The Publisher (8 page)

When he returned to Hotchkiss, she paid for his train tickets, gave him pocket money for the trip, and sent him gifts of cash periodically during the rest of the year. Almost immediately, she began planning for
his next visit. “The glow has fled that radiated through these humble halls, where at Christmas time young voices were heard—and light footsteps on the stair!” she lamented a few days after he left. In the meantime Harry sent her copies of his speeches in the debating society and his articles in the
Lit
, and wrote her—as he did to his parents—recounting the great events of his struggle to succeed. For the rest of her life, he remained her “dear boy,” the object of her continued attention, the recipient of her frequent largesse. Harry had no qualms about accepting her many gifts. Missionary families were accustomed to surviving through the generosity of others.
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The summer of 1914 was a rare opportunity for the Luce family to be together. Harry’s mother and siblings had come over from Europe—his mother in February, leaving the girls behind in their German school until they hurriedly escaped Germany in midsummer on the eve of World War I. His father was committed to another full year of fundraising in the United States. So the family rented a house in Hartford (despite young Harry’s preference for New York) and spent the summer months—as they had so often done at Iltus Huk—pursuing self-improving activities for themselves. Harry created a chart to encourage the family to take “healthy walks”—“Nothing less than a consecutive half mile may be counted,” he announced—and made sure that he finished first in what he, at least, automatically considered a competition. In August he logged thirty and a half miles, more than twice as many as anyone else.
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His parents remained in the United States long enough for him to spend at least part of both the 1914 Christmas holiday and the 1915 summer vacation with them. But he rarely stayed for long. The day after Christmas, despite earlier protestations that he hoped to spend the entire holiday with his family, he left for two weeks with Mrs. McCormick in Chicago. During the summer of 1915, he worked for a time on a farm in Massachusetts (a job he found through a friend at school), but he also visited family friends near Scranton, where he was “forthwith shouted into a whirl of golf and tennis.” Toward the end of the summer, he traveled west to San Francisco to see his family off as they finally returned to China—his sisters en route to Shanghai, where they would enroll in an American boarding school; his parents and Sheldon temporarily to Wei Hsien, pending the move of Shantung Christian University to a new campus in Tsinan, the provincial capital—built largely as a result of Rev. Luce’s prodigious feats of fund-raising in the United States. Characteristically, Harry combined his emotional
farewell with a bout of strenuous sightseeing, into the Yosemite Valley and through the Muir Woods (“all fine exercise … [and] a good tanning process”), and later into San Francisco to get a look at the celebrated evangelist Billy Sunday, whom Harry dismissed as “that loud-mouthed fellow … [who] could jump pretty well, and knew how to box the ears of the wind.” He was much more impressed with a distinguished Presbyterian minister who was visiting a church for the New York City elite. He was “famous as Rockefeller’s pastor,” Harry noted, and spoke both more “intelligently” and more “beautifully” than Billy Sunday had. On his way back east he spent most of his time in the train’s observation car, even though he was traveling on a second-class ticket that did not entitle him to sit there. “I went on the plan ‘go, keep going till you’re stopped,’” he unapologetically explained.
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He spent the last several weeks of the summer in Chicago with the McCormicks, where he found himself drawn into conversations about the long unfolding of the Chinese Revolution. “Ideals are a nation’s greatest asset,” he wrote his father after a spirited conversation with some conservative members of the Chicago business elite, whose views he seemed to have adopted. “But the ideal of democracy is not and never has been, in my mind, either understood or embraced by China as a nation.” Perhaps, he said, the nation would be better off with “a monarchical form of government,” which might “let China find that law and order & courage which is the foundation of liberty,” outside the circle of America and Western Europe. Like his boyhood hero Theodore Roosevelt, he was coming to think of China as one of the “problem” nations for which the best course was “Order first, Liberty second.”
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Harry was a junior when he returned to Hotchkiss in the fall of 1914 and was living now, he excitedly reported, in one of the school buildings, no longer in a rooming house in the village. He was also beginning the year in which the school’s great prizes would be open to him: editorships, club presidencies, class offices, and the like, all of which were bestowed in the spring. Harry’s competitive impulses, which had shaped much of his first year at Hotchkiss, now grew in intensity, and he spent much of his time scrambling for advancement in one organization after another—and writing to his parents with elaborate accounts of his achievements, along with detailed and self-exculpatory explanations of his occasional failures. His father warned him about his “nervous disposition,” which he said ran in the family and which had, he claimed, physical as well as psychological risks. Harry should avoid his tendency to eat
too quickly, which could cause stomach ailments and “distemper;” and he should also avoid rubbing his face nervously with his hands—which, his father insisted, contributed to Harry’s mild acne problems. “I note that the people of best breeding I know never touch their faces, noses, or ears.” But he did not discourage Harry from pursuing his ambitions. Perhaps he knew that such discouragement would be futile.
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Harry paid little attention to his father’s advice. He continued to strive for and almost always attained academic distinction (with courses again narrowly concentrated in Latin, German, Greek, French, English, and the Bible); he remained first in his class through almost all of his junior year and was the only junior to make the High Honor Roll. As a result, as he somewhat smugly put it, he became “the object of a little more respect than here to fore.” But his principal ambition was now not for grades but for office. To achieve a high position in the school, he explained to his occasionally skeptical parents (who urged him to give first priority to his academic work) would “mean that I have made good—slightly above the average—in at least one branch of school life.” He added (somewhat disingenuously for the top scholar in his class) that “this is what scholarship boys are supposed to do and if I want to have my scholarship renewed it behooves me to push things as best I can.”
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He continued to work hard at debating, hoping to become a major figure in the Debating Union, “one of the foremost school offices!” A highlight of the debating year was the contest between the school’s two debating societies: the Forum and the Agora, for which Harry prepared with some trepidation, since his opponent was a senior widely regarded as the school’s best debater. But he defeated the school star and won “the gold medal for myself” and critical points for the victorious team. “Thus another event in Life’s circle goes round,” he reported to his parents, “—‘something accomplished, something done!’” Toward the end of the year, when the Debating Union chose its officers, Luce was named president of the Agora.
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He cast an occasional, hopeful eye at student government but did not pursue it, aware that social standing, not ability, played the principal role in the selection. He tried out for the drama society and secured a minor part (as “a new young missionary just going out to his field”) in one of its productions. He became involved with the campus Christian organization, the Saint Luke’s Society—although he did not see it as one of his principal commitments. His greatest hope, however, was to be president of the
Lit
, a goal he had set for himself during his first year and that he now single-mindedly pursued. He flooded the editors with
poems, essays, and stories and kept meticulous notes on what was accepted (mostly poems, some essays, few stories). He assisted in the design of the magazine, helped with the sale of advertisements, and even came to the rescue of the business manager, who fell ill before a school play and asked Harry to accompany his date in his stead. His election as editor in chief in the early spring was anticlimactic: He had no serious rivals. Almost immediately he began looking ahead to his own time at the helm, determined to make a mark for himself in his new position. He organized a banquet for the outgoing board, “establishing a new precedent here at Hotchkiss … [and] putting the Lit on a distinctly respected and dignified basis.” In the meantime he was laying plans “for the wonderful Lit that we hope to make next year. If our dreams come anywhere near true, we shall give those interested in School Publications an eye opener!”
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Harry’s high ambitions for the
Lit
were at least in part a result of his realization that he would not be a major figure on the more prestigious campus publication, the
Record
. Even though he heeled successfully for the newspaper in the winter of his second year, and even though he worked hard and published many stories in the paper, he was never in contention for the editorship. That was, he explained to his mother, because another of his classmates already had the office virtually locked up—“a boy, Hadden, who is already on the Board.” He did not know it at the time, but the “boy, Hadden,” was to become—with the exception of his parents—the most important figure in Harry’s young life.
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Briton Hadden was born in February 1898 into a prosperous Brooklyn Heights family. His maternal grandfather was a successful silk importer. His father’s father was president of a Brooklyn savings bank. Brit’s childhood was in most respects as conventionally American and middle class as Harry’s was unusual. His father died when he was seven, but a close extended family and a doting mother softened the trauma of the loss. His mother eventually remarried, and Brit’s new stepfather—a physician—became a devoted and affectionate parent.

As a child in Brooklyn, Brit was an exuberant, highly social boy, the leader of a circle of neighborhood friends, and—his mother later claimed—someone with strong opinions about everything. He had two passions: writing and baseball. He wrote poems, stories, and reports of the neighborhood, beginning even before he entered school—including a series of mostly violent tales about battles among rabbits, cats, and other usually more innocent creatures. As a student at Brooklyn Polytechnic
Preparatory School, which he entered at the age of ten, he created an unofficial, handwritten newspaper, illustrated with his own cartoons. He called it the
Daily Glonk
, after a word used in the popular comic strip
Krazy Kat
to describe the noise made when someone hit Krazy on the head with a brickbat. The paper was lively and irreverent. “The ‘Daily Glonk’ wishes to apologize to its many subscribers for its tardyness,” Brit wrote in one issue. “This was unavoidable, however, as the paper was twice destroyed by a rough politician who did not like to see his name in print.” It was also at times both cruel and openly bigoted. Of a Jewish classmate with a lisp, the
Glonk
wrote that “Theo. Oswald Clarke thallied forth to thcool arrayed in a thplendid new thuit. Unhappily for Theo., however, he forgot to remove a Moe Levy price mark…. Take it off Theo. We know you.” In a May 1913 issue he wrote of the “great success” of the “grand Yiddisher ball,” at which the “Jew Theo. Clarke performed wonderfully as leader of the grand march.” Under a crudely racist drawing of a local African American, the paper went on to note that “the niggers are jealous,” and that in response the “champion Nigger Spitter of America … is promoting the ‘Coon’s Cake Walk.’” In the insular, white, Protestant middle-class world of the Hadden family, such sentiments offended almost no one.
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However much Brit liked writing and editing, he liked baseball more. Like many Brooklynites, he was a passionate Dodger fan, but his love for the game was actually almost indiscriminate. “I go and see either Brooklyn or the Giants play every day,” he wrote a cousin in 1914, “and that’s my idea of a good time.” When he was unable to go to the stadium, he often stood outside the
Brooklyn Eagle
offices waiting for scores. In the summers he organized fiercely competitive baseball games almost every day near the family’s summer home in Quogue. He dreamed of being a major-league player himself and spoke with contempt of friends and relatives who liked more sedentary or genteel sports like golf and tennis. When he entered Hotchkiss in the fall of 1913 (at the same time that Harry arrived), his principal ambition was to become a member of the school’s baseball team, as his brother had been before him. But he had little talent for baseball or, for that matter, any other sport. “I’m still on the class squad but I might as well be a dummy for all the baseball I’m getting,” he wrote his mother in despair. “Gee, my chances for making the big team before I get out of here are about as big as the Brooklyns’ of winning the pennant.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Brit soon turned his ambitions to student journalism instead, where he found himself before long in an unstated rivalry with another refugee from Hotchkiss team sports: Harry.
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In many ways it would be hard to imagine two boys more different from each other than Harry and Brit. Brit was gregarious, witty, and charismatic (his classmates named him “Mouth Hadden” in a graduation spoof), enormously popular with his classmates and a “great pet” (as Harry observed) of the faculty. He was a creature of American popular culture—attuned to its slang, its jokes, its entertainments, and its sports. He liked to affect the loping, swaggering walk of professional baseball players, to speak at times in an exaggerated Brooklyn accent, and to express emphatic opinions about almost everything. He was also a mediocre student, despite his considerable intelligence, and had trouble concentrating on subjects that did not interest him—which, in the very narrow Hotchkiss curriculum, was most subjects. Harry, of course, shared none of those characteristics.
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