RIPOSTES
61
No. 1 of
Time, The Weekly Newsmaga–
zine.
Schooled for his high task at Hotch–
kiss and Yale, armed with fat checks
from people with names like Harkness
and Lamont and Iselin, young Harry
Luce made his journalistic debut at a
dramatically inappropriate time. Just as
Fortune,
founded to ballyhoo Success
and the Romance of Business, appeared
a few weeks after the 1929 market
crash, so
Time,
born with a strong belief
in the Divine Rightness of government
by Business, materialized just as the
scandals of the Harding Administration
were beginning to ooze into the public
press. This first issue of
Time
contains
no hint of the widespreading corrup–
tion which five months later was to
bring President Harding to his grave.
Keynote of the "National Affairs" sec–
tion is: Congress is about to adjourn–
Thank God! The first article on page 1
of this Vol. 1, No. 1 begins: "Seeking
only the nation's welfare, Mr. Harding
has suffered defeat at the hands of Con–
gress." It concludes: "Today Mr. Har–
ding is prepared to draw a deep breath,
for Congressional politics will soon drop
over the horizon. After a short holiday
in
Florida he will gather about him the
business men of his cabinet and con–
tinue to manage the affairs of the na–
tion, untrammelled until a new Con–
gress rises-from the West."
Thus smart young Harry Luce and
his smart young editors got off to a
good start. In the rest of their first issue,
they give further evidence of their
capacity to speak for The
Time
Com–
munity. Specifically, they-
-give "three good reasons" why
President Harding will not call a special
session of Congress during the nine–
month recess:
"1.
The President and
Mr. Hughes can develop a foreign
policy more easily without Congress
than with. 2. The new Congress will
generate new opposition to the Presi–
dent in both home and foreign affairs.
3. Business is happier when the Capitol
is deserted. Legislation and rumors of
legislation cause prices to fluctuate."
(Best reason of all, No. 4, not men–
tioned: lest Congress find out what was
going on among the "business men" of
the Cabinet.)
-pay a sentimental tribute to "Uncle
Joe" Cannon (whose portrait adorns
the cover), onetime dictator of the
House of Representatives: "He re–
presents the Old Guard in the very
flower of its maturity, in the palmy
days of McKinley and Mark Hanna,
when 'a little group of wilful men' did
more than make the gestures of gov–
ernment; they actually ruled Congress,
shrewdly, impregnably, and without too
much rhetoric. . . . The American
people . . . will long for the homely
democracy of Mr. Cannon, so often ex–
pressed by those homely democratic
symbols-Uncle Joe's black cigar and
thumping quid."
- pronounce a lengthy elegy over the
notorious Theophile Delcasse, most
chauvinist and imperialistic of pre-War
French politicians: "A statesman whose
diplomacy saved his country from ul–
timate destruction. . . . Without Del–
casse France might now be a German
province and Foch a refugee."
-settle the hash of two literary
pranksters (James Joyce and T. S.
Eliot) in an article headlined: "Has
the R eader Any Rights Before the Bar
of Literature?" Excerpts: "There is a
new kind of literature abroad in the
land, whose only obvious fault is that
no one can understand it. Last year
there appeared a gigantic volume en–
titled
Ulysses
by James Joyce. To the
uninitiated, it appeared that Mr. Joyce
had taken some half million assorted
words-many such as are not ordinarily
heard in reputable circles-shaken
them up in a colossal hat, laid them end
to end....
The Dial
has awarded its
$2,000 prize for the best poem of 1922
to an opus entitled
The Waste Land,
by T. S. Eliot.... It is rumored that
The Waste Land
was written as a
hoax." (·Serious authors, on the other
hand, find
Time's
editors quite sym–
pathetic.) A novel by Gertrude Ather–
ton called
Black Oxen
receives twice as
much space as Messers. Joyce and Eliot
combined. "Valuable as an examina–
tion of social strata and their relation–
ship," pronounce the editors, vaguely
but respectfully. And a work by Arthur
Train (of "Mr. Tutt" fame) called
His Children's Children,
despite its
radical implications, extorts their ad–
miration: "Whatever the accuracy of
its depressing picture of modern so-
