Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
 Author Rick Perlstein's book should sit on the shelf of every aspiring progressive activist working to take over the Democratic Party. The book shows how a small, committed band of extreme right-wingers were able to take over a weak, divided Republican Party by articulating their values and working hard to mobilize people behind their candidate. When they were done, these right-wingers controlled the Republican Party and had transformed it from permanent minority status into the juggernaut that elected Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush. To purchase the book, click here.
Courage in Media: The Astounding Story of Time Magazine's Founding
Isaiah Wilner's new biography, The Man TIME Forgot, does for Time Magazine what Time Magazine did for the news - it is less concerned with "how much it includes between its covers - but in how much it gets off the pages into the minds of its readers." Wilner indeed gets his remarkable story off the pages - and how! Though the conflict and tragedy at the core of the book help make it a page turner, what really marks this book as a must-read are Wilner's stylistic innovations. He fuses the pioneering sumptuousness of Indian author Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things and the irreverence of the 1920's "Timestyle" in a way that transforms what might otherwise be a dry corporate history into a poetic delight. He's bringing the beauty of the Roy style to non-fiction, paying as much attention to the art of writing as to the information he's relating. But the style never obscures the fascinating epic at the core of the book. Instead, the sparkling sentences illuminate how the titanic personal and professional battle between Time's two founders generated a creative tension that was a prerequisite for Time's transformation of American journalism and the 20th century mind.
At the heart of Wilner's book is the story of the nearly-forgotten Britton Hadden, who along with the currently far more famous Henry Luce, founded Time in 1923. Despite Luce's later greater fame, it was Hadden who, as early as his grade school days, dreamt up the idea of a publication that would synthesize the infinite information available in the modern world into a series of pithy and irreverent stories full of personality and pictures. Hadden believed that such a presentation would break through the information overload afflicting Americans as early as the 1870's, and result in a more enlightened nation.
Of course, transforming such an idea into reality wasn't simple, even for two well-born Yale graduates who were members of the Skull and Bones secret society. Launching a national magazine was an expensive venture. Wilner's writing gives Hadden and Luce's hunt for capital the thrill of a hunt for a ticking time bomb. Under the spell of Wilner's prose, I found myself hanging on every meeting with a financier or wealthy family friend - hoping they'd raise the money to keep the magazine going, even though I already knew that they'd succeed.
But as Wilner details in this extraordinarily well-researched volume, Time had to overcome more than the skepticism of aging plutocrats to keep the magazine afloat. The thirty years prior to the founding of Time had seen an explosion of newspapers and magazines, and new media like movies and radio were beginning to compete for the populace's attention. Though nothing quite like Time existed, Hadden and Luce had to convince people who had never heard of their magazine that their product was different and better. They barnstormed the country, giving local chambers of commerce and university students a current events quiz, showing the local bigwigs, in front of their friends and colleagues, how uninformed about the world they were. In doing so, they almost embarrassed their audience into subscribing to Time. Hadden and Luce (and especially the more daring Hadden) also started publishing articles that attacked small and mid-size communities around the country, sometimes for racism, sometimes for corruption, and sometimes for sheer orneriness. When the local papers picked up Time's attacks, Time could count on an explosion of subscriptions, if not affection, in that city.
But the marketing strategy that resonates most is their concerted effort to make sure their readers were intimately engaged in the magazine; seventy years before the blog, Hadden recognized that winning a readership's loyalty would require readers to feel like they could have input into the magazine. Wilner relates how Hadden invented the modern letters-to-the-editor section and how he relished in particular letters attacking Time, figuring they would produce controversy and interest like his attacks on small-minded cities. Hadden even went so far as to invent letter writers when the real correspondents weren't provocative enough. He'd then publish mutual attacks of real and imagined letter-writers for weeks, creating an ongoing controversy within the paper.
Threaded throughout the extraordinary historical analysis of Time and its success is the gripping tale of the Hadden-Luce rivalry. From the moment they first met at the prestigious New England prep school Hotchkiss, Luce was always the leader of the two, and recognized as such. He had charm, wit, and a daring luminosity that drew peers, professors, and hordes of women to him. At Hotchkiss, he served as editor in chief of the school paper, while Luce worked under him. At Yale, he likewise bested the more reserved and conservative Luce in the contest for chairmanship of the Yale Daily News. And after graduation, it was he who invited Luce to join him in creating Time, and who came up with nearly all of the ideas that launched Time, and its sister magazines Life, Sports Illustrated, and many others to awesome success. But when Hadden died at the age of 31 as a result of a bacterial infection likely made worse by years of chain-smoking, heavy drinking, little food and little sleep, Luce betrayed him - largely writing him out of the history of Time magazine, and maneuvering to gain control of his Time stock against the wishes he expressed before his death. For the first time, Wilner exposes the betrayal and the complex emotions that underpinned it - delivering a story that redeems Hadden from his undeserved obscurity, and a style that should inspire readers and writers alike.
Get The Book
Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party is expected in Fall, 2007.
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