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Luce possessed a kind of clairvoyance about history, a journalist's instinct but operating in a higher orbit than journalism usually achieves. Along with Hadden, he saw that America after the Great War was in a state of change that would create a natural audience for the kind of magazine they had in mind. The nation's cultural center of gravity was shifting. A newly emergent, restless urban middle class--often intellectually and socially insecure--was getting into business, making money, buying things.
In the new age of the automobile, the motion picture, the radio, Hadden and Luce detected a new consumers' appetite for motion, stimulation, variety. Traditional sources of information had become inadequate. Newspapers were local or regional and in any case offered only a patchwork of information. Magazines tended to be specialized, with a tendency toward fat and bloviation; they rarely offered news as news. None even set out to be comprehensive on a national and international scale.
TIME played brilliantly to the new American appetite. The magazine turned the news into saga, comedy, melodrama. The very compression of early TIMEstyle, invented almost entirely by Hadden, lent it an urgency of mannered telegraphese. John Martin, Hadden's cousin and an early writer and editor at the magazine, left this account of Hadden at work: "Brit would edit copy to eliminate unnecessary verbiage...If you wrote something like 'in the nick of time,' five words, he might change it to 'in time's nick,' three words...At all times he had by him a carefully annotated translation of the Iliad. On the back cover, he had listed hundreds of words, especially verbs and the compound adjectives, which had seemed to him fresh and forceful."
The style, however silly on occasion, gave the magazine a distinctive voice. Men were not famous but "famed," not powerful but "potent." High on the list of accolades was "able." All were masculine terms of approbation: the news in Homeric mode, demigods or villains on tiptoe. TIME's writers loved Homer's narrative techniques. Compound adjectives: Mexico's President Francisco Madero was "wild-eyed." The World War I German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was "long-whiskered." Public figures were tagged with mock-heroic identifying phrases. Minnesota's Senator Henrik Shipstead was invariably "the duck-hunting dentist."
An impasto of alliterative adjectives got slathered onto public men. George Bernard Shaw was "mocking, mordant, misanthropic." General Erich von Ludendorff was "flagitious, inscrutable, unrelenting." The intent was novelistic. As Luce explained it, "No idea exists outside a human skull--and no human skull exists without hair and a face and a voice--in fact the flesh and blood attributes of a human personality. TIME journalism began by being deeply interested in people, as individuals who were making history, or a small part of it, from week to week. We tried to make our readers see and hear and even smell these people as part of a better understanding of their ideas--or lack of them."