March 3, 1923, 100 years ago: Time magazine debuts, with a cover featuring Joseph G. Cannon, a Republican from Illinois, who had been Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1903 to 1911.
Founded by a pair of Yale University classmates, Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden, it quickly became America's leading news magazine.
Hadden fell victim to a strep infection, and, with antibiotics not yet possible, died on February 27, 1929, a few days after his 31st birthday. Before he died, he signed a will, which left all of his stock in Time Inc. to his mother, and forbade his family from selling those shares for 49 years.
That didn't stop Luce: Within a year, he had formed a syndicate that gained hold of Hadden's stock. He took Hadden's name off the magazine's masthead. He took control of Hadden's personal papers, and claimed credit for Hadden's ideas, including the introduction of Time's annual Man of the Year, first awarded in 1927, to pilot Charles Lindbergh.
In 1936, Luce founded Life magazine, which became a picture magazine, to appeal to people who weren't interested in the in-depth articles that Time was publishing. He built Time-Life, Inc. into a publishing empire that would eventually include, among other magazines, Fortune and Sports Illustrated.
And he used this empire to push conservative Republican causes, including opposing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's liberal "New Deal," and also Nationalist China, as Luce had been born in China to Christian missionaries, and was deeply anti-Communist. Fortunately, he hated the Nazis in equal measure.
Luce died in 1967. Afterward, the company restored Hadden's name to the masthead, and restored his historical reputation as well.
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