Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art and Ideas Inside Henry Luce’s Media Empire. Robert Vanderlan. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 384 pp.
This is a study about the intellectual tensions that filled the editorial side of Henry Luce’s Time, Fortune, and, to a much lesser degree, Life magazines. It is a study of self-defined intellectuals and how they operated within Luce’s control from the 1920s to the 1950s and eventually broke free—though often later fibbing about why they had really left the well-paying jobs they held with Luce’s magazines.
Dwight MacDonald, Archibald MacLeish, James Agee, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans are among the writers and (in the last two cases) artistic photographers who contributed to (or, more likely, were on the staff of) Luce’s magazines, and who are detailed here. At times, let it be said, you get the idea the writers especially complained too much in later years about having had to prostitute their abilities to “write down” for the general audiences Luce sought. Funny—they didn’t complain at the time they made the large salaries he paid his top people, especially during the Depression. There is a bit of maddening “holier than thou” in their later complaining, that somehow working for Luce kept them from completing their really good work.
In contrast, Cornell University historian Robert Vanderlan argues that working for a growing commercial enterprise may actually have aided all of these intellectuals in achieving their best. From his melding of discussions about their lives with the story of Time Inc. (later Time-Life), and relating a number of biographical vignettes in each case, we catch a glimpse of an exciting time in American magazine journalism. The editorial disagreements highlighted a period of exciting ferment in these periodicals—even if it was an exhausting one for the participants.
A good deal of the creative and institutional tension was political as Luce moved to the right (we’d say moderate today) and his creative writers shifted (or always were) left. How far they could take criticism of the American business enterprise was a constant battle of give and take, with Luce and his editors, of course, always in the driver’s seat. Frustration with that drove most of the subject writers elsewhere by the late 1950s if not before.
But, as with John Hersey and Theodore White, for example, these writers had first made their mark in the corridors of the Luce empire. Their writings critical of Luce (often in the form of thinly designed characters in novels and short stories published in later years) couldn’t take away the vital early “training” the magazine work provided.
We seem to know more about Luce’s magazines than about other American periodical publishing empires, perhaps because much of the needed archival material survives. This study adds to an already fascinating shelf of works (some supported by the company itself) that take us behind the magazine covers to the editorial duels that helped create an exciting era that most of us never experienced firsthand, and that few now remember.
CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University