"Too Many Young Men Who Smoke Pipes": Time, Inc. and the Interst itial Intellectual

Abstract

"Too Many Young Men Who Smoke Pipes":Time, Inc. and the Interst itial Intellectual Jennifer Burns (bio) Robert Vanderlan . Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce's Media Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 392 pp. Illustrations, archival sources, notes, and index. $49.95. In this insightful revisionist history, Robert Vanderlan uses a biographical and cultural approach to challenge idealized visions of the American intellectual as a detached seeker of truth floating loftily above the fray of commercial life, arguing instead for a vision of the "interstitial" intellectual who works most productively and consequentially while embedded in institutions, in this case Henry Luce's Time, Inc. As case studies, Vanderlan selects a varied cast of both leading lights and lesser-known writers and photographers, from Walker Evans to Daniel Bell. All of them worked for Luce at various points in time, and Vanderlan shows that Luce was both censor and muse. Luce did not give his writers free rein, intending his magazines to portray his views rather than theirs. But this was a productive tension, Vanderlan argues, for as they pushed back against the boss, the interstitial intellectuals developed "perspectives, ideas, arguments, and criticisms unavailable to intellectuals working from outside this corporate environment" (p. 3). Moreover, they found in Luce's magazines a way to resolve the deep ambivalence many felt "about the value of living an intellectual life divorced from practical concerns" (p. 11). Rather than see their work for Luce as mere "selling out," Vanderlan argues that something far more complex was happening when lauded poets, essayists, and photographers signed on to Time, Life, and Fortune. Assessing their cultural and political impact, he suggests in closing that more was lost than gained when their peers in later generations turned from the crass commercialism of mass-market magazines to the quiet groves of academe. Vanderlan uses the biographical approach to tease apart the thicket of motives that drew intellectuals to Time, Inc. In the first place, he notes pragmatically that even those who live on ideas need bread, too. But, more significantly, his careful attention to context and archive helps establish that writers such as Archibald MacLeish and Dwight MacDonald joined Luce's empire for reasons other than pecuniary ones. Examining the history of MacLeish's [End Page 101] work for Fortune magazine, for example, he establishes that MacLeish had begun working for Luce prior to the stock-market crash that later biographers used to explain his decision. What, then, drew him and the others to Time, Inc.? While Vanderlan's subjects might need their daily bread like everyone else, almost more urgent was their need for influence and status. In deft biographical sketches, Vanderlan traces the path of MacLeish, MacDonald, and Time editor T. S. Matthews through comfortable childhoods, prep school high-jinks, and Ivy League literary pretensions. This was an elite group of men, raised in comfort and trained for power. Nor were they immune to the broader cultural celebration of business in the 1920s. Their love for literature could mitigate, but never overcome, this class background. Many struggled with the feeling that intellectual life was somehow "inconsequential" (p. 59). These were suppositions Luce shared, and he used them to skillfully draw writers into his empire, offering them "a double identity as both creative writers and well paid professionals" (p. 31). Working for Luce allowed writers to at once embrace their intellectual aspirations, achieve the success expected by their families, and exercise the cultural and political leadership they had been bred to assume. Most were recruited to Fortune, Luce's pet project, which quickly assumed an important and unexpected role as a critic of corporate capitalism amid the Great Depression. When Luce founded Fortune in 1929, he intended it to advance an ideal of enlightened corporate stewardship. Instead, pushed leftward by the tide of events and the intellectuals Luce had brought aboard, Fortune became a magazine that, at least in its early years, helped legitimate "a historic shift in American politics, away from the private and corporate control Luce had advocated and toward the acceptance of a new set of social rights protected by an expanded federal government" (p. 91). Fortune provides Vanderlan's...