Now the News Is Happening to Us

You want to talk about direct mail copy? Nothing can beat a series of letters sent by Time magazine during the early years of World War II.

The first one was dated Feb. 10, 1940, during the so-called Phony War.

Dear Reader,

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.

Forgive them their naiveté. The letter noted that only 114 English soldiers have died in this war to hold the Germans at the Maginot Line—but they have stopped Hitler just as surely as 700,000 killed and wounded Frenchmen stopped the Kaiser at Verdun.

Not quite true, but the letter was prescient in some respects. Hitler, it said, “may launch his Blitzkrieg over England through the air; he may send 2,000,000 men through Holland to outflank the French; he may drive north to seek a new Poland in Scandinavia; he may turn again against Stalin, taking advantage of Russia’s military weakness to build a Nazi empire in the Ukraine!”

Continue reading the rest of this letter.

Some of that happened, and the mood was different in the letter dated Spring 1940. It had no salutation.

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.

Continue reading the rest of this letter.

Things quickly got worse, judging by the next letter, dated June 3:

Dear American,

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 in the whole world has changed.

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

The enclosed card will being you TIME for these hundred days for only $1.00.

Continue reading the rest of this letter.

This was the real thing. And the copy reached a dramatic peak on Sept. 20:

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 needs to be reminded that keeping thoughtfully well-informed is a personal duty.

The only question is how—and many people have found the one best answer to that question in TIME, the Weekly Newsmagazine.

Continue reading the rest of this letter.

Think that was a great lead? Here’s another, sent that October:

Dear 1940 Graduate:

Your class graduated right into the middle of the greatest world crisis in five generations!

The offer? A Year of Time for only $3.50. (The regular rate was $5.)

All of these letters were accompanied by a return airmail envelope.

Continue reading the rest of this letter.

When it comes to drama, though, nothing tops the opening featured in a letter mailed in December 1941, three weeks after Pearl Harbor:

Dear American:

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.

Continue reading the rest of this letter.

We’ll save the wartime letters (“How would you punish Hitler? Would you boil him in oil?”) and postwar ones (“Joe Stalin drinks his vodka straight”) for another piece. Rest assured the copywriters never lost their touch.