Worldmaking (34 page)

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.”
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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.

*   *   *

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.”
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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.”
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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 “desire 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.”
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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

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.
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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.

*   *   *

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.
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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.”
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