The Publisher (25 page)

On at least one issue, however,
Time
was well ahead of many contemporaries: its interest in the question of race.
Time
was not a crusader for racial equality, to be sure, and it had its share of offhanded racial slurs. (Among the many absurd new words Hadden invented, and probably the most offensive, was “blackamoron,” to describe an African American criminal or villain.) But frequently during the 1920s, and indeed throughout most of its long history,
Time
used its opinionated style to draw attention to racial injustice. In an era in which African Americans were routinely described demeaningly and condescendingly,
Time
self-consciously chose to treat them with respect. They often used the title “Mr.” and “Mrs.” when referring to black men and women, a practice rare in most American newspapers and virtually unknown in the South. This did not escape the notice of many white Southern readers, who protested angrily to no avail. (“Would Mr. Henderson himself care
to be styled plain ‘Henderson,’” Hadden replied curtly to a letter from a white Southerner complaining about the “glorification of the Negro.” In fact
Time
rarely used the title “Mr.” for white subjects either, which led Luce to comment years later that Hadden was being “a little devilish.”) With uncharacteristic sobriety,
Time
reported in its first issue on a demonstration in Washington: “In dignified and quiet language, two thousand Negro women of the Phillis Wheatley Y. W. C. A. protested against a proposal to erect at the Capitol a statue to ‘The Black Mammy of the South.’”
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In
Time
’s early years, the most compelling racial issue for black Americans was lynching, frequent in the 1920s and into the 1930s, but largely ignored by many of the major organs of journalism.
Time
consistently reported lynchings in harsh and telling detail. “James Scott is dead,” the magazine noted at the end of a lurid account of a lynching in Missouri. “He was put to death by the premeditated violence of yokels who believe in their gross way that they were maintaining the honor of the race that bred them. What they did, some people call murder; others, lynching.” For many years
Time
was among the very few white publications that kept a running tally of lynchings each year.
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Hadden, a man of many prejudices, may have focused on lynchings and other egregious acts of racism more because of his contempt for the white “yokels” responsible for them than because of any real identification with the cause of racial justice. Luce, although himself no crusader on this issue, was somewhat more cosmopolitan both in background (given his youth in China) and his outlook, and his record over many decades of reporting and commenting on race was evidence that his commitment to this issue, although limited in many ways, was nevertheless sincere.
⁵⁴

More important than
Time’s
many idiosyncrasies—its language, its opinions, its attitudes, its youthful impetuosity—was its format: Because above all else
Time
was, and wanted to be, a practical digest of the news. From its first imaginings in the dreams of Hadden and Luce at Yale, to the choice of its name as a symbol of its purpose, to its founding as an institution that synthesized reporting done by others, the magazine considered its principal purpose to give busy people an efficient and thorough account of the world’s news in a brief, readable, and organized way.
Time
advertised itself in many forms, but nothing was more consistent than its promise to save people valuable time while keeping them well informed. One striking example was a foldout postcard distributed to
potential subscribers in 1925 that presented what it called a “play in three acts.” 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.”
⁵⁵

Hadden and Luce came to the conclusion that saving busy people time could be a successful and lucrative enterprise almost instinctively—without market research (which remained a very primitive science in the 1920s) or any other kind of systematic evidence. But even had they been able to use the more sophisticated marketing tools of a later era, they would likely have reached the same conclusion; for
Time
magazine was almost perfectly designed to respond to several of the most important social changes of its era. Among those changes were the increasing pace of modern life, the growing nationalization of commerce, and the need of middle-class people to know much more about the nation and the world. At the same time there was growing pressure on many professional people to devote more hours to their jobs. Finding opportunities to educate themselves even minimally about what was happening outside their own communities was becoming difficult, particularly since the volume of information that people believed they needed to know—and the vast variety of publications that attempted to convey that information to them—had become nearly overwhelming. The success of
Time
was, to a large extent, a result of its editors’ understanding of how eager many Americans were for something that would identify and organize for them the important information of their day.
⁵⁶

Time
was not alone in recognizing the growing demand for digests of information and knowledge aimed at the new middle class. Harvard University had helped launch this trend shortly before World War I with its successful “Harvard Classics,” which claimed to provide readers with an efficient condensation of great literature and thought throughout history. Purportedly assembled by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot himself, the “five-foot shelf of books” promised a “reading course unparalleled in comprehensiveness and authority.” A supplementary volume guided readers through the volumes in a way that the editors claimed would allow them to educate themselves in fifteen minutes a day. In 1922, only a year before the first issue of
Time
appeared, DeWitt
and Lila Wallace launched the
Reader’s Digest
, which offered condensed information from many sources—books, newspapers, and other magazines, carefully edited and packaged for readers who did not have the time or inclination to read widely or thoroughly. (Unlike
Time
the
Reader’s Digest
paid most of the publications from which it drew its material and usually attributed its stories to their original sources. Also unlike
Time
, it did not synthesize from multiple sources and made no claim to originality in what it published.) By the mid-1930s the
Digest’s
circulation was over one million, still well over
Time
’s.

Time
was also a response to the nationalization of American culture—and eventually a contributor to that nationalization. The era following World War I saw a rapid standardization in the way many Americans lived, worked, and understood the world. In Sinclair Lewis’s famous 1922 novel
Babbitt
, the central character, George F. Babbitt, points to this change in a speech to the Real Estate Board of Zenith (the mythical city, apparently modeled on Cincinnati, in which the novel takes place):

To Babbitt this was the great accomplishment of middle-class culture (and to Lewis, one of its great failures). It represented the creation of a common, national, middle-class worldview; a reorientation of interest among middle-class people away from their local communities and toward national issues, events, and institutions. It represented as well a new kind of consumerism, born of prosperity and urbanization, reflecting the more secular, pleasure-seeking culture of the modern middle class—what a
Time
advertising circular 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 in the 1920s by the great urban movie palaces and, beginning in 1927, sound). But
Time
played a modest role as well. With the exception of the national wire services, whose stories were filtered through local newspaper editors with their own interests and tastes,
Time
—which even in its
early, frail years had subscribers in every state—was for a while the only genuinely national news organ. No newspaper had a reach very far beyond its own city. Radio news in the 1920s consisted of an announcer reading headlines a few times a day. Newsreels were not yet prominent. Even with its relatively modest circulation in the 1920s,
Time
established itself as an important force in journalism if for no other reason than that it reached men and women in all parts of the country and promised to rescue them from isolation and provincialism and prepare them for the cosmopolitan world. “Can you afford to be
labelled
as a man from Main Street?” an early advertising leaflet asked potential
Time
subscribers. “Can you afford to
be
a man from Main Street? Civilization moves forward on a thousand fronts,—business, art, politics, science, religion. You have only to ignore it, and you slip back again centuries in time. But can you afford to live in the dark ages?”
⁵⁷

Luce, Hadden, and the other founders of
Time
did not expect (and in the beginning did not particularly want) a vast circulation. They were, they believed, creating a “quality” magazine, aimed at a relatively elite readership—the busy professional people who had largely inspired them to imagine their great project. Their target audience was wealthy, educated men and women, “modern-minded by environment and education.” They solicited subscriptions at first from the alumni of Ivy League universities, from the members of elite men’s clubs and country clubs, from directories of corporate board members, from buyers of the
Harvard Classics
, and from people listed in social registers and in
Who’s Who. Time
boasted of the eminent bankers, industrialists, and politicians (among them Franklin D. Roosevelt) who were early subscribers to the magazine. But the more important characteristic of its readership, at least for advertisers, was its relative youth (“70% of TIME’s subscribers are under 46,” the company boasted) and its wealth. “Our subscribers,” they claimed, “are overwhelmingly classifiable as … potent business & professional leaders, … younger business and professional men, already influential but still climbing the ladder—definitely en route for greater fortune and influence … [and] Wives of Business & Professional men.” In a nation characterized by “a hundred temperaments and a hundred degrees of wealth and class,” one
Time
advertisement argued, “our success is the result of hitting the fancy and imagination of America’s most important and interesting class—the Younger Business Executive—young in years—young in spirit and young in outlook.”
⁵⁸

During its early struggles the
Time
staff drew a perverse satisfaction
from what they considered the “exclusiveness” of their circulation. It was, they believed, a kind of club: a group of like-minded people in tune with the sensibilities and opinions of the editors. (“One reader on a train would see someone else reading
Time,”
Luce once said, “and that would be enough to serve as an introduction.”)
Time
readers, they claimed, constituted a “colony” filled with “men and women who have in common a desire to
know
and
comprehend the news …
a distinctive unit … set apart from all other magazine readerships.” This profile was a useful advertising device. But the leaders of
Time
genuinely believed it to be true, and they based that belief in part on the extensive, if unscientific, surveys they frequently did of their readers. In 1928, shortly after the return of the company to New York from Cleveland,
Time
mailed out a questionnaire, whimsically titled “Do You Own a Horse?,” to ten thousand subscribers and received more than four thousand responses, which constituted about 3 percent of the readership. It reinforced all the assumptions the circulation and advertising departments had been claiming. Ninety percent of the respondents were under sixty-five years old. More than 80 percent were “plainly of the
executive and professional
class,” 27 percent were officers and directors of “companies other than their own,” and 62 percent owned stocks and bonds. More than half of
Time’s
surveyed subscribers had servants, and a quarter had more than one. More than 40 percent were members of country clubs. A third had traveled to Europe, and another quarter planned to do so. And nearly 11 percent of respondents actually did “own a horse.” For several years in the 1920s and early 1930s—before circulation grew so large that the economic base of readers could not easily be characterized—
Time
was ranked in some surveys first among magazines in the wealth of its subscribers, a position later occupied for many decades by
The New Yorker. Time
, a 1928 advertisement grandly claimed, “has built up the greatest, the largest, the soundest quality circulation in the history of U.S. publishing.”
⁵⁹

Hadden liked the idea of
Time
readers as a distinctive, elite “club,” and he came to believe that circulation should not rise much above 250, 000. Anything more might dilute the quality of the subscriber base. Luce imagined a much larger readership. Shortly after the publication of the first issue, Luce wrote desperately to Lila asking her what her distinguished stepfather thought of the magazine. “His approbation [would be] a very valuable piece of evidence,” he said, because of his wealth, his stature, and his “maturity and stability.” If
Time
could “get by” men like that, “we can later broaden down and catch the rabble of George F. Babbitts etc.” (Frederick Haskell apparently did not respond.)
⁶⁰