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Fun & Profit. In the first 15 years of Time Inc., Henry Luce was publisher as well as editor, involved in the planning of major circulation drives, advertising promotion and company investments. His business and administrative ability was as decisive a factor in the company's success as his editorial and news judgment. For many months, he concentrated on getting LIFE going, leaving his other magazines—Time Inc. had also acquired ARCHITECTURAL FORUM —pretty much to themselves. While LIFE was growing strong enough to walk on its own, Luce reorganized management by announcing that henceforth every magazine would have its own publisher as well as an editor. At the same time, he would become editorial director of TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE.
He had had "plenty of fun (and profit) as an entrepreneur," he said, but from now on he wanted to be a journalist. For the next quarter of a century, he turned his attention primarily to the editorial content of his magazines and the affairs of the nation and the world.
TIME's growth—its circulation in 1938 had reached 822,670—had its effects on both the magazine and the country. From more or less a pastepot operation in which its writers clipped from newspapers and magazines to sift and organize the news, TIME developed its own news service (its first Washington stringer: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.), began to be served by the press associations, built up a morgue and reference library, and increasingly depended on its writers' own knowledge for special information and judgments. It also lost some of its early brashness—though not its freshness—as the times became more serious and its influence grew.
The Luce-Hadden invention exerted a great influence on the nation's newspapers, which borrowed (in return for their clippings) some of TIME's style and mode of presentation; the news review section, now a common feature, began to proliferate. A whole generation of young newspaper reporters rebelled against city-room shibboleths, experimenting outside the routine who-what-when-where-why.
"Les Allemands!" Luce himself had become, before the age of 40, one of the most successful journalists of his century. After a divorce from his first wife, he married Clare Boothe Brokaw, playwright and former editor of Vanity Fair, and they became leading figures in New York social and intellectual life.
Having spent most of his ideas and energies up to now within the confines of his own magazines, he also became a public figure who spoke out on public issues. Luce broke publicly with Roosevelt and the New Deal in 1937. In a speech to a group of Ohio bankers, he declared that the Depression was continuing because of a lack of business confidence—and that that lack of confidence had been caused by Roosevelt's basing "his political popularity on the implication that business is antisocial, unpatriotic, vulgar and corruptive."