Henry Luce

He was born on the Shandong coast, at Tengchow, to Presbyterian missionaries, and did not set foot in the United States until he was 15. Hotchkiss took him as a scholarship boy, paid for by an elderly Chicago heiress who liked to help missionaries' sons, and the upper-class students kept their distance while he worked at getting on top of a stutter. He answered by becoming the best student in the school: Greek, Latin, French, German, and the Chinese he already had. He also met Briton Hadden there. At Yale they were two of the four freshmen picked for the Daily News, and in January 1918 Hadden beat him for the chairmanship by a single vote. Luce took managing editor instead. Skull and Bones tapped them both in May 1919.

They quit their jobs in 1922, both 23, raised 100,000 dollars from rich Yale alumni including a partner at J.P. Morgan, and put the first issue of Time on the stands on March 3, 1923, with the Speaker of the House on the cover. It was the first weekly news magazine in the country, and its method was to tell the news through people. Hadden died in February 1929 at 31, of a streptococcal infection that had entered his blood two months earlier, and within a year Luce had assembled a syndicate that took hold of his shares. Fortune followed in 1930, the March of Time newsreels after that, Life in 1936, Sports Illustrated in 1954. He stayed editor-in-chief of all of it until 1964, and built what may fairly be called the first multimedia corporation.

The magazines were not neutral and Luce never claimed they were. He was the central private figure in what became known as the China Lobby, steering American opinion toward Chiang Kai-shek, who appeared on Time's cover 11 times between 1927 and 1955. In 1944 he installed Whittaker Chambers as acting foreign news editor over the objections of the correspondents in the field, whose copy Chambers then rewrote. He founded the United China Appeal in 1941, joined the board of the National Committee for a Free Europe in 1949, and in April 1955 put Ngo Dinh Diem on the cover as the man holding back a flood of communism. He also declared the century American, in Life, in 1941. He and Clare Boothe Luce both took LSD in guided sessions, years before the law caught up with the drug.

He died of a coronary occlusion in Phoenix on February 28, 1967, at 68, and was buried at Mepkin, the 7,200-acre South Carolina plantation he had bought in 1936 for a reported 150,000 dollars and which is now a Trappist monastery. He was said to be worth 100 million dollars in Time Inc. stock, and most of it went to the foundation he had set up in 1936 and his son later ran. The magazines have had a harder century than he did. Life stopped as a weekly, Time went biweekly in 2020, and in 2018 Marc Benioff bought it from Meredith. The phrase he coined in 1941 has outlasted every one of them, mostly as an accusation.

Henry Luce's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Time company
  The first weekly news magazine in the United States 1923
• Fortune company
  Launched into the first full year of the Depression 1930
• Life company
  The picture magazine that set American visual habits before television 1936
• Henry Luce Foundation company
  Set up in his thirties and left most of his estate 1936
• The American Century article
  An editorial in Life that named the era and has been argued about since 1941
• Sports Illustrated company
  The last of the four magazines he founded 1954

• April 3, 1898 aged 0 Born at Tengchow, Shandong, to Presbyterian missionaries
• 1913 aged ~15 Sent alone to the United States at 15, to the Hotchkiss School A scholarship boy funded by the Chicago heiress Nancy Fowler McCormick.
• January 1918 aged 19 Loses the Yale Daily News chairmanship to Briton Hadden by one vote He became managing editor. The two would run Time on the same division of labor.
• March 3, 1923 aged 24 The first issue of Time appears, with Speaker Joseph G. Cannon on the cover
• February 27, 1929 aged 30 Briton Hadden dies at 31 of a streptococcal infection Within a year Luce had put together a syndicate that acquired Hadden's stock.
• 1936 aged ~38 Launches Life, starts the Luce Foundation, and buys Mepkin plantation
• 1941 aged ~43 Publishes The American Century in Life
• 1944 aged ~46 Makes Whittaker Chambers acting foreign news editor over his correspondents's objections
• February 28, 1967 aged 68 Dies in Phoenix, Arizona Three years after stepping down as editor-in-chief of all his magazines.

• William Randolph Hearst 1863–1951
  Publisher whose sensational newspapers and national media empire wielded immense cultural and political power. the model he was measured against
• Joseph Pulitzer 1847–1911
  Publisher who transformed mass-circulation journalism and endowed the Pulitzer Prizes. built the magazine business he inherited
• Edward R. Murrow 1908–1965
  Broadcast journalist whose reporting from London during WWII and confrontation with McCarthy set journalistic standards. rival in the news business, on the air
• Gordon Parks 1912–2006
  Photographer for Life magazine and first Black director of a major Hollywood studio film. staff photographer at Life
• Katharine Graham 1917–2001
  Publisher who strengthened The Washington Post and backed its reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. the publisher who came after him