February 1930 – Henry Luce begins publishing Fortune.
Henry Luce had started Time magazine with the first issue on March 3, 1923 . The cover depicted Republican Speaker Joseph Gurney. But in the 1920s, Luce had noticed the number of business stories the magazine had been forced to scrap because there wasn’t enough space. With the fast-growing economy of the decade and the growth of investing, Luce thought that a monthly business magazine could accomplish what his weekly news magazine had already achieved – provide a wide variety of readers across America with a better understanding of the news and issues that affected their lives.
Luce originally wanted to call his business publication Power, but was convinced to call it Fortune by his first wife. In a prospectus for the magazine, Luce wrote, “Where is the publication that even attempts to portray Business in all its heroic present-day proportions, or that succeeds in conveying a sustained sense of the challenging personalities, significant trends, and high excitements of this vastly stirring Civilization of Business?”
Two major events in 1929 could have killed the new business magazine. The first was the death of Briton Hadden, Luce’s business partner who was not enthused about the project. Another interpretation of Hadden’s death is that Luce might have had clearer sailing without Hadden’s opposition, so his death could have strengthened the magazine's chance at survival, not lessened it. The second was the October 1929 stock market crash, which would severely curtail interest in business information for the next decade as the country entered into a major depression. The board of Luce’s company tried to dissuade him from starting Fortune. And even after the market crashed, Luce believed the magazine’s odds of success were just 50 percent.
His idea was to produce a magazine unlike no other. The covers would contain striking art from some of the country’s leading artists. The fist cover was sketched on a tablecloth in a speakeasy in lower Manhattan by Thomas Maitland Cleland, at the time one of the country’s leading experts on typefaces and design. The photography inside would be the best in the world. Margaret Bourke-White, who later became a famous photographer, was the first staff photographer for Fortune. The graphics and charts would help explain technical points of stories. And the writing would also be the best – Luce hired writers such as Archibald MacLeish and John Kenneth Galbraith to pen its stories. When approached by Luce to write for the magazine, MacLeish replied that he knew nothing about business. Indeed, many of the writers had no experience in writing about business. But they were writers who could take arcane business subjects and explain them to anyone.
The first issue appeared in February 1930 and carried a cost of $1, with an annual subscription worth $10, a large sum for readers in a shrinking economy. But the magazine was definitely visually appealing. It contained stories on the meat packing and glass industries, the Biltmore Hotel and Arthur Curtis James, then one of the richest men in the world. Other article subjects were a study of entertainment giant RCA and how to live in Manhattan on $25,000 a year. At 184 pages, more than half of the magazine contained advertisements.