Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974)[1] was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of theCold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922Public Opinion.[2][3]
Lippmann also played a notable role as research director ofWoodrow Wilson's post–World War Iboard of inquiry. His views on the role of journalism in a democracy were contrasted with the contemporaneous writings ofJohn Dewey in what has been retrospectively named theLippmann–Dewey Debate. Lippmann won twoPulitzer Prizes, one for his syndicated newspaper column "Today and Tomorrow" and one for his 1961 interview ofNikita Khrushchev.[4][5]
He has also been highly praised with titles ranging from "most influential" journalist[6][7][8] of the 20th century to "Father of Modern Journalism".[9][10]Michael Schudson writes[11] thatJames W. Carey considered Walter Lippmann's bookPublic Opinion as "the founding book of modern journalism" and also "the founding book in Americanmedia studies".[12]
Lippmann was born on New York'sUpper East Side as the only child ofJewish parents of German origin. According to his biographerRonald Steel, he 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, cultivated contacts in the highest circles, and the family regularly spent its summer holidays in Europe. The family had aReform Jewish orientation; averse to "orientalism", they attendedTemple Emanu-El. Walter had his Reform Jewishconfirmation instead of the traditionalBar Mitzvah at the age of 14. Lippmann was emotionally distanced from both parents, but had closer ties to his maternal grandmother. His family wasRepublican.[14]
From 1896 Lippmann attended the Sachs School for Boys, followed by theSachs Collegiate Institute, an elite and strictly secular private school in the GermanGymnasium tradition, attended primarily by children of German-Jewish families and run by the classical philologistJulius Sachs, a son-in-law ofMarcus Goldmann from theGoldman-Sachs family. Classes included 11 hours of ancient Greek and 5 hours of Latin per week.[14]
Lippmann in 1914, shortly after the establishment ofThe 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 bookLiberty and the News.[20][21] In 1913, Lippmann,Herbert Croly, andWalter Weyl became the founding editors ofThe New Republic.
DuringWorld War I, Lippmann was commissioned a captain in theArmy on June 28, 1918, and was assigned to theintelligence section of theAEF headquarters in France. He was assigned to the staff ofEdward 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, Lippmann became an adviser to Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson'sFourteen Points speech. He sharply criticizedGeorge Creel, whom the President appointed to head wartime propaganda efforts at theCommittee on Public Information. While he was prepared to curb his liberal instincts because of the war, saying he had "no doctrinaire belief infree speech," he nonetheless advised Wilson thatcensorship 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 andCharles Merz, in a 1920 study entitledA Test of the News, stated thatThe New York Times' coverage of theBolshevik 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.[24][25]
Lippmann saw nationalist separatism, imperialist competition, and failed states as key causes of war.[26] He envisioned the eventual decline of the nation-state and its replacement with large inclusive and democratic political units.[26]
As solution to the problem of failed states, he proposed the creation of regional authorities to provide political control, as well as education of public opinion to build support for these regional governments. He called for the creation of international organizations for each crisis region in the world: "there should be in existence permanent international commissions to deal with those spots of the earth where world crises originate."[26]
He saw the creation of the United States in 1789 as a model for a proposed World State or supranational government, as it was possible to create a constitution to bring order to an otherwise anarchic area. Commerce and regular interactions between people from different nations would alleviate the adverse aspects of nationalism.[26]
After the fall of the British colonySingapore in February 1942, Lippmann authored an influentialWashington Post column that criticized empire and called on western nations to "identify their cause with the freedom and security of the peoples of the East" and purge themselves of "white man'simperialism".[27]
Lippmann was an informal adviser to several presidents.[8] On September 14, 1964, PresidentLyndon Johnson presented Lippmann with thePresidential Medal of Freedom.[30] He later feuded with Johnson over his handling of theVietnam War of which Lippmann had become highly critical.[8]
He won aspecial 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 annualPulitzer Prize for International Reporting citing "his 1961 interview with Soviet PremierKhrushchev, as illustrative of Lippmann's long and distinguished contribution to American journalism."[5]
Lippmann retired from his syndicated column in 1967.[31]
Lippmann died in New York City due to cardiac arrest in 1974.[32][1]
Though a journalist himself, Lippmann did not assume thatnews andtruth 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.[citation needed] The news, therefore, is "imperfectly recorded" and too fragile to bear the charge as "an organ ofdirect 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. InPublic Opinion (1922), Lippmann noted that modern realities threatened the stability that the government had achieved during thepatronage 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 andprotection 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 asstereotypes (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.
John Dewey in his bookThe Public and Its Problems, published in 1927, agreed about the irrationality of public opinion, but he rejected Lippmann's call for atechnocratic elite. Dewey believed that in a democracy, the public is also part of the public discourse.[33] The Lippmann-Dewey Debate started to be widely discussed by the late 1980s in American communication studies circles.[11] Lippmann also figured prominently in the workManufacturing Consent byEdward S. Herman andNoam Chomsky who cited Lippmann's advocacy of "manufacture of consent" which referred "to the management of public opinion, which [Lippmann] felt was necessary for democracy to flourish, since he felt that public opinion was an irrational force."[34][35]
In 1932, Lippmann famously dismissed future PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt's qualifications and demeanor, writing: "Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." Despite Roosevelt's later accomplishments, Lippmann stood by his words, saying: "That I will maintain to my dying day was true of the Franklin Roosevelt of 1932."[36] He believed his judgment was an accurate summation of Roosevelt's 1932 campaign, saying it was "180 degrees opposite to the New Deal. The fact is that the New Deal was wholly improvised after Roosevelt was elected."[37]
Lippmann was an early and influential commentator onmass 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 elite 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".
Later, inThe 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. PhilosopherJohn 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.[38][39]
From the 1930s to the 1950s, Lippmann became even more skeptical of the "guiding" class. InThe Public Philosophy (1955), which took almost twenty years to complete, he presented a sophisticated argument that intellectual elites were undermining the framework of democracy.[40] The book was very poorly received in liberal circles.[41]
Public opinion is volatile, shifting erratically in response to the most recent developments. Mass beliefs early in the 20th century were "too pacifist in peace and too bellicose in war, too neutralist or appeasing in negotiations or too intransigent"[43]
Public opinion is incoherent, lacking an organised or a consistent structure to such an extent that the views of US citizens could best be described as "nonattitudes"[44]
Public opinion is irrelevant to the policy-making process. Political leaders ignore public opinion because "most Americans can neither understand nor influence the very events upon which their lives and happiness are known to depend."[45][46]
French philosopherLouis Rougier convened a meeting of primarily French and Germanliberal intellectuals in Paris in August 1938 to discuss the ideas put forward by Lippmann in his workThe Good Society (1937). They named the meeting after Lippmann, calling it theColloque Walter Lippmann. The meeting is often considered the precursor to the first meeting of theMont Pèlerin Society, convened byFriedrich von Hayek in 1947. At both meetings discussions centered around what a new liberalism, or "neoliberalism", should look like.
Lippmann was married twice, the first time from 1917 to 1937 to Faye Albertson (1893–1975). Faye 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 ofGeorge 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.
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 husbandHamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor ofForeign Affairs. He was the only close friend in Lippmann's life. The friendship and involvement inForeign Affairs ended when a hotel in Europe accidentally forwarded Lippmann's love letters to Mr. Armstrong.[47]
^abSchudson, Michael (2008). "The "Lippmann-Dewey Debate" and the Invention of Walter Lippmann as an Anti-Democrat 1985–1996".International Journal of Communication.2.
^Carey, James W. (March 1987). "The Press and the Public Discourse".The Center Magazine.20.
^Mead, Frederick Sumner (March 14, 1921).Harvard's Military Record in the World War. Harvard Alumni Association. p. 584.Archived from the original on September 24, 2024. RetrievedMay 9, 2021 – via Google Books.
^Converse, Philip. 1964. "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." InIdeology and Discontent, ed. David Apter, 206–261. New York: Free Press.
^Almond, Gabriel. 1950.The American People and Foreign Policy. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
^Kris, Ernst, and Nathan Leites. 1947. "Trends in Twentieth Century Propaganda." InPsychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, ed. Geza Rheim, pp. 393–409. New York: International University Press.
Schapsmeier, Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier.Walter Lippmann: philosopher-journalist (Washington:Public Affairs Press, 1969), scholarly biography
