Luce and His Empire
by W. A. Swanberg
Summary
W. A. Swanberg's biography follows Henry Luce from his 1898 birth in Tengchow, in Shandong Province, China, the son of American Presbyterian missionaries, through a boyhood spent largely in China before he was sent to Connecticut at fifteen to attend the Hotchkiss School, where he overcame a childhood stutter and formed the friendship with Briton Hadden that would define the rest of his career. It follows the two young men through Yale, where they ran the Yale Daily News together, and into the founding of Time magazine in 1923, when Luce and Hadden, both still short of twenty five, quit conventional journalism jobs to build what became, over the following decades, one of the largest magazine publishing companies in the United States, adding Fortune in 1930, Life in 1936, and Sports Illustrated in 1954 to the original weekly.
The book follows Luce's growing political influence as his magazines' reach grew, his staunch anticommunism, his championing of the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai Shek through what critics called the China Lobby, and the 1941 Life editorial in which he argued the United States should openly embrace what he called the American Century, a phrase that gave a generation of postwar foreign policy makers their preferred description of America's role in the world. Swanberg follows Luce's two marriages, first to Lila Hotz, with whom he had two sons before their 1935 divorce, and then to the playwright and future ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, whose own fame and political career ran alongside his for more than three decades. It closes with Luce's retirement as editor in chief in 1964 and his death from a coronary occlusion in Phoenix in 1967, at sixty eight, leaving an estate built almost entirely from Time Inc. stock that funded the Henry Luce Foundation for decades afterward.
Swanberg, writing without Time Inc.'s cooperation, treats Luce's empire and Luce's politics as inseparable, arguing throughout that no other American publisher used a news organization so directly to advance one man's view of the world.
Historical Context & Significance
Charles Scribner's Sons published Luce and His Empire in 1972, and it won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, Swanberg's first Pulitzer, a decade after a controversy had denied him the prize for Citizen Hearst. In 1962 the Pulitzer board's advisory jury had recommended Swanberg's Citizen Hearst for the biography prize, only for Columbia University's trustees, who then had final say over the award, to reject the recommendation, reportedly on the grounds that William Randolph Hearst was not a dignified enough subject, the first such rejection of a jury recommendation in the prize's forty six year history.
Luce and His Empire arrived a decade later as a kind of vindication, honoring Swanberg for another unauthorized biography of another famously powerful American publisher, and it remains one of the fuller accounts of how thoroughly Luce's own politics shaped Time, Life, and Fortune's editorial choices during his four decades running them.