The Time Of Our Lives

By LANCE MORROW

A magazine is a living thing. The child that Briton Hadden and Henry Luce brought into the world in March 1923 was squally, bratty, brash. The new smart aleck--its voice distinctive, sophomoric, self-assured--thrived, almost from the start: born lucky. The magazine sailed through the 1920s as if the decade were a breezy shakedown cruise.

But the '20s ended traumatically, for almost everyone. In 1929 Hadden came down with a strep infection that reached his heart and killed him at age 31. Luce was left to carry on alone. The stock market crashed a few months later.

And in the years that followed, there unfolded all the high, dark world history for which the magazine's epic rhetoric became a perfectly appropriate libretto: the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the cold war and all the rest, down the decades.

TIME prospered all the more. The gravity of world news--especially the war--stimulated the magazine's reporting and its genius for packaging news. TIME became an influence in millions of American lives. It inspired a competitor, Newsweek (which began publication in 1933). It acquired siblings--FORTUNE (1930), LIFE (1936), The March of Time (1935), Architectural Forum (1932). Luce had a golden touch.

And so eventually, the Weekly Newsmagazine matured into an American institution, mentor to the questing middle class, keeper of a certain American self-image and expectation--America's superego, the child of Henry Luce, a presence infuriating to many but undeniably a force.

Eventually, Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, went so far as to claim that TIME, with its siblings, did more to mold the American character than "the whole education system put together." Even Luce's old enemy William Randolph Hearst admitted, "There can no longer be any doubt that TIME is the world's outstanding journalistic venture to date."

TIME, like Luce, was alert to the nuances of American power, which, in a way, was the ultimate focus of the magazine's interest. Occasionally, TIME went against the grain of majority opinion, as when Luce, who came to dislike Franklin Roosevelt, pushed Wendell Willkie as the American hope in 1940, or when, after Luce's death in 1967, the magazine seemed to predict the wrong presidential "inevitabilities"--Maine's Edmund Muskie in 1972, say, or Texas' John Connally in '80. As a monitor connected to the nation's political generators, the magazine sometimes misinterpreted the vibrations. In general, however, its record for being right was pretty good.

TIME's greatest influence was exerted in forming the nation's attitudes, its political opinions and social conscience--especially in the decades after World War II. In the '60s, during Vietnam, TIME was caught in a general American degringolade, a deconstruction of established authority from the President on down. In the '70s, TIME helped guide the nation through the trauma of Watergate, and as part of its role as moral counselor, published the only editorial in its history, urging Richard Nixon to resign.

Born of the Wasp male ascendancy in a self-confidently patriarchal age, the magazine (which routinely used the word men to mean everyone) has passed, along with its parent company, through a series of self-transformations, from an age of industry and structured authority into a post-cold war era of free-flowing information and diversity. And after 3,900 weeks of telling the story of the most complicated century in history, the TIME that Hadden and Luce created turns 75 this week--and celebrates.

Luce and Hadden, classmates out of Hotchkiss and Yale, succeeded because they understood this truth: history may be complicated, as life is complicated, but the business of storytelling is simple. The young men said in their prospectus that their creation would be judged by "how much it gets off its pages into the minds of its readers." Sort the world into stories and carry them (facts, personalities, ideas, images, dramas, quirks, gossip, the details and energy of life) from Out There, where things happen, to In Here, inside the reader's consciousness, where stories turn into wonder, entertainment, cautionary experience, useful memory. The magazine's voice, Luce said, had three modes: "Everything in TIME should be either titillating or epic or supercurtly factual."

The titillating voice told of "cinemactresses," or "great and good friends" (TIME code for lovers) or other uber-brat coinages. When Wallis Warfield Simpson, having lured Edward VIII from the throne of England, was named TIME's Woman of the Year for 1936--a year in which Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Mao were all on the march and F.D.R. was elected in a landslide to a second term--TIME the titillator delivered this quote: "'My, my!' sighed [Argentine] Ambassador [Felipe] Espil to swank U.S. friends last summer, 'who would ever have dreamed that our Little Wallis would ever be where she is now!'"

As for the magazine's epic voice, it expressed, at its best, a disciplined, moral understanding of history, an adult's steady gaze. In a brief introduction to the Victory section in the issue of Aug. 20, 1945, for example, TIME, in contemplating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said this: "With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age. The race had been won; the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race."

The "supercurtly factual" permeated the magazine. "There Are 00 Trees in Russia," ran the title of a famous 1964 piece in Harper's magazine on TIME's obsessive fact-gathering and -checking systems, implying that the magazine had a sinister itch to make reality conform, through the use of plug-in facts, to the editors' preconceptions. Fair enough on occasion, but a little captious overall, in light of the magazine's scrupulous and expensive attention to accuracy.

Luce possessed a kind of clairvoyance about history, a journalist's instinct but operating in a higher orbit than journalism usually achieves. Along with Hadden, he saw that America after the Great War was in a state of change that would create a natural audience for the kind of magazine they had in mind. The nation's cultural center of gravity was shifting. A newly emergent, restless urban middle class--often intellectually and socially insecure--was getting into business, making money, buying things.

In the new age of the automobile, the motion picture, the radio, Hadden and Luce detected a new consumers' appetite for motion, stimulation, variety. Traditional sources of information had become inadequate. Newspapers were local or regional and in any case offered only a patchwork of information. Magazines tended to be specialized, with a tendency toward fat and bloviation; they rarely offered news as news. None even set out to be comprehensive on a national and international scale.

TIME played brilliantly to the new American appetite. The magazine turned the news into saga, comedy, melodrama. The very compression of early TIMEstyle, invented almost entirely by Hadden, lent it an urgency of mannered telegraphese. John Martin, Hadden's cousin and an early writer and editor at the magazine, left this account of Hadden at work: "Brit would edit copy to eliminate unnecessary verbiage...If you wrote something like 'in the nick of time,' five words, he might change it to 'in time's nick,' three words...At all times he had by him a carefully annotated translation of the Iliad. On the back cover, he had listed hundreds of words, especially verbs and the compound adjectives, which had seemed to him fresh and forceful."

The style, however silly on occasion, gave the magazine a distinctive voice. Men were not famous but "famed," not powerful but "potent." High on the list of accolades was "able." All were masculine terms of approbation: the news in Homeric mode, demigods or villains on tiptoe. TIME's writers loved Homer's narrative techniques. Compound adjectives: Mexico's President Francisco Madero was "wild-eyed." The World War I German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was "long-whiskered." Public figures were tagged with mock-heroic identifying phrases. Minnesota's Senator Henrik Shipstead was invariably "the duck-hunting dentist."

An impasto of alliterative adjectives got slathered onto public men. George Bernard Shaw was "mocking, mordant, misanthropic." General Erich von Ludendorff was "flagitious, inscrutable, unrelenting." The intent was novelistic. As Luce explained it, "No idea exists outside a human skull--and no human skull exists without hair and a face and a voice--in fact the flesh and blood attributes of a human personality. TIME journalism began by being deeply interested in people, as individuals who were making history, or a small part of it, from week to week. We tried to make our readers see and hear and even smell these people as part of a better understanding of their ideas--or lack of them."

All the while flourished a classical inversion of sentences. An early writer, possibly suffering from a hangover, took the technique over the top with this effort: "A ghastly ghoul prowled around a cemetery not far from Paris. Into family chapels went he, robbery of the dead intent upon." But in 1936, TIMEstyle began to suffer bouts of self-consciousness. That was the year that the New Yorker, edited by an old nemesis of Luce's, Harold Ross, published Wolcott Gibbs' hilarious and devastating parody of TIME. "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind," Gibbs wrote. He described Luce as an "ambitious, gimlet-eyed Baby Tycoon...efficient, humorless...brusque, contradictory, hostile."

Luce was annoyed. At Rollins College, where he went to speak a few years later, he discovered that students in a class in contemporary biography were discussing him--and using as their text "that goddam article in the New Yorker...Is this thing going to be engraved on my tombstone?"

Luce and Hadden put together the TIME prospectus in an upstairs office on East 17th Street in Manhattan. Soon, with a staff of 33, the magazine moved its offices to a loft building on 39th Street, former home of Hupfel's brewery. In 1925, when Hadden took a European vacation, Luce indulged his wistfulness for heartland America (the instinct of a missionary's China-born child) and arranged to move the magazine to Cleveland, Ohio. The experiment mortified the pub-crawling and cosmopolitan Hadden, who waited until Luce went abroad two years later to organize a countermove, shipping everyone back to New York City.

When TIME began, its handful of writers assembled their material from newspaper clippings and a few reference books. In 1929 the first correspondent, David Hulburd, opened a bureau in Chicago, and a network of stringers--part-time, free-lance reporters--was organized to report from cities in the U.S. and Canada. During the '30s and early '40s, as the news turned urgent and global, TIME expanded its network into what eventually became the Time-Life News Service. By 1958 the magazine had 435 correspondents, stringers and writers reporting from 33 locations around the world. With advances in communications technology, those numbers have since been reduced, but a network of bureaus remains the core of the magazine's newsgathering system.

The TIME editorial process, evolved over a period of years, had the unique collective concentration (and for years, the anonymity) of a well-run beehive. Correspondents went forth into the fields collecting pollen (data, interviews, "bioperse"--or life stories with anecdotes and color) and sent it back to the New York hive by wire in long reports (files)--an immense redundancy of information that writers in New York boiled and kneaded and licked into stories for the magazine.

Senior editors then set to work. Some--like Laird Goldsborough, Foreign News editor in the '30s, or Whittaker Chambers, when he held the same post in the '40s--were famous around the magazine for rewriting almost every word of copy, using the writer's version merely as a guide for straight lines upon which to pencil the interlinear substitute. When the senior editor had initialed the copy, his version, retyped, went to the managing editor, whose mind was the needle's eye through which the entire magazine passed each week before going to Chicago to be printed.

After he formally ascended to the higher altitude of editor-in-chief in 1944, Luce continued to monitor major stories, reading them in advance before they appeared in the magazine. Following publication, he gave each edition of TIME a thorough and sometimes brutal cover-to-cover read, marking each story with words of criticism or praise. Hedley Donovan, the Minnesota-born Time Inc. veteran and former FORTUNE managing editor who succeeded Luce as editor-in-chief in 1964, followed a similar practice. So, with variations, have his successors Henry Grunwald, Jason McManus and Norman Pearlstine.

It was a grueling process of editorial refinement that either improved and sharpened the story at each successive stage, or distorted it as it passed from hand to hand and mind to mind. Sometimes correspondents in the field and editors in New York took exactly opposite views about whether a story had gone from bad to good or good to bad in the editorial alchemy.

During Vietnam, a rift over editorial policy--the magazine's Saigon bureau's quarreling with the New York office's optimism about the war--eventually brought about a significant procedural change at TIME. Edited stories were thenceforth wired back to the reporting correspondents, whose comments and corrections were factored in before the stories went to press.

In the Luce tradition, however, TIME remained very much an editor's magazine. While researchers--and as of the '70s, correspondents--were the guardians of the magazine's factuality, the managing editor retained enormous authority through the selection of stories and, as TIME gradually introduced more personal opinion through bylined articles, the choice of writers.

The most public demonstration of editorial authority has been the annual selection of TIME's Man of the Year, a brilliant stroke of news packaging that Luce and Hadden invented during a no-news week late in 1927. Having neglected to put Charles A. Lindbergh on the cover the previous May, when he had made his famous solo flight, they concocted the Man of the Year idea to justify putting him on at year's end. The choice thereafter became a national guessing game, popular with advertisers but also a serious intellectual drill--a way to encourage Americans to think about the world, and the year just past, in the same ruthlessly appraising way Luce did.

Until the mid-'60s, the vast majority of TIME covers (99%) depicted people--Presidents, dictators, industrialists, generals, scientists, artists, writers, saints, revolutionaries--all in keeping with Luce's enthusiasm for flesh-and-blood personalities and his general sympathy with Carlyle's idea that great men cause great events. But with the '60s' challenge to authority in almost every American institution, from the White House to the family, and the nation's effort to redefine its idea of social justice, TIME began to examine issues and ideas as often as it did personalities. The '60s' work of demystification tended to subvert the heroic or idealizing assumptions that TIME sometimes brought to its cover subjects--an editorial habit of aggrandizement. The Ur issue, and in a way the ultimate subversion of an authority figure, appeared on the cover on April 8, 1966. With a starkness that seemed daring, even blasphemous, at the time, the cover asked, IS GOD DEAD?

After Henry Grunwald became managing editor in 1968, succeeding Otto Fuerbringer, the trend toward cover stories about issues, ideas and events grew more pronounced. Covers on the birth-control pill in 1967 and the battle over busing to achieve desegregation in 1975 focused on the issues more than on the protagonists; photographs of the meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 and the San Francisco earthquake in 1989 dramatized events. Instead of a Man or Woman of the Year for 1982, TIME designated the computer as Machine of the Year. Amid growing anxiety about the environment, the "Endangered Earth" was named Planet of the Year for 1988.

In its 75 years, TIME has proved to be an adaptive organism, reinventing itself periodically. The red border on the cover, first used in 1927, and the familiar lettering of the logo have made the magazine unmistakable, giving it instant identity and reassuring familiarity.

Inside the framework, TIME has added sections (Essay, Behavior, Notebook) and dropped sections (Crime, Animals, Aeronautics), gone from postage-stamp head shots in its early news columns to full-page color displays in which photography and imaginative graphics play a larger part. Amid the proliferation of other sources--including all-news radio and television, national editions of daily newspapers and now the Internet--the magazine has evolved into a mix of news and features that play off the news instead of simply recapping it. The Essay section and signed columns have added stronger, more personal voices to the magazine. Cultural criticism and essays began carrying bylines in 1970; other sections adopted bylines in 1980. The omniscient voice of group journalism has given way to scores of distinctive voices of writers who report and reporters who write what they have seen for themselves.

Today's TIME continues to evolve, as living things do. If Briton Hadden and Henry Luce were around, they'd recognize their progeny. It would be interesting to take them aside at the 75th anniversary dinner and ask them what they think of their work in progress.