Trouble with the Statistical Curve: Walter Lippmann's Blending of History and Social Science during Franklin Roosevelt's First Term

Abstract

Walter Lippmann's efforts to inject scientific rigor into journalism did not prevent him from recognizing the dangers that a cramped understanding of scientific inquiry posed to journalists seeking to understand a novel historical moment. Lippmann's concern that social scientific theory could degenerate into dogma informed his criticism of commentators who sought during Franklin Roosevelt's first term to divine the plan governing the president's “muddling through.” Such efforts, he maintained, produced interpretations and predictions that obscured the role that historical contingency played in shaping the early New Deal. Lippmann's sensitivity to difference and contingency allowed his commentary to feature the self-correcting property that was, for him, the chief virtue of scientific inquiry. His commentary demonstrated that during periods of unprecedented change, journalists must first be historians before they can become social scientists.

Notes

All quotations in this paragraph are from Walter Lippmann, “1959: Birthday Address to the National Press Club,” Nieman Reports, Winter 1999–Spring 2000.

Ibid. Lippmann's conviction that the postwar generation lived in novel times was one shared by many of his contemporaries. For example, Lester Markel, the formidable editor of the Sunday New York Times, had almost a decade earlier identified the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb as a hinge point in history, one that had rendered policymakers uncertain and indecisive in the face of a challenge unique in human history. Lester Markel, “The Great Need—An Informed Opinion,” New York Times Magazine, April 9, 1950.

See, for example, Walter Lippmann, “False Gods,” Boston Globe, May 20, 1932; Walter Lippmann, “Crisis and Renewal,” Boston Globe, July 22, 1932; Walter Lippmann, “Policy and Authority,” Boston Globe, March 1, 1933; Walter Lippmann, “A Crisis in History,” Boston Globe, October 13, 1933; and Walter Lippmann, “The War Generation,” Boston Globe, June 1, 1935.

Paul Fussell, Introduction to Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That (1929; repr., New York: Random House, 1998), x.

Graham Wallas, Our Social Heritage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 23. Lippmann had first encountered Wallas when Lippmann was a student at Harvard in 1910. Lippmann's socialist sympathies were at this moment burning hot, with the consequence that he was “excited to discover that… one of the original Fabians” was coming to teach at Harvard. Wallas's interest in the role that human motivation played in guiding political behavior was a revelation to Lippmann, who had heretofore “been taught that politics was about constitutions, elections, and legislative committees.” Thus commenced a lifelong friendship and intellectual partnership that concluded only with Wallas's death in August of 1932. When Lippmann learned of Wallas's passing, he wrote a brief but poignant handwritten note to Wallas's widow, Audrey, in which he called her husband “the greatest teacher I have ever known.” See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2008), 26–27. For Lippmann's letter to Audrey Wallas, see John Morton Blum, ed., Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1985), 295.

Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (1929; repr., New York: Time Incorporated, 1964), 18.

Ibid., 189–190.

What Barry Riccio has described as Lippmann's “faith in the method of science,” which was particularly apparent in his early works, has been noted by many scholars (Barry D. Riccio, Walter Lippmann—Odyssey of a Liberal [New Brunswick: Transaction, 1996], 66). See, for example, Sue Curry Jansen, Walter Lippmann: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 21 and 91; Charles Wellborn, Twentieth Century Pilgrimage: Walter Lippmann and the Public Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 112; and Benjamin F. Wright, Five Public Philosophies of Walter Lippmann (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), 35–36.

Terrence H. Qualter, Graham Wallas and the Great Society (New York: St. Martin's, 1979), 108.

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922; repr., New York: Free Press, 1997), 18.

Ibid., 3–20. Lippmann first used the term pseudo-environment in Liberty and the News, his 1920 examination of both the role of the press in a democracy and, in Lippmann's view, the American press's failure to play this role adequately. But Lippmann's exploration of this term in Liberty and the News was brief and rather casual when compared to the rigorous treatment it receives and the central role it plays in Public Opinion. See Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (1920; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 33.

Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 40.

Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911), 189 and 192.

Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 49.

Thomas Patterson, Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism (New York: Random House, 2013), 77.

Ibid., 78. Lippmann maintained in a January 25, 1926, letter to Clark McAdams that the time constraints of daily journalism necessitated that the training of journalists be focused less on cultivating expertise than on implanting the judgment that would allow novice journalists to identify the reputable experts who could educate them on the topic they were covering: “So far as the education of the journalist goes, the point I made was a very simple and obvious one. Namely, that newspaper men had to deal with the whole universe, and the whole range of human interests, and that it was impossible for them to become competent in the whole universe, and that therefore the essence of education for journalism was the ability to know who knew all on that subject.” Walter Lippmann to Clark McAdams, January 25, 1926, fol. 749, box 18, Walter Lippmann Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

In 1933, Harvard University President James Conant sought Lippmann's advice on how best to deploy a recent gift to the university “for the advancement of journalism.” Lippmann replied by suggesting that Conant offer scholarships to working journalists to take a year off to pursue the kind of specialized knowledge they would need to practice their craft. These new students would not be attending Harvard “to learn anything more about journalism” but instead “to improve their general education and to specialize in the fields where they are already working.” “I can well imagine,” Lippmann wrote, “that a young assistant financial editor might want to come to Harvard for a year to study banking and corporate finance, that an assistant dramatic critic might want to study drama, that an assistant working in the book section might want to study literature, that other men might want to come to study politics, etc. etc.” Conant weighed Lippmann's advice heavily when establishing what became known as the Nieman Fellowships. Walter Lippmann to James Conant, May 13, 1936, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 351.

While scholars disagree about when journalistic objectivity first emerged, there is general agreement that it had by the 1920s become an established professional norm in most news-rooms. See, in particular, Barbara M. Kelly's argument that the development in the 1920s of codes or canons of ethics contributed to the profession's pivot toward objectivity in “Objectivity and the Trappings of Professionalism, 1900–1950,” in Steven R. Knowlton and Karen L. Freeman, eds., Fair and Balanced: A History of Journalistic Objectivity (Northport: Vision, 2005), 149 and 157. For a review of the debate about both the timing of objectivity's establishment and the course of its development, see Steven Maras, Objectivity in Journalism (Malden: Polity Press, 2013), especially 42–56.

Walter Lippmann to Van Wyck Brooks, February 5, 1914, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 16–17. Lippmann's recoil from what he called in an October 30, 1912, letter to Graham Wallas “fixed formulae” was an important theme in his 1913 book, A Preface to Politics, but it was also one that would form a connecting thread throughout his career as a journalist. Walter Lippmann to Graham Wallas, October 30, 1912, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 13–14. See also Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (1913; repr., Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), especially 19–42.

Walter Lippmann to Van Wyck Brooks, February 5, 1914, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 16–17.

Walter Lippmann to Graham Wallas, August 5, 1915, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 29.

Lippmann, “Elusive Curves,” Boston Globe, April 13, 1935.

Walter Lippmann to Victor Krauth, March 23, 1925, fol. 665, box 16, Walter Lippmann Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

Craufurd Goodwin has addressed Lippmann's turn toward history, characterizing “Lippmann's high regard, especially during his later years, for the contribution of history” to policy analysis as reflecting “a clear progression in his thought.” Goodwin, however, limits his analysis of Lippmann's use of history to Lippmann's contention that “history could be a lingua franca” among policymakers, “a means to achieve communication among those trained in more technical disciplines and an antidote to too much rigorous social science.” See Craufurd D. Goodwin, “The Promise of Expertise: Walter Lippmann and the Policy Sciences,” Policy Sciences 28, no. 4 (November 1995): 333–334.

Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 280. The Boston Globe was one of the papers in which “Today and Tomorrow” was syndicated, copies of which from 1827 to 1981 are available through ProQuest Historical Newspapers. All references to Lippmann's “Today and Tomorrow” columns in the following are from editions of the Boston Globe accessed through this database.

David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (1975; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 369.

Ibid., 368.

See Charles E. Lindblom, The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making through Mutual Adjustment (New York: Free Press, 1965), 137–143.

Lippmann, as many scholars have noted, found science attractive because of its emphasis on disinterested inquiry, which ostensibly allowed it to cast off theories and assumptions in response to disconfirmatory evidence. Lippmann in A Preface to Morals went so far as to argue that the scientific value of disinterestedness could “if pursued resolutely, untangle the moral confusion of the age.” Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 214. For Lippmann's fondness for science's self-correcting nature, see Jansen, Walter Lippmann, 21 and 91.

Walter Lippmann, “If Neither Roosevelt nor Smith—Then Baker,” Boston Globe, February 10, 1932.

Walter Lippmann, “Roosevelt's Achievement,” Boston Globe, April 6, 1933.

Walter Lippmann, “The Savannah Speech,” Boston Globe, November 21, 1933.

Lippmann, “1959: Birthday Address to the National Press Club.”

Lippmann, Public Opinion, 248.

Ibid., 249.

John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 63. For Gaddis's assessment of the critical differences between social scientific and historical inquiry, see, in particular, 62–66. Developments in the social sciences since the publication of The Landscape of History necessitate some softening of Gaddis's most stinging rebukes to that discipline. Gaddis's claim, for example, that social scientists prefer “categorical” to “contingent causation” has been addressed by a group of political scientists in Ian Shapiro and Sonu Bedi, eds., Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

Lippmann, “Elusive Curves.”

Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 12.

Walter Lippmann, “A Whole View of the Crisis,” Boston Globe, April 7, 1932.

Ibid.

Samuel G. Freedman, Letters to a Young Journalist (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 24.

Patterson, Informing the News, 75, 54, 94.

Lippmann, “Elusive Curves.”

Walter Lippmann, “Masters of Their Fate,” Boston Globe, August 11, 1933.

Ibid.

Walter Lippmann, “A Crisis in History.”

Ibid.

Ibid. Lippmann expressed in A Preface to Morals his position that the good scientist understood that scientific inquiry required much more than a tenacious adherence to method: “Doubtless it is true that in all the sciences the difference between a good scientist and a poor one comes down at last, after all the technical and theoretical procedure has been learned, to some sort of residual flair for the realities of the subject. But in the study of human nature that residual flair, which seems to be composed of intuition, commonsense, and unconsciously deposited experience, plays a much greater role than it does in the more advanced sciences.” Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 162.

Lippmann, Public Opinion, 226.

Walter Lippmann, “Congress Is on the Spot,” Boston Globe, December 8, 1931.

Walter Lippmann, “Have Faith in the People,” Boston Globe, January 1, 1932.

Lippmann, “Congress Is on the Spot.”

Lippmann, “If Neither Roosevelt nor Smith—Then Baker.”

Walter Lippmann, “Dark Fears,” Boston Globe, November 1, 1932.

Walter Lippmann, “The Verdict,” Boston Globe, November 10, 1932.

Lippmann, “Policy and Authority.”

Lippmann, “Roosevelt's Achievement.”

Ibid.

Walter Lippmann, “States of Mind,” Boston Globe, May 11, 1933.

Walter Lippmann, “Technocracy I: The Appeal to Science,” Boston Globe, January 31, 1933.

Ibid.

Walter Lippmann, “Technocracy IV: The Promise of Salvation,” Boston Globe, February 3, 1933.

Lippmann, “States of Mind.”

Lippmann, “Masters of Their Fate.” Lippmann's characterization of Roosevelt's leadership as “muddling through” has been endorsed by most historians, beginning with Richard Hofstadter's depiction of Roosevelt in The American Liberal Tradition and the Men Who Made It as “neither systematic nor consistent.” Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948; repr., New York: Random House, 1989), xxxvi and 411. See also James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), especially 528–532; and Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of American Reform (New York: Knopf, 1952), especially chapters 14–16.

Lippmann, “Masters of Their Fate.”

Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 11.

Lippmann, “Masters of Their Fate.”

Ibid.

Walter Lippmann, “The President's Task,” Boston Globe, October 10, 1933.

Lippmann, “A Crisis in History.”

Lippmann, “The Savannah Speech.”

Walter Lippmann, “Personal Devils,” Boston Globe, December 14, 1933.

Lippmann, “Elusive Curves.”

Walter Lippmann, “Is It a Revolution?,” Boston Globe, December 19, 1933.

Walter Lippmann, “The First Roosevelt Year,” Boston Globe, February 27, 1934.

Walter Lippmann, “On Our Way,” Boston Globe, April 20, 1934.

Walter Lippmann, “Making Things Too Complicated,” Boston Globe, June 15, 1934.

Ibid.

Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 20.

Ibid., 122.

Ibid., 123.

Back in 1913, in A Preface to Politics, Lippmann had presented a similar contrast between “the routineer” who was rigidly committed to past doctrines and “the political creator or political inventor” who understood that “it is our desperate adherence to an old method that has produced the confusion of political life.” Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, especially 19–56, above quote on 35.

Walter Lippmann, “Why the Administration Is Weaker,” Boston Globe, February 21, 1935.

Walter Lippmann, “Cure for the Jitters,” Boston Globe, April 23, 1935.

Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 21.

Lippmann, “Roosevelt's Achievement.”

Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 7.

Lippmann, “States of Mind.” Perhaps the best explanation for why historians should practice humility is delivered by David Lowenthal in The Past Is a Foreign Country: “Historical knowledge… is shaped by subjectivity, by hindsight, and by the insurmountable gulf between the actual past and any account of that past. Every account of the past is both more and less than the past—less because no account can incorporate an entire past, however exhaustive the records; more because narrators of past events have the advantage of knowing subsequent outcomes.” David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), xxii–xxiii.

Walter Lippmann, “Bedside Reading,” Boston Globe, April 25, 1935.

Ibid.

Lippmann, “A Crisis in History.”

Lippmann, “1959: Birthday Address to the National Press Club.”