Read The Publisher for Free Online Page B

Everyone recovered, and Harry avoided the disease altogether. In mid-July he was back at Yale for more training. And a few weeks later he and seven other members of his ROTC troop (including Hadden) were shipped off to Camp Jackson, South Carolina—a mammoth army training base with a capacity for one hundred thousand men. The Yale trainees were now themselves assigned to train new recruits as artillerymen. 33
    As “student officers” charged with preparing fresh recruits for battle, Harry and Brit came into prolonged contact for the first time with Americans from outside their own relatively insular social world—young men with limited education from the rural backwaters of the South, many of them away from their home counties for the first time in their lives. These “hillbillies,” as the Yale men called them, often knew nothing about the war. “All they knew,” Harry recalled years later, “was that Uncle Sam had somehow been insulted.” And so the officers, who were no older than their troops, not only had to train their men to operate artillery but also to give them lectures several times a week explaining the reasons for the war. “They were on the edge of their chairs,” Harry liked to remember, and they displayed an impressive “eagerness to do the right thing.” They did not even bridle when Harry explained to them the uses of a toothbrush, something many of them had never seen before.
    The few months Harry and Brit spent at Camp Jackson occupy an important place in the considerable corporate mythology of Time Inc. Various official and quasi-official histories of the company claim that Luce and Hadden, struck by the eagerness of provincial people for knowledge of the world, decided at Camp Jackson to start a magazine or newspaper that would help educate the uninformed. They allegedly took long walks together during idle hours and began to imagine the new kind of journalism that would eventually transform the soldiers’ lives. That Luce and Hadden talked about a magazine at Camp Jackson is almost certainly true, but nothing in Harry’s writings at the time, or in his subsequent reminiscences, supports the claim that the people under their command had any impact on the way they thought about the venture. Nor did the subsequent history of his magazines, none of which targeted the kind of people he had encountered at Camp Jackson. Luce’s own accounts at the time say nothing about the magazine but describe how he plunged wholeheartedly into the world of the army—viewing it as he had viewed school and college, as an opportunity for achievement and distinction. 34
    Harry reported to his parents on his performance on military tests—math, geometry, languages—as if he were describing a semester at Hotchkiss. He searched eagerly for signs that the Yale unit was excelling. “The seven Yale men assigned here, even if I do say it, do pretty well on their job,” he wrote after his first weeks in camp. “Consequently we have little difficulty in making the best showing of any of the twelve batteries…. Several high officers have said that the progress made by this organization in the first twelve day period bests any they have seen. Consequently we are all very much elated.” The great dream of all the Yale men was to receive formal commissions, a dream thwarted at first by the requirement that all officers had to be at least twenty-one; none of Harry’s group was older than twenty. But a few weeks after their arrival in South Carolina the army lowered the age limit, and the Yale contingent was marched en masse (along with a great many other student officers) to a swearing-in ceremony. “You can scarcely [imagine what this] means to me and all the others,” he told his parents shortly before the event. “It will be the consummation of a great deal of hitherto unrecognized work. We have been college boys training! People that didn’t know probably laughed at our safe and sound uniforms. But, boy—if