Lessons from the Optimistic Past

Curation, optimism, and perseverance in the early days of TIME Magazine

Feb 14, 2024

LUSITANIA SUNK BY A SUBMARINE, PROBABLY 1,000 DEAD.

Thus began the lead story in the New York Times on May 8, 19151. It had been roughly nine months since the beginning of the Great War, but despite repeated warnings against travel near Irish waters, the British ship Lusitania bound from New York to Liverpool was sunk by a German U-Boat. More than a hundred American lives were lost.

Two years later, American president Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany. In the following months, thousands rallied together to serve their nation.

Two such men were Briton Hadden and Henry Luce.

As student-officers in Yale’s Reserve Officer Training Corps, they entered Camp Jackson, South Carolina, to give instructions to the draftees flooding the army ranks.

There, they made a stark realization.

Luce recalls giving a lecture to his platoon: “I told them the story of the sinking of the Lusitania, just what I remembered from my reading of the New York Times. They had never heard the story and they were on the edge of their chairs.”2

Hadden and Luce realized that their fellow Americans were poorly informed of current events. Luce particularly was shaken at the idea that men were going off to fight a war about which they knew so little.

Although they didn’t yet realize it, the seeds of TIME magazine had been planted.

As the war ended, both Hadden and Luce went their separate ways — following their interests in journalism. Over the coming years, they kept returning to the same problem: most of their peers were ill-informed about the world.

It wasn’t for lack of material. By this time, America was already awash in a sea of print, with many publications, magazines, and periodicals vying for the attention of the people. However, few of these focused on truly ‘informing’ their readers. Instead, they would comment on arbitrarily selected subjects and stories, sometimes at a length that did not befit the busy schedule of the working men and women of America.

Some chose not to comment at all, but to entertain and provoke — after all, this was the Roaring Twenties, the era when the tabloid was born.3 Joseph Medill Patterson’s The New York Daily News in 1919, and William Randolph Hearst’s The New York Daily Mirror in 1924 spread sensationalist stories, while the stories of The New York Evening Graphic fed on corner-alley sex murders.

State of the newspaper world in the 1920s

Hadden and Luce sniffed opportunity. They quit their jobs in 1922 and began to build their own solution to the news industry’s problems.

On March 3, 1923, the first issue of TIME Magazine was published.

Curation Station

“TIME is interested—not in how much it includes between its covers—but in HOW MUCH IT GETS OFF ITS PAGES INTO THE MINDS OF ITS READERS.”

- TIME’s Prospectus (April 26, 1922)

TIME Magazine launched with a promise: “to keep men well-informed.”

From this promise sprang a strong editorial voice that aimed to give ordinary citizens the valuable knowledge of a statesman. This required the ability not only to identify valuable information but to discard that which had no use.

Selectiveness, discernment, and taste were the name of the game. In early adverts for TIME, Roy E. Larsen4 wrote that “The man who takes life intelligently does not limit his interests, but carefully selects his reading”5:

“What is essential? What is most interesting? What momentous occurrence or trivial incident is significant?
TIME admits to a little pride in the fact that already men famed for their practical intelligence are ordering TIME because it appeals to their sense of the practical and to their sense of the intelligent.”

What is essential? What is most interesting? By using these two filters to sift through the never-ending deluge of information, early TIME magazine was engaged in a herculean act of curation.

A Dash of Optimism

There’s a beautiful quote in the beginning of Isaiah Wilner’s biography of TIME’s founders6:

Hadden and Luce launched their magazine in a time when a young nation stood open to the influence of adventurers and iconoclasts, people with new ideas of how the world should be run and the courage, ambition, and drive to make their dreams reality.

The world of 1920s America, when TIME magazine was founded, was a far-cry from our own. The Great War had just ended, and its destructive specter continued to loom over American minds. And yet, its founders — children of Teddy Roosevelt’s era of American confidence — imbued the magazine with an undercurrent of rational, pragmatic optimism.

Take, for example, the magazine’s “Point with Pride” section, in which the issue’s editors would highlight news items that made them proud. This section would always begin with the phrase: “After a cursory view of TIME’s summary of events, the Generous Citizens point with pride to…” and then list examples such as7:

The consistent integrity of the city council of Atlantic City, which insists that clothing ordinances be obeyed — even by statues.
The relaunching of the Leviathan, second largest ship afloat, by the U.S. Shipping Board.
George F. Baker. He “knows something about running banks.”

Can you imagine reading something like this in today’s mainstream publications?

The Agency of the Individual

TIME’s useful optimism was not always explicit — sometimes manifesting itself through its editorial voice.

Early issues tried to be economical with words, but as the ambitions of the founders grew, the tone of the pieces shifted and became more playful. In short, they started to have fun! Everybody got the free-wheeling TIME treatment, from old-school aristocrats to lynched men. Descriptive adjectives multiplied, always striking a fine balance between terseness of idea and boldness of style. For example: George Bernard Shaw was described as “mocking, mordant, misanthropic”. Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., was introduced as an “able, active scion of an able, active line”.

This language wasn’t just stylistic. It was designed to bring focus back on the individual, these small people who end up making history even as they were a part of it. Henry Luce would later recall:

We tried to make our readers see and hear and even smell these people as part of a better understanding of their ideas—or lack of them.

Hadden and Luce fully acknowledged the role of the individual in history. The world as they saw it could be changed by the actions of a single person. The most explicit acknowledgement of this view was the magazine cover — early ones were almost always adorned by pictures of high-agency men.

Inside, the magazine took every opportunity to recount tales of people: artists, preachers, sailors, librarians, museum curators, scientists. The July 10, 1939 issue notes the story of a Yale research associate who took it upon himself to compile a list of all the studies being done by researchers in the humanities. Two pages before that, TIME mentions an address given by Herbert Clark Hoover Jr, geophysicist and petroleum engineer, on seismographic methods for prospecting. Two opposite profiles, linked not by domain but by attitude: curious, determined, agentic.

Product-Market Fit

Before he started TIME magazine, Briton Hadden went looking for work at New York’s World magazine. He made his way to the desk of World’s executive editor and asked him for a job. He was repeatedly asked to leave. Finally, Hadden said:

“you’re interfering with my destiny.”

He was hired.

The early years of TIME are littered with stories like this. Studying its founding is to receive a masterclass in grit and perseverance.

This was a time without electronics — ink and paper ruled. Publishing the latest issue wasn’t as simple as pressing a button; you had to travel to grimy parts of town — where the printers were — to make sure things were coming out correctly. Distribution was a different game; without the internet’s network effects, the founders had to resort to old-school methods — get the magazine into the hands of a select few with trial subscriptions (and hope they actually pay).

“I settled down and burned the midnight oil writing letters to cajole them into paying. We kept mailing and billing. Lord knows how long we kept on mailing”, wrote Roy Larsen.

They were even met with a cold reception from advertisers, who were unwilling to bet on an upstart magazine.

And yet, the founders persevered. Amid the chaos, they maintained a remarkable clarity of vision.

After the completion of TIME’s first six month’s issues (which they bound together into ‘Vol. I’), they received some encouraging reviews. Colonel House, Woodrow Wilson’s wartime adviser, wrote that the magazine “filled a long-felt need”. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt replied:

“I am glad that Time is proving a success and I feel certain that it will grow in popularity…I think I can say that I have found interesting information in all sections.”

TIME would indeed grow in popularity—and financial success would follow. From a minuscule profit of $674.15 in their first year of operation, by 1930 they were doing ~$125,000 in profit, and it would only grow from there.

The fundamental principle holds true today: if your product is outstanding and you execute well, success is only a matter of time.

Sound Familiar?

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a few parallels in this story.

Today, we are drowning in a sea of content. We hear about news, announcements, earnings reports, marriages, deaths. We are assaulted but rarely informed. Nuggets of valuable signal are shrouded in layers of noise.

The news is overwhelmingly negative.

Individuals with the courage, and yes, the ambition, to try and change the world are scoffed at and dismissed.

In the age of our Great Reshuffle, TIME may not have the same fervor and force that it used to, but for those of us who are now starting media institutions of our own, there are apt lessons to be learnt from its archives.

Like TIME, we believe that curation might be the cure for our informational malaise. One curator with impeccable taste can inform, educate, and inspire their audience in a fraction of the time it would take to otherwise sift through thousands of articles, videos, and blog posts.

Like TIME, we believe in finding things to root for, not to root against.

Like TIME, we believe in the power of the individual to change the future.

Curation of great ideas, a dash of optimism, an embrace of agency, and an unshakeable perseverance can build lasting institutions that can stand the test of time.

After all, “Hadden’s ideas were so influential that a single page from one notebook found among his belongings after his death would serve as a virtual road map of Time Inc. during the next half-century”.

So – what are you cooking in your notebook?

My special thanks to

Ed William

— who took an ax and chopped off huge chunks of my early drafts. His culling greatly improved the tone and structure of this piece!