Walter Lippmann

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Walter Lippmann Drift and Mastery (1914)

• Lippmann was born in New York City to
  German-Jewish parents. The family lived a
  comfortable, if not privileged, life. Annual
  family trips to Europe were the rule.
• At age 17, he entered Harvard University where he
  concentrated on philosophy and languages (he
  spoke both German and French) and graduated after
  only three years of study.
• Lippmann was a journalist, a media critic and a
  philosopher who argued that true democracy is a
  goal that cannot be reached in a complex,
  industrial world.
• In 1913, Lippmann became one of the founding
  editors of The New Republic magazine. During
  World War I, Lippmann became an advisor to
  President Woodrow Wilson, and assisted in the
  drafting of Wilsons Fourteen Points.

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Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914)

• Early on, Lippmann was optimistic about American
  democracy. He embraced the Jeffersonian ideal and
  believed that the American people would become
  intellectually engaged in political and world
  issues and fulfill their democratic role as an
  educated electorate. He later rejected this
  view.
• Lippmann coined the word stereotype and he
  criticized journalists for stereotyping people.
  He argued that seeing through stereotypes
  subjected us to partial truths, and that when
  analyzing a problem or event, people are more apt
  to believe "the pictures in their heads" than
  come to judgment by critical thinking.

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During the 1920s, Walter Lippmann published two
of the most penetrating indictments of democracy
every written, Public Opinion and The Phantom
Public, valedictories to Progressive hopes for
the application of intelligence to social
problems via mass democracy. Instead of acting
out of careful consideration of the issues or
even individual or collective self-interest, the
American voter, Lippmann claimed, was
ill-informed, myopic, and prone to fits of
enthusiasm. The government, like advertising
copywriters and journalists, had perfected the
art of creating and manipulating public opiniona
process Lippmann called the manufacture of
consentwhile at the same time consumerism was
sapping Americans concern for public issues.
(Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, p.
181.)
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Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914) 1.
There is a consensus that business methods need
to change. The leading thought of our world has
ceased to regard commercialism either as
permanent or desirable, and the only real
question among intelligent people is how business
methods are to be alerted, not whether they are
to be altered. 2. The chaos of too much
freedom and the weaknesses of democracy are our
real problem. The battle for us, in short, does
not lie against crusted prejudice, but against
the chaos of a new freedom. This chaos is our
real problem. So if the younger critics are to
meet the issues of their generation they must
give their attention, not so much to the evils of
authority, as to the weaknesses of democracy.
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Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914) 3.
Many are absorbed and overly worried about evil
conspiracies against society. The sense of
conspiracy and secret scheming which transpire is
almost uncanny. Big Business, and its ruthless
tentacles, have become the material for the
feverish fantasy of illiterate thousands thrown
out of kilter by the rack and strain of modern
life. It is possible to work yourself into a
state where the world seems a conspiracy and your
daily gong is beset with an alert and tingling
sense of labyrinthine evil. Everything askewall
the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a
deliberate evil intelligence, and men like Morgan
and Rockefeller take on attributes of
omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity
would reduce to a barbarous myth.
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Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914) 4.
Although there is little legal basis for it, the
standards of the public life are being applied to
certain parts of the business world, thus making
businessmen think more about their
responsibilities, and their stewardship.
As muckraking developed, it began to apply the
standards of public life to certain parts of the
business world. The cultural basis of property
is radically altered, however much the law may
lag behind in recognizing the change. So if the
stockholders think they are the ultimate owners
of the Pennsylvania railroad, they are colossally
mistaken. Whatever the law may be, the people
have no such notion. And the men who are
connected with these essential properties cannot
escape the fact that they are expected to act
increasingly as public officials What puzzles
them beyond words is that anyone should presume
to meddle with their business. What they will
learn is that it is no longer altogether their
business. The law may not have realized this, but
the fact is being accomplished, and its a fact
grounded deeper than statutes. Big business men
who are at all intelligent recognize this. They
are talking more and more about their
responsibilities, their stewardship. It is
the swan-song of the old commercial profiteering
and a dim recognition that the motives in
business are undergoing a revolution.
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Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914) 5.
The crime is serious in proportion to the degree
of loyalty that we expect. American life is
saturated with the very relationship which in
politics we call corrupt. But in the politician
it is mercilessly condemned. In literal truth
the politician is attacked for displaying the
morality of his constituents. I suppose that
from the beginning of the republic people had
always expected their officials to work at a
level less self-seeking than that of ordinary
life. So that corruption in politics could never
be carried on with an entirely good conscious.
But at the opening of this century, democratic
people had begun to see much greater
possibilities in the government than ever before.
They looked to it as a protector from economic
tyranny and as the dispenser of the prime
institutions of democratic life. But when they
went to the government, what they found was a
petty and partisan, slavish and blind, clumsy and
rusty instrument for their expectations. when
mens vision of government enlarged, then the
cost of corruption and inefficiency rose for
they meant a blighting of the whole possibility
of the state. Corruption became a real
problem when reform through state action began to
take hold of mens thought.
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Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914) 6.
Americans need to deal with life deliberately. We
should organize our society, and actively
formulate it and educate it. We should substitute
purpose for tradition. America is preeminently
the country where there is practical substance in
Nietzsches advice that we should live not for
our fatherland but for our childrens land. To
do this men have to substitute purpose for
tradition and that is, I believe, the
profoundest change that has ever taken place in
human history. We can no longer treat life as
something that has trickled down to us. We have
to deal with it deliberately, devise its social
organization, alter its tools, formulate its
method, educate and control it. In endless ways
we put intention where custom has reigned. We
break up routines, make decisions, choose our
ends, select means.