If writers should be judged by their words, then Tom Arnold-Foster’s comprehensive and engaging “intellectual biography” of the legendary journalist Walter Lippmann renders a complete, balanced, and mostly justified verdict.
A history fellow at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, Arnold-Foster trains a critical eye on the varied and voluminous scribblings of Lippmann, whose middlebrow and highbrow writing alike had an immeasurable impact on 20th-century American politics, culture, economics, journalism, and even foreign policy. Lippmann, Arnold-Foster writes, “was remarkable for his breadth, versatility, and sheer durability.” He argues persuasively that Lippmann’s more radical edges were sanded down over time, as the journalist adopted the intellectual trappings of a mainstream American liberal.
Born on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to an assimilated German Jewish family in 1889, Lippmann scaled the academic ladder early and quickly. At Harvard University, he leapt into the fray, defending the suffragettes in a 1909 journal article for advertising themselves “at every opportunity, to let no day pass without reminding the country and its politicians of their demand.”
Four years later, at the ripe age of 24, he published his first book, titled A Preface to Politics, in which he argued that “the focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center” that “proposes to fit creeds and institutions to the wants of men.” He railed against political indifference, especially among his own generation, and also lambasted the hidebound American constitutional order, in particular, the Senate, as “pachydermic in its irresponsiveness.”
The following year, 1914, he published Drift and Mastery, in which he articulated a vigorous dedication to organized labor. “Without unions, industrial democracy is unthinkable,” he wrote. “Without democracy in industry … there is no such thing as democracy in America.” Yet he privately acknowledged that “I find less and less sympathy with revolutionists.”
Around that time, he founded the New Republic with Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl, a gambit that Arnold-Jones attributed to a careful strategy “to advance specific political outcomes through mainstream publications.” Most notably, and, in hindsight, embarrassingly, Lippmann’s New Republic became a mouthpiece for President Woodrow Wilson. “Protection of a healthy public opinion in this country will be of the first importance,” Lippmann told Wilson in 1917, and “all of us here [at the New Republic] are entirely at your disposal.” As the Great War raged, he served in the American Expeditionary Forces’ “Propaganda Subsection.”
After, and inspired by, the war, Lippmann set to work on Public Opinion, his magnum opus, which thoroughly studied the formation and deployment of popular views on public matters. Interest groups, property, and stereotypes played prominent roles and required careful shepherding by a benevolent elite. By today’s standards, his analysis seems elementary, but at the time, its systematic cataloguing was rather novel.
In the 1920s, ensconced as an editor and columnist at the New York World, he further developed his thinking about expertise and his skepticism about technocracy, noting that “aristocratic theorists work from the fallacy of supposing that a sufficiently excellent square peg will also fit a round hole” — perhaps Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency experience reinforces this bit of wisdom. Lippmann strongly backed Al Smith’s 1928 presidential bid, in part because he thought Smith would defer appropriately to experts.
As the Great Depression struck, Lippmann sensed an “inchoate but profound sentiment that serious changes are needed.” Public opinion indeed vindicated this sense, as President Franklin Roosevelt swept into power and enacted unprecedented policies, bolstered by Lippmann’s rhetorical support. Congress, he argued, should “give the president, for a period say of a year, the widest and fullest powers possible under the most liberal interpretation of the Constitution.”
He would later sour on FDR’s overreach, and in the wake of fascism’s rise, Lippmann became a fierce antitotalitarian, lambasting the “omnivorous governments claiming jurisdiction over every interest of man” that had taken root in Germany, Russia, and Italy. In 1938, after Munich, he cautioned that “American preparedness must now take the form of making actually available a capacity to produce great armaments.” He embraced, somewhat reluctantly, the imposition of price controls, at least with respect to defense production, along with high, progressive taxation, situating himself, as Arnold-Foster describes it, “firmly within the Keynesian policy consensus.”
On foreign policy, Lippmann has long been considered “a convinced and unremitting Atlanticist,” especially during and after the war. But Arnold-Foster focuses, somewhat implausibly, on Lippmann’s supposed “imperial rhapsody,” citing as evidence his 1939 article in Life arguing that “what Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be to the world of tomorrow.” When contrasted with the decidedly anti-imperialist historian Charles Beard, Lippmann indeed sounds like he favors some form of American empire. Yet exactly what form of empire was in question matters. And here, Lippmann implants himself foursquare inside the mainstream of American exceptionalism, where the promotion of democracy and free markets by setting a sterling example of a city on a hill replaces traditional imperial coercive means. Here, Arnold-Foster makes common cause with the Soviet press, which, in 1946, risibly labeled Lippmann an “ardent troubadour of imperialist circles in the United States.”
Following World War II, Lippmann’s foreign policy writings reached their apotheosis, including in his publication of The Cold War, a 1947 book that both formally coined the term, informally coined earlier by George Orwell, that defined the conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and challenged the rigidly realist views of the State Department’s George Kennan. “Soviet power will expand,” he predicted, “unless it is prevented from expanding because it is confronted with power, primarily American power.” He favored the establishment of both NATO and the European Common Market as diplomatic and military means of curbing Soviet ambitions. And while he initially supported the Vietnam War, he lost faith in the effort after 1965, claiming, in what would be his final journalistic crusade, that escalation in Southeast Asia undermined confidence “in the wisdom and competence of American leadership.”
As is the wont of an academic historian, Arnold-Foster occasionally drifts into turgid academese, for example, “the modes of political change that Lippmann theorized were contestable reproductions of plural social conditions,” or “this book aims for ruthless historicization rather than normative resurrection”; indulges the anachronistic usage of the vile term “settler colonialism”; and improperly conflates small- and large-L liberalism when he demeans William F. Buckley, Jr. as an “antiliberal conservative.” The book also skimps on biographical detail to an extent beyond what might be expected from an intellectual biography.
But in illuminating the broad corpus of Lippmann’s work and contextualizing it within prevailing political and cultural currents, Arnold-Foster’s exhaustive accounting of his subject’s contribution to the American story is unrivaled.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.