A Flawed Giant of Journalism

...Rumors of quite a different sort were set flying by the prominence among Ingersoll's planning associates of pro-Communists like Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett...

...Worse still from Ingersoll's view as a frustrated parent, Luce told him that he was going to raid every part of the organization for talent to reinforce Life, and that he would look to Ingersoll to provide the needed revenue by stepping up the earnings of Time, the corporation's chief money cow...

...It was under constant assault by the Catholic Church, Wall Street and the rest of the Establishment, the Communists, the anti-Communists, and the Nazi-American Bund...

...in their formative years...

...When an Army doctor discovered a spot on Ingersoll's lung, giving him an easy out, the editor reversed his field and insisted on being drafted...

...It began losing money again...

...Ralph went further, warning Luce in Clare's presence that he could not remain on a perpetual honeymoon and had to engage himself more in the affairs of Time, Inc...

...He inspired the publication in Fortune of an extensive survey on the Communist Party, U.S.A., that must have brought joy to the propaganda ministers in Moscow...

...Ingersoll's first knowledge came when he read the whole thing in the paper...

...In his view, the prospect was for a harmonization of systems that would make the United States and the Soviet Union partners in peace...

...The Newspaper Guild, at the time under Communist domination, fought Ingersoll's attempts to clean up his staff, and he publicly denounced the party-liners for having deserted the fight against Fascism...

...He made substantial creative contributions to both the New Yorker magazine and Time, Inc...

...A conversation at a motel dinner table wound up in a rush to bed so all-enveloping that they forgot to close the hallway door until they noticed a startled passer-by gawking in...

...He resigned in fury upon finding he had been duped into piling up material for what he thought was going to be a laudatory picture story on the Veterans Bureau...

...Part of that impression, to be sure, derives from the utter insensitivity he displayed in boasting of his picaresque exploits as a womanizer...

...the President said...

...Heilman, recently divorced from Arthur Kober and trying to shake her lifelong infatuation with Dashiell Ham-mett, threw herself unreservedly into the Ingersoll romance...

...Gregory Zilboorg, herecruit-ed an anti-Nazi artist to prepare overnight a stark black-and-white line drawing of a Catherine wheel whose spikes bore bound, tortured and broken bodies, with Hitler in the foreground accompanying the carnage on an organ...

...Even more conspicuously, the intensity of his loathing for Adolf Hitler made PM a consequential force, far beyond its meager circulation, in combating the America Firsters and Christian Fronters and rallying United States support for Britian at a critical juncture in human affairs...

...By October Field insisted on dropping its ban on advertising, a move that had the desired effect of forcing Ingersoll's resignation...

...A11450,000 copies were grabbed up right away...

...Even before his initial encounter with Heilman, in the United Front period of the Spanish Civil War and the Great Depression, Ingersoll's sympathy for labor unions spawned by the New Deal and a chance visit to a Communist youth camp at Wingdale, New York, had made him vulnerable to the siren songs of the Stalinists...

...Exhibiting a self-assurance bordering on arrogance, Ingersoll refused to recant and told the university president he wouldn't dare act for fear of a public outcry far greater than the notoriety that had attended the appearance of the letter...

...kept sliding downhill...

...will attempt to preserve a profit system operating under the eye of a kind of public conscience, the regulations which he is obliged to impose to enforce that end will irk only those who are irked by any limitation upon sheer industrial banditry...

...That did not last long...

...What created an explosion was Ingersoll's spontaneous decision, without consulting Luce or anyone else, to scrap the glamorized portrait of Hitler giving a Sieg Heil salute that had been turned in by the cover artist...

...At the start rumors circulated that Time, Inc...

...Summing up his life for Hoopes shortly before he died, he said: "Except for the time I wasted after the War moaning over what happened to PM, I have no regrets about anything I ever did...

...Being a Social Reg-isterite and having a flair for enjoying the good life, though, earned him easy access to the literary set that centered on the Algonquin Round Table...

...What ensued was an off-and-on engagement marked by fervent love-making and even more fervent political arguments...

...He rejuvenated the staff and raised the magazine's earnings...

...His father, chief engineer in building the Queensboro and Manhattan Bridges, wanted Ralph to follow in his footsteps...

...Ingersoll was the descendant of two aristocratic and socially prominent East Coast families...

...Within a few months Ingersoll, the superpatriot, was embroiled in an embarrassing conflict with his local draft board over its decision to classify him 1A—a decision he attributed to the fact that its members were Right-wingers who hated PM...

...A booster from the outset was FDR, and his influence—exerted through Tommy Corcoran—almost delivered a single financial angel ready to put up the entire $1.5 million Ingersoll considered a necessary minimum nut to get his paper under way...

...During the next 10 days circulation stayed over the 200,000 level, the paper's break-even point, but after that the number of readers shrank precipitously...

...The tragedy is the necessity to recognize—when one considers how badly he mismanaged his great capacities—that it may be just as well for the world that Ingersoll was not the engineer of its salvation, that his final contribution was writ small, not large...

...He took tea at the Ritz in London with Randolph Churchill, fished off Key West with Ernest Hemingway, weekended in California with William Randolph Hearst and Marian Davies, attended theater with Lillian Heilman, and went to Washington to talk with Harry Hopkins, Tommy Corcoran and, on occasion, FDR...

...His editor had refrained from telling him the pictures and supplementary data were wanted in connection withamajor expose of graft in the bureau that Hearst had been working on for weeks, and was all set to run...

...By then, however, Ingersoll was consumed with the notion that fulfillment for him could only come by spawning an independent newspaper, novel in all its approaches and very much his own possession...

...He quit, regretting only that he hadn't punched the editor in the nose...

...In contrast to most business publications, the magazine lauded the National Industrial Recovery Act, labeling it "pure socialism" yet supporting it anyway...

...A year prior to his death in 1983, his son, Ralph II, who had become top man of the chain, joined with the other partners in freezing Ingersoll out of further active association with his own company...

...had begun to fade in mid-1935, as a result of reorganizations begun after Time's founder fell in love with Clare Boothe Brokaw, an editor at Vanity Fair...

...Most historians of Time, Inc...

...In an effort to get a firm hand at the tiller until Luce could shake off his trance, Ingersoll dragged him to a private meeting and proposed that he appoint a general manager as Number Two man in running all of the corporation's affiliates...

...Thus in 1925 Harold Ross gave him a job writing "Talk of the Town" pieces for the New Yorker, then only four months old...

...Her treatment of Ralph as a crown prince so inflated his ego that he was almost universally hated by his classmates when he went off to Hotchkiss as a teenager...

...Luce assumed the managing editorship himself and, once Life's first issue in November 1936 proved a smashing success, elbowed Ingersoll out of any leadership role in nurturing his baby...

...Ingersoll's happiness at Time, Inc...

...The tearing point came at the end of 1938, when Time chose Adolf Hitler as its "Man of the Year...

...Two years later Field turned the paper over to Bartley Crum and Joseph Barnes, who renamed it the Star and sank their own money into it for six months before allowing the last vestige of Ingersoll's brave experiment to fold...

...he dismissed the incident as "spilt milk...

...It virtually invented consumer news, and in numerous other ways forced editors to concern themselves with social issues many had preferred to ignore...

...He had already drawn up a 61-page declaration of principles setting forth his determination to produce something more than an instrument to sell news for a profit, or even to improve the wretched quality of the existing press...

...The breach with Clare Luce was a direct outgrowth of the plans for Life...

...Soon PM was back under attack as an outlet for Communist propaganda...

...The article's thesis was that no man should be allowed to exploit the profit system to the injury of others, and it added: "Granted that Mr...

...He stayed on for about a year, and although he left out of disgust over the authoritarianism of theparty'srulingideologues, hecon-tinued to admire its professed concern for humanitarian values...

...We are against people who push other people around in this country or abroad," proclaimed the prospectus...

...Later Luce calmed down...

...Once Ingersoll turned down Luce's offer, his status at Time, Inc...

...A letter from Roosevelt hailed PA/as a venture that would add a notable chapter to journalistic history...

...Ingersoll confessed that the daily picture magazine he had launched with the intent of making it the most idealistic, truth-seeking, literate, eye-catching daily ever published was proving a turkey that did not live up to the dreadfully inflated hype of the prospectus...

...The image of Ingersoll that ultimately emerges from Hoopes' pages is that of a congenital cabalist incapable of sharing or delegating power and possessed of an uncontrollable itch to alienate the people whose loyalty and confidence he most needed...

...While studying engineering at Yale in 1920, he was threatened with expulsion for writing a letter to the Yale Daily News charging that pro-German professors in command of the Biology Department were indulging their political prejudices by denying reappointment to a popular young instructor who did not share their leanings...

...He and Lillian Heilman met when a dust storm stranded their plane in Albuquerque while both were returning from the West Coast...

...His abrupt departure made him a hero in the bars where reporters hung out— and poison in the other city rooms where he applied for a job...

...He did not originate the idea, but he utilized the power entrusted to him while the Luces were away on their honeymoon to bring to the lip of realization what would eventually be that blockbuster among slick mass circulation magazines, Life...

...Ingersoll returned to PM in January 1946, upon completing a book that praised General Omar N. Bradley as the real hero of the War and downgraded Dwight D. Eisenhower, Britain's Field Marshal Montgomery and George S. Patton...

...The sponsor was to be Edward J. Noble, the Lifesaver king, who was serving as Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and papers were drawn up by lawyers for signing at the end of August 1939...

...would be a principal underwriter of the new journal, though Luce had been at pains in announcing Ingersoll's departure to stress that neither Time nor any Time, Inc...

...Whatever else it does or will do, the Communist Party intheU.S.providesa vigilant and persistent opposition...

...Ingersoll, she said, had torpedoed her husband' s intention to appoint her managing editor of the new venture...

...For all the ignominious swiftness with which PMs candle sputtered out, the Ingersoll imprint is still discernible today...

...Ingersoll sought to defuse the Red issue by inviting the FBI to investigate charges that 24 of his staff were party members or sympathizers...

...A journal of the kind he planned, and the journalists he hoped to hire for it, Ingersoll said, must" serve two things larger than themselves...

...Its conclusion: "The Reds may be 'troublemakers' and 'fomenters of rebellion,' but they can make trouble and riots only when the capitalist system has done gross injustice to some social group...

...The president backed down...

...It was the end of a steadily worsening relationship, yet Ingersoll was as unwilling as ever to acknowledge that some of the deterioration might have been his fault...

...to all-out military mobilization against the Axis...

...Ingersoll's frustration, his wife said by way of epitaph, was that he didn't change the world...

...Christian Fronters, allied with the Reverend Charles Coughlin, declared war on PM as an atheistic, Moscow-inspired propaganda mill...

...After Pearl Harbor Ingersoll himself, in and out of uniform, wrote what were among the most readable and informative frontline dispatches and books about World War II...

...In addition, they reinforced in a significant way Roosevelt's fight for lend-lease aid to the British when the whole defense effort was under attack by a sinister alliance of Communists and Right-wingers...

...A four-color dummy and a prospectus written by William Benton helped the sales effort...

...She told her husband he had surrounded himself with incompetents and vowed never again to go near his magazines...

...On the advice of his psychiatrist, Dr...

...After a couple of false starts, he picked up his life with the help of a millionaire friend...

...His jackrabbit speed in and out of bed left a grisly detritus of wrecked marriages and macabre mesalliances that seemed to bother him not at all, and certainly taught him nothing...

...But the distaste stirred by his vainglorious grossness in matters of the heart (or heartlessness) is heightened by the regularity with which he insured the collapse of his brightest dreams through the chaos of his own creation...

...Characteristically, Ingersoll did not let his involvement in reinterpreting American capitalism and fashioning new journalistic models interfere with his amatory and gastronomic pursuits as an elite gadabout...

...Ingersoll felt the picture might have been supplied by Goebbels...

...By leading the oppressed classes and making their grievances articulate, the Communists force the capitalist system to adjust its more glaring inequalities...

...To say PM shook the general press out of political conservatism would be an exaggeration, but the vigor of its crusades in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal created a counterweight that caused those opposing Roosevelt to be less cavalier in their fulminations t han they had been before Ingersoll took up his lance...

...After graduation Ingersoll spent a couple of swashbuckling years as a hard-drinking mine engineer in California, Arizona and Mexico, then came back to New York to write a book about his experiences and to take a j ob as a reporter on Hearst's New York American...

...He rushed to get credentials for a visit to Moscow and the fighting fronts, then wrote a month-long series of breathless articles extolling the determination of the Russian people to match the British in resisting Hitler...

...stock if he would agree to stay for five years...

...When FDR was inaugurated in March 1933, Fortune further broadened its sphere of interest to cover the new regulatory agencies set up under the New Deal...

...He flew to England to cover the Battle of Britain, and the fact-filled, marvelously written dispatches he filed in the winter of 1940 boosted circulation by 50,000 a day during the three weeks they appeared...

...By August it was down to 30,000 a day...

...Much to Ingersoll's astonishment, he found himself yanked out of his editor's chair at Fortune and saddled with the overall administrative assignment he had meant for someone more expert in business management...

...He appeared bent on incorporating a self-destruct mechanism in the devices that grew out of his extraordinary capacities...

...Roosevelt, shaped as he is by nature and tradition...

...in one gesture...

...Raskin Former assistant editorial page editor, New York "Times," and associate director, National News Council It is impossible to exclude Ralph Ingersoll from the all-too-short roster of great innovators in American journalism...

...Nevertheless, he threw himself into trying to correct the biases and inadequacies responsible for a widespread feeling among critics that" Time's editors were well-fed, newly rich Yale boys in whose world labor movements were things to be laughed at, baited, ignored...

...Luce, unenthusiastic at first, got increasingly involved when he came back from Havana and learned the cost of the lavish blueprint Ingersoll had laid out...

...Part of the trouble was the jealousy of many talented, ambitious young executives who resented being passed over, yet Ingersoll's own abrasive, imperious, often mean personality was at least equally responsible...

...Pearl Harbor came a few days after his Russian series ended, and PM yielded to none in the fervor of its efforts to spur the U.S...

...When the first issue was published on June 18, 1940, advance interest was so great that the trucks carrying PM were mobbed as soon as they hit the streets...

...The son grew up in an upper East Side brownstone, a discontented, whiney kid, pampered by his doting nanny...

...The first is the truth as it exists...

...executive had any responsibility, financial or otherwise, for the project...

...Complications arising out of the divorce of the wife who stood in the way of Luce's marriage to Clare so engulfed the publisher that the affairs of his empire drifted into demoralizing disarray...

...He wangled his way into assignments that made him privy to the innermost secrets of top commanders, afforded him an opportunity to continue his superb writing about the War, and enabled him to add countless mistresses to his harem...

...He responded with a typically infantile decision to divorce his ailing wife...

...Otherwise, we all might be in a bigger mess than we are...

...The second is the idea of a better mankind...

...Between its conception by Luce early in 1929 and his invitation to Ingersoll to come aboard a year later, Fortune's mission of explaining the business community to itself and the nation had been expanded to take on all the extra burdens created by a Wall Street crash that had shattered the foundations of public trust in the enterprise system...

...That ambivalence became painfully clear and enormously costly when he launched his dream paper, PM, in the middle of one of the sorriest periods in the history of Stalinist duplicity, the Nazi-Soviet Pact...

...Everything might have turned out all right, though, were it not for the fierce hatred that developed between him and Clare Boothe Luce...

...We propose to crusade for those who seek constructively to improve the way men live together...

...Ingersoll was not leaping into the void when he left the New Yorker...

...He cut his ties to the Luce magazines in April 1939, and set about raising funds for his own paper...

...With Luce's full support, he stood up to corporations threatening to pull their advertising in protest against articles they disliked...

...Ingersoll now had to employ all his charm to round up well-heeled, socially minded backers interested in taking a flier on a crusading journal that aimed to revolutionize the newspaper business and also to make money for its investors, despite its refusal to take advertising...

...The focal point of their feud became control of the picture magazine that took shape in Ingersoll's restless, inventive mind as a logical next link in the Luce chain of publications...

...Ingersoll was delighted when the Stalin-Hitler Pact collapsed in June 1941, following the Nazi invasion of Russia...

...By the time a deterioration in his relations with Ross induced Ingersoll to leave five years later, he had become the New Yorker's first managing editor, done much to shape its style, had a nervous breakdown, entered into his first marriage, gone bankrupt as a stock speculator, and developed a gastric ulcer...

...I would do it all over again...

...Heilman ended back in Hammett's arms...

...Aided by a superb staff of writers and relying heavily on photographs and charts, Ingersoll pioneered brilliantly in the evolution of new models of investigative reporting on business and finance...

...are wont to date the emergence of the back-stabbing internal politics for which the company became famous to the discord triggered by Ingersoll's designation as general manager...

...By 1938 Ingersoll had enrolled in a study group sponsored by the party, heedless of the risk this involved for a key executive at Time, Inc...

...When a copy was delivered to his desk after the issue was safely in the mail, he screamed at Ingersoll: "Have you any idea what you've done...

...Meanwhile, inside PMs office feuds and power struggles between Communist and anti-Communist factions consumed energies that should have been going into making the paper more timely and interesting...

...Ingersoll carried away an intensified interest in social reform and an incipient love affair with communism...

...He assembled a highly profitable chain of small-town papers in monopoly situations, doing almost nothing to improve their mediocre journalistic quality...

...The magazine closed Roosevelt's first year with a long profile of the President, written by Archibald MacLeish, in which Fortune expressed its backing for his policies...

...But even a return to affluence and a blissful final marriage failed to diminish the cantankerousness that had always made Ingersoll a trial to his editorial and business associates...

...Ingersoll rejected totally the notion that Moscow would move along expansionist lines toward world domination...

...He already had lined up an executive post at double his old pay with Henry Luce, whose new magazine, Fortune, was not running as smoothly as Luce felt it should...

...Hitler's invasion of Poland in the middle of the night before the signing scared off Noble...

...Given these affirmative aspects of the editor-publisher's legacy, one is shocked to come away from this admiring biography by Roy Hoopes—a journalist who makes no secret of the respect he developed for his subject as a result of his research—with a depressing conviction: Ingersoll was not only an insufferable egomaniac and intriguer, he was basically a boob in the great bulk of his personal judgments and relationships...

...Ingersoll was named publisher of Time as well as general manager of Time, Inc., an additional responsibility he considered particularly unwelcome because he had little admiration for Time's strong conservative tilt...

...But Ingersoll realized it was time to go...

...That relief from money worries freed Ingersoll to concentrate on editing...

...In the process, he made himself so valuable that in the fall of 1937 Luce offered him a million dollars in Time, Inc...

...The work was vehemendy pro-Soviet and anti-British in its analysis of the postwar scene...

...With bankruptcy at hand, Marshall Field, one of the original investors, rescued PM by buying out all the other stockholders at 20 cents on the dollar...

...everything I've built...

...There was no disagreement about the choice...

...Such open editorialization on the cover of his flagship magazine infuriated Luce...

...Yourproposal to sustain your enterprise simply by merchandising information, with the public as your only customer, appeals to me as a new and promising formula for freedom of the press...

...In brightness of writing, use of color and design, his wide-column tabloid did more than any single publication to educate metropolitan newspapers away from their old stodginess...

...The cry that PM was a mouthpiece for the Communist Party plagued the budding paper before its birth and dogged it till its death...

...basic tradition destroyed...

...The principal effect of his open break was to widen the front of PMs detractors...

...In the early 1940s he was the omnipresence in fabricating PM, the ad-vertisingless New York daily that ranked as the most exciting newspaper experiment of the century during the two years of his active direction...

...In the service he had a meteoric rise from private to lieutenant colonel...