TIME at 60: A Letter From The Editor-In-Chief

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The atom was still unsplit. So were most marriages. Movies were silent, television existed only in the laboratory, and a "byte," however you spelled it, had to do with food, not information. Freud was becoming an unsettling household word, although the U.S. was not yet his colony. Hitler was still widely regarded as a hysterical Munich beer-hall brawler who could have benefited from Freud's treatment. In headlines "holocaust" was only a word for a large fire. Japan's chief export was raw silk. The jet set did not yet exist; its precursor, the smart set, took a week to cross the Atlantic. The juxtaposition of "man" and "moon" was strictly fantasy.

That was the world in which TIME was born.

It was a scrawny excuse for a magazine, 32 pages, with pictures looking, according to one wit, as if they had been engraved on pieces of bread, the red border of the cover still far in the future. Even the name had been a problem. Facts was the early working title. There had been other suggestions—Briefs, Hours, Destiny, Chance. The editorial staff fitted easily into three taxis to go to the printing plant. There, in an all-night siege "amid torn newspapers, fried-egg sandwiches and smudged proof sheets," according to a later account, the first issue was put to bed. And yet when the 24-year-old Henry Luce, co-founder of the magazine with Briton Hadden, looked at the result the next afternoon, he was pleasantly surprised: "It was quite good. Somehow it all held together."

Not everyone agreed with Luce's estimate. Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, called the idea of condensing news "disgusting and disgraceful." But Franklin D. Roosevelt praised the new creation, and so did Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. At any rate, TIME caught on, and it became part of the American and world scene, its presence reaffirmed in humor, fiction and legend. Its early style with its inverted prose and piled-up adjectives was endlessly spoofed, notably in a parody by Wolcott Gibbs in The New Yorker ("Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind)."

In 1940 a William Saroyan play, Love's Old Sweet Song, offered a character who sold TIME subscriptions and reinforced his pitch by reciting the euphonious glories of the magazine's masthead ("Carlton J. Balliett Jr., Robert Cantwell, Laird S. Goldsborough . . ."). In 1977 an angry protest novel by Robert Coover, The Public Burning, described TIME, ironically, as the national poet laureate. In a current Broadway musical, My One and Only, the hero dreams of being on the cover of TIME. In a recent song Billy Joel is more ambiguous:

All your life

All your life

Is Time Magazine.

I read it too

What does it mean ?

One thing it means is that not many institutions launched 60 years ago have survived, thrived and become part of folklore years ago have survived, thrived and become part of folklore. Without undue self-congratulation, and with much gratitude to our readers, we are proud that TIME did. We like to think that it happened, in part, because America and TIME developed and grew up together.