Life sketches, p.4
Life Sketches, page 4
It was rooted in Palestine in the first three decades A.D. This historical event, as Luce saw it, was the high point of God’s intervention in human affairs that began with the Creation, picked up speed with Abraham, left signs for the eye of faith in every century, and will make its purpose fully clear at the end of the world. Luce’s providential view of history remained intact against the arguments of his more learned and less certain friends.
Pressed once about his rigidity on some issue, Luce rather testily blurted out: “I am biased in favor of God, the Republican Party, and free enterprise.” What is interesting here is the interconnection of those biases. For Henry Luce held to a Presbyterian interpretation of history. In a speech at the centennial of Lake Forest College, in Illinois, in 1957, he said: “[What] I want to emphasize tonight is that God is the ruler of human history…. We need not,” he said, “exaggerate the dominance of Calvinist influence in the founding of the United States. Enough to say that Presbyterians played an immense part in it—and without the Calvinist influence, the American form of government and the American ethos are inconceivable….” And he went on: “God moves in a mysterious way. Who would have thought that He would have dedicated the New World, the new hope of mankind, to freedom, by the means of such ornery people as us Presbyterians. But the record is there—facts are facts.” He also said in that speech:
Presbyterians are credited with the invention of modern capitalism—and if we accept the credit, as we might as well, we are accountable for the horrible sins of capitalism as well as for the revolutionary advance of human productivity and physical well-being.
Thus he could account for his own fast-growing material well-being as God-sent—though he knew that some thought him in touch with Mammon. He was aware—and hurt—that certain clergymen considered his publications materialistic and unprincipled, and his mother let him know she was worried about his immortal soul because, among other reasons, he presided over what was then the world’s largest medium for the advertising of alcoholic beverages.
The younger Luce’s connection with money was far closer than his father’s. His father raised it; he made it. Of course this distinction sharply marks off Henry R. Luce from Davies and Service, and indeed from other mishkids in general. Lucepower, it turned out, was money power; such power of influence as the other two gained and later lost was manifestly not material. At Hotchkiss, where Luce waited on tables and swept out classrooms as a scholarship student, he thought of becoming a businessman in China—as he put it at the time, in “some big economic movement—railroads, mining, wholesale farming, 5 and 10-cent store, news syndicates.” He seemed to think of this opportunity as a kind of mission in itself, because, as he wrote, “before the [Chinese] people as a whole become alive to the ‘higher things’ they must get their noses off the economic grindstone.” Someone once called Luce “the very embodiment of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic,” one who must have agreed with Victorian divines that God is in league with riches. Be that as it may, by the beginning of the period we are talking about, Luce held shares of Time Inc. stock worth on paper more than twenty million dollars, and, not yet forty years old, he drew dividends from them, as the Depression dwindled away, of something like eight hundred thousand dollars a year. Nineteen-thirties dollars.
The money power was of course ancillary to his growing power as an editor. He became sure of himself. He had not always been. At Hotchkiss and Yale, the boy who had wanted to be an Alexander—you will remember that whoever untied the Gordian knot would rule all of Asia, and books said that Alexander had cut the knot with a single daring blow of his sword—this young dreamer suffered the humiliation of being second in magnetism, popularity, and power to his friend Briton Hadden, who was chosen over Luce to be editor first of the Hotchkiss Record and later of the Yale Daily News. At school and college, Luce had the hated nickname “Chink.” Undergraduate life was a bit heavy. Sardonic Hadden, meeting Luce one day on the campus, called to him, “Watch out, Harry, you’ll drop the college.” When the two founded Time, Hadden again got the top spot, as editor. At the height of prosperity in the late twenties, Luce wanted to start a magazine on business, to which he wanted to give the name Power. Hadden was opposed, but in 1929, at age thirty-one, he considerately died, and Luce at last became top dog, as editor of Time, and he was free to found Fortune; and on the eve of the period we are considering, he had just started the fabulously successful Life.
In this period of change, there was one constant in Luce. At a dinner of Time editors, he said: “I regard America as a special dispensation—under Providence…. My spiritual pastors shake their heads about this view of mine. They say it tends to idolatry—to idolatry of nation.” Luce’s particular strain of patriotism was fixed in him early. Speaking to Time’s so-called Senior Group of executives on another occasion, he told of going, at age ten, to the Chefoo School, where only about a fifth of the students were American. “We were,” he said,
a strong, conspicuous, successful minority [among which, by the way, was Thornton Wilder]. The British code—flogging and toadying—violated every American instinct. No wonder that hardly an hour passed that an American did not have to run up the flag. A master insists that Ohio is pronounced O-hee-ho. What are you going to do? Will you agree? The American can’t agree; it would betray every other American. So first your knuckles are rapped, then you get your face slapped—by the master—then you are publicly caned. By this time you are crying, but still you can’t say O-hee-ho.
“In some ways,” Luce said in 1950,
that background endowed me with special qualifications to be editor-in-chief of great American publications…. In some ways, it disqualified me. I probably gained a too romantic, too idealistic view of America. The Americans I grew up with—all of them—were good people. Missionaries have their faults, but their faults are comparatively trivial. I had no experience of evil in terms of Americans…. Put along with that the idea that America was a wonderful country, with opportunity and freedom and justice for all, and you got not only an idealistic, but a romantic view—a profoundly false romantic view.
This insight may have come as hindsight, for it was uttered long after the public reaction to his famous essay “The American Century,” published in 1941. Luce was right in saying that his romantic Americanism had been planted in him early. I have come across a fascinating preview of “The American Century.” Partly, no doubt, because of his stammer—or, rather, because when he spoke forensically he did not stammer—he set great store by oratory in his school and college years. Winning the Deforest Oration prize at Yale in 1920, he pronounced some amazingly predictive words, which he more or less plagiarized from himself in “The American Century.” In his college speech, as in the later essay, Luce took the high tone of the pre-Boxer missionaries who advocated both Christian charity and gunboats:
When we say “America” twenty years from now may it be that the great name will signify throughout the world at least two things: First, that American interests shall be respected, American citizens entitled to trade and to live in every corner of the globe, American business ideals recognized wherever the trader goes; second, that America may be counted upon to do her share in every international difficulty, that she will be the great friend of the lame, the halt and the blind among nations, the comrade of all nations that struggle to rise to higher planes of social and political organization, and withal the implacable and immediate foe of whatever nation shall offer to disturb the peace of the world. If this shall be, then the America of this century shall have glory and honor to take into that City of God far outshining the glory and honor which the kings do bring….
Three months after the publication of “The American Century,” Luce went to China, and in Chungking he extended his idolatry of nation to embrace as well the one—or the part of one—presided over by the Christian Chiang Kai-shek and the Christian Soong Mei-ling, Chiang’s wife. During that visit, he also encountered and was dazzled, charmed, and challenged by the brilliant young Time correspondent there, Theodore H. White; and on his return to the States he took White with him, to make him an editor of the magazine—but more importantly, to adopt him, to take possession of him. As he had done, in a different but no less paternal way, over the years, with me. Four years later, both White and I had, not without pain, torn ourselves away from him.
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At this point I should probably mention two people who had a great deal to do with the change in Luce during the years I am talking about. The first, of course, was Clare Boothe, whom he married two years before this period began. Her diamond-hard mind and her religious journey toward Rome, which culminated in her conversion just at the height of White’s and my struggles with Luce, certainly bore on his views on China. Her conversion to Catholicism could not have been easy for this faithful Presbyterian missionary’s son, but he accepted it with Calvinist fortitude. Clare reinforced his bias in favor of God and against the Godless. In an interview with McCall’s she said the experience of her conversion had given her increased moral ammunition against the Communists—because of their denial of personal sin.
The other person, who figured much more directly in the White and Hersey outcomes, was Whittaker Chambers. He had joined the Time staff in 1939, the year after his renunciation of the Communist Party, and he had become the Foreign News editor. By late 1944, the monotone of paranoia he imposed on Time’s foreign news had begun to alarm not only White in China and me in Moscow but also Walter Graebner in London, Charles Wertenbaker in Paris, John Osborne in Rome, and others. “Some recent copies of Time have just reached me,” I cabled Tom Matthews one week.
In all honor I must report to you that I do not like the tone of many Foreign News stories. I need not itemize: You know what I mean…. For this week, and until I cool off, I shall abstain from corresponding with Foreign News.
This was also the juncture at which Teddy White sent back from China a long and considered account of the firing of Stilwell, which he managed to have flown home on Stilwell’s plane. When he read a Domei news-agency summary of the cover story Chambers wrote on Stilwell, White blew up, threatened to quit, and flew off to Yenan.
There were so many complaints like these that Luce ordered a survey of a number of correspondents’ opinions of Chambers’ editing. A query was sent to us in the field. The replies were unanimous. All cabled back essentially what I cabled back: passages used from my dispatches were “torn from the context…and put into [the] new context of Time’s editorial bias,” which, I said, was “grossly unfair” and “actually vicious.”
In the very midst of all this, Luce, with his gifts of charm and seduction, cabled me offering to bring me home and train me for the top job on the magazine, the managing editorship—just as he had taken Teddy White home to make him what he could never be, an editor. I declined, asserting that I was a writer and that I would anyway have been a prickly choice, in view of his bias in favor of the Republican Party and the fact that I was a convinced Democrat.
Luce soon gave the correspondents his judgment of their replies to the survey, and there was no doubt where he came out. “The posture of events in January, 1945,” he cabled,
seems to have confirmed Editor Chambers about as fully as a news-editor is ever confirmed…. I have just been told, in a highly confidential manner, that Stalin is, after all, a Communist. I am also somewhat less confidentially informed that the Pope is a Christian. Some will say: what does it matter in either case? And what does it matter that Hersey advises me that he, John Hersey, is a Democrat? Well, I cannot say for sure what these pieces of information signify, but one must respect the data in each case. A good Foreign News Editor, while guarding against the prejudices arising from his own convictions, will not ignore the circumstance that the Pope is a Christian and Stalin a Communist and Hersey, God bless him, a Democrat.
Cryptic stuff—but the message was clear. So far as the boss was concerned, Chambers was right, and the men in the field were wrong. Take it or leave it.
In February, Teddy White sent a cable about a new breakdown of negotiations between the Nationalists and Communists; Chambers used not a word of the dispatch. White quarreled along until April. Luce was evidently shaken by Teddy’s arguments, because he wrote a memo to his management executive committee, advising them “of the possible serious error of my policy in re China.” He went on: “For myself, barring details of execution, I have not the slightest doubt that [Time’s] policy has been right…. Nevertheless, it is, in some respects, a dangerous policy to pursue and I shall be glad to receive from you advice and counsel thereon.” The committee did not ask for a change, and soon Luce sent White an extraordinary message through a third party: “After consultation with Luce,” the cable said, “here’s what he (and most emphatically he) would like you to do: stay in and near Chungking…to report not political China…[but] mainly small indigenous colorful yarns.” As a sample of the kind of reportage Luce expected of him, the editor sent an excerpt of a London bureau cable of England’s two-thousandth day of war: “Yellow crocuses bloomed, daffodils sold for dollar and a half per bunch, Commons passing bill making rear lights compulsory on bicycles….” Till the end of the war, White limited himself to reporting on the fighting. In his book In Search of History, he tells movingly of the final break on his return to the States, when Luce put to him, in effect, the question “Will you do whatever I tell you to do as my employee?” Teddy said no, and that was that.
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Just about then I left Time and went to China and Japan on contracts with strange bedfellows, Life and The New Yorker. The New Yorker asked me to do a story on the damage in Hiroshima; Life made no such suggestion. Several years later, I saw Luce walking toward me on a sidewalk in New York, and he saw me, and it was clear that he intended to cut me dead. I blocked his way and spoke to him, however, and I found that he was still furious at my disloyalty in not having given the Hiroshima story to Life. He and I came to quite different reasons for wishing there had never been an atom bomb. In an unpublished book he was working on at the time of his death, he wrote:
If the bomb had not been dropped and if the well-laid plans for the MacArthur invasion had been carried out—then, almost certainly, the following would have occurred on the mainland of China. In September-October of 1945 there would have been a major Chinese offensive, with American-trained Chinese divisions, leading out of the mountain fastness and down to Canton. It would have been successful. Then, during the winter, having regrouped around Canton, the Generalissimo would have marched north and taken the Yangtze Valley as he had done twenty years before. If the Japanese had then surrendered in the spring of 1946, Chiang Kai-shek would have been in a position to move armies up to Peking and Manchuria. He would still have had to face the Mao Tse-tung trouble…. But Chiang would have had a chance—and I think he deserved that chance.
And so Henry Robinson Luce had reached his final destination in a wish: that the sword could have done it. That Alexander, who cut the Gordian knot, could have made the dream come true. For it had all become a dream. He spoke to the Senior Group of Time Inc. once about his revisit in 1945 to Tsingtao, which he said was
the most beautiful of all places on this earth, where the mountains come down to the sea. Kaiser Wilhelm II called it the fairest jewel in his crown. It was the last grab of European imperialism in Asia…. All I wanted was to swim on the beaches of the bay. And I did. And I took with me the finest swimmer in the United States Marine Corps, Major General [Lemuel] Shepherd. I tell you very solemnly, if American affairs had been entrusted to Major General Shepherd and me, China would not now be Communist.
“Henry Luce’s China Dream,” New Republic, May 2, 1983.
James Agee
It must have been on a Tuesday evening. Time went to bed late on Monday nights in those years—this was in the fall of 1939—and such was the intensity of the last two or three days of our work weeks that we did all we could to set fire to our weekends, which fell on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. That night Wilder Hobson, a madcap cousin of Thornton Wilder’s who had been Dwight Macdonald’s roommate at Yale, was giving a party in his apartment for some of the magazine’s writers (all of whom were male then) and their wives or girls. I was recently back from a stint for Time in Japan and China, and I saw that there was a new guy in the crowd.
He was at the heart of a constellation on the other side of the room, and he seemed to be doing all the talking. There were rockets of laughter going up. Someone told me the man was Jim Agee. There was no particular reason to know the name then. I vaguely remembered Hobson’s having told me some zany stories about Agee, with whom he had worked at Fortune, over in the Chrysler Building; Time’s offices had been on a different floor, and I’d never happened to meet Agee. I think I had heard that with the support of Archibald MacLeish, who had also been writing for Fortune then, he had had a book of poems published in the Yale Younger Poets series, and that he had a reputation for having written, on assignment, a series of such relentlessly brilliant and quirky articles that Henry Luce and the editors of Fortune were obliged to scrap several of them. He was now reviewing books for Time.
