Kathryn McGarr: Lippmann’s Washington Life

I want to thank Tom Arnold-Forster for sharing this book with us and providing such a clear-eyed assessment of Lippmann as a thinker. The book corrects misconceptions, both about Lippmann’s political and ideological stances and about the contexts for Lippmann’s books. I will first highlight what I found to be some of the most important corrections and insights this book offers. Then I would like to talk a bit about Lippmann, the man, living not just in “ruthless historicization,” but in the physical context of mid-century Washington (9). I would not want Arnold-Forster to have written a cradle-to-grave biography of Lippmann, which, as he notes, we have.[1] But I do invite him to talk us through his approach of bifurcating Lippmann into his writings and his life. Since my own work has been in the cultural life of Washington, I want to find out more about how Lippmann the person and Lippmann the thinker usefully intersect in an intellectual biography.

First, as I said, I’m grateful for the book and the years of painstaking work that Arnold-Forster put into it. On the first page, he notes one of the reasons we did not yet have this book: Lippman’s “range and productivity are real problems for historians” (1). No one particularly wants to trudge through everything Lippmann wrote, and so Arnold-Forster most basic but very significant intervention is that he did read everything, so the rest of us do not have to. Despite the reverence Lippmann inspired in the next generation of newsmen who populated my book, he never struck me as someone with whom I would want to spend years of my life. Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography certainly did not disabuse that sense. Arnold-Forster not only waded through the condescension of a man whom the perhaps more unpleasant Arthur Krock mocked as a “syndicated oracle”—in a letter to Lippmann—but emerged with his own confident analysis and judgments.[2]

I’ll begin with a few of the many substantive insights I appreciated. This book reminds us not just that the Lippmann-Dewey debate was a creation of late twentieth century scholars, which, as he points out, is no longer the dominant thinking among communications scholars either; but he also then teaches us that the Lippmann-Terman debate was important at the time (90). Rather than reducing Lippmann to an elitist technocratic caricature, Arnold-Forster gives us the broader view of ways in which Lippmann disapproved of elitist social science, like Terman’s IQ test, which limited democratic potential.

The book also contributes to our understanding of the Cold War’s theoretical continuity with earlier periods. For instance, Chapter 5, on Lippmann’s urban liberalism in the 1920s, explains the importance to Lippmann of modernization theory, in a way that anticipates his attitude towards economic development, domestically and internationally, after World War II. Arnold-Forster also promises that the book will help us understand our present moment without being ahistorical. The name Trump, mercifully, appears nowhere in this biography. But the book’s discussion of the New Deal, which has two chapters devoted to its “political crisis” and the “constitutional turmoil” it created, cannot help but resonate. Chapter 6 addresses arguments over whether constitutional dictatorships were possible or necessary in times of emergency, as Lippmann believed. Lippmann did not fear fascism coming to the U.S. because he thought it operated outside legal frameworks and constitutionalism. Arnold-Forster reminds us that Hannah Arendt, by contrast, argued that totalitarianism need not be lawless. And in either formulation, we, the readers, will be fearful.

I also appreciated how much archival work Arnold-Forster did to understand the drafts and correspondence preceding Lippmann’s books, some of which Lippmann wrote under presentist circumstances that had passed by the time of publication. The Good Society, from 1937, was a response to the 1935 Schechter case and Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme, which had blown over by the time it came out. The Public Philosophy, from 1955, reacted to excesses of McCarthyism. Arnold-Forster does a wonderful job contextualizing not just the final products of Lippmann’s books but also his processes.

Now for the question that persisted for me while reading this book: To what extent can we separate the intellectual history from the geography of Lippmann’s life? I want to continue thinking through the ways in which a person’s environment necessarily affects their thinking, and the importance of place as a category of analysis. By focusing on the published works, I wondered if Arnold-Forster was taking an epistemological position about the nature of intellectual history, and to what extent practical considerations about the focus and length of the book mattered.

Had Lippmann stayed in New York in 1938, instead of moving to Washington, D.C., we know intuitively—without needing to engage too much in counterfactuals—that not just his life, but also his published works and his influence on political thought, would be different. Washington was smaller than New York socially, intellectually, and physically. The Washington environment incentivized resolving ideological differences behind closed doors and smoothing them over before they went into print. [3] How could that not contribute to Lippmann’s legacy? And what is a responsible way we can tie together what was “in the air” of a city with what a thinker produced while breathing I in? I am not saying that Arnold-Forster would that argue place does not matter at all, because of course it does. But I would like him to expand on where in his research he saw it mattering and if there is room for place in an intellectual biography.

Finally, I think being in Washington mattered not just for Lippmann’s writing but for what looks like a shift in his intellectual preoccupations. One of Lippmann’s most important roles in the 1920s was as a critic of journalism, as Arnold-Forster explains in Chapter 2. In “A Test of the News,” from 1920, the same year as the publication of Liberty and the News, Lippmann censured the New York Times for its coverage of the Russian Revolution as part of his on-going critique of the commercial press. He chastised the Times for reporting based in subjectivity and wishful thinking about the Bolsheviks, rather than in truth. The importance of public opinion, the danger of manufacturing consent, and even the mechanics of journalism saturate the early works. Lippmann-as-press-critic then disappears from the rest of this intellectual biography, and I would like to know possible reasons why. I don’t think that World War II alone can account for it.

In 1947, Lippmann explained in one of his syndicated columns why there was not more public press criticism. His news peg was the release of the Commission on the Freedom of the Press’s report—the findings of the so-called Hutchins Commission. Lippmann praised the commission, not for any particular findings, but for showing how one might go about critiquing the press in a period when, as he put it in the column, criticism was “much neglected.”[4] The Commission had recommended journalists practice mutual criticism, which Lippmann seemed to support in theory. He then explained in practice why it could not and should not happen. Talking about mutual criticism among journalists, Lippmann writes, “We are all tempted, and now and then we indulge, but on the whole we refrain. And the reasons are good reasons. They are the same reasons which make it very rare indeed that a lawyer or a doctor or an actor or a professor will speak out publicly and say how badly the lawyer argued his case, how inexpertly the doctor diagnosed the disease, how lamely the actor performed, how dull was the professor’s lecture. For there is a fellowship among newspapermen as there is in other crafts and professions. They are not lone wolves. They have to see each other, meet together, and work together, and life would become intolerable, as it would in a university faculty or an officers’ mess, if they practiced vigorous mutual criticism in public. I might say that I have tried it, and have had it tried on me, and my conclusion is that the hard feelings it causes are out of all proportion to the public benefit it causes.” So Lippmann clearly has feelings, despite his often coming across as someone who lived only in his brain, and he even says here that he is willing to place feelings above public benefit. That statement only makes sense in the context of a very peculiar Washington notion of journalism fellowship at mid-century. I would love to hear Arnold-Forster speak more about how Lippmann’s criticisms of and theories related to journalism and democracy changed over time. Where did the thread of journalism criticism go after his move to Washington?

I do not want Arnold-Forster to have written a different book, because I enjoyed this one very much. But I do want to hear more about where, in his analysis, he was tempted to look beyond intellect and into the emotions that come from Lippmann living an embodied life in a particular place.

[1] Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Little, Brown, & Co., 1980).

[2] Arthur Krock to Walter Lippmann, January 10, 1942, Reel 72, folder 1256, Walter Lippmann Papers, Yale University.

[3] This is an argument I make in Kathryn J. McGarr, City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

[4] Walter Lippmann, “On Criticism of the Press,” Washington Post, March 27, 1947.