The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley

Author:Alan Brinkley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Industries, Autobiography, Publishing, Periodicals, Editors, Media & Communications Industries, Publishers, Journalists, Publishing Industry And Trade, Language Arts & Disciplines, Historical - General, Industries - Media & Communications Industries, Biography: General, United States, Historical, Historical - U.S., Business & Economics, History, 20th century, General, Biography & Autobiography, Publishers and publishing, Biography
ISBN: 9780679414445
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-04-20T07:00:00+00:00

At the same time that Luce was immersed in the Willkie campaign, he was also working quietly to persuade Roosevelt to take a more aggressive stance toward the war. The awkwardness of this situation was not lost on either man. While Luce was excoriating the president in his magazines, working actively against his reelection, and accusing Roosevelt of incompetence and something close to tyranny, Roosevelt was privately condemning Luce’s “bias” and “propaganda” and making vague threats (rarely implemented) to challenge Luce’s power. “There are some things in life that one should not let certain people get away with,” Roosevelt wrote in 1940 after a petty dispute with Time about some inconsequential reporting errors. Luce, he complained, was “slippery.” George Washington “had the courage to admit a lie,” he wrote (crossing out the word “lie” and replacing it with “sin”), but “Henry Luce lacks that ability.” And yet both men were pragmatic enough to know when to put their mutual dislike aside, and both sought ways to use each other to advance their own ends, which in reality had more in common than either was willing to admit.37

In the summer of 1940, as the military situation in Europe deterioriated and as Luce immersed himself in the Willkie campaign, he joined a nonpartisan group of influential men who were trying to pave the way for more active American support for Britain. The renowned Kansas editor William Allen White had just created the highly public Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which worked actively to combat isolationism through public exhortation. The group Luce joined, by contrast, relied on quiet and mostly secret diplomacy. They first convened in July 1940 at the midtown Columbia University Club and agreed to create a formal organization, which they later named the Century Group, after the elite New York men’s club in which they held most of their subsequent meetings. Its director was Francis Pickens Miller, a Virginia congressman with ties both to the Council on Foreign Relations and to the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies; and its members included other political figures (Lewis Douglas, Roosevelt’s former budget director, now a Willkie Republican; Robert E. Sherwood, a playwright and Roosevelt speechwriter; Will Clayton, an official in the State Department); theologians (Henry Sloane Coffin, the renowned president of Union Theological Seminary and Henry Van Dusen, who later succeeded him); academics (among them Ernest Hopkins, the president of Dartmouth College); and the publishers of the Louisville Courier-Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the New York Herald Tribune. But there was probably no one in the thirty-member group more influential than Luce; and although he at times expressed discomfort at being a member of what was essentially a lobbying organization (a discomfort that rarely inhibited his participation in the Willkie campaign), he gradually became one of its most active members. He helped pay for the office and staff that the group opened on Forty-second Street, and he made himself increasingly central to their efforts to change American policy.

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