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propaganda of materialism than American advertising. Is it therefore just plain and unqualifiably wrong in any serious, moral philosophy? No. Not at any rate in Christian morality. For Christian morality based on Christian theology does not separate matter and spirit into two worlds of evil and good. Concretely, it is the first job of Modern Living to show how the multiplicity of goods in an industrial age can be used towards relatively better rather than relatively worse taste. A broad the latitude is of course left to the winds of fashions, in clothes, food, architecture or anything else. Being so deeply involved in the contemporary, Life can't, for example, refuse to have anything to do with clothes if it thinks that contemporary fashions as a whole stink. But it can, without becoming hopelessly eccentric, choose the less bad among the bad, and with a combination of subtlety and earnestness try to point the way out of a period of bad taste in anything, toward good taste.”

This is 1946. Have any memories of this, of that department being--?

Yes. Maria Sermelino. That's when we hired Maria Sermelino, as I remember, and created the Modern Living Department. I don't think that Maria Sermelino or anybody else thought in theological terms about modern living. [they laugh] They just looked at what's hot and what's fun.

But in terms of this nexus between advertising--did the publishing side concern itself with the Modern Living Department?

No, no.

So this is just Henry Luce justifying what?

Just his theories. [laughter] He had theories about everything. Nothing was any good unless it could be phrased in theoretical terms.