TIME'S People and TIME'S Children

Today's news may be about the French budget, or the Atomic Energy Commission, or tax proposals in Congress. People, however, still make the news, just as they did when the women met around the well.

TIME'S attempts to help the reader "see" the people who make the news has rarely, if ever, approached Carlyle's famous characterization of Robespierre, the "seagreen incorruptible." Gone are the days when TIME'S pages were exclusively inhabited by a jut-jawed, bucktoothed, moose-tall, haystack-haired race. "TIME style" served a purpose; it used a showman's trick to call attention to the fact that TIME had a style of editing and thinking, that TIME was not a jumble of "eye-terns," but an integrated report "as if by one man for one man."

TIME'S determination to tell the news, whenever it can, through people, is as strong as ever. "Human interest" is not only the most interesting kind of news, it is also the "truest," i.e., the nearest approach to the way events actually happen. In casual conversation, people sometimes reveal more about the news than in set speeches or ponderous books. Millions of words have been written in the past 15 years about the personality of Franklin Roosevelt. In March 1933, the week he was inaugurated President, TIME printed a brief quotation from his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt. It summed up two viewpoints on that quality in him which his friends called decisiveness and his enemies called arbitrariness. Here is the quotation: "Franklin had a great habit of ordering his playmates around and was generally permitted to have his way. Once I said to him: 'My son, don't give the orders all of the time. Let the other boys give them sometimes.' 'Mummie,' he said, lifting a soil-streaked face, 'if I didn't give the orders nothing would happen!'"

In the 1920s business news was especially depersonalized. To get business out of the dusty gloom of the financial pages, to tell what one TIME editor called "the vast and lurid and exciting and beautiful bibliography of balance sheets," TIME broke new ground. It went to great pains to get a picture of Sosthenes Behn (the only available picture had a beard which he had shaved long before), and introduced the Hartford brothers to their A. & P. stores' customers. Out of those efforts grew FORTUNE. Even in its early years, TIME was highly selective about the three-inch, one-column portraits of people which were then the only kind of illustration TIME used. It tried for pictures (not always flattering) which brought out the salient characteristics of a personality. A very simple principle was added: if the story told about a man in wrath, TIME chose a picture of him looking angry; if, in the story, he had reason to rejoice, the picture smiled. Years ago, Edward Steichen, master of photography, made this comment: "Depending chiefly on one class of material, press portraits, and in spite of an apparently casual and insignificant display, these portraits have become one of the most dynamic features of the magazine."

In June 1933, TIME published its first picture supplement. The unphotogenic occasion: the London Economic Conference.

TIME was trying to prove in pictures as well as words that important, "pig iron" news could be made graphic. A year later TIME ran two pages from a Fox Movietone reel of the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. Out of these experiments grew the idea of LIFE.

MARCH OF TIME (Radio), MARCH OP TIME (Cinema), both developed by Roy E. Larsen (TIME'S first non-editorial employee, now president of TIME Inc.), are projections of TIME'S journalistic ideas.

TIME has stressed its interest in people by putting a picture of a person on almost every one of its 1,360 covers. Some exceptions: Cartographer Bob Chapin's maps of Paris (Sept. 4, 1944) and Jerusalem (Aug. 26, 1946), Japan's setting sun (Aug. 20, 1945). TIME covers are a special responsibility of Assistant Managing Editor Dana Tasker. He presides at weekly cover conferences at which editors pick cover subjects, sometimes weeks, sometimes months in advance. Then he and one of the three cover artists--Ernest Hamlin Baker, Boris Artzybasheff and Boris Chaliapin--decide on the symbolism to accompany the portrait (e.g., for Petrillo, a foot stepping on a pile of phonograph records). Most TIME cover stories are written and edited by the regular staffs of the section in which they appear. Certain cover stories, that present special difficulties or call for a special literary skill, are written by Senior Editor Whittaker Chambers. Some Chambers cover stories: Marian Anderson, Arnold Toynbee, Rebecca West, this week's Niebuhr story.

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