• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, March 2, 2023

Time magazine sent its first direct mail piece around the time of its launch in 1923. A simple typewritten letter, it promised that the magazine would cram into its 24 pages “a complete account of the week’s developments in politics, art, science, foreign news, sport, books, and all the other things that interest you.”

That was only the start of Time’s century-long work in direct mail, an effort that would reach a creative peak during the years around World War II. The copy, especially resonant given today’s events, provides an eloquent running history of the global crisis, and we share it here in honor of Time's Centennial. 

This is America’s year, Time said in a letter dated Jan. 2, 1940 and signed by  circulation manager Perry Prentice. 

All over Europe the lights are going out. All over Europe the nights are dark with fear. 

But here in America the nights are bright with the lights of a thousand factories as America starts back to work after the long depression -- bright with the lights of a thousand laboratories whose discoveries may change the course of history and all the ways of our living -- bright with the lights of forty-million homes, where Americans are newly confident that they can find and conquer new frontiers in the American way. 

Yes--this is America’s year -- so this is the year you need TIME most.

That was soon followed by:

Time has been banned in Germany! 

Banned in Russia! Banned in Italy! Banned in Japan! 

But here in America, where men are still free to think and learn the truth -- thousands upon thousands of new families are turning to TIME each week to help them make the confusing news and war and peace make sense. 

In February, at the height of the Phony War, Time sent a direct-mail piece, saying: 

This is the dullest war in history... 

FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT! 

But it’s a tremendously exciting, moving, portentous war for those who know and understand what is really going on... 

...tremendously exciting for the readers of TIME. 

Two months later, with Hitler now on the march, recipients read this stark reminder: 

When kingdoms vanish in the night...

and nations wake to find the enemy within their gates...

Millions of people snap up each extra as it comes off the press and scan each headline in fear and horror - as puzzled children turn to parents for reassurance and explanation. 

The real war had started. And in June, Time reported this:

The Nazi Blitzkrieg has swept like a flame –

--over Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Northern France.

In eight short weeks kingdoms and governments have fallen, peoples have been subjugated, the balance of power of the whole world has changed. 

It cannot go on much longer, many experts say -- the next hundred days should tell the story. 

In September, Time continued:

Dear American

Ours is the tragic privilege —

The tragic privilege of living and taking part in the greatest worldwide military crisis since Napoleon, the greatest American election crisis since Lincoln, the greatest economic crisis since Adam Smith. 

And in times like these, when the news is so confusing and so dramatic and so immediately important -- no American need be reminded that keeping thoughtfully well-informed is a personal duty. 

In 1941, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the U.S. into the war, Time sent this piece:

And now the news is happening to us.

Its unpredictable turns and changes are altering the whole course of your life -- the job you work at, the town you live in, the clothes you wear and the food you eat. 

The news is happening to you in the Pacific -- and sudden developments in Malaya and the China Sea, at Singapore and off San Francisco, in Tokyo and Manila and the Dutch East Indies can change your life more than you can possibly change it yourself. 

The news is happening to you across the Atlantic -- where Russia bleeds Germany white, where American tanks fight the Axis in Libya, where Britain waits tense for an attempted invasion – and your life and my life, the safety of our families and the future of our children all wait on tomorrow’s news. 

The news is happening to you at home -- where new laws and new regulations pour out of Washington – where entire industries are changing over to war production, where uniforms fill the streets and the whole nation moves with a new unity and determination.

Yes, the news is the biggest things in our lives today – stirring and vital and very near us all. And it is very confusing. 

And that is why this is the year you need TIME most. 

Time had a staff of brilliant (and party loving) direct-mail copywriters whose salaries Henry Luce paid when they served during the war. And with the war over, they engaged in mischief. For instance, they sent the following letter on crumpled-up paper: 

 Dear American: 

This is the way this letter might look (after it had been fished out of the wastebasket and somewhat smoothed) if I had sent it to Andrei Vishinsky or Maurice Thorez or Ana Pauker. 

For this is an invitation to subscribe to TIME--and Communists have as little respect for honest journalism as they have opportunity to read it. 

It’s not clear how the team achieved the crumpled-up paper effect. Time also sent a burnt letter that had to be burned with a blowtorch, according to writer and later copy chief Frank Johnson.

Weren’t these stunts just a little expensive? “Time Inc was making money like crazy, so we never asked what anything would cost,” Johnson answered in 1999. “We used to look back at what we had done and say, ‘My God, we were damned fools.'”

Note: These pieces were researched at the old Time archive with the permission of archivist Bill Hooper.