What Walter Saw

NOTES

• James Boylan, ed., The World and the 20's: The Best from New York's Legendary Newspaper (New York: Dial Press, 1973), 3. One of The World's admirers was Adolph Ochs, the owner and publisher of the rival New York Times, who, according to Gay Talese, saw The World as “a remarkable combination of writing and reporting, urbanity and intelligence.” See Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World (New York: Random House, 2007, first published in 1966), 13.
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• See Boylan, The World and the 20's, 3. Ashley Morrissette in her unpublished Ph.D. dissertation maintains that The World “had built a circulation of 400,000 readers by combining the sensationalism of its news page with the ‘crusading liberalism’ of its editorials. It thus complemented its calculated illustration of individual wickedness with a passion for remedying the systemic wickedness of the Republic.” See Ashley Morrissette, “Walter Lippmann: Architect of Crisis,” (Ph.D. diss, Claremont Graduate University, 1983), 66.
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• Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 272. While the chairman of Scripps Howard, Roy Howard, took out a full page ad on page 10 of the front section of the last issue of The World on February, 27, 1931, to reassure the paper's readers that “features of the Morning World which have become part of your daily reading fare will be in the World-Telegram today and every day,” his firing of 2,000 World employees signaled more clearly than any ad Howard's true intentions. See “Today the World Becomes the New York-World Telegram,” The New York World, Feb. 27, 1931.
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• Letter from Herbert Bayard Swope to Ralph Pulitzer, Dec. 8, 1926, box 23, folder 899, Walter Lippmann Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library (henceforth WLP).
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• Ibid.
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• Record of New York World Council Meeting, April 15, 1925, box 25, folder 916, WLP.
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• Letter from Swope to Pulitzer, Dec. 8, 1926.
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• Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 270. Lippmann did, however, think that if “Herbert [Swope] had shown some courage and thrown his private resources behind the paper,” The World could have survived the Depression and “when the tide turned in 1933, it would have pulled out and undoubtedly have been a prosperous paper” (p. 273). Lippmann's final editorial for The World, which was titled “Valedictory,” professed fewer regrets about how The World's editors had tried to adapt to a changing competitive environment. He concluded his piece with a quote from The Pilgrims Progress, in which Mr. Valiant-for-truth, after receiving his summons from God's messenger, states, “Though with great difficulty I am got thither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.” Lippmann, however, fails to note that when Mr. Valiant-for-truth travels to the river the next day to embark on his crossing to the other side, he asks, “‘Death, where is thy sting?’ And as he went down deeper, he said, ‘Grave, where is thy victory?’” Perhaps the sting of The World's demise was still too fresh for Lippmann at this moment. See John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1856), 333.
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• Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013), 33.
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• Ibid., 33.
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• Ibid., 48.
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• While the precise moment when journalistic objectivity first emerged is disputed, there is general agreement among scholars that it had by the 1920s become an established professional norm in most newsrooms. Barbara Kelly, for example, notes that “objectivity became the cornerstone of the established press in the periods between World Wars I and II,” though she concedes that “it sometimes remains difficult to determine just what journalists of the period meant by the term.” The publications of codes of journalistic ethics, however, during the 1920s went some way toward establishing a common understanding of the key properties of objectivity, one of the most important of these being the separation of news from opinion. One of the earliest of these codes of journalism, The Kansas Code of Ethics for Publishers, underscored that news was “the impartial portrayal of the decent activities of mind, men, and matter.” There are, however, scholars who maintain that objectivity was an important feature of journalistic thought and practice long before such codes emerged in the 1920s. David Mindich, for example, argues that the elements of objectivity—which he identifies as detachment, nonpartisanship, the inverted pyramid, facticity, and balance—seeped into journalism in a serial fashion between 1830 and 1890, the latter year marking the moment when “all the elements… came together,” with the consequence that “journalists and journalism were [now] what the profession calls ‘objective.’” Richard Kaplan argues in a similar vein that the seeds of objectivity were sown at the end of the nineteenth century when “a radical transformation in newspaper economics” created “a new profit orientation of newspapers” that generated “a complex dynamic weakening journalism's embrace of partisanship.” Gerald Baldasty concurs with Kaplan's assessment that much of the groundwork for the development of objectivity was laid with the establishment of a commercial republic in the nineteenth century, an event that was shaped by industrialization and urbanization processes that also created a market for newspapers appealing to the masses and attractive to advertisers. Dan Schiller traces the origins of objectivity to an even earlier moment: the mid-1830s, when the emergence of a penny press that “claimed to speak alike to the politicized and the less-politicized, the journeyman and the merchant, and which appropriated and softened the anger of the labor press into a blustery rhetoric of equal rights enlightenment and political independence” allowed “the appeal to reason” to enter public discourse. Michael Schudson and Stephen J.A. Ward, on the other hand, do not see objectivity becoming journalists' ethos until the 1920s. Steven Maras seeks to mediate this dispute by maintaining that objectivity can be best understood as consisting of a number of archaeological strata or layers that extend upward from the era of “proto-objectivity” in the 1830s to “objectivity as a democratic-realist epistemology in the late 1800s” to objectivity as a “reporter-focused occupational or organizational ethic from 1880–1900” to objectivity as an “informational ethic at the turn of the twentieth century” to the post-1920 “ideal of objectivity.” See Barbara M. Kelly, “Objectivity and the Trappings of Professionalism, 1900–1950,” in Fair and Balanced: A History of Journalistic Objectivity, eds. Steven R. Knowlton and Karen L. Freeman (Northport, Ala.: Vision Press, 2005), 149, 157, 160; David T.Z. Mindich, Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 113; Richard L. Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 104, 105; Gerald L. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 139; Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 46; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 121–59; Stephen J.A. Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004), 214–57; and Steven Maras, Objectivity in Journalism (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2013), 42–56.
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• Daxton R. “Chip” Stewart, “‘Gagged, Mincing Neutrality’: Horace Greeley on Advocacy Journalism in the Early Years of the Penny Press,” in Burton St. John III and Kristen A. Johnson, News with a View: Essays on the Eclipse of Objectivity in Modern Journalism (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2012), 11–25.
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• James Nuechterlein maintains that both Lippmann and his Progressive colleagues on The New Republic believed that the scientific method was the best way to address normative as well as empirical questions. The New Republic in its early years sought to bridge the divide in the Progressive movement between “a liberalism centered in humanitarian and moral passion and one based in an ethos of scientific analysis” by, as the editors explained in a May 1916 piece, producing a magazine where readers would find “the passion of the humanitarian yoked with the zeal of the scientist; the sentimentalist and the rationalist fighting side by side against the established order.” This dream of “scientific liberalism” had at its center the idea that “morality was as morality did, and science did morality better than anything else could.” See James A. Nuechterlein, “The Dream of Scientific Liberalism: The New Republic and American Progressive Thought, 1914–1920,” The Review of Politics 42, no. 2 (April 1980): 167–90, quotes on 167, 168 and 170. Lippmann's most complete statement of his view that the disinterested posture of science could become the basis of a new humanism that could replace popular religion was in A Preface to Morals. See Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: Time Incorporated, 1964, first published in 1929), especially 110–30 and 190–96. For a critique of Lippmann's effort in A Preface to Morals to translate “his early demand for a science of human nature” into an “ersatz religion,” see Charles Wellborn, Twentieth Century Pilgrimage: Walter Lippmann and the Public Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 124–28.
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• As John Palen observes in his unpublished master's thesis, Lippmann contended throughout his life that science was “the most reliable epistemological link to reality.” Palen goes on to argue that science was both an intellectual preoccupation for Lippmann and “a strong emotional absolute.” See John A. Palen, “Science and Walter Lippmann” (master's thesis, Michigan State University, 1981), 76, 104.
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• This desire for a fact-based journalism emerged, paradoxically, at a moment when what David Shi calls the “mania for facts” that had characterized the realism movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was unraveling as a consequence of the puncturing of the belief in absolutes on the battlefields of Europe, the new psychology, and the increasing awareness of the power of propaganda and public relations to present Americans with different versions of the facts. On how positivist science influenced both social science and philosophy in the late nineteenth century, see David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 66–78. In A Preface to Morals, Lippmann maintained that Americans' yearning for verifiable facts at a moment when confidence in facts was under assault had both philosophical and psychological origins: “The modern man has ceased to believe in [religion] but he has not ceased to be credulous, and the need to believe haunts him. It is no wonder that his impulse is to turn back from his freedom, and to find some one who says he knows the truth and can tell him what to do, to find the shrine of some new god, of any cult however newfangled, where he can kneel and be comforted, put on manacles to keep his hands from trembling, ensconce himself in some citadel where it is safe and warm.” This aspiration for “a new god,” however, must, according to Lippmann, remain unrealized because “the acids of modernity are so powerful that they do not tolerate a crystallization of ideas which will serve as a new orthodoxy,” with the consequence “that it is impossible to reconstruct an enduring orthodoxy, and impossible to live without the satisfactions which an orthodoxy would provide.” See Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 9, 19.
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• Heywood Broun devoted his column in The New York World-Telegram on May 5, 1931, to a defense of agitators, providing his readers with a historical overview of agitators from missionaries to the South Sea Islands to William Lloyd Garrison. He concluded his column by stating that while agitators “May be disturbing. They may be a nuisance. But they are the corpuscles of corporate being through which the waste and the stagnation of the status quo is turned into living tissue.” Broun's column is reprinted in Heywood Hale Broun, ed., Collected Edition of Heywood Broun (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941), 257–60, quote on 260.
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• The World's columnists, while without exception sympathetic to liberal causes, wrote on a range of subjects, many of which were nonpolitical, in a variety of styles, which stretched from the colloquial to the literary. Heywood Broun, the paper's most prominent and controversial columnist, was given considerable latitude by Swope to choose his subjects, with Swope's only stipulation being that Broun's columns be “provocative, controversial, [and] outspoken” See Richard O'Connor, Heywood Broun: A Biography (New York: P. G. Putnam's Sons, 1975), 82. Broun honored this agreement with a verve that caused Swope on occasion to regret having made it. Broun could on one day write knowledgeably of the workings of Shakespearian tragedy; on another poignantly on the passing of Sidonia Barsey, “the best known of all” bearded ladies; on another on the futility of Eugene Debs's life but the promise of his legacy; and on still another unsettlingly on the propriety of “striking a woman.” It would be, however, his two columns on the Fuller Committee's failure to exonerate Sacco and Vanzetti, discussed below, that would prove to be the most incendiary and, ultimately, lethal for his tenure at The World. See Heywood Broun, “He Didn't Know It Was Loaded,” “They Buried the Bearded Lady,” and “The Miracle of Debs,” Collected Edition of Heywood Broun, 153–55, 177–79, and 180–85. On the treatment of women, see Heywood Broun, “It Seems to Me,” The New York World, Aug. 7, 1927. Charles Michelson, though not formally a columnist, was the most political of The World's commentators, writing a feature called “The Political Undertow” that often appeared on the paper's editorial page. Michelson's subject, as the title of his feature suggests, was political strategy and tactics. He could, however, engage in fierce political advocacy on occasions, as evinced by the first paragraph of his defense of Al Smith, which appeared on The World's editorial page on Sunday, Nov. 4, 1928, two days before the 1928 presidential election: “It might have been assumed that after the stock of falsehoods that had been circulated against Governor Smith had been run down there would be some let-up in the output of this kind of campaigning. The contrary is the fact. Every tale that was circulated at the opening of the campaign is still going the rounds and a crop of new ones has appeared.” See Charles Michelson, “The Political Undertow,” The New York World, Nov. 4, 1928. Michelson's ostentatious political bent was, however, the exception among The World's columnists. Elsie McCormick's “A Piece of Her Mind” addressed principally what were considered at the time to be “women's issues,” such as the shortage of marriageable men, though she could stray into politics on occasion, such as when she worried that the Anti-Saloon League might go after tea drinkers next. See Elsie McCormick, “A Piece of Her Mind,” The New York World, Feb. 1, 1929. Charles Bolitho, though he had a background in radical politics, wrote most often about books and the theater. When Bolitho did discuss politics, he did so with an insight and a fluidity of expression that confirmed Broun's assessment of him as “the most brilliant journalist of our time.” See Heywood Broun, “Bill Bolitho,” reprinted in Broun, Collected Edition of Heywood Broun, 237–39. For example, Bolitho once described the setting of a New York City Board of Estimate meeting this way: “None of the sinister and rowdy hosts the cartoons of Nast perpetuate…. It is full of the silky light of a January sun and all painted in clear colors. The arch ways are like calligraphic verbs, and the pillars like nouns in a philosophic discourse on classical beauty in the eighteenth century.” See William Bolitho, “In at the Death,” The New York World, Jan. 29, 1929. The Worlds op-ed page had a discernible tilt toward the arts, featuring each day the literary critic Harry Hansen's “First Reader” and Francis Pierce Adams's “The Conning Tower,” a widely read feature that was a mix of Adams's and others' light verse, a mixture that was leavened on occasion by observations on recent books or plays and some satirical social commentary. There were, finally, Samuel Chotzinoff's regular column on music and Alexander Woollcott's column on theater. The World's devotion to the arts was even more perceptible in its Sunday edition, which featured separate sections on New York theater, films, music (divided into a “Music” section and a “Concert” section), books, and art.
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• Janice Scott Andersen, “The Rhetorical Theory and Practice of Walter Lippmann: Advocacy Journalism as Rhetorical Discourse” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1981), 277–78.
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• Ibid., 278.
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• Curtis D. MacDougall, Interpretative Reporting (New York: Macmillan, 1982), vii-viii. As Gerry Lanosga notes, both investigative and interpretative reporting had been practiced since the late nineteenth century, but the lure of an impartial journalism, a lure that Hazel Dicken-Garcia claims had existed since the beginning of the republic, was not quelled by even what Robert Hackett and Yuehzi Zhao call “the positivist ideal of unmediated, purely factual representation.” See Gerry Lanosga, “A New Model of Objectivity: Investigative Reporting in the Twentieth Century,” in St. John and Johnson, News with a View, 42–57; Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 98–99; and Robert A. Hackett and Yuezhi Zhao, Sustaining Democracy? Journalism and the Politics of Objectivity (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998), 40. Michael Emery, Edwin Emery, and Nancy Roberts argue that it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that interpretative reporting became an established genre of journalism, as “the socio-economic revolution of the New Deal years, the rise of modern scientific technology, and the shrinking of the world into one vast arena of power politics forced a new approach to the handling of the news.” See Michael Emery, Edwin Emery, and Nancy T. Roberts, The Press and America: An Interpretative History of the Mass Media (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000) 310–11.
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• MacDougall, Interpreting the News, 16. MacDougall maintains that the practice of such drab objectivity became less tenable “after the stock-market crash of 1929 and… the depression years of the ‘30s and the period of New Deal experimentation brought with it nationwide awareness of the increased importance to the life of every citizen of the federal government.”
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• As Ronald Steel suggests, Lippmann sought to craft journalists in his image, placing a premium on men like himself “who could write and think clearly, not flashy stylists.” See Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 202. A scientific approach to journalism certainly played to Lippmann's strengths as a writer and a thinker. Lippmann, as Barry Riccio observes, was, like other “new liberals” of the postwar period, “pragmatic rather than doctrinaire,” a public intellectual who sought, in the words of D. Steven Blum to “reverse the intellectual sterility of a society for which thought itself was an unwelcome intruder.” See Barry Riccio, Walter Lippmann—Odyssey of a Liberal (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996), xiii; and D. Steven Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitan in the Century of Total War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 27. This intellectual temperament is apparent near the conclusion of Public Opinion when Lippmann urges journalists to adopt “the principle of intelligence,” which would allow them to help their readers impose order on “the uncriticized parts” of their minds, where “there is a vast amount of association by mere clang, contact, and succession.” It is at least worth entertaining the notion that Lippmann's search for the modern Socrates who could re-educate Americans by separating and organizing the facts, ideas, and emotions swirling in their minds went no further than himself. See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997, first published in 1922), 249, 254–55.
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• Nuechterlein, “The Dream of Scientific Liberalism,” 167. See also n. 14, above.
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• Ibid., 188.
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• Lippmann used this term in an address to “Teachers of Journalism” at a dinner at Columbia University on Dec. 29, 1925, in which he sought to unmask what he called “the tyranny of the Associated Press.” Lippmann argued that this tyranny was apparent in the AP's wide dissemination of “routine news” whose only virtue was that it could be readily perceived and documented, a dissemination that made it difficult for “an accidental story” about “matters of real consequence” to make it into newspapers around the country. These matters of real consequence were located in what Lippmann called the “twilight zone of news.” See letter from Walter Lippmann to Adolph Ochs, Dec. 30, 1925, box 26, folder 933, WLP. This letter is also reprinted in John Morton Blum, Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1985), 180–81. See also letter from Walter Lippmann to Kent Cooper, Dec. 30, 1925, box 6, folder 281, WLP.
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• Quoted in Schudson, Discovering the News, 147.
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• Ibid., 151.
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• Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008, first published in 1920), 48–49.
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• Even before the war, Lippmann was concerned about what he viewed as organized efforts to deceive the public. For example, he claimed in A Preface to Politics that “Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.” See Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005, first published in 1913), 95. On how the Wilson administration's propaganda efforts during World War I and the rise of the public relations industry after the war fueled increasing skepticism about the validity of information disseminated by the “impersonal organizations… that dominated the age,” see Schudson, Discovering the News, 134–44; and Stuart Ewen, PR: A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 39–130.
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• Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 231. Lippmann notes that in this modern environment, people must move “among these complexities which are shrouded in obscurity, making the best [they] can out of what little it is possible for [them] to know.”
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Gertrude Light, Sept. 30, 1914, box 18, folder 717, WLP.
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• Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 18.
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• Lippmann, Public Opinion, 226. Lippmann underscored that while this picture would be a fiction, it would allow readers, as he had observed a decade earlier in A Preface to Politics, the “secret spring of certainty” that was necessary for moderns to be “aggressively active toward the world.” At a historical moment when “the facts [were] inhumanly complicated” even a “glimpse at the possibilities of knowledge” could paralyze the most “neutral thinkers.” Such fictions were thus necessary because “unless [people] can act with certainty they will not act at all.” But Lippmann also noted that the certainty that propels us must evaporate when the consequences of those actions are revealed. People must now be “experimental towards life,” adjusting their hypotheses in response to the evidence, and then building new hypotheses that will again propel action. Such statements revealed Lippmann's interest in Pragmatism from the outset of his scholarly career. But Lippmann's interest in Pragmatism probably peaked during the interwar years when, as John Patrick Diggins observes, Lippmann saw in Pragmatism's “rejection of foundationalism what might be called the beginning of inventionalism, the urge to make up in activity what cannot be discovered in theory.” The imperative to act even when confronted with doubt was an important property of Pragmatic philosophy, which held that “the legitimacy of government would be based not on its historical origins but on its subsequent performances.” Lippmann expressed a similar view on the relationship between knowledge and action in a letter to Felix Frankfurter on March 14, 1933, in which he defended President Franklin Roosevelt's rapid efforts following his inauguration to combat the Depression: “I take it from your letter that you approve what's been done during the past ten days, but that you deplore the arousing of the public which has accompanied it. Aren't you a little bit in the position of desiring the end but being hesitant to will the means? Of course the means are rough and, to a degree, irrational. But the process of reason in public affairs is necessarily a very slow process, and in an acute emergency you have either the choice of means that will procure the end or forgo attaining it.” Charles Wellborn, however, contends that Lippmann “never admitted to being a full-fledged pragmatist,” his reluctance fully to embrace this stance being a product of his commitment to his former teacher George Santayana, “who rejected [William] James' concept of reality and posited a realm of ‘essences,’ immanent in the totality of nature, never wholly accessible, but approachable only through the life of intelligence and reason.” Diggins claims that Lippmann's “break with James's pragmatism and… turn to Santayana's Platonism” came with the publication of A Preface to Morals in 1929. See Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, 27; Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 95, 96; and John Patrick Diggins, “From Pragmatism to Natural Law: Walter Lippmann's Quest for the Foundations of Legitimacy,” Political Theory 19, no. 4 (November 1991): 535, 524, 530. A slightly modified version of this piece appears in John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 321–42; letter from Walter Lippmann to Felix Frankfurter, March 14, 1933, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 304–5; and Charles Wellborn, Twentieth Century Pilgrimage, 16. For another exploration of how Lippmann's interest in Pragmatism seeped into his early writings, see Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 97–169.
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• Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 103.
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• Ibid., 122. Lippmann would go on to observe that any “picture of the world” created by science was “simply one among many possible creations of the mind into which most of the data of experience could be fitted” (p. 124).
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• The scientific method, with its commitment to disinterestedness, became for Lippmann in A Preface to Morals “high religion incarnate” for the modern era, a high religion that was open to all and was essential to the development of the intellectual maturity that Lippmann argued would allow moderns to place “desire in perfect harmony with reality.” He added, the “Scientific method can be learned. The learning of it matures the human character. Its value can be demonstrated in concrete results.” See Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 180, 224. But, as Lippmann noted more than fifteen years earlier, one must also cultivate the requisite “scientific humility” to understand the limitations of one's results. See Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, 96.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Graham Wallas, Aug. 5, 1915, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 29.
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• Both when and even if the Progressive Era really died is a question that is still debated. Julia Azari, for example, identifies 1929 as the end of the Progressive Era, justifying her choice by claiming that “presidents in the 1920s were still influenced by Progressive ideas, if only in their opposition to them.” Otis Graham argued many years ago that Progressive reformers, after giving “conservatives just over a decade of peace,” exerted an influence on the New Deal, an influence whose legacy is still apparent today. More recently, Sidney Milkis argues in a similar vein that Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party campaign for the presidency in 1912 “transformed American democracy” by “joining… social reform, ‘direct democracy,’ and the cult of the leader” in a way that “weakened political parties and advanced a distinct form of ‘modern’ politics in the United States.” Arthur Link and Richard McCormick were, however, several years ago prepared to declare the conclusion of World War I in 1917 as the end of the Progressive period, as “the optimism that had inspired the kind of reforms which had flourished before 1917 was severely shakened,” with the consequence that many Progressives began to question the status and universality of the moral values that had guided the movement.” Kenneth MacKay, on the other hand, detected a still-vibrant Progressive movement in 1924, as the presidential candidacy of Robert La Follette cemented “the first formal alliance of organized labor in America with farmers and Socialists.” Students of critical elections such as Walter Dean Burnham have often defined the Progressive period by the electoral and policy changes that the election of 1896 spawned. For a critique of the critical realignment literature, see David R. Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), see in particular 57–58 for an assessment of the durability of the political changes sparked by the 1896 presidential election. There are, finally, scholars such as, most notably, Peter Filene, who have argued that the Progressive movement was not a movement at all but a pastiche of factions that disagreed on a number of critical issues. A more recent argument in this vein is Morton Keller's claim that the Progressive “impulse” was no more than an “interlude” in the “party-democratic regime” that had exerted control over American public life since the 1830s. The end of World War I and the conservative turn in the 1920s, in Keller's view, led to the return of the “pre-Progressive political culture” of the party regime. See Julia Azari, Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), n. 5, 185; Otis L. Graham, Jr., An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 14; Sidney M. Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 25; Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1983), 110–11; Kenneth C. MacKay, The Progressive Movement of 1924 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), 9, 12–13; Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1971); Peter G. Filene, “An Obituary for the Progressive Movement,” American Quarterly 22, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 20–34; John D. Buenker, “The Progressive Era: A Search for a Synthesis,” Mid-America 51 (1969): 175–93; Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 94 (December 1982): 113–32; and Morton Keller, America's Three Regimes: A New Political History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 174–200.
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• Letter from Morris Markey to Walter Lippmann, June 26, 1926, box 20, folder 792, WLP. Markey's principal concern was that The World's liberalism was seeping into its news stories, which he thought exhibited displays of emotion that stemmed from the news writers' belief that The Worlds status as a shaper of liberal opinion obliged them to say something “special” about “the story at hand” instead of allowing “the facts [to] tell the story.”
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• Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 318–19. This view that facts could conceal as readily as they reveal was in response to what social scientists in the interwar years understood as the flaws of late-nineteenth century realism. David Shi notes that while realism's roots can be traced back to the antebellum period, it did not take flight until the second half of the nineteenth century when transformations of the “social, intellectual, and moral landscape” created a “mania for facts” that sparked the development of a scientific materialism that promised to “see through the ‘false’ assumptions of both philosophical idealism and conventional religious beliefs.” See Shi, Facing Facts, 43, 67.
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• Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911), 6. For an example of one social scientist's effort to identify the key differences between the social sciences and the natural sciences that accounted, in his view, for the “astonishing paucity of results in social science,” see O. Fred Boucke, “The Limits of Social Science I,” American Journal of Sociology 28, no. 3 (November 1922): 300–18, quote on 301; and O. Fred Boucke, “The Limits of Social Science II,” American Journal of Sociology 28, no. 4 (January 1923): 443–60.
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• Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 318–19.
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• Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969) 147, 153–54.
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• Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), xv.
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• Ibid., xvi. See n. 39 for a discussion of views on the duration and significance of the Progressive Era.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Graham Wallas, Aug. 31, 1920, box 33, folder 1246, WLP. According to the letter, Lippmann thought that, in particular, “the working man [was] surly and disillusioned.”
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• Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, Why Americans Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2000). See also Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Kornbluh seeks to build on McGerr's argument that the precipitous decline in voting around the turn of the twentieth century was a consequence of the replacement of “the vital democratic theater” of political rallies, parades, and other “celebrations of partisanship” by non-partisan “campaigns of education” by examining a variety of political and social forces that came together to create an administrative state that “erode[ed] the political culture of mass participation.” Alexander Keyssar argues that a critical factor driving efforts by economic and social elites to narrow the electorate at the turn of the twentieth century was that “the threatening lower orders consisted largely of men who were racially different or came from different ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds.” Among political scientists, discussions of the decline of turnout in the early twentieth century usually begin with the famous debate between Walter Dean Burnham and Philip Converse, with the former contending that the decline in turnout was a consequence of the dealignment of the electorate after the 1896 presidential election and the latter contending that it was Progressive efforts to address vote fraud through registration laws that explain much of the change in turnout. See McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics, 38, 7; Kornbluh, Why Americans Stopped Voting, 158; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books), 168–71, quote on 169; Walter Dean Burnham, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59, no. 1 (March 1965); and Philip E. Converse, “Change in the American Electorate,” in The Human Meaning of Social Change, eds. Angus Campbell and Philip E. Converse (New York: Sage Publications, 1972), 263–337.
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• Arthur S. Link, “What Happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920's?” The American Historical Review 64, no. 4 (July 1959): 841.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to S.K. Ratliffe, Oct. 16, 1924, box 28, folder 1025, WLP.
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• Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1993, first published in 1925), 5.
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• Record of New York World Council Meeting, Feb. 3, 1926, box 25, folder, 917, WLP.
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• Lippmann's discussion in Public Opinion of the value of the new social scientifically driven “intelligence bureaus” for assisting reporters in their quest to “understand the environment in which they are working” is probably the clearest statement of his conviction that social science could make the press more credible by making its efforts to understand the environment more visible. See Lippmann, Public Opinion, 250–52.
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• Lippmann could be equally candid in his scholarship. For example, in A Preface to Morals he rejected “the rather crude mechanistic materialism which our grandfathers thought was the final conclusion of science.” See Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 99.
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• Gerald Johnson, “Some Thoughts on Walter Lippmann's Philosophy of Liberty,” box 14, folder 618, WLP.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Gerald Johnson, May 24, 1928, box 14, folder 618, WLP. This letter is also reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 220.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Newton Baker, May 15, 1929, box 3, folder 99, WLP. This letter is also reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 241.
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• Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 147.
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• Speech to the American Society of Newspapers, as quoted in letter from Walter Lippmann to William J. Robertson, Jan. 27, 1925, box 28, folder 1047, WLP. It was Gerald Johnson's claim in his review of American Inquisitors that Lippmann was “a newspaperman convinced that the scientific spirit may with propriety be introduced into every department of life” that prompted Lippmann to respond that he, on the contrary, believed that “science is not the way to salvation.” See Johnson, “Some Thoughts on Walter Lippmann's Philosophy of Liberty.”
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Clark McAdams, Jan. 25, 1926, box 18, folder 749, WLP.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Kent Cooper, Dec. 30, 1925, box 6, folder 281, WLP.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Adolph Ochs, box 26, folder 933, WLP. This letter is reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 180–81. Lippmann's disillusionment with mechanical reporting was also evident in his effort to nudge Bruce Bliven, a former colleague on The New Republic, out of the daily newspaper business. “I hoped you would return to a different medium. You are altogether too good a man to be ground to pieces in the ridiculous machine of democratic criticism and a daily paper. You clung to your standard bravely but the mechanical conditions, as well as the character of the audience and the proprietors, makes a daily newspaper no place for the kind of thing you can do best.” See letter from Walter Lippmann to Bruce Bliven, undated, box 4, folder 160, WLP.
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• Andersen, “The Rhetorical Theory and Practice of Walter Lippmann,” 239. For more on Lippmann's understanding of the columnist as a “visualizer,” see Andersen, “The Rhetorical Theory and Practice of Walter Lippmann,” 239–48. Lippmann grew impatient with social scientists when they pursued a mere cataloging of facts, with the apparent faith that a recitation of observed phenomena would be sufficient to answer important social questions. For example, Lippmann responded on Nov. 22, 1929, to a copy of “The Confidential Report on the Commission to Study Prohibition,” which was presented to him by Max Lowenthal, by stating: “I think I have sufficient respect for facts and for the processes of investigation, but I have often noticed that in America, and especially in the field of the social sciences, fact-finding and investigating easily become an excuse for an unwillingness to confront the intellectual difficulties of the subject. If you'll pardon me for saying so, you seem to be working on the assumption that if you accommodate enough ‘facts’ some sort of valuable wisdom will pop out of them. I don't think scientific work is done that way, although it may be a good way of editing an encyclopedia.” See letter from Walter Lippmann to Max Lowenthal, Nov. 27, 1929, box 18, folder 738, WLP.
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• As Dorothy Ross notes in The Origins of American Social Science, Progressive social scientists sought to probe “the new worlds” created by “the new concentration of economic power, the teeming polyglot cities, and the expansion of urban, state, and federal governance.” “Empirical studies of the concrete operation of business, government, and social life” were hence designed to pierce the mysteries of these worlds in ways that would allow for some control over the shifting landscape. “In the hands of this [postwar] cohort the idea of social control took on greater insistence and harder contours, stressing objective, quantitative methods and behaviorist psychology.” See Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 156, 311.
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• Lippmann, Public Opinion, 216–17.
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• Ibid., 217.
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• Ibid., 241. Lippmann notes here, “[The expert] represents people who are not voters, functions of voters that are not evident, events that are out of sight, mute people, unborn people, relations between things and people. He has a constituency of intangibles.”
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Lincoln Steffens, May 18, 1910, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 6.
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• Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 147.
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• Riccio, Walter Lippmann—Odyssey of a Liberal, 67.
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• Benjamin F. Wright, Five Public Philosophies of Walter Lippmann (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), 13. Ronald Steel concurs with Wright's assessment, observing that The World boasted “the best-written and most influential editorial page in the nation.” Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 202. The editorial page during Lippmann's time on the paper produced as many as ten editorials each day—whose length could range from as few as 250 words to as many as two thousand words—which were arranged in three columns. Below the last editorial was often a short excerpt from an editorial from another paper, such as The Kansas City Post or The Columbus Dispatch. The remainder of the page consisted of four columns of letters to the editor that were situated in the lower right hand corner of the page, these columns resting beneath a single editorial cartoon penned by either Rollin Kirby or W. J. Enright.
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• Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 202.
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• That Lippmann left a deep imprint on the editorial page from the beginning of his tenure at The World in 1921 is evinced by the lack of discernible changes to the page after the became its editor in 1929. Both in format and in substance, the page would have looked the same to even the most discerning of readers.
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• The entire credo was as follows: “An institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printed news, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”
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• The World's editorial page did not indulge in the kind of “birthday greetings” (e.g., “Mr. Smith is the new Ambassador to France and we wish him well and know that the entire Washington community joins us”) that David Halberstam notes were standard on many editorial pages during the 1920s and 1930s. At a moment when, Halberstam claims, newspapers were often bought to provide their new owners with an “editorial voice,” reporting was often starved to feed the editorial page writers, who “were sophisticates, men who had been to college, smoked pipes, and were often specialists.” The reach of The World's editorial page was particularly impressive, extending from America's proper posture toward Russia to the Volstead Act to the Naval Cruiser Bill to New York city and state elections. It could also address issues or events of less import with the same elegance and seriousness with which it addressed matters of state. The World, for example, on Sept. 16, 1929, assessed the implications of the new policy of having football referees inform spectators of the doings on the field by “wigwaging” signals to the stands. The World viewed this, on the surface, minor change as symptomatic of the growing status of football as “a great business… with budgets, capital investments and bonded indebtedness all complete,” an assessment that was remarkably prescient. But perhaps the best example of the editorial page's determination to dissect even the most apparently trivial issues with gravity and lucidity came on April 16, 1928, when it endorsed the honeydew melon as an alternative to what it viewed as inferior Mexican cantaloupes: “The only melon for a New Yorker to eat is honeydew. It is rugged. You can freeze it, thaw it, play football with it and you cannot hurt it…. So here's to it. It is the Tom Heeney of melons.” See David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000, first published in 1975), 182–83; “Wigwagging Football,” The New York World, Sept. 6, 1929; and “Cantaloupes,” The New York World, April 16, 1928.
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• “Hoover and Smith,” The New York World, May 4, 1928. The World's editorial page, however, soon soured on Hoover, accusing him and his advisers of running a campaign designed, as the lead editorial stated on Oct. 12, “to frighten, not persuade,” a campaign in which “they will under no circumstances permit themselves to be drawn into a real discussion of economic questions.” See “Prosperity,” The New York World, Oct. 12, 1928; and “Far from the Madding Crowd,” The New York World, Sept. 29, 1928.
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• The World's editorial page continued to prod the Smith campaign the following week, blaming Smith's advisors in the lead editorial on April 26 for “insisting that [Smith] will get more delegates at Houston by saying nothing than by declaring where he stands on questions which interest the voters.” While the editorialist, who was likely Lippmann, conceded that “by remaining silent the Governor can be looked upon as a wet in the wet districts and as a man committed to the sacred duty of enforcing the Volstead law in the dry districts,” he chastised Smith for choosing “shrewd tactics” over “Al Smith tactics” of speaking “his mind with fearless and engaging frankness.” But by October The World was satisfied that Smith had placed himself “squarely before the voters as a candidate who believes that the evils of prohibition are not to be accepted as a mere byproduct of a ‘great sacred and economic experiment’ but are inherent in such a system as the Anti-Saloon League has succeeded in foisting on the country.” See “Political Go-Getters,” The New York World, April 26, 1928; and “Gov. Smith at Milwaukee,” The New York World, Oct. 1, 1928. For Lippmann's efforts to persuade Smith to take a firmer stand on Prohibition, see letter from Walter Lippmann to Al Smith, box 30, folder 1137, WLP; and letter from Walter Lippmann to Ralph Pulitzer, June 21, 1928, box 27, folder 1009, WLP.
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• The World's lead editorial excoriated La Follette on four successive days between Wednesday, Oct. 29, and Saturday, Nov. 1, with the only respite from the criticism coming on Oct. 30, when the paper conceded that La Follette's campaign had begun “with high hopes” before observing that La Follette's “actual accomplishment” was that he “had united the conservatives and divided the progressives. He [had] paralyzed the liberals and revivified the reactionaries. He [had] muddled every issue, dragged a red herring across every trail, and done his complete and most effective best to reinsure the election of Coolidge and Dawes.” See “Mr. La Follette's Service to Reaction,” The New York World, Oct. 29 1924; “What a Vote for La Follette Means,” The New York World, Oct. 30, 1924; “Lessons from England,” The New York World, Oct. 31, 1924; and “Labor Faces the Facts,” The New York World, Nov. 1, 1924.
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• “The Paramount Issue of Our Time,” The New York World, Oct. 15, 1924.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to William Allen White, Jan. 31, 1931, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 269.
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• Ibid.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Newton Baker, Feb. 26, 1931, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 271.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Herbert Swope, Sept. 16, 1925, box 32, folder 1183, WLP.
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• Record of New York World Council Meeting, Oct. 22, 1924, box 25, folder 915, WLP.
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• Record of New York World Council Meeting, Feb. 3, 1926, box 25, folder 917, WLP.
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• Lippmann, as Ronald Steel observes, “not only analyzed events but actively tried to influence them… he plotted strategy with politicians, drafted programs for secretaries of state, advised senators, promoted friends for public office, launched presidential booms, wrote speeches for candidates, and even helped negotiate a secret agreement that averted an American invasion of Mexico.” Lippmann's relationship with Al Smith was, in particular, more akin to one between candidate and advisor than subject and journalist. Lippmann, for example, wrote several letters both to Smith and to his supporters before the 1928 Democratic Convention urging the presumptive nominee to “take a strong stand on prohibition” that would leave no ambiguity in the minds of the delegates as to “the line you intend to take on a matter of such importance.” Lippmann was not, however, the only member of The World interested in supporting Smith. When Smith declared in 1925 that he would not run for the New York governorship again, Swope suggested to his fellow editors that they consider hiring Smith as The World's political correspondent. Lippmann's engagement with public affairs did not tempt him to enter politics himself. As he told Dixon McNeil in 1930, “It is more fun to write than it is to be an executive of any kind, however noble, however useful, however honorific. I would not endure being a public character. I have had just enough experience of being a public official never to want anything remotely resembling it again.” See Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 236; letter from Walter Lippmann to Al Smith, May 9, 1928, box 30, folder 1137, WLP; Record of New York World Council Meeting, June 1, 1925, box 25, folder 916, WLP; and letter from Walter Lippmann to Dixon McNeil, May 29, 1930, box 19, folder 774, WLP.
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• Lippmann's response to Harold Rowntree in July 1924 illustrates how emphatic he could be when trying to squelch accusations that The World was merely an adjunct of the Democratic Party: “You are… mistaken in thinking that The World aspires to be the ‘national organ of the Democratic party.’ The World is fundamentally a Democratic paper. If you will study its record in local and state and national affairs you will see that it has never attempted the role of party organ.” The World's independence was not shared by all crusading papers of this period. The Los Angeles Times of the 1920s and 1930s was probably the most prominent and, in many commentators' view, egregious example of a newspaper that was so entangled in party politics that, as David Halberstam observed, it “was not an organ of the Republican Party of Southern California, it was the Republican Party.” See letter from Walter Lippmann to Harold Rowntree, July 23, 1924, box 29, folder 1075, WLP; and Halberstam, The Powers That Be, 117.
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• Such collaborations between journalists and political figures were not unusual during this period. Journalists could be quite blunt with public officials about their determination to use their pens either to aid or to harm them. Doris Kearns Goodwin, for example, details how the members of the famous investigative reporting team at McClures Magazine used their positions to promote Theodore Roosevelt's legislative agenda, efforts that did not cease when Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, took office. Goodwin writes that soon after Taft's inauguration, “William Allen White, Ray Baker, and Ida Tarbell all signaled their readiness to support tariff revision, postal savings, and the rest of the president's progressive agenda. ‘If ever at any time I may serve you in any way,’ White wrote after the inaugural, ‘kindly let me know.’” See Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 589.
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• Lippmann proposed that this new banner be “the Progressive Democratic or Democratic Progressive Party.” After the editors debated Lippmann's proposal, Swope directed Lippmann to write an editorial “to be published after the election” that would then be transmitted “to [a] group of 20 Democratic newspapers throughout the country and to prominent leaders in order to elicit comment and opinion.” See Record of New York World Council Meeting, Oct. 22, 1924, box 25, folder 915, WLP.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to Jean Flexner, Nov. 2, 1925, box 9, folder 400, WLP. Steel also quotes this letter in Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 201–2.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to William Allen White, Jan. 31, 1931, reprinted in Blum Public Philosopher, 269.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to George Rubbe, Feb. 12, 1930, box 29, folder 1076, WLP.
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• Letter from Walter Lippmann to F.E. Hyslop, March 3, 1927, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 198–99. Lippmann reassured Hyslop that Southern segregationists' and British kings' use of nullification did not compromise its usefulness in the campaign against Prohibition: “There is no reason for being horrified at an idea which has served the English-speaking peoples so well for so long a time. There is nothing in my suggestion which isn't a commonplace to any serious student of British or American institutions.”
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• “Hang Yourself, Brave Crillon!” The New York World, Oct. 3, 1928.
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• Ibid.
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• “Prohibition and Health,” The New York World, Oct. 6, 1928.
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• “Problem for a Dry President,” The New York World, Jan. 29, 1929. See also “Happy with a Crumb,” The New York World, Jan. 30, 1929; “A Dry Congress Votes Wet,” The New York World, Feb. 22, 1929; “Much Too Innocent,” The New York World, Sept. 24, 1929; and “How Dry Are the Drys?” The New York World, Dec. 6, 1929.
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• Record of New York World Council Meeting, Dec. 15, 1925, box 25, folder 917, WLP.
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• Record of New York World Council Meeting, Dec. 21, 1925, box 25, folder 917, WLP.
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• See, in particular, the Oct. 30, 1928, lead editorial's explanation of the implications of Charles Evan Hughes's position that “no modification of the Volstead Act is possible under the Eighteenth Amendment.” The editorialist, who was likely Lippmann, characterized Hughes's statement as an antimajoritarian, “sinister” effort “to remove a great public question from public debate and to convert it into a religious dogma which cannot be questioned and about which nothing can be done.” See “Nullification and Stultification,” The New York World, Oct. 30, 1928,
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• “Memorandum on Sunday Paper,” July 7, 1925, box 23, folder 894, WLP.
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• “Memorandum for Council” from Walter Lippmann regarding the Sunday Paper, July 2, 1925, box 23, folder 894, WLP.
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• “Memorandum to the Council” from J.O'H.C., July 6, 1925, box 23, folder 894, WLP.
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• “Memorandum to the Council” from A.K., July 2, 1925, box 23, folder 894, WLP.
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• “Memorandum for Council” from Walter Lippmann regarding the Sunday Paper, July 2, 1925.
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• Ibid.
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• “Memorandum on Sunday Paper,” July 7, 1925.
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• “Memorandum to the Council” from J.O'H.C., July 6, 1925.
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• Ibid.
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• Lippmann shared Herbert Swope's concern that “crowd psychology” would pull the “main body of journalism” down to the tabloids' execrable level. Letter from Herbert Swope to Walter Lippmann, Nov. 16, 1926, box 32, folder 1184, WLP.
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• “Memorandum for Council” from Walter Lippmann regarding the Sunday Paper, July 2, 1925.
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• All quotations are taken from Record of New York World Council Meeting, April 15, 1925, box 25, folder 916, WLP.
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• Ibid.
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• Ibid.
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• David Felix, Protest: Sacco-Vanzetti and the Intellectuals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 176.
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• O'Connor, Heywood Broun, 130.
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• “The Verdict of the Law,” The New York World, Aug. 5, 1927. Lippmann made it clear that he thought that Governor Fuller had approached his task with the proper seriousness of purpose and fairness of mind: “The law placed this awful responsibility on [Governor Fuller]. There was no way in which he could evade it. He did not evade it, and regardless of what any one may think of the intrinsic justice of his decision or of his wisdom, we believe that he was fully aware of the gravity of his task and that he sought with every conscious effort to learn the truth.” The World's coverage of the Fuller Committee's ruling was both conspicuous and extensive, featuring a bold headline running the breadth of the front page on Aug. 4 that exclaimed, “Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die, Says Fuller: Decision Is Backed By His Inquiry Committee.” The paper's coverage included on the front page the complete text of “Fuller's Decision in the Famous Murder Case” and on the next page a piece of news analysis entitled “Sacco-Vanzetti Decision Ends Case That Echoed around the World,” which addressed both the reach of the case and the emotions it roiled: “One of the most extraordinary features of the case has been the violent partisanship displayed not only by those who have studied the record of its evidence but by those who have only a casual acquaintance with its facts. This feeling has extended from the lowliest illiterate man to some of the best educated people here and abroad.” The editorial page's attention to the case on both Aug. 4, the day of the announcement of the Fuller Committee's ruling, and the next day was, in contrast, much more spare and muted, featuring only a single editorial each day and devoting its editorial cartoons to the GOP's efforts to find a candidate to replace Calvin Coolidge, who only a few days previously had delivered his succinct declaration that “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.”
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• Lippmann's initial editorial was followed up on Aug. 6 with a lead editorial that appealed to Fuller to commute Sacco's and Vanzetti's sentences to life imprisonment “on the ground of mercy,” not, that is, on the basis of a holding that the verdict was unjust: “Knowing that we could not know as much of the case as the Governor and his advisers have had the opportunity to know, we have refrained and now refrain from holding a definite opinion of our own as to the justice of the verdict.” The World, however, took a different, more prosecutorial tack on Friday, Aug. 12, urging the Fuller Committee to provide the public with its reasons for concluding that “Judge Thayer was sufficiently unprejudiced to not only conduct the trial but to pass upon all subsequent motions for a new trial on the basis of newly discovered evidence.” See “An Appeal to Gov. Fuller,” The New York World, Aug. 6, 1927; and “Insurance against the Possibility of Irrevocable Error,” The New York World, Aug. 12, 1927.
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• Broun compared the governor in his first column to Pontius Pilate, and he concluded his second column with an incendiary question for the president of Harvard University, A. Lawrence Lowell, who was a member of the Fuller Committee: “From now on, I want to know, will the institution of learning in Cambridge which we once called Harvard be known as Hangman's House?” See Broun, Collected Edition of Heywood Broun, 198, 204.
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• O'Connor, Heywood Broun, 132.
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• Letter from Lippmann to Franklin P. Adams, Aug. 16, 1927, box 1, folder 9, WLP. This letter is reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher, 204–7.
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• Ibid.
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• Ibid.
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• Predictably, Broun disagreed with Lippmann's assessment that he, and not The World's editorial page, was guilty of poor argumentation. In a column published in The Nation on May 4, 1928, Broun accused The World of taking “two, three, or even four different stands with precisely the same material in hand.” This flaw was, according to Broun, particularly discernible during the Sacco and Vanzetti controversy, when “the paper seemed like an old car going up a hill.” See “The Piece That Got Me Fired,” Broun, Collected Edition of Heywood Broun, 221.
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• Letter from Lippmann to Franklin P. Adams, Aug. 16, 1927.
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• Lippmann's eagerness to move on from the debate about the Sunday section to address other pressing problems was evinced by the conclusion of his memo to the Council on the Sunday section, in which he suggested that they would need to await the arrival of a visionary thinker to address the fundamental problems with the Sunday paper: “I am convinced that the present type of Sunday paper is a dying institution. I hope it is. Somebody is going to have a revolutionary idea about the Sunday paper which will make it more adapted to modern ways of living. The present Sunday paper is a relic of the pre-automobile and blue-Sunday age.” See “Memorandum for Council” from Walter Lippmann regarding the Sunday Paper, July 2, 1925.
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• Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, translated from the German by A.W. Wheen, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982, first published in 1929), 122. The complete passage is “To-day we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled—we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there?”
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