A magazine is a living thing. The child that Briton Hadden and Henry Luce brought into the world in March 1923 was squally, bratty, brash. The new smart aleck--its voice distinctive, sophomoric, self-assured--thrived, almost from the start: born lucky. The magazine sailed through the 1920s as if the decade were a breezy shakedown cruise.
But the '20s ended traumatically, for almost everyone. In 1929 Hadden came down with a strep infection that reached his heart and killed him at age 31. Luce was left to carry on alone. The stock market crashed a few months later.
And in the years that followed, there unfolded all the high, dark world history for which the magazine's epic rhetoric became a perfectly appropriate libretto: the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the cold war and all the rest, down the decades.
TIME prospered all the more. The gravity of world news--especially the war--stimulated the magazine's reporting and its genius for packaging news. TIME became an influence in millions of American lives. It inspired a competitor, Newsweek (which began publication in 1933). It acquired siblings--FORTUNE (1930), LIFE (1936), The March of Time (1935), Architectural Forum (1932). Luce had a golden touch.
And so eventually, the Weekly Newsmagazine matured into an American institution, mentor to the questing middle class, keeper of a certain American self-image and expectation--America's superego, the child of Henry Luce, a presence infuriating to many but undeniably a force.
Eventually, Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, went so far as to claim that TIME, with its siblings, did more to mold the American character than "the whole education system put together." Even Luce's old enemy William Randolph Hearst admitted, "There can no longer be any doubt that TIME is the world's outstanding journalistic venture to date."
TIME, like Luce, was alert to the nuances of American power, which, in a way, was the ultimate focus of the magazine's interest. Occasionally, TIME went against the grain of majority opinion, as when Luce, who came to dislike Franklin Roosevelt, pushed Wendell Willkie as the American hope in 1940, or when, after Luce's death in 1967, the magazine seemed to predict the wrong presidential "inevitabilities"--Maine's Edmund Muskie in 1972, say, or Texas' John Connally in '80. As a monitor connected to the nation's political generators, the magazine sometimes misinterpreted the vibrations. In general, however, its record for being right was pretty good.
TIME's greatest influence was exerted in forming the nation's attitudes, its political opinions and social conscience--especially in the decades after World War II. In the '60s, during Vietnam, TIME was caught in a general American degringolade, a deconstruction of established authority from the President on down. In the '70s, TIME helped guide the nation through the trauma of Watergate, and as part of its role as moral counselor, published the only editorial in its history, urging Richard Nixon to resign.