Document Type
Article
Abstract
Fortune, a magazine intended to chronicle American industrial life, evolved from employing broadly apolitical writers who were critical and disdainful of his business readership, to drawing upon "interstitial intellectuals", pursuing their own literary, political, and intellectual interests from the spaces they created and defended within corporate organizations. Fortune's assumptions provided concrete support for the New Deal and its expansive new role for the government, sometimes legitimating more radical demands. Crucial to Fortune's success was the self-identification of its journalists as intellectuals. Luce could not impose his own vision for Fortune's journalism on his writers. In contrast their primary commitment was intellectual and they held a commitment to their own intellectual independence, yet unlike later intellectuals who turned this independence into a fetish, they believed they could act unimpeded from within the interstices of large institution. They were willing to fight to see their vision represented in the magazine, and their success was crucial in making Fortune what it was.
Repository Citation
Vanderlan, Robert. "Telling the Truth in the Headquarters of Lying: Intellectuals Writing for Fortune Magazine in the 1930s." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–25. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/12