Worldmaking

by David Milne

  Published in 1925, The Phantom Public pursued Public Opinion’s elitist logic to an even more discomfiting degree. Disregarding populist niceties, Lippmann wrote that viewing the average voter as “inherently competent” was a “false ideal” that had caused great damage.56 The American polity was in fact divided between elite “insiders,” with detailed contextual knowledge of salient political issues, and uninformed “outsiders,” whose interests did not extend far beyond the everyday combination of work, sleep, family, and leisure. Lippmann had first trialed this distinction in The New Republic in 1915, when he wrote that “only the insider can make the decisions, not because he is inherently a better man, but because he is placed that he can understand and can act.”57 His ideal “democracy” would give insiders free rein to make important decisions, permitting the mass of “outsiders” to exercise a veto only if they felt the decision would unfairly injure the majority—a utilitarian calculation that few were capable of making. Hence Lippmann anticipated useful apathy.

  The Founding Fathers recognized the dangers of extended suffrage. But democracy since the presidency of Andrew Jackson had labored under the illusion that the common man possessed virtue and sound judgment as an Aristotelian “political animal.” Lippmann’s purpose in The Phantom Public was to ensure that “each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”58 It was a postmortem on the corpse of his earlier idealism and Progressive faith in the capacity of people to self-govern and pursue a sage foreign policy. He had lost faith in Wilsonianism and the Universalist optimism that justified the attempt to make “the world safe for democracy.” Democracy in the United States was clearly not safe in itself. Considerably more bracing and pessimistic than Public Opinion, the book met with an icy reception among reviewers and readers. Lippmann anticipated this when he observed that he was likely to be “put on trial for heresy by my old friends on The New Republic.”59 John Dewey’s 1927 book The Public and Its Problems, conceived as a response to Lippmann, noted persuasively that the “world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than from the masses.”60

  Lippmann clearly diverged from Beard in these indictments of the political aptitude of the American people—although he shared his ambivalence toward unnecessary involvement in European affairs and opposition to interventionism in Latin America born of great power chauvinism. Sharp differences of opinion were becoming evident, though warm relations existed between the two men through the 1920s. On September 8, 1925, Lippmann wrote to Beard that “the answer, so far as I’m concerned, to the question about the collective capacity of democracy to plan a state is emphatically ‘no.’” A few days later, Beard replied, “I shall wait with impatience the coming of your book on ‘The Phantom Public’ … At all events you always shoot every subject you touch full of holes and full of light.” Lippmann thanked Beard for his letter, which “gave me a great deal of pleasure,” before asking if he was available to meet in person: “I want lots of time and some solitude.” Beard suggested that they meet at his house for an informal dinner, in order “to polish off the unfinished business of the universe. I suggest dining here because we can be as quiet and profane as we like in my lookout tower.”61 This intriguing flirtation is all we have to connect the two men during the 1920s. Regrettably, no record exists of their “survey of our little cosmos,” as Beard poetically described it.

  While Beard moved swiftly and purposefully toward his continental Americanism, Lippmann equivocated on the necessary dimensions of diplomatic retrenchment. Intellectually he was in flux. He became close with Senator William Borah, the retrenchment-inclined chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1924 to 1933. The two men collaborated in supporting naval disarmament and its attendant international agreements, and in opposing military intervention in Latin America. Yet they also joined forces in calling for a renegotiation of Allied war debts and supporting diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union—policies that could not be characterized as isolationist in the orthodox sense. Their endeavors sometimes echoed internationalist goals and sometimes tended toward insularity. At one point Borah supported U.S. membership in the World Court. The next year he professed faith in the Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war, which Lippmann found ludicrous in its detachment from reality. That “Europe should scrap its whole system of security based on the enforcement of peace,” wrote Lippmann in The World in 1927, “and accept in its place a pious, self-denying ordinance that no nation will disturb the peace” was nonsensical. The support that Borah extended toward such folly represented an “extraordinary spectacle” in light of his own well-recorded contempt for the League of Nations.62 Yet by 1930, Lippmann’s foreign-policy views appeared as illogical in their entirety as Borah’s. Ronald Steel captures this well: “During the 1920s, and much of the 1930s as well, Lippmann was neither consistent nor persuasive in his prescriptions for preventing war. Simultaneously espousing disarmament and American naval strength, international cooperation and an Anglo-American domination of the seas, American freedom of action and a ‘political equivalent of war,’ he reflected the confusions of the age.”63

  It took the onset of the Great Depression, the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and the rise of Germany and Japan to instill in Lippmann’s diplomatic thought a realist consistency.

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  The World’s circulation began to flag in the late 1920s. The newspaper had been drained of its capital (human and otherwise) by the feckless stewardship of Herbert Pulitzer, and there appeared little realistic prospect of recovery, in spite of a loyal readership. A variety of organizations began to bombard Lippmann with job offers. Impressed by his ability as a political scientist, despite the absence of a doctorate, Harvard offered Lippmann an endowed chair in government. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, asked Lippmann to become director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. These were prestigious offers and destinations. Yet Lippmann decided that universities and think tanks were too far removed from the power that he so artfully cultivated. The solitude that lured certain intellectuals to the ivory tower discouraged this particular thinker, who thrived on flesh-and-blood relationships.

  Politely declining these overtures, Lippmann instead accepted a job at the International Herald Tribune—a national Republican newspaper rather than a metropolitan Democratic one—which offered a significant salary of $25,000 a year in return for four columns a week. The paper also provided a personal assistant, generous travel budget, and two weeks’ paid vacation in winter and six weeks over the summer. These vacations were essential to Lippmann in terms of business and pleasure. During his annual jaunt to Europe, he invariably met the continent’s brightest intellectual and political lights.

  Lippmann’s first “Today & Tomorrow” column—or “T&T,” as it became known among the cognoscenti—first rolled off the press in September 1931. A year later, the column was syndicated to a hundred papers with a combined circulation in excess of ten million.64 Lippmann remained at the Tribune for the next thirty-six years. The column became a journalistic phenomenon, its author a trusted explanatory voice in a world changing fast for the worse. A rival of Lippmann’s, the journalist Arthur Krock, observed bitterly that “to read, if not to comprehend, Lippmann was suddenly the thing to do.”65

  One of Lippmann’s best-remembered “T&T” columns cast a critical eye on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On August 1, 1932, Lippmann described FDR as “a highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions … He is an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but he is not the dangerous enemy of anything.” So far, so conventional. FDR’s lack of fixed ideological moorings had been noted by observers before. More damning was Lippmann’s description of the Democratic presidential nominee as “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.” Lippmann had kept a close eye on Franklin Roosevelt since the Wilson administration and had arrived at a mixe
d conclusion. While admiring his rhetorical facility and keen political antennae, Lippmann found the generality and vagueness of FDR’s policy interests unsettling, concluding that he was unqualified for high office. There was more to politics than merely winning elections: something meaningful had to be done with the accompanying power. While dismayed by the onset of the Depression, Lippmann could at least detect ideological constancy in President Hoover’s response, resting on a substantial record as a public servant.

  “The two things about him that worry me,” Lippmann wrote Felix Frankfurter after FDR secured his party’s nomination, “are that he plays politics well and likes the game for its own sake and is likely to be ultra-political almost to show his own virtuosity. The other fear I have is that he is such an amiable and impressionable man, so eager to please, and, I think, so little grounded in his own convictions that almost everything depends on the character of his own advisers.” Roosevelt’s forceful presidency proved Lippmann to be wide of the mark on this second point. Nonetheless, in the absence of any better options, Lippmann placed his reservations to one side, stating his intention come Election Day to “vote cheerfully for Governor Roosevelt.”66 Parlous domestic circumstances suggested to Lippmann that change was essential.

  Lippmann met President-elect Roosevelt at a dinner in New York in honor of the retiring president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell. Conscious of Lippmann’s rapt national readership, Roosevelt brushed off the earlier criticism and invited Lippmann to visit him in Warm Springs, Georgia, where doctors attended annually to the paralysis caused by his childhood polio. It was a remarkable encounter by all accounts. In Roosevelt’s private cottage near the medical facility, Lippmann reminded his host that Hitler had assumed power two days before, exploiting the ineffectiveness of a weak government that appeared incapable of dealing with economic meltdown. Roosevelt’s most pressing task was to tackle America’s economic malaise—a combination of low growth and high unemployment—head on and to forestall the threat of extremism. “The situation is critical, Franklin,” Lippmann observed darkly. “You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.” According to Ronald Steel, “The starkness of the phrase, particularly from Lippmann, took Roosevelt aback.”67 Over the space of a few months, Lippmann had gone from casting serious doubt on Roosevelt’s suitability for high office to advising him to assume the necessary role of enlightened despot. Lippmann’s 1920s mercurialness was continuing well into the 1930s.

  Lippmann was enthralled by the executive energy of the early stages of Roosevelt’s presidency, writing that the nation “had regained confidence in itself” and that “by the greatest good fortune which has befallen this country in many a day, a kindly and intelligent man has the wit to realize that a great crisis is a great opportunity.”68 His vote against Hoover had been vindicated in a short time. On foreign policy, Lippmann celebrated President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy enunciated in his inaugural address—which promised noninterference in the affairs of Washington’s Latin American neighbors—as a “radical innovation” and a “true substitute for empire.”69 On April 18, 1933, Lippmann called for the abandonment of the gold standard to inflate the money supply, combat deflation, and thus boost the economy. His column sparked a day of frantic trading on Wall Street; such was the expectation that Lippmann’s positioning foreshadowed executive action. And so it came to pass when President Roosevelt denounced the logic of collaborative currency stabilization and removed the United States from the gold standard. British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald desperately called Lippmann from the London economic conference, imploring him to use his influence to revisit the decision to so brutally reject multilateral action—to no avail. An earlier discussion with John Maynard Keynes had convinced Lippmann that his position had been sound and the president’s decision wise, so he politely rebuffed MacDonald’s request. Keynes himself celebrated FDR’s decision as “magnificently right.”70 Roosevelt could do little wrong during his first six months.

  It was during the remainder of Roosevelt’s first term that Lippmann found fault with his president, primarily in regard to the outsized statist ambitions of the New Deal. On domestic issues, Lippmann turned rightward as the president led the nation purposefully to the left. His disenchantment was such that in the presidential election of 1936, Lippmann endorsed Roosevelt’s opponent, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas. Many liberals were appalled by Lippmann’s strong move against Roosevelt and the New Deal. Writing in The Nation, Amos Pinchot dismissed Lippmann as an “obfuscator … who can be quoted on either side of almost any question.” Pinchot compared Lippmann to the sometimes liberal bête noire Alexander Hamilton, who was “the first strong advocate of plutocratic fascism in America.” Denigrating Lippmann’s close links to lawyers and bankers, Pinchot described him as “an ambassador of goodwill to the philistines.”71 Unruffled by this assault, Lippmann welcomed The Nation’s scorn as proof that his rightward track was correct. He continued to denigrate the New Deal as an assault on political liberty and focused particular ire on FDR’s ill-considered plan to pack the Supreme Court with sympathetic justices. In 1937, Lippmann published The Good Society, a frontal assault on what he viewed as Roosevelt’s socialistic collectivism, which bore comparison to Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Influenced by the conservative Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, Lippmann’s polemic was criticized by previously supportive voices. John Dewey thought the book gave “encouragement and practical support to reactionaries.”72

  An aspect of the New Deal that Lippmann found particularly irksome was the participation of university professors. President Roosevelt evidently believed that law and the social sciences might assist the government in solving intricate problems in those arduous times—convening an august group of academics to assist his administration’s efforts. FDR’s original “Brain Trust,” as they became known, consisted of a triumvirate of Columbia University law professors—Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf Berle—who combined to shape the first wave of New Deal reforms (1933–1934), which focused on practical measures to combat mass unemployment.73 Not to be outdone, Harvard Law School, smarting perhaps from Columbia’s prominence in the policy process, offered teaching relief to three scholars—Benjamin Cohen, Thomas Corcoran, and Lippmann’s friend Felix Frankfurter—who helped shape the second wave of New Deal legislation (1935–1936), which pursued the more ambitious goal of effecting fundamental reforms in American society. Some attacked the Brain Trust as a phalanx of unaccountable ivory tower idealists. Others attacked them for lacking intellectual substance. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, complained through the 1930s that it was not the intellectual but “the technician … [who was] the really big man in the modern world.”74

  Lippmann declined to impugn the Brain Trust’s intellectual substance, instead delivering a pointed speech at the University of Rochester in June 1936 that cautioned professors against sullying their independence in the pursuit of policy influence. Lippmann dwelled powerfully on the perils of co-optation:

  Members of the university faculties have a particular obligation not to tie themselves to, nor to involve themselves in, the ambitions and pursuits of the politicians … Once they engage themselves that way, they cease to be disinterested men, being committed by their ambitions and their sympathies. They cease to be scholars because they are no longer disinterested, and having lost their own independence, they impair the independence of the university to which they belong … If the professors try to run the government, we shall end by having the government run the professors.75

  At the time of this speech, Lippmann was being routinely denounced by liberals for his sympathy for reactionary causes and the absence of any value system connecting his inchoate views on politics, society, and foreign policy. It is no stretch, therefore, to detect an element of catharsis in Lippmann’s words. But his opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and its irresponsible academic facilitators, remained constant through the remainder of his presiden
cy. Lippmann just longed for a competent Republican to appear on the national scene with the ability to oust the incumbent and take a hatchet to the bloated government bureaucracy. One thing prevented Lippmann from professing clear allegiance to the GOP: the party’s views on foreign policy, which tended toward muddle-headed isolationism. Lippmann was deeply concerned by the socialistic nature of the New Deal. But he came to view the rise of Germany and Japan as graver concerns, requiring an emphasis on military preparedness that only Roosevelt appeared capable of delivering.

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  Reflecting on Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and the bellicosity displayed by irredentist Italy, Lippmann wrote in 1934, “As long as Europe prepares for war, America must prepare for neutrality.”76 Ostensibly, this entreaty might have been crafted by Charles Beard. But the operative word in Lippmann’s sentence was “prepare,” not “neutrality”—an important difference in emphasis. Lippmann believed that building a formidable American military was the surest way to repel predators. Like Beard, Lippmann harbored few illusions about the diabolical nature of the Nazi regime. Yet Lippmann thought that Hitler would pay little heed to professions of neutrality that were unsupported by serious military power. Avowedly neutral nations must also possess a big stick, to paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt.