A History: To See And Know Everything

Through most of an eventful and extraordinarily successful life, Henry Luce--the co-founder of TIME and its undisputed leader for nearly 40 years--was not a wholly contented man. He was unsuccessful in his marriages; intermittently estranged from members of his family; frequently dismayed by the directions in which his nation, and the world, were moving. But what most concerned him was the gap he always saw between his own actions and the high purposes against which he measured them. He achieved great power, wealth and fame, and he was by any measure one of the most influential figures in the nation. But Luce was not satisfied with conventional success of whatever magnitude. He had higher, perhaps unattainable, aims that he had absorbed in his youth and retained until his death.

Luce was born in 1898 in Tengchow (now P'eng-lai), China, where his father--a Presbyterian minister and missionary--headed a small college for Chinese converts to Christianity. Harry spent his entire childhood in China, except for one or two trips to visit relatives in the U.S. Like most missionary families, the Luces lived not among the Chinese but inside walled compounds, alongside other American and English clergy. The contrast between the ordered world of the missionary community and the harsh social and physical landscape outside it reinforced the assumptions driving the missionary project in China: the unquestioned belief in the moral superiority of Christianity and the cultural superiority of America; and the commitment to show the way not just to the love of Christ but also to a modern, scientific social order. The image of America that Luce had as a child was the idealized one his father and other missionaries created to justify their work. It was an image Luce never wholly abandoned.

Luce emerged from his youth with a deep sense of moral certainty matched by his unquenchable ambition and limitless curiosity. At an early age he began to crave books of all kinds. And he developed an almost obsessive attraction to travel. In 1913, at 15, he journeyed alone through Europe for four months before returning to the U.S. for prep school. He was, he said, "a fanatical sightseer," and he visited cities, museums and other sites with a relentless and methodical efficiency. That thirst for knowledge and experience--at times, it seemed, an almost undifferentiated thirst, a quest to see and know about everything, large and small, important and arcane--helped determine the direction of his career.

Luce spent the next seven years ensconced in all-male, all-white, overwhelmingly Protestant institutions of the American upper class: first Hotchkiss, then Yale (where he joined that bastion of the Establishment, Skull and Bones). Luce was active in student journalism in both schools--and in the process formed an intimate relationship with Briton Hadden, the classmate, friend and frequent rival with whom he would found TIME. Having encountered America first as an abstraction, Luce encountered it after 1913 as a member of a self-proclaimed enlightened elite, among boys and young men trained from an early age to think of themselves as natural social leaders.