Walter Lippmann

• 1. Introduction

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  Walter Lippmann was born on the Upper East Side of New York City on the 23rd of September 1889, and by the time he died eighty-five years later, he had done something few journalists ever manage: he had changed the language people use to think. The word stereotype, in its modern psychological meaning, is his coinage. The phrase Cold War entered common currency through his 1947 book by the same name. And the question he kept returning to throughout a career spanning sixty years - whether ordinary people are actually capable of governing themselves - proved so provocative that it sparked a debate with philosopher John Dewey that scholars still argue about today. How did a boy from a wealthy German-Jewish family in New York become the man Michael Schudson describes, via James W. Carey, as the author of both the founding book of modern journalism and the founding book in American media studies? And what did Lippmann actually believe about democracy - the system he served his entire working life?

• 2. A Gilded Beginning

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  From 1896, Lippmann attended the Sachs School for Boys, then the Sachs Collegiate Institute, an elite and strictly secular private school run by the classical philologist Julius Sachs. Sachs was a son-in-law of Marcus Goldmann of the Goldman-Sachs family, and the school drew primarily from German-Jewish families. Students there absorbed eleven hours of ancient Greek per week and five hours of Latin. It was a formation built on close reading, precision of language, and the classical tradition.

  His biographer Ronald Steel described the household Lippmann grew up in as a gilded Jewish ghetto. His father Jacob Lippmann had built wealth through a grandfather's textile business and a father-in-law's real estate speculation; his mother Daisy Baum cultivated connections at the highest social levels and brought the family to Europe every summer. The family attended Temple Emanu-El, a Reform congregation with a studied distance from what they called orientalism. Walter had a Reform confirmation instead of a traditional Bar Mitzvah, at age fourteen. Despite this privileged setting, he was emotionally distant from both parents and found his closer bond with his maternal grandmother.

  Shortly before his seventeenth birthday, Lippmann entered Harvard. He studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas, concentrating on philosophy and languages. He already spoke German and French. Harvard's social clubs closed their doors to Jewish students, but the Phi Beta Kappa society did not, and Lippmann joined it. He also became a member, alongside Sinclair Lewis, of the New York chapter of the Socialist Party of America, which signals how early he began thinking about the problem of political power.

• 3. The Making of a Public Voice

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  In 1911, Lippmann served as secretary to George R. Lunn, the first Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York. He resigned after four months, concluding that Lunn's programs had merit on their own terms but fell short as socialism. The experience was formative: Lippmann learned that idealism in office collides with the texture of actual governance.

  By 1914, he had joined Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl as one of the three founding editors of The New Republic, a magazine built to reshape progressive thought. Four years later, on the 28th of June 1918, he was commissioned a captain in the Army and assigned to the intelligence section of the AEF headquarters in France. That October he moved to the staff of Edward M. House, and in December he was attached to the American Commission to negotiate peace. He returned to the United States in February 1919 and was immediately discharged.

  Through House, Lippmann became an adviser to Woodrow Wilson and helped draft Wilson's Fourteen Points speech. He also found his critical voice during the war years. He sharply criticized George Creel, the man Wilson appointed to head wartime propaganda at the Committee on Public Information. Though he told Wilson he had no doctrinaire belief in free speech, he advised 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. That advisory voice, privately insistent and publicly influential, would define his method for decades.

• 4. The Stereotype and the Herd

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  In 1920, Lippmann and Charles Merz published A Test of the News, a study that charged The New York Times with biased and inaccurate coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution. Two years later came Public Opinion, the book that James W. Carey later called the founding document of American media studies. Lippmann's central argument was uncomfortable: people make up their minds before they define the facts. The ideal runs the other direction, gathering facts first and reaching conclusions after.

  He coined the term stereotype in its modern psychological sense to describe how interpretation through fixed mental images subjected audiences to partial truths. He compared the political understanding of an average citizen to a theater-goer who walks in during the third act and leaves before the last curtain. News, he argued, is imperfectly recorded and too fragile to carry the charge as an organ of direct democracy.

  His solution was not to educate the masses but to install a class of experts. In Public Opinion, he called the ordinary voter part of a bewildered herd that required governance by a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality. By 1925, in The Phantom Public, he had begun to see the limits of even that remedy: experts, he acknowledged, are also outsiders to most problems and not always capable of effective action. Philosopher John Dewey pushed back in his 1927 book The Public and Its Problems. Dewey agreed the public could be irrational, but he rejected the need for a technocratic elite and insisted that a composite of publics could form what he called a Great Community capable of educating itself and reaching solutions. That exchange became retrospectively known as the Lippmann-Dewey Debate, and it began to attract wide attention in American communication studies circles by the late 1980s.

• 5. Power, War, and Geopolitics

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  After the fall of Singapore in February 1942, Lippmann wrote an influential Washington Post column calling on western nations to identify their cause with the freedom and security of the peoples of the East and purge themselves of white man's imperialism. The column appeared on the 12th of February 1942 and signaled his growing conviction that empire was not only immoral but strategically self-defeating.

  Following the removal from office of Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace in September 1946, Lippmann became the leading public voice arguing that the United States should respect a Soviet sphere of influence in Europe, a position squarely opposed to the containment strategy George F. Kennan was advancing at the time. His 1947 book The Cold War gave the emerging global conflict the name it would carry for the next four decades.

  Lippmann saw nationalist separatism, imperialist competition, and failed states as the structural causes of war. He proposed regional international commissions for each crisis zone in the world, describing them as permanent bodies to deal with those spots of the earth where world crises originate. He looked at the founding of the United States in 1789 as a model: a constitution had brought order to an otherwise anarchic area, and he believed something similar could work at a global scale. President Lyndon Johnson presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the 14th of September 1964, though Lippmann later feuded publicly with Johnson over Vietnam.

• 6. The Long Skepticism

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  In 1932, Lippmann wrote one of his most quoted assessments, dismissing the future president Franklin D. Roosevelt as a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President. He called Roosevelt no crusader, no tribune of the people, no enemy of entrenched privilege. Even after Roosevelt's New Deal transformed American life, Lippmann stood by the words. His argument was that the 1932 campaign ran 180 degrees opposite to the New Deal, and that the New Deal was wholly improvised after Roosevelt was elected. The criticism was not a retraction; it was a defense of his original judgment.

  By the 1950s, his skepticism had turned inward, toward the educated elite he had once championed. In The Public Philosophy, published in 1955 after nearly twenty years in the writing, he argued that intellectual elites were themselves undermining the framework of democracy. The book was poorly received in liberal circles. In 1943, before that turn fully completed, the journalist George Seldes had named Lippmann one of the two most influential columnists in the United States.

  In 1958 he received a special Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated column Today and Tomorrow, honored for the wisdom, perception and high sense of responsibility with which he has commented for many years on national and international affairs. In 1961 he won a Peabody Award for an interview on CBS Reports, and the following year he won the annual Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his 1961 interview with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. He retired from his syndicated column in 1967, and died in New York City of cardiac arrest in 1974. The Walter Lippmann House at Harvard University, which now houses the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, carries his name.

• 7. Neoliberalism's Forgotten Seed

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  In August 1938, the French philosopher Louis Rougier convened a gathering of primarily French and German liberal intellectuals in Paris to discuss Lippmann's 1937 book The Good Society. They named the meeting after Lippmann himself: the Colloque Walter Lippmann. At that meeting, the German sociologist and economist Alexander Rustow coined the word neoliberalism, using it to describe a rejection of old laissez-faire liberalism.

  Lippmann and Rustow argued together for a social liberalism in contrast to the neoclassical liberalism championed by Friedrich von Hayek, who was also present. The Colloque is now regarded as a precursor to the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, which Hayek convened in 1947. Lippmann's role as the intellectual occasion for neoliberalism's naming is one of the less-remembered facts about a man whose legacy usually stops at journalism and media theory.

  His private life carried its own dramatic turn. His first marriage to Faye Albertson, whom he had met through visits to her family's socialist cooperative in West Newbury, Massachusetts, ended in 1937 after two decades. He then married Helen Byrne Armstrong in 1938. Helen had been married to Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs and Lippmann's closest friend. A hotel in Europe accidentally forwarded Lippmann's love letters to Armstrong, and that discovery ended both the friendship and Armstrong's marriage. It was, by any measure, an irreversible rupture in the closest personal relationship of Lippmann's life.