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Banana Peel. Editing TIME during 1928, Luce, who had an early bias in favor of the activist and the entrepreneur, became especially engrossed in American business. Feeling that the press covered the field inadequately, he assigned a staff to explore the idea of a business magazine. Five months later, he decided the time was opportune. Among the names considered were Power and FORTUNE. Luce picked the latter because it appealed to his wife, the former Lila Ross Hotz of Chicago. They had married in 1923 and had two sons: Henry III, a Time Inc. vice president and the head of the London Bureau, and Peter Paul, a management consultant on Long Island.
Luce believed that "America's great achievement has been business"—and he charged a new magazine, FORTUNE, to report business not in dull statistics but through drama, personalities and technology. After a year of careful preparation, FORTUNE'S first issue, an elegant and handsome magazine with a black and bronze cover, appeared in February 1930. Luce later said that it was difficult to imagine a magazine less likely to survive: FORTUNE had walked in on the Great Depression. As a later FORTUNE managing editor, Eric Hodgins, put it: "Almost on the eve of FORTUNE's publication, the whole of the economy of the U.S. clapped a hand over its heart, uttered a piercing scream, and slipped on the largest banana peel since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations." Yet, surprisingly, the magazine prospered in that dramatically inopportune time. Even at $1 a copy—then an unheard-of price for a magazine—businessmen bought FORTUNE with amazing regularity.
In its first years, FORTUNE was more or less a journal of discovery, but the length of the Depression (TIME's editors had felt that "it may last as long as a year") prompted it to begin a study of the stricken economy. As Franklin Roosevelt was elected and power ebbed from Wall Street to Washington, the magazine's editors made Government as much as business the object of editorial scrutiny. In so doing, FORTUNE in the early '30s came down very much on the side of the New Deal, reflecting Luce's general approval of the early reforms of the Roosevelt Administration as well as the personal sympathies of FORTUNE's writers and researchers.