A Moment in Time

Today's guest-post is by Grace Wagner, a Reference Librarian at the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society. (see bio below)

One hundred years ago today … the first issue of Time was published, printed in the magazine offices on the 9th floor of 9 East 40th Street. Time was shepherded into existence by two young newspaper reporters, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden. The recent Yale University graduates had just started working as string reporters at The Baltimore News together when they made the decision to resign from their jobs and form their own company and newsmagazine. Their experiment, once begun, took on a life of its own, and Time magazine’s brevity, breadth, and distinct storytelling style became a signifier of a new mode of journalism and reporting in the 20th century.

In a February 6, 1922 letter from Hadden to his mother, primary confidante from childhood days onwards, he informs her of the plan. He optimistically imagines that the then-named “FACTS” will be proven a success or failure in a matter of seven weeks, and provides a provisional outline of his projected financial losses, lest the plan is met with “universal condemnation as will warrant our immediate prodigal return to Baltimore.” As with most things Hadden undertook at this time and in years prior, this careful accounting is undercut by the flippancy of his signature (“several bushel baskets full of love and regards and hopes and apologies from Brit”), indicating that embarking on this business venture is treated with the same seriousness as a schooldays adventure.

And indeed, the origins of Time magazine, as told by those who witnessed the earliest days of the publication’s beginnings, speak of an energetic pace:

“They seemed to be working together in a big and very bare room, with an immense wastepaper basket. I remember standing up all the time as there were no extra chairs. They were all young, in a very great hurry it seemed, and they wanted printing quotations on a new newspaper or weekly that they had in mind.” [excerpt from a letter sent from Julian Bach Jr. to Mr. Roy Larsen dated March 30, 1948]

It took Luce and Hadden less than a year to move from this space to the 40th Street location, just off Fifth Avenue, where the first issue of Time went to press. If the recollections of those who witnessed the early days of the magazine reflect something frenetic in the magazine’s beginnings, this outward pace is counterbalanced by the level of thoughtfulness and planning Luce and Hadden cultivated during the school years they spent together. This systematic perfecting was not unusual for the pair. Former prep-school classmates, Luce and Hadden first met at The Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, and then continued on to attend Yale University together, working at each respective school newspaper as they came up, and first developing their plans for Time in the summer of 1918 while stationed in Camp Jackson, South Carolina, as student officers with Yale’s R.O.T.C. 

The pair then worked at The Baltimore News together, perfecting the model of their newsmagazine, and seeking to distinguish their publication from others on the market through the brevity and breadth of its reporting. Anecdotal, pithy narratives that came to a distinct point appealed to Hadden, who, according to one origin story for the publication, would hop off the train from New York to Houston at various towns to buy and skim the local newspaper for the most interesting bits of news. This informal collation of articles became the basis for the Time model. As The New York Times attests in its announcement of the first issue of Time, “Its purpose is to give in the shortest possible space a summary of the week’s news.”

Luce and Hadden’s youth made them relatively non-threatening to more established newspapers, while their access to more privileged circles made it possible for them to easily tap into the capital and connections necessary to launch their publication. The pair cultivated these connections, contacting former college professors and prominent men of New York, and secured funding for their venture largely through the Yale alumni network. Former Yale classmates were also brought in to serve editorial roles on staff, in many ways consciously recreating the same insulated, club-atmosphere that encircled them during school. The meteoric success of Hadden and Luce’s composite edition of the week’s news also owes something to the 1918 International News Service v Associated Press Supreme Court case decision that determined 24-hours old news was in the “public domain,” effectively making it possible for Time to collect the news from the week and publish it in a digestible form for its readers. 

Hadden took another key characteristic from his school days into the writing of Time with him – style. Timestyle, to be exact. Ostensibly a remnant of school days, Briton Hadden’s copy of The Illiad from Hotchkiss provides evidence of the type of style and speech patterns that appealed to Hadden early on, and would eventually become synonymous with Timestyle. Epithets (“large-eyed Philomedusa”; aegis-bearing Jove”) and complex compound words (“all-gloomy heart”; “rosy-fingered morning”) are repeatedly underlined in the book, and the endpages of the volume are filled with lists cataloging appealing turns-of-phrases. 

Alongside Homeric epithets, inverted sentences, composite words (newsmagazine, for one), invented (“socialite”), and repurposed words (“Tycoon”, transformed from a title for the shogun of Japan to a term for a titan of industry) all found their way into Time, and became key-markers of Hadden’s distinct syntactical style. Such devices made Time readers feel as though they were in the know, reading the same news, using the same terminology, and connecting to a broader, though decidedly socially and class-conservative, sphere of influence. In a 1926 letter written to Hadden, John M. Berdan taps into the distinct appeal and irritation the style engendered: “The style irritates people almost to madness, --- but they continue to subscribe and bring their friends.”

As the 1920s wore on, Hadden continued to consider new ideas and new potential publications, partly from an excess of energy and partly as a means to counter his boredom once Time was up and running. A page from his notebook marked “Expansion” shows his consideration of future projects, including a fiction magazine, a business magazine, a sports magazine, and a women’s magazine. Many of the items on Hadden’s list did eventually materialize as future Time publications, though Hadden saw few of these projects come to fruition.

Six years after the first issue of Time magazine was submitted to the publishers, Hadden unexpectedly died of blood poisoning at the age of 31. Within two weeks of his death, Hadden’s name was removed from the Time masthead, and within a year, Hadden’s stock in the company (left to his mother in his will) was dissolved through the formation of a syndicate. Henry Luce infrequently mentioned his business partner’s name in subsequent years, and Luce was largely remembered as the sole founder and driving force of Time. Nevertheless, it was the foundation built by Luce and Hadden, and the distinct rhetoric Hadden developed in the early days of Time that fundamentally changed the way stories were written and told by journalists for years to come.

The Time Inc. records are part of the manuscript and archival collections held by the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society.  To learn more about the Library’s holdings and to plan a visit, please visit the website.

– Grace Wagner, March 3, 2023

Grace Wagner is a Reference Librarian at the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society. She has a background in archives and special collections librarianship and has previously worked at Syracuse University's Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Seward Family Digital Archive. She holds a MLIS degree from Simmons University and a BA in history and English from the University of Rochester. For more New-York Historical Society content, you can follow the From the Stacks blog and @nyhistory on Instagram.

TAGS: magazines, media, journalism, news, print culture