An Aristocracy of Critics by Stephen Bates

Author:Stephen Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300111897
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Gentleman’s “C”

IT’S UNCLEAR HOW MUCH Henry Luce knew about the deliberations of the Commission on Freedom of the Press; but he knew something, and he didn’t like it. In July 1946, four months after he had declined to give Robert Hutchins another $25,000, Luce visited William Ernest Hocking at his farm in New Hampshire. Afterward, Hocking sent Luce a draft of his appendix to A Free and Responsible Press. His accompanying letter sounded concerned: “A fragment of the debate will be helpful in understanding what emerges; and it seems to me to the interest of all concerned that, in your mind at least, there should be the three-dimensional picture—process plus result.”1

At the commission’s final meeting in September, Hutchins remarked that Luce might find the report disappointing because it wasn’t “a monumental philosophical treatise.” It was the first time he had suggested they were offtrack. During that meeting, Hutchins received a telegram from Luce, asking to meet in New York.2

Almost three years after the project’s launch, Luce read the draft report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press. The Time Inc. archives contain the typewritten manuscript with his handwritten commentary in the margins. He wrote “excellent” alongside the epigraph, a quotation from John Adams supplied by Arthur Schlesinger: “If there is ever to be an amelioration of the condition of mankind, philosophers, theologians, legislators, politicians and moralists will find that the regulation of the press is the most difficult, dangerous and important problem they have to resolve. Mankind cannot now be governed without it, nor at present with it.”3

After that, Luce’s comments were mostly negative. He thought the commission blamed the press for all the flaws of American politics while failing to credit its positive contributions. He rejected Archibald MacLeish’s contention that Americans could easily spread their views in the late eighteenth century. He believed that the report overstated the perils of concentrated ownership. He complained about undefined terms: what constitutes an “adequate” press or a press “available” to all? The charges of errors in the press irked him, too. He circled a reference to Time-Life Inc. and scrawled beneath it, “Gross factual inaccuracy!” The company was Time Inc.4

At some points, Luce seemed incensed. In response to the report’s assertion that “there are no simple solutions,” he wrote, “A real understanding of a problem often yields a brilliantly simple solution!” When the report said “we see” that news of public affairs accounts for only a small part of the media product, Luce wrote “we see” that professors spend only a small part of their time talking to students. A reference to “concentrations of private power . . . strong enough to thwart the aspirations of the people” prompted the remark, “It may thwart you, but you are not the people.” Other marginalia include “Shabby superficial paragraph,” “childish,” “God!” “Jesus!” and “Nuts!” Across the top of one page, he scrawled, “after 2nd reading I think whole thing so naïve & unsophisticated I say the Hell with it.” Of Hocking’s appendix, signed by

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