Walter
Lippmann, the son of second-generation German-Jewish
parents, was born in New York City on
23rd September, 1889. While studying at Harvard
University he became a socialist and
was co-founder of the Harvard Socialist Club and edited the Harvard
Monthly.
In 1911 Lincoln Steffens, the campaigning
journalist, took Lippmann on as his secretary. Like Steffens, Lippmann
supported Theodore Roosevelt and the
Progressive Party in the 1912 presidential
elections. Lippman's book, A Preface to Politics
(1913) was well-received and the following year he joined Herbert
Croly in establishing the political weekly, the New
Republic.
Lippmann rejected his earlier socialism in Drift
and Mastery (1914) and in 1916 became a staunch supporter
of Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic
Party. In 1917 Lippmann was appointed as assistant to Newton
Baker, Wilson's secretary of war. Lippman worked closely with
Woodrow Wilson and Edward
House in drafting the Fourteen Points
Peace Programme. He was a member of the USA's delegation to the
Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and helped
draw up the covenant of the League of Nations.
In 1920 Lippmann left the New Republic
to work for the New York World.
His controversial books, Public Opinion
(1922) and The Phantom Public
(1925), raised doubts about the possibility of developing a true democracy
in a modern, complex society.
Lippmann became editor of the New York World
in 1929, but after it closed in 1931, he moved to the New
York Herald Tribune. For the next 30
years Lippmann wrote the nationally syndicated column, Today
and Tomorrow. Lippmann developed a very pragmatic approach
to politics and during this period supported six Republican
and seven Democratic presidential
candidates.
After the Second World War, Lippmann returned
to the liberal views of his youth. He upset leaders of both the Democratic
and Republican parties when he opposed
the Korean War, McCarthyism
and the Vietnam War. Walter Lippmann died
on 14th December, 1974.
(1)
Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914)
There is no doubt, I think, that President Wilson and his party
represent primarily small business in a war against the great interests.
Socialists speak of his administration as a revolution within the
bounds of capitalism. Wilson doesn't really fight the oppressions
of property. He fights the evil done by large property-holders to
small ones. The temper of his
administration was revealed very clearly when the proposal was made
to establish a Federal Trade Commission. It was suggested at once
by leading spokesmen of the Democratic Party that corporations with
a capital of less than a million dollars should be exempted from supervision.
Is that because little corporations exploit labor or the consumer
less? Not
a bit of it. It is because little corporations are in control of the
political situation.
But there
are certain obstacles to the working out of the New Freedom. First
of all, there was a suspicion in Wilson's mind, even during the campaign,
that the tendency to large organization was too powerful to be stopped
by legislation. So he left open a way of escape from the literal achievement
of what the New Freedom seemed to threaten. "I am for
big business' he said, "and I am against the trusts." That
is a very subtle distinction, so subtle, I suspect, that no human
legislation will ever be able to make it. The distinction is this:
big business is a business that has survived competition; a trust
is an arrangement to do away with competition. But when competition
is done away with, who is the Solomon wise enough to know whether
the result was accomplished by superior efficiency or by agreement
among the competitors or by both?
The big
trusts have undoubtedly been built up in part by superior business
ability, and by successful competition, but also by ruthless competition,
by underground arrangements, by an intricate series of facts which
no earthly tribunal will ever be able to disentangle. And why should
it try? These great combinations are here. What interests us is not
their history but their future. The point is whether you are going
to split them up, and if so into how many parts. Once split, are they
to be kept from coming together again? Are you determined to prevent
men who could cooperate from cooperating? Wilson seems to imply that
a big business which has survived competition is to be let alone,
and the trusts attacked. But as there is no real way of distinguishing
between them, he leaves the question just where he found it: he must
choose between the large organization of business and the small.
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