The Publisher (33 page)

But it was not always easy to hold liberal or radical views while writing for a business magazine that, for all its flirtations with the Left, remained committed to the ethos of the capitalist world. They soon began to run up against the limits of radicalism Luce was willing to tolerate. Two of the most talented writers at
Fortune
were also the most disaffected. Both Agee and Macdonald had come to
Fortune
because they needed the money. Like almost everyone on the editorial staff, they wrote the standard company and industry stories. But they were always a poor fit with the magazine’s culture, even in its most iconoclastic years. Agee described the spectrum of his feelings about
Fortune
as ranging from “a hard masochistic liking to direct nausea.” Macdonald later claimed that he wrote for
Fortune
“with no special interest in the subject” or in his published stories, which were “impossible for me to reread or even remember writing, a month later…. Never did I think of myself as a member of the team, a loyal, dedicated Fortunian.” Both began to chafe at what they considered the increasingly formulaic culture of the magazine.

Agee, taking advantage of
Fortune
’s growing interest in dysfunctional industries and regions, proposed a study of Southern sharecroppers, and in 1936 traveled to Alabama with the photographer Walker Evans to chronicle the lives of three families of white tenant farmers. The result was a remarkable series of photographs by Evans and a massive text by Agee—a sprawling, discursive expression of his own emotional response to the lives of the families he had visited. It reflected his simultaneously radical and antiprogressive belief in the “divinity of man,” and it argued that neither journalism nor politics could adequately convey the richness of individual lives.
Fortune
unsurprisingly declined to publish the enormous, idiosyncratic manuscript, and Agee spent the next four years trying to find a publisher for it. (It finally came out in 1940 as
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
and received scant, unenthusiastic
critical attention. It sold about six hundred copies before being remaindered and forgotten—only to be revived in the 1960s and proclaimed a literary classic.)
²⁹

Agee’s disaffection was no secret to anyone. Macdonald’s restiveness remained mostly hidden. He argued with Luce occasionally, once accusing him of not having “enough social consciousness.” But mostly he kept his opinions to himself until he finally decided to rebel openly. He was assigned in 1936 to coauthor a four-part series on U.S. Steel with his fellow
Fortune
writer Robert Cantwell. The story sharply denounced the company’s harsh labor policy, “the most severely criticized and most uncompromisingly defended position ever taken by the Corporation.” And it concluded sourly that “three great social groups are affected by the Corporation: its stockholders, its customers, its employees…. It has in the past pleased no one of them.” But Macdonald was not content with criticism of the company’s performance alone. In the course of his work on the project, he had taken a strong dislike to Myron Taylor, U.S. Steel’s president; and he wrote scathingly in the last of the four articles that Taylor had come to head the giant corporation only because he “looked like a movie director’s idea of a big corporation CEO.” (Even years later, looking back on the story, he described Taylor as “that great ham character actor.”) He also, as he himself later claimed, included a deliberate provocation to Luce: an epigraph that read “‘Monopoly is the final stage of capitalism.’ V.I. Lenin.” Luce demanded that Macdonald rewrite the article. Macdonald refused—apparently no longer able to suppress his loathing of his work at
Fortune
—which he later expressed openly in an acerbic article about Luce and his magazine in the
Nation.
³⁰

Luce had been mostly tolerant of the critical tone of
Fortune
despite his frequent grumbling about the complaints he received from his friends and colleagues in the business world. But his intervention in the U.S. Steel piece was a clear sign of change. In 1936 Luce began to harden the tone of
Fortune
—partly in response to the passions raised within the company by the Spanish civil war, which was, Luce later wrote, “fought in the
Time-Life
Building with some bitter consequences.” Many of the more left-leaning writers and editors departed. Macdonald resigned, openly defiant. His departure was the most wounding to Luce, who later recalled spending “more time trying to educate that young man than any other writer I’ve ever dealt with.” Agee moved out of
Fortune
at about the same time and became a book reviewer for
Time
. A few years later he left the company to write novels. MacLeish resigned in 1938 to accept a position at Harvard, unhappy with the direction the magazine was taking and disappointed in Luce.

The growing restiveness among the
Fortune
staff was driven as much by their unhappiness with
Time
as by the changing character of their own magazine. Macdonald wrote Luce not long before his resignation that “the chief difference between
Time
and the [liberal journal of opinion]
Nation
seems to be that the
Nation
is consciously left-wing … whereas
Time
is ostensibly impartial but actually (perhaps unconsciously) right-wing.” MacLeish, in his own last year with the company, frequently sent Luce tough if courteous criticisms of
Time
. He was particularly contemptuous of Laird Goldsborough, whom MacLeish, like many others, still accused of fascist inclinations. “I don’t think anyone here has ever thought
Time
was fascist in intention,” MacLeish wrote in 1936. But the magazine did have “a strong unconscious bias, particularly in labor stories and in foreign news relating to revolutionary developments.” MacLeish engaged in an increasingly acrimonious exchange with Goldsborough himself about
Time
’s coverage of the Spanish civil war and its often-unsubtle admiration for fascism, Franco, and Mussolini. Goldsborough, in turn, accused MacLeish of being in league with communists. Luce stood largely apart from the fray, which MacLeish correctly interpreted as his siding with Goldsborough. “I wish some things had gone differently with you,” he wrote Luce ruefully in a farewell letter. “You were meant to be a progressive—a pusher-over—a pryer-up. You were meant to make common cause with the people—all the people. You would have been very happy I think if you could have felt that the New Deal was your affair. Because it was your affair.”

The angst within
Fortune
was, in short, a fear that it would become more like
Time
. That concern grew when Ingersoll moved out of
Fortune
and into a management position in 1936. The shift created anxiety about his successor and also doubts about Ingersoll’s ability (or willingness) to resist Luce’s influence. (Ingersoll later left the company entirely to start his own short-lived newspaper,
P.M
.) Ingersoll’s departure from
Fortune
hastened the changing culture of the magazine. His immediate successor was Eric Hodgins, whose views were not unlike Ingersoll’s but who was weaker and more deferential to Luce. He was replaced less than a year later by Russell Davenport, who was considerably more conservative than either Ingersoll or Hodgins had been and who set out enthusiastically to change the magazine’s tone.
³¹

The changes at
Fortune
were in part a result of Luce’s loss of patience with what he had come to consider the increasingly anticapitalist and pro–New Deal tone of the magazine. As early as 1933 Luce had told MacLeish that he “ought not to resent the millionaires in the audience,
and should cheerfully remember that
that
happens to be the audience to which they were invited to lecture.” By late 1936 Luce was becoming concerned by the rising level of complaints from advertisers and by what he called the “considerable change in [
Fortune
’s] philosophy.” The trouble with
Fortune
, Luce once said, “is that it often forgets it is a Journalist and imagines itself like the Oxford Union … (Socialist these days, of course).”

He was also developing a “growing antipathy to Mr. Roosevelt and the New Deal,” despite some initial enthusiasm. Luce had arranged a meeting with the president in 1933, and he brought MacLeish—who was writing a
Fortune
profile of Roosevelt—along with him. As they left the White House, MacLeish later recalled, Luce said excitedly, “My God, what a man!” But by 1934 Luce was regularly criticizing the administration—both in speeches and in print. And by the end of 1935 he was becoming exasperated by the great enthusiasm for the New Deal among
Fortune
writers. He became determined to “get
Fortune
a little bit straightened out ideologically.” The magazine was, he later recalled, “going more and more socialistic in its attitude. And the question was how could we honestly ask businessmen to advertise in
Fortune
if our editorial policy had diverged so far from the general business community’s sentiment.” The result was what Luce called a “Respectus” in mid-1937, in which Luce charted a revised course for the magazine.
“Fortune,”
he announced, “can be either a great Communist magazine or a great Capitalist magazine,” and there was no doubt which choice Luce was making:
Fortune
would “have a platform with two planks.” One would be the “free and fearless journalism of inquiry.” The other would be “a bias in favor of private enterprise” and against “State-control
…. Fortune
views with alarm the weakness in private capitalism which invokes collectivism; and points with pride to those merits in private capitalism which argue against collectivism.”
³²

The new direction for
Fortune
was not just a result of Luce’s disagreements with his writers about capitalism. It was also a reflection of Luce’s own growing determination to impose a coherent ideology on the magazine—and on the company as a whole.
Fortune
had, in fact, never been an anticapitalist magazine. Most of its content always fit comfortably into Luce’s own sympathetic, if slightly skeptical, view of the business world; the iconoclastic stories from some of his more left-leaning writers were the exception. What Luce found increasingly troubling about
Fortune
was less its politics than its diversity of opinion.
He had tolerated such diversity into the mid-1930s, but gradually, he had ceased to tolerate the wide range of views reflected in his magazines. Instead he had come to believe that the Time Inc. publications needed to reflect a shared sense of purpose—a purpose defined largely by him.

It was not easy to impose his own beliefs on a large and growing institution. For the rest of his life, Luce railed frequently about his inability to control the contents of the magazines, about the ways in which his writers and editors appeared to ignore his wishes. But he continued to try, and he succeeded often enough to ensure that the Time Inc. magazines would be distinctive in the world of journalism, that they would present not just the news, but the editor in chief’s own sense of what it meant.

The battle for control began almost immediately upon Luce’s presentation of his “Respectus.” Several staff members protested vehemently against it, not because it marked a turn away from the “socialist inclinations” of the past, but because of the very idea that the magazine should have a more-or-less official “purpose” at all.
Fortune
, they argued, should “not stoop to a profession of faith … we do not need a platform.” Seventeen female researchers signed a statement denouncing the “total disregard of facts” and the “deliberate bias” that was creeping into the magazine; the principle underlying
Fortune
, they insisted, had always been the honest pursuit of truth without “a pre-established editorial bias.” Davenport and Luce emphatically disagreed with them. Davenport had, in fact, accepted the managing editorship in 1937 precisely because, as he later wrote, it was necessary “to develop a policy that business men could accept … if
Fortune
’s reputation in the business world was to be saved.” Luce had a larger goal. He believed that the magazine should take a stand on the great issues of the day—a stand that would reflect Luce’s own political and ideological progress.
³³

Although Luce would eventually become best known, and most controversial, for his opinions on international affairs—and for his passionate views on China—his first active political interventions focused on the role of government in the economy. He was unhappy with the New Deal and what he considered its arrogant and dismissive attitude toward business. But he was not a reactionary. He was impatient with the rigidity and conservatism of many corporations and their leaders. Beginning tentatively in 1935, and with greater emphasis in the later years of the decade, he helped craft an economic policy for himself and for his magazines—a set of ideas similar to what some years later would
come to be known as “corporate liberalism.” He began increasingly to argue that the dangerous path to “collectivism” could be averted only by a change in the character of private enterprise. He also came to believe that one of
Fortune’s
missions must be to explain and promote his views.

Corporate liberalism as Luce understood it had roots in the efforts of some corporations in the 1920s to create a benevolent environment for their workers, a system known at the time as “welfare capitalism.” The relatively few industries that embraced this concept had provided employees with previously rare benefits such as pension contributions, paid vacations, and most of all higher wages. Luce was a quiet champion of welfare capitalism in the late 1920s. But more than that, he was a harsh critic of what he considered the “defensive, suspicious, false” conservatism of many business leaders. “Toryism resists change,” he had said in 1928. “But business is the great innovator. Business discards the good for the better, the best for the once impossible…. And with business came liberalism. It remodeled thrones, rewrote constitutions, altered, adapted, renovated, recreated. And what could not be renovated, it removed.”