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- <text id=93TT1083>
- <title>
- Mar. 08, 1993: From The Publisher
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Mar. 08, 1993 The Search for the Tower Bomber
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- FROM THE PUBLISHER, Page 4
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> It was past midnight when Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden and
- their colleagues jammed themselves into three taxis and drove
- to a printing plant in downtown Manhattan. Working till dawn,
- they wrote copy to fill holes and supplied captions for illustrations
- that years later were described as looking as though they had
- been engraved on pieces of bread.
- </p>
- <p> Those were heady hours. Luce and Hadden, recently out of Yale,
- had struggled for about a year scrounging up financial backing
- to launch a radically new idea in journalism: a weekly newsmagazine
- that aimed to summarize world events and organize them in pithy
- style. Now editors Luce and Hadden were putting to press the
- first issue of TIME, with House Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon on
- the cover. "It wasn't bad at all," Luce wrote later. "In fact,
- it was quite good. Somehow it all held together--it made sense,
- it was interesting."
- </p>
- <p> That edition was dated March 3, 1923--70 years ago this week.
- Through all those decades, this magazine has changed in both
- style and appearance many times. The news has changed too, but
- a glance at the headlines of 1923 is a reminder that many events
- suggest a certain eerie sameness while others show how far the
- U.S. has progressed.
- </p>
- <p> A presidential Administration (Harding's) was reeling in a welter
- of scandal, most of it dealing with accusations of graft. The
- anticipated federal deficit was--are you ready?--$180 million
- and, according to Washington--ready again?--soon would be
- wiped out. The government reported that the U.S. (pop. 111,947,000)
- had 10 million registered passenger cars and 20,550,000 horses.
- A helicopter stayed aloft at 15 feet for 2 minutes and 45 seconds.
- Southern blacks, hounded by poverty and a rampaging Ku Klux
- Klan, were moving to the North in large numbers.
- </p>
- <p> Inventor C. Francis Jenkins demonstrated his "long-distance
- cinema" by transmitting "still" pictures over radio waves from
- Washington to Philadelphia. U.S. Navy astronomer Captain Thomas
- Jefferson Jackson See denounced Albert Einstein as a fraud.
- Birth control was a subject of passionate debate, and in fact
- was forbidden under the U.S. penal code ("Every obscene, lewd
- or lascivious book...designed for preventing conception
- or producing abortion...is hereby declared to be non-mailable
- matter"). As this last item suggests, some attitudes do change.
- What has not changed in 70 years, however, is our determination
- to ensure that TIME still holds together, makes sense, stays
- interesting.
- </p>
- <p> Elizabeth Valk Long
- </p>
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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