The Publisher (35 page)

Reacquainting himself with the important places of his own childhood was only the beginning of this new commitment. A more enduring result of his visit was his discovery of a “new China,” a China Luce believed to be struggling to its feet after centuries of oppression and backwardness and now joining the modern world. He had left China in 1912, in the midst of a revolution that had brought to an end four thousand
years of empire. He returned in 1932 in the midst of a war with Japan and an emerging civil war between the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang—the nationalist party created in 1936 by Sun Yat-sen and now led by the fiercely anti-Communist Chiang Kai-shek. Among the many Chinese leaders Luce met during his travels, perhaps the most important to him was T. V. Soong, the former minister of finance and a powerful banker of great wealth and even greater political connections. One Western journalist called him the “Pierpont Morgan of China.” Luce was strongly attracted to Soong, a sophisticated, worldly, Harvard-educated man only slightly older than Harry. Soong was also a Christian—the son of a Chinese Methodist missionary and Bible salesman. (One of his famous sisters had married Chiang Kai-shek and had been responsible for Chiang’s conversion to Christianity.) Privately Soong himself was deeply worried about the future of his nation, but he kept his pessimism to himself. Instead he excited Luce with alluring predictions of great economic and political progress in a united, democratic China. Luce had always believed in the power of great leaders to transform societies. Now the discovery of this new political and financial elite seemed to him to promise the fulfillment of his father’s dreams of drawing China into the modern, Western, Christian world.
⁸

That Luce could leave China in 1932 with such confidence in the nation’s future was a measure of how selectively he processed his own experiences. Although he saw many signs of apparent progress and stability during his travels, he also saw areas devastated by the expanding conflict with Japan, the growing civil war, widespread poverty and famine, and a governing elite that, however urbane and Christian, was awash in corruption and incompetence—and itself deeply divided. (Soong, for example, saw Chiang’s preoccupation with fighting the Chinese Communists as a dangerous distraction from the more important conflict with Japan.) All this, Luce chose to believe, was simply the necessary price of China’s wrenching transition to modernity—a transition the United States should support whatever the cost.
⁹

The next leg of Luce’s journey took him across the Soviet Union on the famous Trans-Siberian Railroad. He had traveled through China focusing on whatever buttressed his affection for the country, but his trip through Russia evoked what he described as a “violent dislike,” much of which had preceded his actual arrival in the country. Russia was, he said, a “100% proletarian” society, whose people were “sloppy and boorish,” with “an atrocious body odor.” Indeed, the “stink” of Russia was perhaps his single most vivid impression of the country—perhaps
understandably, given that he spent six days in a crowded, unventilated train filled mostly with Russian farmers and workers. He and Les had booked “first-class” accommodations, but there was little deference to such distinctions on the Trans-Siberian. As the train filled up, passengers squeezed into every available space, including Harry’s supposedly private compartment (which he had refused to share with Les and which instead attracted a Russian woman and her five-year-old son, who used the compartment’s small washbasin as a urinal). “Everybody on the train is getting somewhat on everybody else’s nerves,” Severinghaus wrote in his diary. Suffering from a head cold, revolted by the heavy food served in a dining car crowded with “barefooted Russians, dirty, bearded, and smelling of toil,” so overpowered by the “stink and sourness” that he sometimes spent the night standing in the corridor to escape his fellow travelers, Luce began to think of Russia as a place outside the civilized world. The Russians, he wrote in a memo to his editors in New York, were “neither Oriental nor Occidental,” a people without “an indigenous civilization.” He referred to the Russians he encountered on the train and in Moscow as “natives,” and the Americans and Western Europeans as “whites.”

They spent a week in Moscow, doing a great deal of sightseeing and meeting with journalists and a few low-level Soviet officials. To the horror of his Intourist guide, they even visited a randomly chosen “typical Moscow apartment” identified for him by a fellow journalist. Moscow did little to change Luce’s grim views of the Russian people, but it did much to increase his alarm about Stalin’s regime. “The belt is being tightened,” he wrote from Moscow, “by the screws of Terror.” The journalists he met were “practically unanimous” in their loathing of the Soviet regime—and united as well in their contempt for the few Western journalists there, most notably Walter Duranty of the
New York Times
, who shamelessly continued to write optimistically about Stalin’s policies. “Duranty—you take him seriously in America?” a hardened French reporter dismissively asked Luce.

Approaching the border with Poland after two weeks in the Soviet Union, Luce sourly watched the last miles of the “scrabbly,” “drab” Russian landscape from another “stinky and dirty” train. Crossing into Poland was, he wrote, like entering “Paradise.” He was dazzled by the contrast—“a beautiful sunny day,” “the most beautiful railroad car in the world. Clean, glistening, all-steel, immaculate.” Waiters came by offering ice cream and cake, while Luce admired the “perfectly cylindrical haystacks” in the fields outside, the “contented cows,” the “buxom
hausfraus positively stylish in black dresses trimmed with white lace…. Never in all my tens of thousands of miles of travel has a border seemed to signify so much.” Looking back on his time in Russia, he wrote, “I don’t think I learned or heard a single basic fact” that he did not already know from a recent
Fortune
article he had helped edit months before. And so Luce, the veteran traveler, came to the end of his long journey of education having absorbed many new images and many powerful impressions, but having interpreted them all through the lens of his already settled beliefs.
¹⁰

Before returning home, Luce spent a few days in Western Europe with Lila and the boys, but he was already impatient to return to his company. The Great Depression (as it was now coming to be known) was heading toward its nadir. A critical presidential election was only months away. For now, at least, one of the biggest stories in the world was happening in the United States, and Luce was eager to be part of it. Time Inc. itself had so far largely escaped the impact of the Depression. Advertising dropped significantly in 1932, but far less than it did for most other publishers. And in 1933, both advertising and profits resumed their upward momentum. Luce was certainly aware of the momentousness of the crisis, and he periodically raised alarms within the company about “economic conditions,” at one point proposing—but never enacting—a salary freeze for all employees. From time to time he examined expense accounts for waste. But the reality of the Depression had very little impact on his personal life or on his company’s fortunes at the same time that the crisis became a powerful story that shaped the future of his magazines.
¹¹

Even without serious financial worries, Luce remained restless, tense, and unpredictable—“very fidgety … harassed and hard-hearted,” one of his editors noticed. To a large degree this took the form of what Billings called “nervous, strange … high pressure” intrusion into the writing and editing of the magazines. Luce was, of course, editor in chief of all Time Inc. publications, but the managing editors of
Time
and
Fortune
were mainly responsible for the contents of the magazines. Luce’s engagement was frequent enough to unsettle the routine of the editors and their staffs but not consistent enough to give him real control. In the fall of 1932, for example, Luce urged editors to highlight the accomplishments of the beleaguered Herbert Hoover, hoping to improve the president’s chances of reelection. Most of his editors, however, wanted Roosevelt to win, and they quietly ignored his suggestions. When Luce
pushed to have Hoover on the cover of
Time
shortly before the election, Larsen took him aside and talked him out of it. More often Luce simply dabbled. He gave after-the-fact notes to editors and picked up individual pieces almost randomly and rewrote them. Sometimes he tore a story apart, then—unable to concentrate long enough to fix it—dumped the ruins on an editor’s desk and departed. Once he spent a morning cutting a few lines out of a small piece and then writing a memo to the staff about it, as if to make clear that he remained in charge. “I got fussing with it,” he wrote. “Fuss. Fuss. Fuss. I fussed for an hour. At the hour’s end, I had in 30 lines every single fact which was in the 50 lines.” Because he was so unpredictable his staff was often on edge. “Luce rarely expresses satisfaction,” Billings complained in his diary, “… a devil to please…. He never has any praise for anybody.”
¹²

And yet Luce could also be encouraging and generous. His editors generally hung on his approval, however infrequently expressed, and reveled in his occasional compliments. “Luce was rather critical,” Billings noted in 1933. “I must get used to that…. But I am devoted to him—and would work my heart out for him.” Luce was a shrewd judge of quality and, however hard-driving he might be, moved gently when he had to change or dismiss struggling personnel. In the early 1930s he found himself with real competition for the first time when
News-week
*
began publication. No one at
Time
was much impressed with the new magazine. (“Dull and stodgy,” Billings wrote. “This first issue doesn’t frighten us. Most of its writers … were fired from
Time
for incompetence.”) But Luce understood the potential danger and moved quickly to shake up his own editorial staff. John S. Martin’s deteriorating behavior had become increasingly disturbing, and, Luce believed, threatened the future of
Time
. He had always deplored but tolerated Martin’s conspicuous womanizing. But what made him finally lose patience was Martin’s increased drinking and frequent absences. (“He gets drunk and says the most outrageous things about Luce … a horrible mess,” Billings confided to his diary.) Luce finally eased Martin out as managing editor of
Time
in October 1933. He replaced him with Billings, who had already proved himself a brilliant if unflamboyant editor—perhaps the most talented ever to serve under Luce. Billings was from an aristocratic southern family, and maintained a large, historic (and expensive) family plantation—Redcliffe, in Aiken, South Carolina. He privately yearned at times for fame and visibility of his own. He longed to travel. He looked
enviously at the glittering social world that Luce (and a few of his other Time Inc. colleagues) inhabited. But he rarely achieved, or even spoke of, any of these ambitions, and seemed slowly to abandon them (especially after the traumatic death in infancy of his only child). He gradually became what, at first, he had only appeared to be: a sober, somewhat reclusive man, deeply devoted to his wife and content to provide sure and steady editorial guidance to
Time.
¹³

Once Billings took over, Luce’s intrusions into the editorial life of
Time
became less frequent (although, to Billings, more unnerving when they did occur). Luce continued to take an active hand in
Fortune
, especially during its ideological tumult in the mid-1930s. But little by little he began thinking of new ventures. In March 1932, to the surprise of some of his colleagues, Luce bought an obscure magazine,
Architectural Forum
, which (having begun its life in the nineteenth century with the prosaic title
Brickbuilder
) had become a glossy but specialized trade journal for architects. Luce had recently developed an interest in architecture on his own and, as was often the case, assumed that anything that interested him would likely interest others. He had even toyed for a time with launching a new architectural magazine himself and had hired a recent Princeton graduate, C. D. Jackson (who was eventually to become a major figure in Time Inc.), to help him develop the idea. They produced a dummy issue, under the title
Skyline
, but never had enough confidence in it to proceed.
Architectural Forum
took its place. The magazine would, Luce wrote in his announcement of the purchase, chronicle “the several elements of the building world—architects, engineers, contractors, workmen, investors”—that were “at last integrating a great single industry.”

There could hardly have been a less promising moment to invest in a magazine devoted to the construction industry, which was hit harder than most economic sectors by the Great Depression. Time Inc’s own research—quoted in the dummy of
Skyline
—found the president of the American Institute of Architects warning architects to avoid New York City. Another architect asked, “We wonder if there will ever be a building again.” But Luce’s real interest was less in the economics of architecture than in its aesthetics and innovations, an outgrowth, perhaps, of
Fortune
’s interest in design. “We do not know when business will turn,” he wrote to some of his investors and employees. “We do know that great changes in the building art lie ahead…. We believe that the architect, as he has been in days past, will again be the decisive factor in the rate and character of building progress.” Luce liked the
Forum
because its longtime editor, Howard Myers, used it to showcase important young American and European designers. It was also unusual among trade journals in giving significant attention to the architecture and design of private homes. That gave the
Forum
a small but significant audience outside the professional world, among readers interested in home design, and made it a precursor of the soon-to-be robust market for what became known as shelter magazines. (Twenty years later
Architectural Forum
spun off its housing coverage into a second magazine directed at a wider audience,
House and Home
.)