Worldmaking

by David Milne

  We’re starting a weekly here next fall—a weekly of ideas—with a paid up capital—God save us—of 200,000. The age of miracles, sir, has just begun … If there is any word to cover our ideal, I suppose it is humanistic, somewhat sharply distinguished (but not by Irving Babbitt) from humanitarianism. Humanism, I believe, means this real sense of the relation between the abstract and the concrete, between the noble dream and the actual limitations of life.30

  Croly captured the magazine’s essence more succinctly when he remarked, “We shall be radical without being socialistic and our general tendency will be pragmatic rather than doctrinaire.”31 This disavowal of socialism was perhaps a good thing in light of the magazine’s unproletarian office on West 21st Street, lavishly equipped with resources that modern journalists would find inconceivable. The Straights’ philanthropy funded a wonderfully stocked library, a wood-paneled dining room, and the services of an excellent French chef, who prepared lunches of uncommon quality for The New Republic’s lucky scribes.

  It is doubtful that Lippmann saw anything exceptional in this. He rarely questioned the justness of his elevated station. With his impeccably tailored suits, elegant gray fedora, and air of high intellectual seriousness, Lippmann tended to impress—and maybe even unnerve—those he met. He was a solidly built man, five foot ten, 190 pounds, although the chubbiness of his early years earned him the affectionate nickname “Buddha.” A happy imbiber of Greenwich Village bohemia, in spite of his buttoned-up appearance, Lippmann formed a friendship with Mabel Dodge—a bisexual patron of the arts and friend of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and John Reed—who convened a high-culture bacchanalian salon at her apartment. Dodge described Lippmann as “big and rather fat, but he had … intellectualized his fat so that it shone a little.”32 The quality of his mind was a wondrous thing for his friends and colleagues to behold. He moved from one success to another, remaining true to his Stakhanovite work habits and unerring self-belief. He knew exactly who he was, liked what he saw, and did not adjust his personality depending on his audience. The variety of his intellectual interests made him stand out as an individual capable of discerning connections that others missed and offering large-canvas analyses of which few others were capable. He shone brightly in the early stages of his journalistic career, although foreign policy did not yet figure highly in his range of interests. This would change when total war visited the European continent in 1914.

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  Lippmann was in England, meeting with H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw, when the chain reaction of ultimatums and mobilizations commenced. Progressives and British Fabians were intellectually blindsided by the conflict and struggled to finesse a position in its wake. Beatrice Webb told Lippmann that “we don’t form opinions on foreign affairs. We don’t know the technique.”33 Neither did Lippmann. He wrote to Felix Frankfurter that “nothing can stop the awful disintegration now. Nor is there any way of looking beyond it: ideas, books, seem too utterly trivial, and all the public opinion, democratic hope and what not, where is it today? Like a flower in the path of a plough.”34 The first issue of The New Republic hit the newsstands on November 7, 1914. A magazine created to proselytize for Progressive domestic reform was now compelled to fix its attention on alliance-driven bloodletting in Europe. Lippmann’s debut editorial continued the lamenting tone of his letter to Frankfurter: “Who cares to paint a picture now, or to write any poetry now but war poetry, or to search the meaning of language, or speculate about the constitution of matter?” After dwelling on the humanities’ limitations, Lippmann turned to their centrality as a means to achieve a more peaceable world: “The final argument against cannon is ideas … For while it takes as much skill to make a sword as a ploughshare, it takes a critical understanding of human values to prefer the ploughshare.”35 These were hopeful words, naïve, even, but Lippmann would soon form a much stronger sense of what was required of America.

  Lippmann’s views on the First World War were largely conditioned by his appreciation of the works of Alfred Thayer Mahan. On August 5, 1915, he wrote to Graham Wallas that “British sea power is the decisive factor in the future arrangement of the globe but I personally prefer its semi-benevolent autocracy to the anarchy of ‘equal.’ And I am prepared to have the U.S. join with Britain in the control of the seas, rather than see a race of ‘sovereign states’ oscillating in insecure ‘balance.’”36 The sinking of the Lusitania mainly suggested to Lippmann that the United States had ill-advisedly neglected its navy under Wilson and Taft, rendering the nation dangerously dependent upon Great Britain’s merchant marine to ferry passengers and trade across the Atlantic. The unspoken dependency logic of the Monroe Doctrine had to be abandoned in favor of rapid naval expansion to allow Britain and the United States to operate as equals. Nothing less than America’s sovereignty was at stake. German U-boats had shown beyond doubt that the Royal Navy was an unreliable instrument around which to build a nation’s commerce and wealth.

  To further develop his knowledge on foreign policy, Lippmann decided to write a book on the subject. Published in 1915, The Stakes of Diplomacy observed that conflict arose from an emotional nationalism hardwired into human nature: “It is the primitive stuff of which we are made, our first loyalties, our first aggressions, the type and image of our souls … They are our nationality, that essence of our being which defines us against the background of the world.” Lippmann believed Mahan had been correct in identifying the existence of a Hobbesian world and was similarly convinced that the United States had to expend more energy in mastering it. “We have all of us been educated to isolation,” wrote Lippmann, “and we love the irresponsibility of it. But that isolation must be abandoned if we are to do anything effective for internationalism … The supreme task of world politics is not the prevention of war, but a satisfactory organization of mankind.”37 The United States needed to assume its responsibilities as a leader of the international order—and do so without illusion. Internationalism was the only plausible and respectable foreign-policy course, but a sense of limits had to undergird the framing of diplomacy. The book’s debt to Mahanian geopolitics is clear.

  Yet aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign-policy vision also struck Lippmann as logical and necessary. The president had invited Lippmann to the White House in early 1916, and the young journalist had been impressed by the confidence Wilson possessed in his own judgment. On Mexico, for example, Lippmann recalled, “I remember Wilson’s talking about how he believed in the Jeffersonian principle of the sacred right of revolution. It’s something that no president would say today [in 1950]. He was defending his own policy and his belief that Huerta was a counter-revolutionist. He believed in the Madero Revolution.”38 A second meeting with Wilson, in the summer of 1916, moved Lippmann firmly into his camp of supporters. Aware that Lippmann’s purpose was endorsement reconnaissance, Wilson welcomed him into the Oval Office with the words “So you’ve come to look me over?,” rendering Lippmann mute. Wilson then said, “Let me show you the inside of my mind.” Wilson had clearly taken the measure of the intellectualism that made Lippmann tick. The president delivered what Ronald Steel has described as “a dazzling monologue covering virtually every issue, from the Mexican imbroglio to German designs on Brazil, from TR’s ambitions to dilemmas of neutrality.”39 Mightily impressed by Wilson’s intellectual range, and the absence of any obvious idées fixes, Lippmann embarked on a campaign to convince his colleagues at The New Republic that supporting Wilson’s reelection was the only sensible course in the midst of war: “We became more and more for Wilson. In 1916, we supported him in the campaign. It was a great struggle. Croly didn’t want to do it. I did. Finally, by September I persuaded them that [Secretary of State Charles Evans] Hughes was taking a pro-German line with a feeling toward the pro-German vote, and that Wilson was the man for us.”40

  Lippmann’s endorsement in The New Republic praised Wilson’s potential more than his achievements to date. “I shall not vote for the Wilso
n who has uttered a few too many noble sentiments,” Lippmann wrote, “but for the Wilson who is evolving under experience and is remaking his philosophy in the light of it.”41 In Lippmann’s estimation, Wilson possessed “the most freely speculative mind we’ve had in Washington.”42 Firsthand experience had convinced Lippmann that the president’s cognition was supple and that he was destined for greatness. But this path was realizable only if Wilson resisted the temptation to moralize. Nothing was more likely to undermine America’s reputation with its hard-bitten Old World allies than cant. Lippmann believed that U.S. foreign policy should combine the best of both Mahan and Wilson, that realism and idealism work best in tandem.

  In December 1916, Lippmann wrote a column titled “Peace Without Victory,” which evenhandedly examined the peace overtures the president had made to the European belligerents, alongside the reasons for their rebuttal. Two weeks later, Wilson delivered a speech declaring his strong support for achieving “peace without victory,” a rationale and compliment to Lippmann’s phrasemaking that the journalist was quick to appreciate.43 Yet there were clear differences between Wilson’s and Lippmann’s conception of the national interest—over what American aims should look like if war came. After Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, for example, Lippmann penned an influential article titled “The Defense of the Atlantic World,” which presented a straightforwardly realist rationale for an American declaration of war. Lippmann observed that there existed a virtuous “Atlantic Community,” consisting primarily of the United States, Britain, and France, which were all threatened by German domination of the Atlantic, and a future combination of authoritarian states in Eurasia: “A victory on the high seas would be a triumph of that class which aims to make Germany the leader of the East against the West, the leader ultimately of a German-Russian-Japanese coalition against the Atlantic world. It would be utter folly not to fight now to make its hopes a failure by showing that in the face of such a threat the western community is a unit.”44 Lippmann wanted Wilson to be clearer about his war aims and present them with the clarity that was his own journalistic hallmark. The war should serve America’s vital interests in preventing German naval domination of the Atlantic. But establishing war aims that redounded clearly to the nation’s advantage was a task that Wilson, consumed by grander visions of the future, failed to discharge.

  Lippmann performed significant wartime service for his nation. He first served as a special assistant to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, next as the executive secretary of the president’s “Inquiry,” and finally as a member of the Inter-Allied Propaganda Board in London, where he drafted propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind enemy lines. Lippmann played an important role in drafting the Fourteen Points and elucidating their meaning for the benefit of perplexed French and British diplomats, unused to diplomatic gambits of such abstract ambition. Here, Lippmann was sympathetic to Wilson’s idealism, which chimed with The New Republic’s perspective. Yet once the war ended, and peace negotiations commenced in Paris, Lippmann experienced a distinct sense of foreboding: “I remember very well Wilson’s arrival in Paris. It was a great event—one of the greatest spectacles. I had the most gloomy feeling all day. Everybody was rejoicing, but I had an ominous feeling that something was very wrong already.”45

  Lippmann observed Wilson’s performance despairingly from his vantage point as a little-used member of the American delegation. While conceding that the League of Nations could prove useful in providing “a temporary shelter from the storm,” Lippmann could not fathom how the president could mortgage “peace without victory” for an untried international organization that had yet to clear the significant hurdle of Senate confirmation.46 He also viewed concurrent participation in counterrevolutionary military action against the fledgling Soviet Union as counterproductive and clearly at odds with the much-trumpeted Versailles principle of national self-determination. In May 1919, Lippmann observed that “looked at from above, below, and from every side I can’t see anything in this treaty but endless trouble for Europe, and I’m exceedingly doubtful in my own mind as to whether we can afford to guarantee so impossible a peace.” In a letter to Norman Hapgood, Wilson’s unofficial press liaison, Lippmann observed pointedly and accurately that the president had “bought the League from France and Britain with a bad peace instead of selling it to France and Britain for a good peace.”47

  When the Treaty of Versailles emerged into the harsh light of public view, Lippmann followed Beard in experiencing an acute sense of betrayal. He felt gullible for following President Wilson with such enthusiasm, hoping for the best in such a jejune fashion. Usually so accurate when judging the character of his interlocutors, Lippmann had erred in identifying Wilson as a pragmatist. Lippmann was so riled by what had transpired in Paris that he provided William Borah, Hiram Johnson, and other “irreconcilables” in the Senate with insider anecdotes and evidence that helped undermine the peace accords.

  Lippmann suggested that the president had dissembled in denying personal knowledge of Allied secret treaties prior to his arrival in Paris. Wilson’s concealment owed everything to his failure to use these revelations to his negotiating advantage. The Fourteen Points were partly conceived as a morally charged riposte to the treaties, made public by Lenin after the October Revolution in 1917. This made Wilson’s denials appear ridiculous. Borah and Johnson used these revelations to damaging effect and implored Lippmann to testify before a Senate committee. Unwilling to go quite this far, Lippmann instead suggested that the diplomat William Bullitt, similarly angered by events in Paris, take his place. On the hearings, Lippmann observed that “Billy Bullitt blurted out everything to the scandal of the Tories and delight of the Republicans. When there is an almost universal conspiracy to lie and smother the truth, I suppose someone has to violate the decencies.”48 Lippmann’s earlier preference for combining the best of Mahan and Wilson had ended with contempt for the latter. He would spend the remainder of his career tracking close to the worldview of the former.

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  Lippmann’s break with Wilsonianism followed a similar pattern to that of Charles Beard. Reflecting on the role he had played supporting and advising President Wilson, Lippmann confessed, “If I had it to do all over again, I would take the other side … We supplied the Battalion of Death with too much ammunition.”49 Though let down by Wilson, Lippmann was less than enthused by his presidential successors, however. He wrote to Graham Wallas, “Harding is elected not because anybody likes him or because the Republican Party is particularly powerful, but because the Democrats are inconceivably unpopular.”50 On Calvin Coolidge, Lippmann noted that his laconic reputation regrettably did not tally with his own experience:

  I … saw quite a lot of Calvin Coolidge in that period between 1922 and 1931, although we were opposing him rather strenuously. I used to go to lunch with him alone and we would have long interminable talks with him in his study. He did all the talking. He was far from a silent man … I had a strong impression with Coolidge that he really had nothing very much to do—that he was not at all a busy man. He always took a nap in the afternoon. His idea was, “Let the government drift.”51

  Yet in the sphere of foreign policy, Lippmann was relaxed about drift—compared to the misdirected energy of the war years, at any rate. Though never strictly isolationist, he welcomed U.S. detachment from the League of Nations. Like Beard, he denigrated the dollar diplomacy that undergirded Harding’s and Coolidge’s policies toward Latin America, and he opposed military intervention in Nicaragua and Mexico, especially when justified in reference to supposedly vital economic interests. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Lippmann examined “the conflict between the vested rights of Americans in the natural resources of the Caribbean countries and the rising nationalism of their peoples.” He chided President Coolidge and Secretary of State Frank Kellogg for confusing nationalism with Bolshevism, for failing to comprehend the reality that Latin American nationalism mainly derived from the “de
sire to assert the national independence and the dignity of an inferior race.” The worst of all policies would slavishly follow economic self-interest, impinge on national sovereignty, and lead to the “realization in Latin America that the United States had adopted a policy, conceived in the spirit of Metternich, which would attempt to guarantee vested rights against social progress as the Latin peoples conceive it.”52 Lippmann did not dispute that economic interests were present—he simply wanted them handled with greater sensitivity and sense of proportion.

  Lippmann left The New Republic for Pulitzer’s New York World—New York City’s most important liberal daily—at the beginning of 1922. He wrote for the World for the next nine years, drafting twelve hundred editorials, of which about a third focused on foreign affairs, a notably high proportion given the parochialism of the American public sphere in the 1920s. It was during this time that Lippmann developed a truly national reputation. His profile was enhanced by the publication of two books, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, which together caused a considerable stir.

  In Public Opinion, Lippmann contended that the American people could not be trusted to make political decisions of high importance, and that more power should be placed in the hands of an administrative elite in respect to the framing of both domestic and foreign policy. In Lippmann’s pessimistic view, democracy could function effectively only if politicians dismissed the “intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs.”53 It was a brilliant and unsparing dissection of participatory democracy, which garnered glowing endorsements. John Dewey described Public Opinion as “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned.”54 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that “there are few living, I think, who so discern and articulate the nuances of the human mind.”55