Walter Lippmann

Lippmann was born on New York's Upper East Side as the only child of Jewish parents of German origin and, as his biographer Ronald Steel writes, grew up in a "gilded Jewish ghetto".[13] His father Jacob Lippmann was a rentier who had become wealthy through his father's textile business and his father-in-law's real estate speculation. His mother, Daisy Baum, who like her husband came from modest economic circumstances, had graduated from the renowned Hunter College. The wealthy and influential family belonged to the upper social class, cultivated contacts in the highest circles and regularly spent their summer holidays in Europe. The family had a reform Jewish orientation; averse to "orientalism", they visited the temple Emanu-El. He had his reform Jewish confirmation instead of the traditional Bar Mitzvah at the age of 14. Lippmann was emotionally distanced from both parents—he had closer ties to his maternal grandmother. The political orientation of the family was Republican.[14]

From 1896 Lippmann attended the Sachs School for Boys, followed by the Sachs Collegiate Institute, an elitist and strictly secular private school in the German Gymnasium tradition, attended primarily by children of German-Jewish families and run by the classical philologist Dr. Julius Sachs, a son-in-law of Marcus Goldmann from the Goldman-Sachs family. Classes included 11 hours of ancient Greek and 5 hours of Latin per week.[15]

Shortly before his 17th birthday, he entered Harvard University where he wrote for The Harvard Crimson[16] and studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas, concentrating upon philosophy, history and languages (he spoke German and French). He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society,[17] but important social clubs rejected Jews as members.[18]

He left university shortly before taking his master's degree.

Lippmann became a member, alongside Sinclair Lewis, of the New York Socialist Party.[19] In 1911, Lippmann served as secretary to George R. Lunn, the first Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York, during Lunn's first term. Lippmann resigned his post after four months, finding Lunn's programs to be worthwhile in and of themselves, but inadequate as Socialism.[20]

Lippmann in 1914, shortly after the establishment of The New Republic

Lippmann was a journalist, a media critic and an amateur philosopher who tried to reconcile the tensions between liberty and democracy in a complex and modern world, as in his 1920 book Liberty and the News.[21] In 1913, Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl became the founding editors of The New Republic.

During the war, Lippmann was commissioned a captain in the Army on June 28, 1918, and was assigned to the intelligence section of the AEF headquarters in France. He was assigned to the staff of Edward M. House in October and attached to the American Commission to negotiate peace in December. He returned to the United States in February 1919 and was immediately discharged.[22]

Through his connection to House, he became an adviser to Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points speech. He sharply criticized George Creel, whom the President appointed to head wartime propaganda efforts at the Committee on Public Information. While he was prepared to curb his liberal instincts because of the war, saying he had "no doctrinaire belief in free speech," he nonetheless advised Wilson that censorship should "never be entrusted to anyone who is not himself tolerant, nor to anyone who is unacquainted with the long record of folly which is the history of suppression."[23]

Lippmann examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuracies and other problems. He and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, stated that The New York Times' coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution was biased and inaccurate. In addition to his newspaper column "Today and Tomorrow", he wrote several books.

Lippmann was the first to bring the phrase "cold war" to a common currency, in his 1947 book by the same name.

It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. He argued that people, including journalists, are more apt to believe "the pictures in their heads" than to come to judgment by critical thinking. Humans condense ideas into symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public. Even if journalists did better jobs of informing the public about important issues, Lippmann believed "the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation." Citizens, he wrote, were too self-centered to care about public policy except as pertaining to pressing local issues.

Following the removal from office of Secretary of Commerce (and former Vice President of the United States) Henry A. Wallace in September 1946, Lippmann became the leading public advocate of the need to respect a Soviet sphere of influence in Europe, as opposed to the containment strategy being advocated at the time by George F. Kennan.

Lippmann was an informal adviser to several presidents.[24] On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson presented Lippmann with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.[25] He later had a rather famous feud with Johnson over his handling of the Vietnam War of which Lippmann had become highly critical.[26]

He won a special Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1958, as a nationally syndicated columnist, citing "the wisdom, perception and high sense of responsibility with which he has commented for many years on national and international affairs."[4] Four years later he won the annual Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting citing "his 1961 interview with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, as illustrative of Lippmann's long and distinguished contribution to American journalism."[5]

Lippmann retired from his syndicated column in 1967.[27]

Lippmann died in New York City due to cardiac arrest in 1974.[28][2]

He was mentioned in the monologue before Phil Ochs' recording of "The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo" on the 1966 album Phil Ochs in Concert.

Though a journalist himself, Lippmann did not assume that news and truth are synonymous. For Lippmann, the "function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act." A journalist's version of the truth is subjective and limited to how they construct their reality. The news, therefore, is "imperfectly recorded" and too fragile to bear the charge as "an organ of direct democracy."

To Lippmann, democratic ideals had deteriorated: voters were largely ignorant about issues and policies and lacked the competence to participate in public life and cared little for participating in the political process. In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann noted that modern realities threatened the stability that the government had achieved during the patronage era of the 19th century. He wrote that a "governing class" must rise to face the new challenges.

The basic problem of democracy, he wrote, was the accuracy of news and protection of sources. He argued that distorted information was inherent in the human mind. People make up their minds before they define the facts, while the ideal would be to gather and analyze the facts before reaching conclusions. By seeing first, he argued, it is possible to sanitize polluted information. Lippmann argued that interpretation as stereotypes (a word which he coined in that specific meaning) subjected us to partial truths. Lippmann called the notion of a public competent to direct public affairs a "false ideal." He compared the political savvy of an average man to a theater-goer walking into a play in the middle of the third act and leaving before the last curtain.

Lippmann was an early and influential commentator on mass culture, notable not for criticizing or rejecting mass culture entirely but discussing how it could be worked with by a government licensed "propaganda machine" to keep democracy functioning. In his first book on the subject, Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann said that mass man functioned as a "bewildered herd" who must be governed by "a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality." The élite class of intellectuals and experts were to be a machinery of knowledge to circumvent the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the "omnicompetent citizen". This attitude was in line with contemporary capitalism, which was made stronger by greater consumption.

Later, in The Phantom Public (1925), Lippmann recognized that the class of experts were also, in most respects, outsiders to any particular problem, and hence not capable of effective action. Philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) agreed with Lippmann's assertions that the modern world was becoming too complex for every citizen to grasp all its aspects, but Dewey, unlike Lippmann, believed that the public (a composite of many "publics" within society) could form a "Great Community" that could become educated about issues, come to judgments and arrive at solutions to societal problems.

In 1943, George Seldes described Lippmann as one of the two most influential columnists in the United States.[31][32]

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Lippmann became even more skeptical of the "guiding" class. In The Public Philosophy (1955), which took almost twenty years to complete, he presented a sophisticated argument that intellectual elites were undermining the framework of democracy.[33] The book was very poorly received in liberal circles.[34]

The Walter Lippmann House at Harvard University, which houses the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, is named after him.

Lippmann was married twice, the first time from 1917 to 1937 to Faye Albertson (*23 March 1893-17 March 1975). Faye Albertson was the daughter of Ralph Albertson, a pastor of the Congregational Church. He was one of the pioneers of Christian socialism and the social gospel movement in the spirit of George Herron. During his studies at Harvard, Walter often visited the Albertsons' estate in West Newbury, Massachusetts, where they had founded a socialist cooperative, the (Cyrus Field) Willard Cooperative Colony. Faye Albertson married Jesse Heatley after the divorce in 1940.

Lippmann was divorced by Faye Albertson to be able to marry Helen Byrne Armstrong in 1938 (died 16 February 1974), daughter of James Byrne. She divorced her husband Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, a close friend of Lippmann, in the same year. The friendship and involvement in Foreign Affairs ended with the love affair with Armstrong's wife.

Lippmann was very discreet in personal matters. There is no record of any correspondence with his first wife. He rarely dealt with his personal past.

• Harold Lasswell
• Edward Bernays
• Progressivism
• Liberal democracy

Articles

• Baker, Matt. "Walter Lippmann: How to Cure Liberal Democracy, Then and Now" The American Interest, November 19, 2019.
• Clavé, Francis. "Comparative Study of Lippmann's and Hayek's Liberalisms (or Neo-liberalisms)." The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 22, Issue 6, 2015, pp. 978–999. doi:10.1080/09672567.2015.1093522
• Jackson, Ben. "Freedom, the Common Good, and the Rule of Law: Lippmann and Hayek on Economic Planning." Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 72, 2012, pp. 47–68. doi:10.1080/09592296.2011.625803
• Whitfield, Stephen J. "Part IV: The Journalist as Intellectual. Walter Lippmann: A Career in Media's Rays." Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1981, pp. 68-77. doi:10.1111/j.0022-3840.1981.1502_68.x
• Porter, Patrick. "Beyond the American Century: Walter Lippmann and American Grand Strategy, 1943–1950." Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 22, No. 4, 2011, pp. 557-577.
• Seyb, Ronald P. "What Walter Saw: Walter Lippmann, the New York World, and Scientific Advocacy as an Alternative to the News-Opinion Dichotomy." Journalism History, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2015, pp. 58+.

Book reviews

• McPerson, Harry C. Review of "Walter Lippmann and the American Century," by Ronald Steel. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 55, No. 1, Fall 1980. doi:10.2307/20040658

Books

• Adams, Larry Lee. Walter Lippmann. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977. ISBN 978-0805777093
• Forcey, Charles. The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. LCCN 61--8370
• Goodwin, Craufurd D. Walter Lippmann: Public Economist. Harvard University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0674368132
• Riccio, Barry D. Walter Lippmann: Odyssey of a Liberal. Transaction Publishers, 1994. ISBN 978-1560000969
• Walter Lippmann: philosopher-journalist by Edward L. Schapsmeier and Frederick H. Schapsmeier (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1969)
• Steel, Ronald. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Little, Brown & Co., 1980. ISBN 978-0765804648
  • Foreign Affairs review.
• Wasniewski, Matthew A. "Walter Lippmann, Strategic Internationalism, the Cold War, and Vietnam, 1943-1967" (Ph.D. dissertation). University of Maryland, 2004.
• Wellborn, Charles. Twentieth Century Pilgrimage: Walter Lippmann and the Public Philosophy. LSU Press, 1969. ISBN 0807103039
• Wright, Benjamin F. Five Public Philosophies of Walter Lippmann. University of Texas Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0292724075

Primary sources

• Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985.
• Rossiter, Clinton, and James Lare (eds.). The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.