The Man Time Forgot by Isaiah Wilner

Author:Isaiah Wilner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

11

Hot Stuff

SOON AFTER LUCE RECEIVED his honorary degree, Hadden’s friend Stuart Heminway visited him in Cleveland. Heminway asked Hadden how he liked the town. “I have been here forty-four weeks and have been to New York thirty-six times,” Hadden said. Heminway asked how Luce was doing. Hadden said he had absolutely no idea. “What, don’t you two see anything of each other anymore?” Heminway asked. “The less I see of him the better I like it,” Hadden said.

In public, Hadden put the best face on things, writing a story for the house magazine of the Cleveland chamber of commerce about how much help the city had provided the young company. “Time is here to stay,” he concluded. “Time likes Cleveland.” Privately, he expressed a different attitude. “We think we’re hot stuff here, big frogs in a small puddle,” he would say. “But what the hell are we? A bunch of kids, deafened by adulation. We sit at dinner parties with people twice our age and they listen to us. We think we’re some punkins. We must get back to New York where we have competition and can’t get smug.”

Back in the editor’s chair in the second half of 1926, Hadden began to fill the magazine with more jokes and pranks, often poking fun at rural America. He invented a new phony correspondent, George Zweiger of Chillicothe, Ohio. “What’s West Virginia but Ohio’s coal bin?” Zweiger wrote Time. “Just a dirty disheveled stretch of mine dumps, scraggly mountains, filled with a bunch of ignorants that only know enough to swing picks and drink moonshine.” West Virginian readers wrote Time to attack Ohio, and newspapers in both states spread the controversy. Reporters in Chillicothe tried to track down Zweiger, but they weren’t able to find anyone by that name. Newspaper reporters called the office, wondering whether Time had manufactured the controversy. Hadden, in a panic, ordered his researchers to destroy the files. From then on, Time’s phony correspondents tended to live in large cities, making Hadden’s hoaxes more difficult to detect.

Realizing that a scandal could provide free publicity for Time, Larsen encouraged Hadden to attack a variety of towns across America. They stayed up late at night plotting their targets. In the next several months, Time ran a report on political corruption in Indianapolis, covered a newspaper battle in Denver, and made fun of the only skyscraper in Greensboro, North Carolina—a town Time called “second-rate.” Larsen checked the circulation figures in those areas the following year and discovered that the readership had increased between 50 and 100 percent. “The numbers speak for themselves,” he wrote Hadden. “What we have done in Winston-Salem, Denver, and Indianapolis, we can do in hundreds of cities and towns throughout the country.” “Noted,” Hadden wrote back. “This important point is well taken. Will cooperate. BH.”

Hadden’s attacks on small-town and rural America earned Time the hatred of book-burning preachers, Prohibitionists, and a good number of Southerners who disliked reading about lynchings. “I would not want your propaganda sheet

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