David Cranmer Underdown Profile picture

May 21, 2021, 34 tweets

Henry Luce was born in Tengchow (now Penglai), Shandong, China, on April 3, 1898, the son of Elizabeth Root Luce and Henry Winters Luce, who was a Presbyterian missionary.

Henry W. Luce graduated from Yale University in 1892. After graduation, he stayed at Union Seminary in New York for 2 years, before his seminary training at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1896.[1]
In 1897, Luce married Elizabeth Root, was ordained, and sent to China by the

Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions.[1] In total, he spent 31 years in the country with Elizabeth, and where their four children were born, Henry, Emmavail, Elisabeth, and Sheldon.[2]
Luce was a professor at Cheeloo University in Jinan, China, where he led fundraising efforts

and served as vice president for a short time. He also helped to initiate the Yale-in-China Association. In 1928, he accepted a professorship at the Kennedy School of Missions in Hartford, Connecticut. He held this position until his retirement in 1935.

With the arrival of Dr. Edward H. Hume in 1905, medical education and care became a major focus of the endeavor. The educational compound that began with Dr. Hume's medical clinic eventually grew to comprise a preparatory school, the Yali School; the College of Yale-in-China

(later moved to Wuhan, where it joined two other missionary colleges to form Huachung University); and the Hsiang-Ya Medical College, Nursing School and Hospital. Over the years, Hsiang-Ya (a compound of hsiang, denoting Hunan, and ya, denoting Yale-China; transliterated today as

Xiangya) developed a reputation for providing the most advanced training in Western medicine in all of central and southern China. More than at other foreign-affiliated institutions, an effort was made early on to bring as many Chinese faculty and administrators on board as

possible. By the late 1920s, all major leadership positions were held by Chinese, and Yale-in-China was very much a joint Sino-American enterprise.
Between 1919 and 1920, future Chairman Mao Zedong had several encounters with the school: he edited its student magazine, re-

focusing it on "thought reorientation," and operated a bookshop out of its medical college.

Warner Media, LLC, doing business as WarnerMedia, is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate corporation owned by AT&T and headquartered in New York City,

United States. It was originally formed in 1990 from the merger of Time Inc. and the original Warner Communications, and was formerly known as Time Warner during 1990–2001 and 2003–2018.

From 1973 to 1977, Barr was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency during his schooling years. He then served as a law clerk to judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey. In the 1980s, Barr worked for the law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, sandwiching a year's work in the

White House of the Ronald Reagan administration dealing with legal policies. Before becoming Attorney General in 1991, Barr held numerous other posts within the Department of Justice, including leading the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and serving as Deputy Attorney General.

From 1994 to 2008, Barr did corporate legal work for GTE and its successor company Verizon Communications, which made him a multimillionaire. From 2009 to 2018, Barr served on the board of directors for Time Warner.

Luce, supported by Editor-in-Chief T. S. Matthews, appointed Whittaker Chambers as acting Foreign News editor in 1944, despite the feuds that Chambers had with reporters in the field.[6]
Luce, who remained editor-in-chief of all his publications until 1964, maintained a position

as an influential member of the Republican Party.[7] An instrumental figure behind the so-called "China Lobby", he played a large role in steering American foreign policy and popular sentiment in favor of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, in their

war against the Japanese. (The Chiangs appeared in the cover of Time eleven times between 1927 and 1955.[8])

Once ambitious to become Secretary of State in a Republican administration, Luce penned a famous article in Life magazine in 1941, called "The American Century", which defined the role of American foreign policy for the remainder of the 20th century (and perhaps beyond).[7]

An ardent anti-Soviet, he once demanded John Kennedy invade Cuba, later to remark to his editors that if he did not, his corporation would act like Hearst during the Spanish–American War. The publisher would advance his concepts of US dominance of the "American Century"

through his periodicals with the ideals shared and guided by members of his social circle, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State and his brother, director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. Designed by I. M. Pei, the Luce Memorial Chapel, on the campus of Tunghai University, Taiwan,

was constructed in memoriam of Henry Luce's father.
Henry R. Luce Hall at Yale University, home to the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, was erected by the Henry R. Luce foundation in his honor. After a tour of Europe with her mother and stepfather,

Dr. Albert E. Austin, whom Ann Boothe married in 1919, she became interested in the women's suffrage movement, and she was hired by Alva Belmont to work for the National Woman's Party in Washington, D.C. and Seneca Falls, New York. Alva Erskine Belmont (née Smith; January 17,

1853 – January 26, 1933), known as Alva Vanderbilt from 1875 to 1896, was a prominent multi-millionaire American socialite and a major figure in the American women's suffrage movement. Alva maneuvered Consuelo into marrying Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough, on

November 6, 1895. The marriage was annulled much later, at the Duke's request and Consuelo's assent, in May 1921. The annulment was fully supported by Alva, who testified that she had forced Consuelo into the marriage.

An oft-repeated story tells that Vanderbilt felt she had been snubbed by Caroline Astor, queen of "The 400" elite of New York society, so she purposely neglected to send an invitation to her housewarming ball, a dress ball of about 750 guests,[7] to Astor's popular daughter,

Carrie. Supposedly, this forced Astor to come calling, in order to secure an invitation to the ball for her daughter

Alva remarried on January 11, 1896, to Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, one of her ex-husband's old friends.[12] Oliver had been a friend of the Vanderbilts since the

late 1880s and like William was a great fan of yachting and horseraces. He had accompanied them on at least two long voyages aboard their yacht the Alva. Scholars have written that it seems to have been obvious to many that he and Alva were attracted to one another upon their

return from one such voyage in 1889. He was the son of August Belmont, a successful Jewish investment banker for the Rothschild family, and Caroline Perry, the daughter of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry.

Johnson was very active in the Republican Party. His first leave of absence, in 1948, was to work with the Dewey presidential campaign. His second leave of absence, in 1952, was to help create the United States Information Agency at the request of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In 1960 he worked for the Nixon presidential campaign and helped to form various other local republican groups. Four main divisions existed at the beginning of the USIA's propaganda effort.[5] The first division dealt with broadcasting information both in the United States and

around the world. One of the most widely used forms of media at the onset of the Cold War was the radio. The Smith–Mundt Act authorized information programs, including Voice of America.[12] Voice of America was intended as an unbiased and balanced "Voice from America" as

originally broadcast during World War II. The VOA was used to "tell America's stories ... to information deprived listeners behind the Iron Curtain".[2] By 1967, the VOA was broadcasting in 38 languages to up to 26 million listeners.[6] In 1976 VOA gained its so-called "Charter"

which required its news to be balanced. The second division of the USIA consisted of libraries and exhibits. The Smith–Mundt Act and the Fulbright–Hays Act of 1961 both authorized the international cultural and educational exchanges (the Fulbright Scholarship Program).

The USIA's third division included press services. Within its first two decades the "USIA publishe[d] sixty-six magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals, totaling almost 30 million copies annually, in twenty-eight languages".[6] The fourth division dealt with the motion

picture service. After the USIA's failed attempts to collaborate with Hollywood filmmakers to portray America in a positive light, the agency began producing their own documentaries.

Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.

A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.

Keep scrolling