Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 9

Fortune Magazine in the 1930s

dollar's worth of advertising in Fortune purchased 92.8 readers, as
compared to 140 in the New Yorker and 282.8 in Time. Nonetheless,
selling advertising space in Fortune was quite easy. During the first
year o f Fortune's existence, there was a money-back guarantee for
advertising in the new publication.®
Even Luce's left-wing critics largely agreed that, in contrast to
common business journalistic practice of the time. Fortune's editors
stood up to big corporations who threatened to cancel their
advertising—sometimes in all Time, Inc. magazines—when they were
unhappy with a story. This was in marked contrast to the rampant
puffery in so many advertising-hungry publications of the Depression
era.® Fortune's publishers also prom is^ to "give its subscribers the
most beautiful magazine yet attempted in this country—so strikingly
illustrated that nearly every page will be a work of art."^ Shrewdly
selected photographs, portraits, maps and drawings richly
illustrated the text. Luce hired Thomas Maitland Cleland, a wellknown typographer and art director, to design the page lay-out (11 x
14 inches). Among the famed artists who were commissioned to
provide paintings and etchings for Fortune's covers and inside pages
were Rockwell Kent, Edward Wilson, and even Diego Rivera, who
illustrated a feature story in October 1938 on the ongoing Mexican
revolution. Miss Margaret Bourke-White (well-known industrial
photographer) and Erich Solomon (who coined the phrase "CandidCamera") were hired as permanent staff photographers to provide
action-oriented pictures of industrial enterprise. Printed on richly
textured paper designed to eliminate eye glare, its cover was of such
heavy stock that the first issue weighed almost two pounds. Fortune
was indeed a lavish publication with great artistic as well as
literary merit.
If Fortune represented a triumph of artistic journalism, it also
achieved its promise of high literary standards. In assembling his
writers for Fortune, Luce decided to hire a permanent writing staff,
who at Time were young men fresh from Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton. Although many did not know at first how to read a balance
sheet. Luce believed that talented amateurs and poets make better
business journalists than glorified bookkeepers.®
The senior writing staff included such names as Archibald
MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald, James Gould Cozzens, James Agee, and
the poet Russell Davenport. As Eric Hodgins, editor in the mid-1930s