In Brief: Henry Luce and LIFE Magazine

Before the internet and before even television, Henry Luce’s LIFE magazine served as the nation’s family album—documenting the grotesque, the wonderful, and the thrilling during times of both war and peace. By the close of the 1930s, it had supplanted Popular Mechanics—the bible for teen-aged boys taking shop classes—by enlarging, glorifying, and explaining, with stunning full-page pictures, what was happening in science—particularly American advances in science. During World War II, it documented the London blitz and the power of a new weapon: bomb-carrying rockets. In the 1950s, LIFE took postwar Americans, most of them still living in small towns, on voyeuristic journeys into the living rooms of the rich—showcasing, for example, the Ford family of Grosse Pointe in a January 1953 pictorial, and introducing important Eisenhower administration cabinet members to an increasingly prosperous and confident United States.

Most of all, LIFE gave its vast reading audience spectacular close-ups of human beings under extreme conditions: Men dropped from balloons in the stratosphere, men on rocket sleds, women (LIFE called them “ladies”) in borrowed spacesuits, men too, and the mice and chimpanzees who preceded them all in to spaceflight. With its direct, page-turning appeal, LIFE struck a chord with the American people.

In 1959, with the selection of the seven Project Mercury astronauts (and with network television poised to take LIFE’s place in American homes), Henry Luce speedily arranged for the exclusive rights to the personal stories of the astronauts and their wives (see Rene Carpenter’s account here). At his command were some of the best editors, writers, and photographers working at the time—managing editor Ed Thompson; photo and layout editor Marian MacPhail; writer-editors Loudon Wainwright, Don Schanche, and John Dille; and of course Ralph Morse, photographer.