The Press: Elucidator

Other countries might have produced such a journalist, but only in the U. S. could he exist today. In Germany or Italy he would be in prison or silent; in Russia, dead; in France, a partisan among partisans; in England, anonymous; in Japan, inconceivable. Only in a kind where the banner of a free press still proudly flaps could such a journalistic phenomenon as Walter Lippmann rise and continue to shine. Last week, however, Walter Lippmann rose and shone in a new quarter of the political firmament.

Plague to Both Houses. A journalist but his own master, a columnist but a dignified writer, a pundit almost without pomp, the master of a lucid style which thrice multiplies the effect of his political criticism, Walter Lippmann has been a marked man even among the small company of those for whom journalism is not a trade but a profession. Hence during half-a-dozen years of political crisis he has commanded, from his eight million readers, a respect and attention which the Administration in power had to regard as, at the very least, disturbing.

Actually he has disturbed not one but two antipodal regimes. Six years ago, when a Republican Administration was dying of slow political and economic tuberculosis, Herbert Hoover, sitting down to his breakfast and his worries, used to turn regularly to the editorial page of the arch-Democratic New York World to read Walter Lippmann’s dispassionate discussion of his shortcomings. When in recent months Franklin Roosevelt, sitting up in bed with his breakfast and his grin, has occasionally picked up the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune, he has found no less disconcerting reading in Walter Lippmann’s column ”Today & Tomorrow.”

Milestones. This change of target on Lippmann’s part did not coincide with his change of employment from a Democratic to a Republican paper. For the first three months of the Roosevelt Administration he was one of its strongest supporters. At the end of six months he had begun to speak of the “dictatorial spirit” of NRA, although he continued for some months to insist that “the President’s statesmanship has been right.” By the end of two years he reached the point of saying, “The courts will do an historic service not only to the nation as a whole but to recovery and reform, to the President and his Party, if they liquidate a major part of the centralized regulation to which the New Deal has committed itself.”

When four years had nearly gone, Lippmann announced: “I am going to vote for Governor Landon;” but not with elation, not without misgivings voiced as criticism of Landon’s campaign. Not until last spring, after Franklin Roosevelt launched his Supreme Court plan, did Pundit Lippmann, who had steadily grown more critical of “personal government,” turn to outright condemnation.

So Lippmann alienated a large group of his former admirers, liberals who had once stood with him against Hoover, who now stand with Roosevelt against Lippmann. To them Lippmann as an opponent of the New Deal is a man convicted of treason to progressive social ideals, a turncoat, seduced not by cash but by the meretricious appeals of Bourbonism.

Their change of view was a milestone in Walter Lippmann’s career, for whether he had so chosen or not, his stand was no longer with the Left but with the Right, in politics. Recognizing that milestone, Walter Lippmann last week gave both his friends and enemies something to consider. In his 15th published book* he turned the cry of “turncoat” back on his new detractors: they have shifted the targets on his range, but his aim has not faltered—he still fires in defense of individual freedom, the type of liberalism which he had always fought for.

Planned Society. The most pungent words of which Pundit Lippmann delivers himself in The Good Society are aimed not at fascism or communism alone but at all forms of “collectivism.” Excerpts from his passages on “planned society” as a hateful hoax:

“Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must . . . direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come.”

“Men deceive themselves when they imagine that they take charge of the social order …. A directed society must be bellicose and poor. If it is not both bellicose and poor, it cannot be directed.”

“Fascism is martial law. … It has taken some time to recognize fascism for what it is. Men have not seen a mobilization lasting many years, preceding any declaration of war, preceding even a clear decision as to when the war was to be declared or against whom. . . . All collectivism, whether it be communist or fascist, is military in method, in purpose, in spirit, and can be nothing else. . . . There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.”

“Governments are composed of persons who . . . have to be fed, and often they overeat. They would often rather go fishing, or make love, or do anything, than shuffle their papers. They have to sleep. They suffer from indigestion and asthma, bile and palpitation, become bored, tired, careless, and have nervous headaches. . . . There are few supermen. There has never been a succession of supermen. . . . There can be no plan to find the planners. . . . The eye must recapture its innocence if it is to see things as they are: to see not the New Deal in terms of its aspirations, but the New Dealers in their actual careers … to remember that while ideals are illimitable, men are only men.”

Good Society. Since by Walter Lippmann’s definition the inevitable compulsions of a planned society are antiliberal, he admits that “The Good Society has no architectural design. There are no blueprints.” Instead of a design, he offers a liberal philosophy operating through economic law—”A law which is superior to kings, parliaments, magnates, majorities, and mobs . . . the really inexorable law of modern society . . . that nations must practice the division of labor in wide markets or sink into squalor and servitude. … In the liberal philosophy the ideal regulator of the labor of mankind is the perfect market; in the collectivist philosophy it is the perfect plan imposed by an omnipotent sovereign.”

To such a “good society,” ruled by no personal ruler but by the impersonal necessities of economic markets in which governments take part only by regulating against abuses, Walter Lippmann looks for social progress, “the enlargement of the middle class as against the poor and the rich.” To him this is not a pious hope but a sober expectation, for he concludes that the economic law which Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini try to attack and impair will compel men to rediscover and to re-establish the essential principles of a liberal society . . . the renascence of liberalism may be regarded as assured.”

Liberal’s Career. Many onetime admirers of Walter Lippmann will seriously question whether this conclusion is a fitting crown to a career which to them long seemed bound in a different direction. Born in Manhattan, the only child of well-to-do Jewish parents, young Walter was privately schooled, taken regularly to Europe, sent to Harvard. There in a class (1910) that included John Reed, Heywood Broun, Kenneth MacGowan, Robert Edmond Jones, Lippmann worked so hard and well that he finished his course in three years, spent his fourth year as assistant to Philosopher George Santayana. William James thought him a bright boy. But it was a British social philosopher visiting at Harvard, Graham Wallas (author of The Great Society which in title at least was the obvious forerunner of Pundit Lippmann’s latest book) who really fired Lippmann’s imagination, gave his sprouting career its direction. When Lincoln Steffens, the late great muckraker, went looking in Harvard Yard for “the ablest mind that could express itself in writing,” Lippmann, by almost unanimous recommendation, got the job of Steffens’ assistant on Everybody’s Magazine.

When in 1912 a crusading parson, George R. Lunn, was elected mayor of Schenectady on a Socialist platform, he offered the job of secretary to young Mr. Lippmann. Lippmann accepted, found a few months of practical politics plenty, retired to the Maine woods to write his first book, A Preface to Politics. The book attracted the attention of the late Herbert Croly, then cogitating (with the late financier Willard Straight’s backing) a U. S. liberal weekly. Croly wrote to Lippmann, urging him to sign up. When the first issue of the New Republicappeared (1914) 25-year-old Lippmann was No. 2 on the staff and its most brilliant writer.

In the early Wilsonian era the New Republic was the almost-official White House organ. When the U. S. entered the War it was not surprising that Walter Lippmann should be given the job of assistant to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. His experiences in Washington and abroad (where he joined the A. E. F. as captain in the U. S. A. Military Intelligence and attended the Versailles Conference as aid to the U. S. commissioners) left him with the feeling that the New Republic was a shade too theoretical. When he returned to the U. S. he soon left the New Republic for the late great New York World, as assistant and heir to the late and even greater Editor Frank I. Cobb. whose editorials provided for years the most trenchant criticism of what would now be called Old Deal Republicanism.

Lippmann’s two years with able Editor Cobb taught him much, left him well fitted to take over the editorial page of the World when Cobb died at 54. For the next seven years Lippmann’s editorship made and kept the World?, editorial page the brightest liberal lighthouse in U. S. journalism. With the death of the World in 1931 Lippmann seemed checked in midcareer. When he was offered and accepted a place in the columns of the arch-Republican Herald Tribune, which hired him not as an editor but as an independent columnist whose opinions the publisher disavowed, it was as much of a shock to Herald Tribune readers as to Lippmann’s friends. Before long, however, the Herald Tribune’?, bosom ceased to quiver from the shock of taking in this potential viper and started to preen itself on owning the prize exhibit in the journalistic zoo. Lippmann’s popularity as a daily elucidator of world-events soon grew nationwide, and his column was last week being syndicated in 160 U. S. and Canadian newspapers of assorted political persuasion.

The Same or Different? From Socialism to G. O. P., from New Republic to Herald Tribune, these are transitions which the contemners of Walter Lippmann today cannot forgive and will not allow to be forgotten. Although his sincerity is above cavil and his personality above bitterness, they question whether the lucidity of his writing (the Herald Tribune once billed him in phrases borrowed from the American Magazine as “The Man with the Flashlight Mind, the Great Elucidator”) is more than a meretricious semblance hiding a confused mind.

Sharpest dig at Walter Lippmann was made by Mabel Dodge Luhan, whose Manhattan salon Lippmann frequented as a young man: “Walter is never, never going to lose an eye in a fight. He might lose his glow, but he will never lose an eye.”

Whatever Walter Lippmann may have lost, it is a fact that he has gained a great deal of this world’s goods, has a more-than-comfortable income ($54,329), three houses—in Manhattan, Florida and Wading River, Long Island—among which he gravitates with his handsome blonde wife (the Lippmanns have no children). Even by the standards of U. S. success, Walter Lippmann does not lead an underprivileged life. Mornings he writes (can turn out in his illegible longhand a smooth, 1,200-word column in two hours). Afternoons he rides, fishes, plays golf (fairly), tennis (better), or referees a polo game for his Long Island friends (see cut, p. 45). In the private matter of personal friends, he is more apt to be on intimate terms with Morgan partners than with union leaders. He is himself a member of a union, the American Newspaper Guild, but has paid no dues since it voted to join the C. I. O.

All these things provide grounds for those who question whether he has any title to be called “liberal.” It is true, however, that none of them was pointed to with scorn until his opinions ceased to please those who now look upon him with disdain.

Beyond dispute, however, is one point about Walter Lippmann’s present place in the American scene. His social philosophy, whether or not it be defined as liberal, has been reduced to one major principle: opposition to planned society, collectivism, dictatorship. This leaves unsettled just one important question in regard to Mr. Lippmann, a question which cannot be answered until a more significant judgment has been made: whether the New Deal will be written down in history as social reform or as the Dictatorship of the Forgotten Man.

*Good Society—Little, Brown ($3).