...Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis wrote withering novels about small-town life, and other writers fled to Paris to enjoy a bohemian or cosmopolitan existence...
...His motive was not political power (though he was not averse to its use and pleasure), and by temperament he could never function as a politician in the American system (he did not know how to mix with people easily...
...An indifferent Baptist, she had decided to become a Catholic...
...he liked to talk with such religious figures as John Courtney Murray and Father Bruckberger, and he admired most those political individuals whose careers were fused with history, particularly Winston Churchill...
...But Luce's was more than an artisan achievement (the language tricks were largely the work of Briton Hadden, the co-founder of Time), and to explain his unique role in American life one has to turn to the nature of the times, to history and sociology...
...At one point Swanberg writes, "It was his [Luce's] magazine, after all...
...President, and more than official piety has led each President, in his Inaugural Address, to invoke a sense of Godly righteousness in blessing the American undertaking...
...As a genre, journalism is distinctive in its depiction of reality...
...Luce believed deeply in what Robert Bellah has called the "civil religion...
...Swanberg seems incapable of realizing the medium's limitations...
...Luce was one of those who, through Time, brought small-town and provincial America into the mid-20th century...
...when Luce "hoped to advance his own political career under the aegis of some version or modification of authoritarianism...
...For Luce, however, an explanation was a formulaa simplification based on personality, motive, national character, or history—that could be presented quickly to a reader, for whom Luce was the surrogate...
...In truth, Luce's first allegiance was to journalism, and if an editor could convince him of the facts, or of the soundness of an interpretation (to be sure, this was not always easy), Luce would back down...
...The vice of certain kinds of history, such as vulgar Marxism, is the assumption of a single key (say, class interests or economics) that overrides the diverse characteristics of events and forces them into a Procrustean bed...
...Morality gave way to self-righteous moralism (particularly with Dulles), and the American century foundered on the broken rock of American omnipotence during the Korean and Vietnam wars...
...its mode is the dramatic voice...
Vol. 55 • December 1972 • No. 24
