The Publisher (34 page)

Although Luce disliked many New Deal policies, his principal complaints against Roosevelt were more personal. The president, he believed, was governing outside the rule of law; he had become an authoritarian leader who exercised power almost arbitrarily, and had used his position to make demagogic attacks on rival institutions, most notably business. As early as 1935, in an article titled “The Case Against Roosevelt” (which Luce, somewhat capriciously, assigned to the very pro-Roosevelt MacLeish),
Fortune
noted the “personal character” of New Deal regulation, its apparent vindictiveness, its “feel of the human interferer.” The president, MacLeish wrote, “has opened a door through which a dictator could easily pass.” Such criticisms grew steadily over the next several years—in commissioned pieces in
Fortune
from such anti-Roosevelt figures as Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan (“This either is, or it is not, a government of laws rather than of men,” Vandenberg wrote, citing the New Deal’s “disregard for the spirit as well as the letter of the Constitution”), and in Luce’s own public statements (“It is now Franklin Roosevelt’s task without delay to restore the long-term conditions of confidence which private capitalism requires,” he told a group of Ohio businessmen).
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Corporate liberalism, therefore, was simultaneously a plea for government to respect the “rule of law” and the prerogatives of business, and a call for the private sector to embrace an enlightened policy of
social responsibility. As early as 1934, despite his unhappiness with the New Deal, Luce was—through
Fortune
—exhorting business to accept a series of progressive principles: “that a livelihood should be guaranteed to every man, … that there must be a dwelling for every man, woman and child, and that it must conform to some minimum standard of decency,” and that “there must be developed a widely understood pattern for the reward of talent” because the “greatest practical test of a nation’s devotion to liberty is the extent to which it maintains the open door of opportunity.”
³⁵

Luce’s commitment to enlightened business leadership as the key to a successful society was clearly at odds with the belief of many liberals, and virtually all socialists, that capitalism was a less reliable provider of justice than was the state. But Luce was not entirely hostile to government. Were the New Deal to fail, he predicted, the result would not (and should not) be “a return to laissez-faire capitalism.” The nation’s economy “can be established only by Business working with Government and Government working with Business, over a long period of years, toward a progressively higher standard of living derived from the incentives of private enterprise.”
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By 1939
Fortune’s
idea of a rapprochement between government and business was far from that of the left-leaning liberals who had written for the magazine in the mid-1930s. By the end of the decade,
Fortune
reflected instead the emerging moderate Republican position of accepting some of the New Deal and rejecting a great deal more. Through a series of
Fortune
“Round Tables,” the first published in March 1939, the magazine presented the views of a carefully selected group of business leaders brought together to discuss important political issues, beginning with federal fiscal policy. “In general,” the panel agreed, “the social and labor reforms so far established should be retained … [and] public spending should indeed be used to counterbalance the business cycle.” But while government spending was not inevitably bad, it should be used to “increase productive opportunity rather than merely
spend
to create purchasing power.”
Fortune
’s editors summed up the Round Tables with considerable pride: “We have the satisfaction of having done a small bit in the herculean job of bringing business and government points of view into alignment.” A year later they boasted further about the new, progressive business spirit, which had changed not only political economy but culture.

In “The Culture of Democracy,” an essay in a special 1940 issue of
Fortune
on America, the editors argued that literature and art were no
longer the property of Popular Front critics of capitalism. They were, rather, moving into a “dialectic” with the world of enlightened business, helping to create a stronger, more abundant, and more pluralistic America. The essay concluded with a passage from Walt Whitman, which expressed—in a way certainly unintended by Whitman himself—
Fortune’s
own optimistic vision of the new, enlightened capitalist age:

Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared,
I see the genius of the modern, the child of the real and the ideal,
Clearing the ground for a broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand,
To build a grander future
.

Fortune
had not given up its commitment to elevated language, as Whitman’s florid poem made clear. But it had made a decision about what the magazine stood for: no longer a broad, pluralistic look at the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism, but a vehicle for expressing the ideas and convictions that Luce had come to believe must be
Fortune
’s new mission.
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B
y the mid-1930s Luce had become—as he would remain for the rest of his life—a famous publishing titan, admired by some, reviled by others, but to almost everyone in his orbit an object of curiosity and fascination. “How could you work for Luce?” was a question serious writers such as Dwight Macdonald often encountered from friends and literary colleagues. And yet many important writers did flock to Time Inc. Some of them stayed for decades, attracted in part by the good pay but also in part by Luce’s own magnetism and energy.

He was still a very young man. (He turned thirty-seven in 1935.) He had good reason to feel satisfied with what he had achieved.
Time
itself was healthy, robust, and consistently profitable even during a deep Depression. The erratic performance of its managing editor, John Martin, who was dogged by alcoholism and apparent depression, troubled Luce. But the rise of the talented and reliable John Shaw Billings, who now edited National Affairs, and the continued if controversial competency of Foreign Affairs editor Laird Goldsborough kept
Time
on a stable track.
Fortune
was admired, popular, and financially stable. In September 1931, Luce leased two floors in the prestigious Chrysler Building as if to announce Time Inc.’s transition from a presumptuous fledgling company to a publishing giant. “This was an extravagance,” he said of the move in a memo to the staff. “I believe we will not regret it because of the satisfaction to be derived from such a unique place to work.” Within a few years the company had expanded to all or part of eight floors.
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But success, however gratifying, did not create satisfaction. Luce was always searching for new challenges and new purposes. Early in 1932 he decided, almost abruptly, to change course, at least for a while. He made plans for a three-month trip around the world.

Luce had been an enthusiastic traveler as a boy and a young man. But since his return in 1921 from his year in England and Europe, he had done relatively little traveling and had left the country only twice—in 1927 and 1931—for brief trips to France with Lila. Now travel became again a central part of his life. To his father, who was “mystified as to the purposes of my trip,” Luce explained that it would be a “vacation—sheer idleness! … I’m going to leave behind an awful pile of mental baggage.” But Luce was as incapable of “sheer idleness” as he was of leaving behind his “mental baggage.” The trip was a product both of his own insatiable curiosity and his belief that he must educate himself to guide the future of his magazines and to play a larger role in the world.
²

He did not want to travel alone, but he apparently never considered asking Lila to join him. The trip would likely be too arduous and too dangerous, he explained to her, and he had no intention of traveling with his two young boys, Hank and Peter, in tow. Instead he asked Leslie Severinghaus—the husband of his sister Emmavail and now a high-school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia—to accompany him. (“I’d rather have you with me than anyone else,” Severinghaus later recalled Harry saying.) The two men were not close, and Les was surprised—even if pleased—by the invitation to join his brother-in-law. Harry never explained his choice, but it is reasonable to assume that Les’s modest, self-effacing manner and his fluency in Chinese were among his attractions. (The earlier tension with Emmavail had eased, and she was now friendly with Lila—perhaps another reason for his choice.)
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After a cross-country trip by train and two hectic days of sightseeing in Seattle and Victoria, they boarded the Canadian Pacific steamship
Empress of China
on May 7 for the long voyage across the Pacific. Except for a short interlude in Hawaii, during which Luce raced frantically from one meeting with local dignitaries to another, they were at sea for just over two weeks. There were relatively few passengers in first class, and it did not take long for boredom to set in. Luce spent much of his time reading, exercised every day in the gym and the saltwater pool, and tried—not always successfully—to avoid the bridge games and idle social conversations with which most passengers filled the day. It was, he
wrote Lila, “the dullest trip I have
ever
made,” leavened only by the presence on board of the missionary Leighton Stuart, president of Yenching University and a close associate of Harry’s father. Although Harry brought most shipboard conversations to an abrupt end as soon as he became bored (which was generally very quickly), he often sat up late into the night talking with Stuart and reconnecting himself with China.
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He spent six crowded days sightseeing in Japan—“very drab” with an “occasional bit of loveliness,” he described it. But he was already preoccupied with his impending return to China, which was the real purpose of the trip. In “a few lazy hours,” he said, he had formed a “workable notion of the simple (though, of course, fascinating) history of the Island Empire. But China! … Here we have to deal with the complete gigantic and elaborate symphonies of the human heart, its incomprehensible discords and its resolutions of breath-taking sublimity. Oh brave new world! … Oh China!” (Aldous Huxley’s newly published novel had been part of his shipboard reading.)
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Harry and Les rose before dawn—both of them too excited to sleep—to watch the Chinese shoreline come into view. Their first glimpse of the country was a nightmarish landscape of physical devastation, the product of recent Japanese air and gunboat attacks, which were among the first battles of a war that would continue for more than a decade. But once on shore they were whisked through customs and taken quickly to Shanghai, where Luce almost immediately began a busy series of meetings, visits, and social events—most of them carefully arranged in advance by the network of family friends and business acquaintances who had been paving the way for his arrival. Throughout his monthlong journey through China, Harry was at once reserved (rarely talking about himself) and almost aggressively inquisitive with guides, dinner companions, fellow journalists, and almost everyone else he met. (“The curiosity appetite of Harry is insatiable,” Severinghaus noted in the extensive journal he kept of their trip. “You should have heard him fire questions at the guide!”) Luce was tireless in exploring Beijing, a city he had not known during his childhood, and he organized sightseeing trips to shrines and mountains outside the city—on one of which he encountered an international commission that included U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson. He also visited Yenching University, for which his father had worked tirelessly for many years. It was, he wrote his parents, one of the “climaxes of the trip,” although in fact he found the campus drab and disappointing.
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But to Harry the most rewarding part of his time in China was visiting
the sites of his childhood. At the mission compound in Wei Hsien, where his family had lived for most of his youth, he talked so rapidly and excitedly that Les could hardly understand him. But Luce could not help feeling downcast after a while as he discovered that almost everyone he had known there twenty years before was now gone. “The shell of our house and our compound hasn’t changed,” he wrote, “but the spirit is gone out of it.” He had a similar if fainter sense of loss when he visited the “sadly bedraggled” missionary compound in Tengchow, where he had been born (and from which his family had fled the Boxer Rebellion in 1900). Oddly enough, one of his warmest experiences was his return to the British boarding school at Chefoo, which he had so hated as a student. The real highlight of his trip, however, was a week at Iltus Huk, the seaside resort at which he had spent most of his childhood summers. “To be here is indescribable delight,” he wrote Lila. “Mountains, hills, ocean, sand (
real
silky sand), rocks, woods, grass—I think there never was such a place…. Such a satisfaction to know that all these years I haven’t been harboring a false illusion of first-love.” He spent his days swimming in the ocean, hiking, reading, and driving around the region in a car he had leased—“an idyllic holiday within a holiday…. Along with the tan, health seems to be zooming in every department. A tremendous appetite.”
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During the almost twenty years since he had left China, Luce had been only intermittently interested in what was happening there. He paid more attention to China than did most of his American contemporaries, to be sure. But his sense of connection had grown faint, beginning at Hotchkiss, where he struggled to escape the image of “foreign-ness” that had earned him the unwelcome nickname “Chink;” continuing at Yale, where he wanted nothing so much as to fit in to its powerful and wholly conventional culture of achievement; and persisting through the early years of
Time
, when he had relatively little influence over the contents of the magazine and struggled mostly to make it a financial success. Among the results of Hadden’s death had been a new freedom for Luce to embrace and advance causes of his own, and during his 1932 trip he revived and strengthened his identification with China.