Nick Witham: Lippmann’s Public Life on the Page

“What kills political writing,” Walter Lippmann wrote in the New Republic in 1915, “is the absurd pretense that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes on what you think.” This is just one of Lippmann’s bon mots that had me smiling as I read Tom Arnold-Forster’s lucid and insightful biography. Despite living a life characterized by “daily habits that were a deeply conventional dance of bourgeois male respectability” (11), Lippmann was an entertaining guy, and Arnold-Forster makes excellent use of this throughout the book.

Lippmann’s success as a public thinker between the 1910s and the 1960s came from his ability to meld thinking with writing in ways that were deceptively simple and at the same time immensely powerful. As Arnold-Forster puts it, “Lippmann matters because his mind and his pen were formative aspects of American political thinking…He influenced the opinions of citizens in their millions and helped set agendas for several academic disciplines” (11). I am thus going to focus on what this book tells us about Lippmann as a writer.

First, being a writer for Lippmann meant deploying forceful argumentation, but also not being afraid to change his mind. He embraced controversy. One example of this is his disagreement with Lewis Terman in the 1920s over the subject of intelligence testing. Terman was a Stanford professor and arch proponent of the “intelligence quotient”, or IQ, test. Writing in the New Republic, Lippmann argued that “no expert could possibly isolate or measure intelligence as an innate construct” (95). Terman was angry – apparently, while he was happy to debate other scholars in academic journals, he “responded badly to public attacks in weekly magazines” (100). In going on the offensive in the way that he did, Lippmann initiated “a debate about the politics of expertise in a democracy” (90) that drew in a range of other actors including John Dewey, with whom he disagreed much less than extant interpretations have realized. In doing so, he demonstrated the complex dynamics at work in modern democracies. These dynamics, Lippmann argued, simply could not be captured by posing democratic politics and technocratic expertise in binary opposition to each other – the reality was that they were fundamentally intertwined.

Argumentative as he was, Lippmann was also not afraid to change his mind. We see this in his response to the constitutional turmoil that engulfed the New Deal in the mid-1930s, during which he moved from “early support” of Franklin Roosevelt’s policy agenda to “aggressive critique” and then to “eventual reconciliation” (162). At stake was his conceptualization of the good and ill of economic planning in moments of crisis. He started by distinguishing between “free collectivism” as exemplified by the New Deal order, and the “absolute collectivism” of European fascism and communism, before arguing in later years that any form of collectivism was a “totalitarian threat to liberalism” (169, 175). It was the outbreak of war that changed his mind again, turning him into a reluctant Keynesian: as Arnold-Forster puts it so wonderfully, he “learned to stop worrying and love the war economy” (186).

Lippmann’s long-term influence was rooted in a second important dimension of being a writer: the way he was embedded in and benefitted from the twentieth century’s cultures of print. Throughout the book, Arnold-Forster makes the case that to properly understand Lippmann, we need to understand his professional commitment to journalism. Experiences writing for the New Republic, the New York World, and the Herald Tribune all shaped the core concepts of liberty and public opinion that drove his career. He contrasted his sense of professionalism with peers such as the firebrand John Reed. This meant “settling for capitalism” (47) to most effectively interrogate the political forces at work on the American scene.

Later in his career, Lippmann wrote a widely syndicated Herald Tribune column that put his ideas in front of ten million readers in over a hundred newspapers. This process of reproduction meant that his employer could credibly present him as the “Spokesman of American Liberalism” (136). Not without jealousy, James Truslow Adams pointed out that Lippmann’s public was made up of mainly of business commuters reading his column at the end of a long day on their train rides from cities to suburbs. This connection to the American “middlebrow” was reinforced by his relationship to the publishing industry, with his books regularly chosen as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. By midcentury he was, in Arnold-Forster’s words, “the middlebrow suburban meridian of mainstream consensus liberalism” (135). But this was not simply a result of his skill as a writer and networker: he was also indebted to the evolving landscapes of American print culture, and the book brings this very effectively into focus.

A third element of Lippmann’s identity as a writer was his commitment to shifting registers between the academic and the popular. Early in his career, he thought deeply about what he called “public opinion” and developed ideas that would be influential in debates about democratic politics for years to come. In his advocacy for New York State Governor Al Smith, he developed ideas about the process of urban growth that, Arnold-Forster argues, influenced the “modernization theory” that would shape American attitudes towards international development at midcentury. In observing the storm clouds of European politics in the 1930s and 1940s, he was an early advocate of the concept of “totalitarianism” that would become so important to later discussions of global politics. And in his writing on the post-1945 world, he was one of the first to use the phrase “Cold War” to describe the new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Each of these moments in Lippmann’s public life shaped not only his thinking but also that of many others. While he transmitted his ideas to millions of suburban readers, he exchanged and refined them in dialogue with leading academics and public thinkers. On multiple occasions in Arnold-Forster’s book, we see him corresponding with historians, political scientists, economists, and sociologists. While he was not trained in any of these disciplines, he demonstrated his ability to think and write in ways that captured the attention of their gatekeepers. I struggle to imagine a public thinker doing the same today.

Arnold-Forster’s conclusion is situated in the late 1960s, with an aging and gloomy Lippmann dialoging with two other public intellectuals: Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky. Representing three distinct generations of American thought, each of them shared a deep and abiding unease at the impact of the war in Vietnam on the American polity, albeit for very different reasons. Until his death, then, Lippmann remained a protagonist in America’s most important debates about democracy, public opinion, war, and the nation’s role in the world.

I want to end on this sense of Lippmann as protagonist, because that word best exemplifies the role he plays in the book. Lippmann is not a hero, though there are elements of his thought and his writing Arnold-Forster clearly admires. Nor is Lippmann a villain, though there are moments when Arnold-Forster’s judgement falls harshly but fairly on the blind spots in his world view. Instead, Lippmann exemplifies a particular and very twentieth century way of thinking about, writing about, and being in the world.

Quite appropriately, Arnold-Forster does not with a grand claim for significance or a sweeping synthesis. Instead, the book’s last sentence is simple and to the point: “He died at eighty-five in 1974” (267). It was only at this moment that Lippmann stopped being puzzled. It was only at this moment that he stopped making notes on what he thought. And while we might argue about whether he made any truly “great” utterances along the way, Arnold-Forster’s humane rendering of Lippmann’s writing helps us to see twentieth-century American politics anew. This is because Lippmann was, ultimately, a man who led “a public life on the page” (2).