Authors: Alan Brinkley
The Publisher (31 page)
“And now the question,” Luce wrote in a crude early prospectus. “What’s going to be
in
this magazine?” Luce, Lloyd-Smith, and the few others who worked on the creation of
Fortune
spent days, even months, proposing and testing story ideas. Luce himself used his few idle hours—sitting in hotel lobbies, riding on trains—listing potential topics on scraps of borrowed stationery: “the Rothschilds,” “Inheritance—the Family Business,” the “Biggest Farmers in the World,” “Total value of art works in the U.S.,” “Sleep—how many hours,” the “Power Trust,” “Sewage,” “Why Jews in clothing business?” According to another early prospectus
Fortune
would be “not simply a magazine to look at or through.” Like
Time
it would be “a magazine to read from cover-to-cover.”
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Fortune
did not set out to be a cheerleader for businessmen. But it did intend to elevate the importance of business in the minds of its readers. “Accurately, vividly and concretely to describe Modern Business is the greatest journalistic assignment in history,” Luce’s prospectus announced. Even years later
Fortune
described itself as “a magazine with a mission. That mission is to assist in the successful development of American Business Enterprise at home and abroad.” But the real story of business, Luce insisted, was not simply industry and financial markets. It was “the daily activity of millions of men throughout the country and
throughout the world.”
Fortune
would look beyond the obvious stories of great corporations and their leaders and search for opportunities to illuminate the workings of economic life. In a sense, therefore,
Fortune’s
charge was nearly without limits. It would be “the log-book, the critical history, the … record of Twentieth Century industrial civilization.” It would also, Luce insisted, be without ideological boundaries. “Not always flattering will be these descriptions,” the prospectus announced (in high
Time
style), for
Fortune
“is neither puffer or booster. Both of ships and of men,
Fortune
will attempt to write critically, appraisingly … with unbridled curiosity.” Reading
Fortune
, moreover, “may be one of the keenest pleasures in the life of every subscriber.”
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As the publication date approached in late 1929, there was something close to euphoria about the rapid progress
Fortune
was making toward profitability, even before a single issue had been printed. Larsen reported to Luce in early November that there were now thirty thousand subscribers and that nearly eight hundred pages of advertising had been sold, with more than eighty pages already committed to the first issue alone. The magazine, he accurately predicted, would “break even for the year 1930.” The rapid deterioration of the American economy after the October 1929 stock market crash only slightly dampened Luce’s optimism. “We will go ahead and publish,” he told the board, “but we shall be realistic…. We shall recognize that this slump may last as long as one year.” Luce never wavered in his commitment to proceed, and he even persuaded himself that the emerging Depression might be a good thing for the magazine, whose first issue was published in February 1930. “We didn’t want
Fortune
thought of as stock market fluff,” he later recalled. “In starting out in a slump we had a more solid base.”
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Fortune
was indeed not stock market fluff. Although it went through several distinct phases in its first decade, it remained true to many of its initial goals. It was almost certainly, as Luce had hoped, the most beautiful broad-circulation magazine in America. It was also a true writer’s magazine. Although its language sometimes mimicked
Time
’s, there was no consistent effort to impose a single literary style on
Fortune
. That was one reason that it attracted so many distinguished staff writers in its first years: James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald, among many others. Another reason was the relatively high salaries Luce offered in the midst of an economic crisis. (“We have absolutely nothing now but what I earn here,” MacLeish, who missed his poetry but on the whole rather liked writing for the magazine, wrote his family in a low moment, “and … it has meant that I have written nothing [except for
Fortune
] for a year. Which I cannot endure.”)
Fortune
was also distinguished by its commitment to photography, so much so that in its early years it promoted itself to a large degree by showcasing a woman who would become its most famous staff photographer, Margaret Bourke-White.
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Bourke-White came to the attention of
Fortune
by chance. She had been among the first American photographers to show an interest in industrial design. A series of striking pictures she took in Cleveland between 1928 and 1930—including a particularly impressive set of images of the Otis Steel Company—established her reputation as, in Luce’s words, the “greatest of industrial photographers.” (“It seems to me,” Bourke-White wrote at the time, “that huge machinery, steel girders, locomotives, etc., are so extremely beautiful because they were never meant to be beautiful. They are an expression of something that has come about in a perfectly natural way.”) Luce wired her in Cleveland and invited her to come to see him. Within a few weeks
Fortune
had hired her on unusual terms. She would work half-time for the magazine at the substantial salary of one thousand dollars a month and would have the remaining weeks to work on her own. Few photographers had achieved widespread fame by 1929; Bourke-White herself was still largely unknown. But Luce saw in her an opportunity to provide a new kind of star power to
Fortune
, and he began publicizing her association with the magazine as if she were already famous. Promotional literature in the months before publication contained full-page photographs—such as a picture of a steel mill that “imprisons the glow of molten metal”—credited to “The Photographer: Margaret Bourke-White of
Fortune
’s staff, now touring the U.S.” She was, she later said, impressed by Luce’s sophisticated understanding of what photographs could do and his curiosity about “what the average man is interested in. As though he was a sort of super-average man.” She remembered Luce telling her that “the camera would be as an interpreter, recording what modern industrial civilization is, how it looks, how it meshes.” It was almost “miraculous,” she later said, that a magazine could so perfectly capture her own ambitious hopes—“I with my dream of portraying industry in photographs, and they with their new magazine designed to hold just such photographs.”
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Time Inc. was not accustomed to hiring women for high-profile positions. Talented women abounded in the company, but almost never did they emerge from the virtually all-female research and clerical staffs, which—while indispensable to the magazines—were rarely considered pools from which to draw writers and editors. Bourke-White was among
the first women to break that mold, and she was able to do so only because the company had never before hired professional photographers and could, despite her growing fame, consider her in some way outside the core editorial activities of the magazines. Perhaps as a result of her anomalous position, she and her editors were almost always in conflict—about money, about the quality of her photographs, about her “inappropriate” work for other publications. Her reputation with the editorial staff was, one editor wrote, someone who caused “troubles and headaches wherever she operates.” And yet through the early years of
Fortune
(and later
Life
), she provided some of the most memorable and important images the magazines ever published, and she became in many ways more renowned (and more marketable) than any other editorial employee.
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Among the qualities that made Bourke-White so valuable to
Fortune
was that her own photographic aesthetic coincided with—and also helped to shape—an important aspect of the magazine: Luce’s own fascination with and admiration for what was coming to be known as the “machine age.” Just as Bourke-White had found herself drawn to the physical structures of modernity in Cleveland, so Luce, and his
Fortune
staff, were enthralled by the new social aesthetic that the modern industrial world was creating. Their enthusiasm for the beauty and power of technology was visible in the first issue of
Fortune
, in which Bourke-White provided photographs of the Swift Meatpacking Plant in Chicago. A factory that was, in essence, a slaughterhouse would seem an unlikely example of the new machine age. But Bourke-White’s pictures revealed the state-of-the-art technology of the slaughterhouses with few glimpses of the carnage. Her opening photograph—accompanying an elaborate and clinical diagram of a hog’s various cuts of meat—provided an almost abstract image of a vast herd of hog backs, nearly unrecognizable as living animals. Even the more conventional photographs of pigs moving through the plant emphasized the orderly, almost mechanical process. The text of the article, by Parker Lloyd-Smith, was similarly dispassionate in its description of the efficiency, and even the beauty, of the grisly process. The hogs that arrived at the Swift plant were, Lloyd-Smith wrote, “beautifully assembled mechanisms…. By countless individual acts of destruction, Swift & Company paradoxically increases the value of products which are the result of countless individual acts of creation.”
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Fortune
’s admiring portrait of Swift had a special meaning, because Swift was the meatpacking giant that twenty-four years earlier had been a target of Upton Sinclair’s sensational novel
The Jungle
. Sinclair had
used the meatpacking industry as a symbol of the greedy, rapacious, and chaotic character of American industry. He was particularly effective in providing revolting depictions of the slaughterhouses, and especially accounts of how sausages were made:
There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it … a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats…. the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.
The book created a popular sensation and led directly to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which imposed new sanitary standards on the industry.
Fortune’s
very different portrait of Swift deliberately reflected the broad, “modern” changes in meatpacking that Sinclair had helped create. The choice of Swift as the first article in the first issue of
Fortune
was also designed more broadly to contrast the character of modern industries from the unregulated, inefficient factories of a generation earlier. And it was also a deliberate effort to draw a contrast between the hostile muckraking of the Progressive Era and the more professionalized journalism of Luce’s world.
Fortune’s
Swift was no longer a “jungle” but a model of modern, progressive technology:
Here is a mechanical saw which grinds through the shoulder; there is a draw knife like a curved adz which scoops out the loin. Hundreds of white-sleeved arms swing back and forth. Hundreds of funnels gulp the morsels the knives flip aside. Some gulp lean trimmings; these will make sausage. Some gulp fats; these will make lard. Down one chute go the hams … down another go the shoulders.
In its clean, modern, clinical language, Lloyd-Smith seemed purposely to contrast his description with the censorious, emotional language of
The Jungle.
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Fortune
continued to feature striking examples of industrial design
and productive efficiency throughout the 1930s: a story about the creation of an “ideal factory … in which the employees would work under optimum conditions as regards their five senses;” an article on the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, praising “this new, artistic generation … fixed not on the past … but strictly on the present…. modern aestheticism must embrace the machine with all its innuendos;” a utopian essay on functionalism in home design (“Machines for Living”) by Lewis Mumford; a dramatic full-page Margaret Bourke-White photograph of the Chrysler Building under construction as it awaited its “sheathing in Nirosta Steel.” In an unsigned editorial in May 1933,
Fortune
attacked the antimodern claims of H. L. Mencken that the machine age was destroying the “sense of the continent” and its literature. In an era of aviation and industrial transformation, the
Fortune
editorial replied, “the sense of America, the sense of the continent revives. And as always in the civilization of industrialism it revives not by a return to an earlier and simpler life but by a further complication.”
Fortune
’s enthusiasm for the machine-age aesthetic was also visible in its fascination with serious artists who chose modern industrialism as their subjects. One example was a full-page painting by Charles Sheeler of the Ford Plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Sheeler was renowned for his use of industrial scenes as timeless art, and the magazine embraced the ideology behind his style. “An artist, observing a factory, usually finds in it some symbol of industrial grandeur, oppression, or monotony,” the caption explained. “Charles Sheeler, whose calm and meticulous Fordscape appears on this page, has another approach. He looks at the Ford plant as it is; enjoys its patterns, shades, and movements; and its careless deductions.” Another was a 1931 article on a lesser-known artist, the sculptor Max Kalish, who came to
Fortune’s
attention because of his focus on “linemen and steel workers and iron forgers and electric workers.” His sculpture was a “reproach” to much American art. For it proved “that there exists in America the material for a primary and unspoiled [industrial] art.”
Fortune
, in short, was part of the broad effort of its age (and now of Luce) to legitimize modernism, to reward those who contributed to the rationalization of industry and commerce, and to celebrate the sleek new aesthetic that accompanied it.
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