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Born of the Wasp male ascendancy in a self-confidently patriarchal age, the magazine (which routinely used the word men to mean everyone) has passed, along with its parent company, through a series of self-transformations, from an age of industry and structured authority into a post-cold war era of free-flowing information and diversity. And after 3,900 weeks of telling the story of the most complicated century in history, the TIME that Hadden and Luce created turns 75 this week--and celebrates.
Luce and Hadden, classmates out of Hotchkiss and Yale, succeeded because they understood this truth: history may be complicated, as life is complicated, but the business of storytelling is simple. The young men said in their prospectus that their creation would be judged by "how much it gets off its pages into the minds of its readers." Sort the world into stories and carry them (facts, personalities, ideas, images, dramas, quirks, gossip, the details and energy of life) from Out There, where things happen, to In Here, inside the reader's consciousness, where stories turn into wonder, entertainment, cautionary experience, useful memory. The magazine's voice, Luce said, had three modes: "Everything in TIME should be either titillating or epic or supercurtly factual."
The titillating voice told of "cinemactresses," or "great and good friends" (TIME code for lovers) or other uber-brat coinages. When Wallis Warfield Simpson, having lured Edward VIII from the throne of England, was named TIME's Woman of the Year for 1936--a year in which Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Mao were all on the march and F.D.R. was elected in a landslide to a second term--TIME the titillator delivered this quote: "'My, my!' sighed [Argentine] Ambassador [Felipe] Espil to swank U.S. friends last summer, 'who would ever have dreamed that our Little Wallis would ever be where she is now!'"
As for the magazine's epic voice, it expressed, at its best, a disciplined, moral understanding of history, an adult's steady gaze. In a brief introduction to the Victory section in the issue of Aug. 20, 1945, for example, TIME, in contemplating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said this: "With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age. The race had been won; the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race."
The "supercurtly factual" permeated the magazine. "There Are 00 Trees in Russia," ran the title of a famous 1964 piece in Harper's magazine on TIME's obsessive fact-gathering and -checking systems, implying that the magazine had a sinister itch to make reality conform, through the use of plug-in facts, to the editors' preconceptions. Fair enough on occasion, but a little captious overall, in light of the magazine's scrupulous and expensive attention to accuracy.