Early in 1960, as the Cold War dragged on, Henry R. Luce took on the already much-discussed project of defining America’s “national purpose.” As the head of the Time-Life publishing empire, Luce was as influential as any American of the time, aside from President Eisenhower himself. The magazines over which Luce had broad editorial oversight included Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. Each of these dominated its field in a day when print media still played a central role in guiding widely shared parts of the culture. Using the pages of Life, which had a circulation of close to seven million and claimed a readership of up to 25 million, for a series in which leading American commentators (Archibald MacLeish, Adlai Stevenson, Walter Lippmann, Billy Graham, David Sarnoff, and others) would reflect on the nation’s unifying purpose, seemed a significant way to help steer a rapidly changing culture that had been thrust only recently into world leadership. “Here we are at the beginning of a really possible golden age of western culture,” Luce observed, yet some people “still want to believe that tending to wealth alone will give culture and a decent standard of living to all men on earth.”
In retrospect, knowing how fragmented America would look even a decade later, the widely hailed 1960 project of trying to define a “national purpose” from corporate headquarters in New York through the words of a group of distinguished white males suggests to us how vastly different the United States looked just a half century ago. Understanding the mentality of someone like Henry Luce, then, provides a window for looking into an American world that, despite many continuities, was vastly different from our own. As Alan Brinkley suggests in his engaging biography, the immense success of Luce’s magazines was not so much in shaping mainstream mid-20th-century American culture as it was in reflecting and reinforcing the outlooks that were emerging in the influential white middle class.
Searching for a national purpose was also very much in character for Henry Luce. His was a purpose-driven life marked by reflection on what good he could do for the world with his power and influence. He was also, as Brinkley sympathetically shows, to some extent corrupted by his power and his immense wealth, but those failures made him all the more discontent and determined to find out what higher cause he could serve. This strong sense of calling undoubtedly arose from his rigorous Presbyterian upbringing as the child of missionaries to China. As has often been observed of Luce, he transformed his parents’ missionary zeal into a broader mission of America to save the world. In his most famous essay, “The American Century,” published in Life early in 1941, he urged Americans to use their power to export whatever is best about Western civilization—”above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of charity …. It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.”
One might think that a biographer would find in this quest for purpose—and especially its religious and intellectual dimensions—a major motif for understanding the inner workings of a complex man like Luce. The publisher was, after all, sometimes accused of being more interested in ideas than in people and was often said to be too “philosophical” in his conversation. Yet in an otherwise excellent, insightful, and eminently readable account, Brinkley puts these interests of Luce to the side. The central story line is that of an intelligent and immensely competitive man who is a spectacular success as a businessman, becomes a major commentator and a sometimes controversial force in American politics, has two largely unsatisfactory marriages and a number of notable affairs, is seldom happy, and is never content. Brinkley mentions Luce’s religious faith in passing from time to time, and near the end he devotes two pages to describing how “the simple unquestioned faith of [Luce’s] youth was long gone”; although still an active Presbyterian, he was looking for something in “the great liberal tradition” that might be, as he once put it privately, a “New Religion, the search for God, without Christianity.” But Brinkley clearly thinks that Luce’s changing faith and lifetime religious quest was epiphenomenal. Never is it presented as the source of any other idea or interest (other than his transference of missionary zeal to the American mission). “He was fascinated by Christianity,” Brinkley summarizes, “in the same way he was fascinated by politics, business, culture, and many other areas of life.”
My suspicion is that by treating Luce’s considerable religious interests as just another fascination Brinkley has missed what could have been a poignant major motif in the biography, particularly when juxtaposed with some of the contradictions between Luce’s high ideals and the way he lived as one of the rich and the powerful. I realize, of course, that it may seem parochial for me to criticize a fine work of history for failing to do justice to my own specialty. Nonetheless, I think it is arguable that Brinkley, like a lot of fine historians, has almost a blind spot regarding matters of religion and so misses significant themes that could have enriched his already fine narrative.
For example, we are told that Luce’s father, Henry W. Luce (Yale ’92), became deeply involved with the college Student Volunteer Movement. He then attended Union Theological Seminary in New York for a year but eventually finished his degree at Princeton Theological Seminary. Brinkley says nothing about the possible significance of this transfer to Princeton, the bastion of Presbyterian orthodoxy. More generally, he never thinks to ask what sort of Presbyterians (strict? pietistic? broad?) Luce’s parents were or how they (or their son) responded to the great missions controversies that disrupted the Presbyterian Church in the 1920s and ’30s.
In 1913, the younger Henry (always known as Harry) was enrolled at age fifteen at Hotchkiss School, a feeder for Yale, which he entered three years later. Regarding all his formative prep and college years, we learn much detail about Harry’s ambitions, striving, competitiveness, and journalistic work, but comments on religious matters, which presumably would be sprinkled in correspondence with missionary parents, surface only once in Brinkley’s narrative. That is to remark that when he entered Yale, “Harry’s own faith was almost certainly stronger than that of most of his classmates, but he usually gave scant evidence of it.” Brinkley then quotes Harry’s revealing comment that the opening religious gathering at Dwight Hall, Yale’s famed evangelical center, made him wonder whether the young men who talked so enthusiastically about Jesus “know of what they talk, or are they only religiously drunk.” Such “fervid Xianity,” he added, “has completely alienated my friend Brit Hadden from its holy halls.” One can learn from other sources that Harry remained active in Dwight Hall and even preached there on occasion, but in Brinkley’s account this quotation is the first and last we are told of Harry’s religious development, interests, or concerns from his teens until his mid-thirties. The next mention of religion pops up when, in 1934, he has fallen desperately in love and is determined to marry the extraordinary writer Clare Boothe Brokaw; he is quoted as wondering, in a list of considerations, whether he has the “Christian right” to divorce his first wife (who is the mother of his two sons). It seems as though there must be a fascinating story of a religious journey and even personal agonizing that is not being told. It appears as though Brinkley has little interest in religious matters and so chooses to regard them as essentially private concerns (even in a biography) and something like a hobby.
Brinkley nonetheless spins a fascinating tale of young Harry’s spectacular rise to success. Central to that story through all the school years is Harry’s friend and sometimes rival Brit Hadden (he who was alienated from Dwight Hall). The two of them took over the Yale Daily News during the patriotic days following World War I. Then, in 1923, the 24-year-old Yalies audaciously launched Time as a weekly news magazine. Hadden was the editor in chief and Luce the business manager. Time was fascinated by the rich and powerful and proved to play an important role in helping to standardize the culture, especially for the better educated and well- to-do. Almost immediately it was a great success. When Hadden died suddenly in 1929 (he effectively drank himself to death), Luce took over the editorship and built an empire, adding Fortune and Life in the 1930s.
The story of Luce in his prime during the mid-decades of the century is that of a public figure of considerable political interests and influence, and of a private life often in turmoil. Luce was a moderate Republican who nonetheless voted for Al Smith and probably for Lyndon Johnson. He was especially close to Eisenhower and very much liked Jack Kennedy, a family friend. Luce was always relatively progressive on matters of race (one wonders if religious motives were involved). He was renowned for his support of Nationalist China and of General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. He was an ardent Cold Warrior but did not like populists such as Senator Joseph McCarthy. Luce regarded his faith in America’s mission and destiny as a matter of principle higher than mere patriotism.
In his private life, troubles began with Clare Boothe Luce on their honeymoon and continued periodically until Harry’s death in 1967. After Clare’s daughter, a Stanford senior, died in a car accident in 1944, Clare joined the Roman Catholic Church. She seems to have taken her Catholicism seriously (it was later a factor in resisting divorce), except that the Luces had in effect an open marriage and each had a number of affairs—a matter that seemed taken for granted in their élite social circles. Harry was the archetypical public figure who knew everyone but had few close male friends, a lack he made up for through a series of intimate relationships with accomplished women.
After World War II, Luce became concerned, as were a number of public intellectuals of the time, to find a higher law that could guide nations and perhaps unite the world. He was unhappy with the sort of relativism that he saw in the pragmatic conception of the law of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He also was unhappy with the Realpolitik of the Truman administration and argued that “the struggle between Freedom and communism is, at bottom, a moral issue … a religious issue.” In his quest Luce kept up correspondence with leading theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and others, and Father John Courtney Murray, SJ, became a sort of personal counselor for the Luces in their troubled marriage. Brinkley mentions all this in passing. He does note more fully that for guidance on higher law Luce turned particularly to William Ernest Hocking, an idealist philosopher at Harvard who advocated a philosophically based theism rooted in human experience. What Brinkley does not mention is that Luce’s interest in Hocking was almost certainly linked to the philosopher’s work in the 1930s as the leading author of the controversial report of the laymen’s inquiry into world missions, Re-thinking Missions, published in 1932. In fact Time gave Re-thinking Missions a glowing review when it came out, suggesting that, despite the inevitable carping of critics, its “God-centered” rather than “Christ-centered” religion signaled the wave of the future and might be the key to building one unified world culture.
Nor does Brinkley take seriously Luce’s lifelong role as a professing Christian, an active Presbyterian, and even something of a public theologian. In 1969, after Luce’s death, John K. Jessup, former chief editorial writer for Life, published a collection entitled The Ideas of Henry Luce. In his introductory sketch of Luce’s outlook, Jessup claims that Luce’s “faith” as a “Protestant Christian” was his first priority. Perhaps we must take that with a grain of salt, but we also find Luce himself claiming similar priorities. For instance, in a 1946 address to Duke Divinity School he proclaimed that love of country could become for Americans “a barrier between the patriot and love to God.” In quite a few other speeches he called for the priority of Christianity. At Princeton Theological Seminary’s commencement in 1962 he advocated the theology of Teilhard de Chardin as a way to reconcile evolutionary science and Christian theology. And in 1964 he even published an essay on “The Essence of Teilhard” in Life, suggesting that Teilhard might be “the greatest thinker-prophet of the twentieth century.” None of this makes it into Brinkley’s book.
While I think Brinkley misses some potentially enriching and intriguing dimensions of his story, it is also easy to understand how an apparently secular biographer might come to the conclusion that the religion of Luce and of the mainstream America he represented so well was epiphenomenal. My guess is that Luce became what in the 1920s was known as a Protestant modernist and remained seriously committed to that quest for the latest and most advanced understandings of Christianity. Modernism, or the more progressive sort of liberal Protestantism, was an effort to save Christianity by emphasizing its ethical and theological essence rather than its historical particulars. For Luce and for many of his generation of élite Protestants, faith in some sort of God, whatever that meant to them personally, played a very important cultural role. In the mid-decades of the 20th century they were desperately struggling to build and to preserve a great national culture, unified on the basis of the best in Western civilization, as opposed to the deadly barbarism of Nazism and the materialism of godless communism. During and after World War II, the future of the world seemed literally to depend on the success of this project.
The white Protestant males who still ran most things in America had recently opened their club to Jews who acted like secularizing Protestants, a few women, and an occasional Catholic. At home their cultural project was largely the same as that which had been around since America’s founding during the 18th-century Enlightenment. They were searching to build a unified culture out of diversity based on a consensus of national ideals on which all right-thinking people might agree. The problem was that the natural law foundations for such a consensus had been dynamited by Darwinism and relativistic versions of pragmatism. Faith in God may have been optional for those who were part of the club searching for a new basis for consensus, but for considerable numbers who had such faith, it was not incidental. The most useful sort of theism for consensus building was of the inclusive sort. One continuity, then, with America’s founders was that modernism or liberal Protestantism played a role for some élite mid-20th-century Protestants similar to the role played by Deism (and its liberal Protestant cousins) in the 18th century. That is, it provided a grounding for universal principles. Except now the theistic substructure was progressive, taking into account evolutionary, pragmatic, and historicist concerns. Some hoped, as apparently did the publisher of America’s most influential magazines, that such outlooks, combined with broad ecumenism, might eventually provide a basis for harmony among the religions of the world.
Obscuring the actual role of such religion even more is that Protestantism itself could be an agent of secularization. One feature of much of middle-class Protestantism, and not just of the modernist sort, was that no one had to know that you were religious. One did not have to dress differently, wear religious artifacts, eat fish on Friday, or observe unusual holidays. One did not have to pray in public or talk about God in polite society. Harry Luce, even as a young man, when he may have thought of himself as a somewhat traditional Christian, apparently learned to turn on and off his piety as the occasion demanded. Eventually the faith seems to have become sufficiently compartmentalized that it did not preclude partaking in whatever pleasures went with his Gatsby-like social class. Possibly Brinkley is right that Harry’s continuing interests in theology, however absorbing for him, became something like a hobby, or at least functionally so. But my guess is that there was much more going on.
George Marsden is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and teaches part-time at Calvin College and at Calvin Theological Seminary.
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