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Mark Thomas Edwards, "Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor" (Oxford UP, 2023)
00:53:27
An interview with Mark Thomas Edwards
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
I'm Caleb Zakrin, assistant editor of the New Books Network, and you're listening to New Books and Biography. Today I'm speaking with Mark Thomas Edwards, professor of U.S. history at Spring Arbor University. We are discussing his new book, Walter Lippman, American Skeptic, American Pastor. Walter Lippman is arguably the most important journalist in American history, popularizing terms like the Cold War and writing a news column for over 30 years with more than 10 million weekly readers. He influenced both powerful world leaders and public perception on a multitude of issues. In this volume, Mark pays special attention to the spiritual life and religious views of Litman. Taking this approach, Mark reveals Lippman's complexity and provides a window into the American century. Mark, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [01:18]
A
Glad to be here.
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C
Great to have. Great to have you. And before jumping into the text, I was wondering if you could just introduce yourself to the audience and tell them a little bit about yourself.
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A
Sure. My name's Mark Edwards, coming from Spring Arbor University, where I've been since 2010, teaching a variety of US history and some world history and a lot of core, interdisciplinary, core classes here. So a lot of teaching. But I've been able to find the, you know, find the time for. For scholarship. I really find the scholars as a useful hobby and great for mental health and to keep me just kind of motivated to keep learning.
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C
And as far as this topic is concerned, how did you decide to write about Lippmann for this particular project?
- [02:13]
A
So I actually wanted to write about Bono. I actually wanted to write about Bono, but the editors of Spiritual Lives said, well, you know, there's copyright issues there with musicians, so, no, but, you know, could you, you know, maybe write about Eisenhower? And I don't. Do not. I did not want to take on a US President. And, you know, we kind of brainstormed about, you know, who. Who had. What public intellectual, had stature in the 20th century. And I immediately remembered from. From graduate school days reading a lot of Walter Lippman and enjoying his books. And I said, you know, you Know what about Walter Lippman? He'd be great for this series. And so, you know, we kind of developed that and put it together. The, the interesting thing, the connection back to Bono is in graduate school, I'd written a paper on Bono called Bono the Post Christian Gadfly, where I developed kind of a theory of post Christianity as you two, representing a Christianity that had become more of a mass cultural, mass media phenomenon and really on moored from any kind of, you know, traditional community or theology. And as I wrote the book on Littmann, I didn't realize that in using a post Christian framework to make sense of Lippman as well, that I was in many ways channeling that, that first paper on Bono, it wasn't until the end that I was like, oh, so I kind of did write the, the Bono book after all. I just used Walter Lippmann to do it.
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C
And for those who aren't really familiar with Lippmann, you know, would you, would you give a high level introduction just, just who he was in a broad, in broad sense? And you know what, if people know anything about him, what is he most known for?
- [03:51]
A
Lippman is best known as a political journalist and op ed columnist. He was one of the persons who really developed the idea of the op ed. Of course, op eds are everywhere. They're ubiquitous today. In the years right after World War I, they were kind of new. He didn't, you know, start that, but he probably did as much as anyone to popularize that trend through his thrice weekly column Today and Tomorrow. Now, he wasn't the why. He wasn't the most widely read columnist in the United States, but he was close. With about 10 to 12 million readers in the United States and abroad, we believe he was the highest paid. He certainly, you know, lived very well and traveled a lot in between writing these, these columns. He managed to write 21 books over the course of his career. About three or four of them were collections of his op eds, but a number were original works, including his first book when he was just in his 20s, preface to politics, which won even the applause of Teddy Roosevelt, one of Lippman's heroes. Lippman will go on to write two bestsellers, the preface to Morals in 1929, which is really centerpiece book of the Lippman biography that I've written. And then During World War II, U.S. foreign policy, the Shield of the Republic, another bestseller. His most enduring work is his 1922 work Public Opinion, which is considered by many to be the founding text of modern Media studies and one of the most trenchant criticisms of mass democracy. Even somebody like John Dewey, who did not want to, did not. Did not want to like the work, did not want to like Libman's findings, were nevertheless forced to admit that, that this was the best work on democratic theory to that point. And so Public Opinion is probably the book that's, you know, people should still read and still do read. And then final thing I'll say about Lippman is he managed to, while writing critically of almost every US politician and president from the 1920s all the way into the 1970s, he somehow managed to friend many of them, to be invited by many of them to the White House, to be able to advise them on any number of issues and, you know, outright defy them in some ways, both in personal conversation and in print.
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C
Backing up a little from that high level overview, just taking it a little bit more granular, what was Lippmann's youth like and his time at Harvard, you know, really the early years for him.
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A
So Lippman came from a very privileged background. He went to Julius Sax All Boys School in New York and so had a really good education there. His family was. Was wealthy. Not, you know, not rich, but certainly, certainly wealthy. He described him, you know, he described himself as having a comfortable existence, but also pretty free. I think, as he said once his father allowed him to do whatever he wanted to do. And so he had this really good education, went to Harvard with his friend Carl Binger, and really expected to be able to do whatever he wanted to at Harvard until he realized that Harvard was not too kind to Jews. At the time. Walt Libman was from a German Jewish family. And at Harvard at this time, you could not be a part of the social clubs as a Jew. And I mean, that was one of the. Besides getting the Harvard education, networking through these clubs was really essential to the Harvard experience. And Lippman and his friend Carl Binger were shut out of that. I think that played a large role in Lippmann turning to socialism and starting a socialist society there on campus and ultimately becoming involved in socialist circles, kind of bohemian socialist circles. He was part of the bohemian crowd in New York as well too. So he had this phase probably up until his service in World War I, where he was running around with bohemian crowd in Greenwich Village and he worked for a socialist mayor and. And the state of New York was pretty radical on issues of class, on feminism for a while.
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C
And what were his religious views at that time?
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A
You would say he was what we would describe as a nun. So he, He. He rejected Judaism fairly early. So some letters between one of his best friends, lucy, and in 1908, where he's. He's writing about the. The temple that he had been confirmed in, that his parents went to. It was a Reform Jewish community that really stressed assimilation, but that was even too extreme for Lippman. So he complained about what he saw as this kind of artificiality of the. Of the people who attended there and that Judaism was empty. In his first book, he would say that, you know, the Christian dream is dead. He was really attracted to probably through his biggest. And one of his biggest influences at Harvard was William James, kind of translated through James, came to know Frederick Nietzsche pretty well. And so a lot of his first book was a lot of Nietzsche. And he doesn't outright say God is dead, but he's really kind of working from that vein. So a lot of his life's work was now that organized religions can no longer play the intellectual or social role that they played in the past. How do we get along? How do we hold together? How do we stay happy? And that question really dictated all of his writings and thought, I would say, all the way up until the end of his life in the 1970s.
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C
You give a decent amount of attention to his 1929 book, a preface to Morals. So what's this book about and what led you to focus so much on this one?
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A
So he spends a lot of the book, I guess, not so much attacking religion as much as just assuming. I think he's assuming that his readers will understand that organized religions, Christianity, Judaism in particular, or dead or dying. He. Yeah, that's probably. That's probably about half the book. But then he. He calls it the. The Acids of Modernity, I think, is, you know, rather than kind of go through and, you know, give a hard answer for why this is happening to religion, he just coins this phrase, acids of modernity, the conditions of modern life. And I think particularly he kind of singles out cities as places where that are particularly harmful towards religion, which is a common view at the time. It doesn't fit the facts all that well. A lot of the leading fundamentalists, including people he reported on, like John. John Roach Stratton, the fundamentalist, they're from cities. So religion thrived pretty well in cities. But his assumption was that big cities were that really like, as long in rural life and simple life, you know, people could hold to religious views, but in cities, people were giving that up. And so given that. Given that secularization was really the Order of the day. How do individuals then achieve a sense of integrity? He frames this really as kind of a paradox. Human beings need an orthodoxy. He uses that phrase, human beings need an orthodoxy in order to order their desires and to. To. To essentially be happy and get along with others and get along with the. Their environment. But they can't have an orthodoxy anymore. Organized religions are dead. And so what's the substitute there? He kind of presents his first answer. It's one that he's immediately dissatisfied as soon as he publishes the book and starts to. Tells his friends he's. He sets out to write a sequel. But his first answer, without really mentioning the wor. Stoicism or Epicureanism, that's pretty much what he goes to a kind of talks about disinterestedness or detachment or even uses Jesus to say that Jesus reflected this religion of the spirit of somebody who, you know, just kind of went through life unaffected, disinterested. So he. So his answer at that point was very centered on how do individuals get by in the absence of belief in divine revelation or, you know, the belief that divine revelation was. Was possible? How do individuals get along? He tried to present that. Present that answer. A lot of his later works would address how do societies get along in the absence of a kind of common. A common culture, what he eventually will call things like the higher law or traditions of civility and the absence of these, how societies hold together. And so he's always going back and forth between how do individuals get along in this kind of world? How do societies hold together in this kind of world? But the assumption running through it is organized religions had really were on their kind of last, last legs. He himself, even though he would. I think I used the term affiliate, he would affiliate with. With various. Particularly Christianity by the. By the kind of late 20s, early 30s. But he never, you know, officially converts to any religion. He remains probably the. The best word to describe his religious views would be humanist, although he would use terms to describe himself like agnostic at times. But he really never accepted any kind of supernatural existence or revelation. And then given that baseline right that the religion is impossible, religious inheritance is possible. How do individuals get along in that kind of world? How do societies hold together in that kind of world? And so I believe all of his political and diplomatic writings were written within that philosophical and theological context.
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C
Yeah. Moving to discussing more, more of his political views. One of the beauties of someone like Lippmann is that he wrote so much that you can kind of learn history alongside his writings. And what did Lippman think about and how did he understand the Great Depression and then the New Deal response to it?
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A
He understood the Great Depression. A critic, friend, slash critic of him, said, yeah, yeah, whenever, you know, Lippman doesn't have the answers, he, we quote. He quote goes cosmic. And that was a lot of Lippman's writings during the 1930s. It was. Well, it wasn't just simply that we had, you know, this problem of, you know, an international debt structure that had collapsed or lack of confidence in the market. He understood all of those things, right? He even cast them, tried to cast himself in the 1930s as a kind of public economist. He wrote more on economics than he wrote on anything, even though he had very little background on that in Harvard. A lot of his writings were trying to address. And here again, where I think Lippmann was the proper subject for a spiritual biography, he tries to address the Great Depression really as a spiritual crisis. A crisis of people who had kind of lost a moral compass or lost an ability to, to get along with each other. A great critique of the 1920s, Jazz Age runs through his 1930s writings that, that human beings have become soft and consumerist and, you know, too, too, too urban. It was very, very much a Teddy Roosevelt kind of Critique of the 1890s was how Walter Lippmann approached the 1920s. And Teddy Roosevelt was, if anyone besides William James was kind of Lippman's hero, it was Teddy Roosevelt. He kept coming back to Teddy Roosevelt's idea of cultural renewal through a kind of tough minded, you know, manly, pulling oneself up and working hard. So there's a lot of critique of the 1920s leading to the Great Depression, you know, in Lippman, suggesting that Americans had gone soft and it was time to get tough. A part of that toughness was having to, you know, rethink politics. He was somebody who was. For as much as he criticized New Deal policies, almost, almost everything Roosevelt did, the parts of the New Deal Roosevelt was or Lippman was very critical of, but the whole of it, the idea that government needed to do more to hold societies together, that we needed a stronger executive branch, that was something that was pretty consistent with him. So he was both a chief apologist and a chief critic of the New Deal at the same time. You'll find him, you know, one day criticizing the. He really hated the National Recovery Administration, but he wasn't too fond in the Wagner act too, providing labor legislation, very critical of these things, even a little bit critical of public works programs. But you'll find him the next day suggesting that the New Deal was really necessary for the country to be able to hold together and endure this kind of crisis.
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C
What political identities was he identifying himself with mostly at this time? How was he reflecting on his earlier, more bohemian, radical approaches?
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A
So he will. After kind of going through a socialist phase, he comes out largely. It might even have started before, but certainly during and after World War I, he would pretty much identify as a liberal, and I think Time magazine would identify him in 1931 as the Moses of liberalism, as kind of one of the chief voices for liberalism. And liberalism largely meant a Roosevelt and state, a state in which the federal government, particularly the executive branch, took more responsibility, exercised more authority to be able to hold the country together, to certainly to enact social justice, but also to just, you know, keep basic order within that. Within that society. So he largely identifies as a liberal. I suggest that. I think I introduced the chapter on the Great Depression with a quotation, with an interview of him in the 1970s where he says, telling his biographer, Ronald Steele, I'm a conservative. I think I've always been a conservative. So I think that wouldn't necessarily run against his liberal identity as much as it is that Lippman was somebody who understood that what constituted American liberalism in the 20th century was something that was not unlike or had elements or should have elements that an Edmund Burke was. When Lippman talked about conservatism, he talked about Edinburgh or William Blackstone, some older voices like that. Modern liberalism needed to have some conservative elements there. So it's in the 1930s he's starting to read Burke, and I think he's even identifying thinkers like policies like Keynesianism as a kind of conservativism, as a kind of conservative alternative to socialism. I know that runs completely counter to how Keynesianism is understood today by the right is considered a form of socialism. But for Lippmann, Keynesianism was really the alternative to socialism, or it was a kind of post socialism. So Lipman's, you know, Lippman's political identity ran liberal, conservative. He's fairly consistent within the Democratic Party, although for a while he does. He does. He does vote Republican, but he's largely doing that still as a supporter of conservative Democratic candidates and stuff. But he's. He's kind of all over the place. The one. I'll just say this in conclusion, as far as the difficulty of trying to categorize Lipman politically, this is an individual who would endorse Teddy Roosevelt twice for president and Richard Nixon twice for president. So it's a pretty fascinating journey he had over the course of his life.
- [22:23]
C
Yeah, no, it's. So it was so difficult for me to figure out the cons like to just to put Lippman's views into, into today's context because he really does seem to mix and match views that today we would think of as maybe cutting against each other. But you know, for the time, obviously it was so different. Things were so different and he was working in a different environment. You know, you also write a lot about his foreign policy views, which were some of the most fascinating aspects of his views that you talk about and how he really did have a very, let's say, different foreign policy take than maybe other standard liberals. So what were his views on foreign policy during World War II and then kind of leading into his book the Cold War and his popularization of that term?
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A
He seemed to be in many ways an isolationist and a Wilsonian at the same time. I, I would put him a term that I borrow from Robert Scholzinger in his book in the Council on Foreign Relations, which Lippman was a part of for a long time. Realistic Wilsonian. And I think that that's probably the, probably the simplest way to categorize Lippmann. He never, even for all of his upsets with, with the, the state of world affairs after World War I, he never really gave up on Wilsonianism, particularly America playing a, a world ordering kind of role. At the same time, his, his best selling book, U.S. foreign Policy Shield of the Republic from 1943 tried. It's a book. It does, I think, have Wilsonian elements, but it very much has isolationist elements too. Lippman recognized that rather than some kind of idealistic League of Nations order, that power Americans needed to kind of understand the limits of their power and recognize kind of where their region or environment was. So Lippman was both in World War I and World War II, is a huge advocate for the idea of an Atlantic community. I was one of the chief apologists for this because that's where he believed that America and its chief ally predominantly was, and it's where their power was greatest. They could not, however, exercise power everywhere. And so for Asia, for Eastern Europe was always a place that Libman believed Americans needed to kind of respect their limits and figure out how to work with the great powers that were there. He always starting In World War I, he, during World War I, he was an advocate for essentially leaving Russia alone, even after it had had fallen to the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution. Lippman, one of the 14 points that he wrote was, let Russia alone. Let Russia work this out. Let's not worry about Russia. That was pretty consistent for him throughout his life. It wasn't that he was a communist sympathizer at any point, but he did believe that Americans power to be able to affect change, particularly in Eastern Europe and certainly over the Soviet Union, was just very limited. And so Americans needed to figure out how to get along with the. Get along with the Soviets, which is why he was so, so critical, took such a critical view of the. The Truman Doctrine and the belief that Americans could somehow, somehow organize the world irrespective of Chinese and Soviet power.
- [26:22]
C
So his. His approach to the Cold War was, you know, definitely one of skepticism, one of, we should not. This is not something that we should not a road that we should go down. We should avoid this conflict at all costs.
- [26:37]
A
Yeah, you know, he really tried. And this kind of goes back to what he thought of as the, you know, the chief concern of World War II. The chief concern of World War II was to end World War II and to get Germany pacified and settled in its boundaries and ultimately to get Russia to go back within its boundaries as well, too. And after World War II, that remained his priority. The primary focus he believed in 1947, 1948, was he thought that Americans that World War II really hadn't been settled because the Soviets and the Americans were still in Europe. Europe. And the chief goal should be how do we get both the Americans and the Soviets out of Western Europe and out of Germany and then out of Eastern Europe as well, too. And so all the talk of, you know, all the talk of concerns in the Middle east, in Asia, considered that his word secondary. What. And all the way into the 1960s, his primary foreign policy focus was how do we end World War II, particularly how do we get the Soviets to withdraw and the Americans to withdraw from Europe as well, too.
- [28:02]
C
Another book of his 1955 book, the Public Philosophy, is another that you give particular attention to. So what was the Public Philosophy about? And why was this another book that you decided to really highlight?
- [28:17]
A
So, you know, for all of his kind of changes of opinion and interests, he has this consistent trying to explain what has gone on in the 20th century. And I suggest that his predominant. His predominant thing he identifies as the problem is 20th century is the end of organized religions. And what should we. What should we do about it? A preface to Morals was one answer to that. But as I said, it was immediately unsatisfactory he writes to a friend, said, I'm setting out to write a sequel. He's. He had been reading theology before this. He starts reading Catholic encyclicals right after Preface to Morals, trying to figure he's reading people like Arnold Toynbee, who's dealing with these kinds of issues as well, too. Very, you know, very different intellectual influences by the 1930s, because he's trying to write this sequel, a preface. I would suggest he writes various sequels to A Preface to Morals, but probably his best attempt to offer a. A sequel was the public philosophy in 1955. Given all these problems of social ordering in the absence of a divinely ordered or orchestrated society, how do we get along? And he borrows. He borrows a phrase from Sir Barker, I forget his first name, who wrote a book, Traditions of Civility. And Lippman just took the title and took a lot of Barker's writings and just kind of wrote his book around it. But he did that a lot. He just didn't have the time to do a lot of the research and things. So he borrowed very liberally from other people's works. And so the kind of centerpiece of public philosophy is Americans had lost tradition of civility, and we needed to get back to these. And so kind of half of that book is a kind of a rehash of public opinion. Here's the problems with modern democracies and why they can't hold together because the societies are too complex. Individuals do not have the means to vote or keep their leaders accountable. So. So what do we do? We have to get back to or build some kind of consensus, that consensus that he calls various things traditions of civility. He also talks about Confucius and a mandate of heaven. He'll at different points look at Christian theology. He looks at pretty much everything except for Judaism. He only occasionally, you might know, you know, from reading the book, he not only did he reject Judaism kind of personally for himself, but he largely just did not want to talk about Judaism at all. For all of his talks of a kind of comparative morality, public morality, he largely just left Judaism out of it. It's just something he did not want to draw any attention to because he's afraid it might draw attention to him himself. And he had been hurt by antisemitism at various points in his life. So Public philosophy was his attempt to say, here's the things that we need to recommit to as a society if we are going to successfully hold together and meet our challenges moving forward. And what I kind of suggest there is that while he's kind of playing this pastoral role of here's what we need to kind of come together and stay together, the skeptic is very much there. He is not himself able to embrace any kind of moral or ethical or religious tradition himself and ultimately kind of comes back, you know, comes back on and undercuts the very message of the book.
- [32:18]
C
You write in the acknowledgments of the book that some of this work that you did on the book came out of workshops on Cold War Liberalism. And there's been a decent amount of discussion recently on Cold War Liberalism. So, you know, what do you see as Lippmann's relation, relationship to Cold War liberalism? And if you have any other comments just on the recent wave of scholarship that's been done on the topic.
- [32:43]
A
Yeah, it's been great being part of that project. I had drafted a lot of the book and then I got a chance to be part of this workshop and we'll have an edited collection coming out, I think, with Cambridge sometime soon. But my contribution was suggesting was simultaneously arguing that Walter Lippmann should be included in the circles of Cold War Liberals for all of his rejection of the, the. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me say this. He should be. He kind of checked all the boxes of Cold War Liberal, even though most histories of Cold War liberals don't mention mentioned Lippman for different reasons. But as soon as you put Lippman in a Cold War liberal category, he doesn't really. He doesn't really fit fit. So what I suggest, I think in the essay I've written for that volume is Walter Lippman the Cold War Liberal as Conservative isolationist or the conservative isolationist is Cold War Liberal. It's kind of what we talked about. Lippman just he, he himself never tried to be consistent in terms of particular identities. That's the skepticism that he. Skepticism that he suggested characterized his life led him to constantly be interrogating a lot, not all of his prejudices, but a lot of them. A lot of American prejudices, not all of them. And it led him to very eclectic, eclectic position. So he's somebody who belongs in a Cold War liberal volume, but he is somebody who is outside of it at the same time. But Lippman's Lippman had this ability to be this, this insider outsider for much of his, for much of his history.
- [34:44]
C
How much of it was that he was, you know, really just charting this unique intellectual path and how much of it was Maybe a streak of contrarianism. It's. Obviously, it's hard to read into someone's mind, but I always wonder with these sorts of people, you know.
- [35:03]
A
Yeah, I almost wanted to. To call the book the Constant Contrarian. Or people suggested to me, you really should. Should call. Should call Lukeman that I think I settled on instead of contrarian. I think I settled on Chameleon as a kind of final way to. To make sense of him. But I. I think it's. I think it's a mix. I think it's a mix of Lippman trying to be and maintain an intellectual and intellectual honesty in a way that led him to be very disorderly. I think, you know, one of the. One of my favorite insights I had about him was, you know, his life, his social life, his family life was so incredibly regimented. And the kinds of views of. Of American society that he argued for were ones that were fairly. It kind of followed through. Would be pretty regimented as well, too. Not quite Handmaid's Tale, but, you know, not. Not too far away from that as well either. So he's so concerned about social order, but when it comes to the intellectual life, he was just a mess and he was comfortable with that. So I think part of it was an intellectual honesty that he really was a skeptic. But I think part of it was when people he were around, when he saw them taking a particular position, he just decided whether it was right or not. He just decided. I'm going to go against that. Now, ultimately, did he come down against Harry Truman and George Kennan, against, you know, the Truman Doctrine and the kind of Cold War policy and all that kind of language? Did he. Did he come down against that because of some kind of staunch intellectual commitments on his part or is because Harry didn't invite him to the White House for drinks in the way that Franklin Roosevelt did? He didn't get to spend a lot of time in the White House with. With Harry Truman. Truman didn't really want l Around too much.
- [37:11]
C
Yeah, those are hard to. Hard to say.
- [37:14]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [37:16]
C
You also talk. Talk about, you know, he's a. He's a fascinating person because he, you know, he wrote. Wrote for so much of his life and covered so many topics. And you also talk about. I think he died, if I remember correctly, in 74. So he really. He really saw a lot. But, you know, how did he approach and think about civil. Civil rights? You know, I think he was. Was the Civil Right when the Civil Rights movement was really getting going, he was by that point in time, maybe touching. 70.
- [37:42]
A
So his first writings on, on the issue of civil rights go all the way back to the first Red Scare. He writes, and he writes a book on the Red Terror that had happened in Chicago. You know, Chicago had seen during World War I, part of the Great Migration, a lot of movement of African Americans into the city. And in 1919 they had a huge race riot. It Lman wrote an introduction to, to the study of that Red Terror. Lippman was fairly, fairly consistently against red scares in the United States. One things that I, you know, find kind of most noble or likable like, like likable about him is how he was always trying to put down his theory, except when he wasn't. But his first writing was an introduction for this book. And he, he, he talks about race parallelism. And it's not so much that he's arguing therefore integration. And in some ways he kind of sees past integration as the right goal. I think he even suggests there that if integration at that point could only look for African Americans, like trying to accommodate white standards of culture, class, taste, what have you, and instead what African Americans should have the freedom to develop along parallel lines. So it's this interesting way of maintaining separate but equal, but also suggesting that African Americans need to develop their own. Need to develop their own kind of standards of culture and success and they need to have the freedom to be able to do so initially, have the resources to be able to do so. He will not kind of revisit that race parallelism. He will instead become a reluctant supporter of civil rights. In the 50s, he was not in favor of the Brown decision, thought that it was upsetting the social order in a way that, in, in a way that just wasn't helpful. Right. So he, he believed Africans should have more rights, but just kind of government, government enforced integration. He was largely opposed to and didn't really come around to it until probably the early 1960s or so. So he's probably put him in kind of a, a, a, a racial moderate. He's not a Southerner, but he would fit kind of a Southern moderate type of let's, let's make moderate progresses towards, towards civil rights. He ends his life by saying positive things about black power. And what I suggest is that shouldn't surprise us given what he had said at the beginning of his life, that race parallelism was in some ways I think he could see his support for black power in some ways in that race parallelism, in that African Americans were taking, instead of trying to work with white liberals, African Americans were looking to kind of develop their own communities, their own strength, their own power, what have you. And Lippman believed that that ultimately was a positive. A positive thing. And so I think that there is. But for all of his reluctance to support civil rights, there is a kind of forethought in Lippman that ultimately runs back to his theories about colonialism and colonized people taking on the values of their colonizers and trying to avoid that for African Americans. I think he kind of ends his life around there. Not that he's. Not that he's going out, you know, significant. Not that he's kind of, you know, joining the Black Panthers or anything like that or endorsing them, but he does recognize, and in the same way that Richard Nixon and did too, recognize that there was a positive value in African Americans looking to kind of achieve their own standards of success and build. Build their own communities up and really kind of gain freedom in ways that integration or working with white liberals was going to make possible.
- [42:20]
C
Yeah. His views sort of remind me of, like, the, you know, the views of, like, a libertarian, like Murray Rothbard at the time, sort of a skeptic of the mainstream civil rights. But then, you know, interestingly endorsing or, you know, creating dialogue with black power, with advocates of, like, the black power movement. You know, a thread that's really running throughout this entire book is. And we've talked about it a little bit, is just Lippmann's views on Christianity and his understanding of the role of religion in civic life. So, you know, is there a sort of takeaway that you think that people should have about how Lippman thought about religion and civic life and just Christianity in general?
- [43:03]
A
Sure, sure. So I was thinking about this interview, thinking about the book again, when I was reading Run an op ed in the Washington Post last week, and it was entitled I'm a Nun. I Wish we had a. Not N O N E, Not N. I'm a nun. I wish we had a church. And I could. I could fully expect Walter Lipman to have written that, you know, written that piece, uh, because I think that encapsulates in many ways, uh, his. His entire, uh, life and body of work. Work. He was, from very early on, a religious nun. He's had no faith in institutionalized religions whatsoever. Had enough positive appreciation, I guess, of Judaism to, you know, to be. To have a. To be confirmed, but ultimately rejects that pretty early on. Eventually comes around to what he calls the classical and Christian heritage in the 1930s. As he tells his wife Helen. But he never commits to these. He never, you know, steps into a church. But he recognized not just that. And a lot of this, this up in Washington Post was on, you know, as religious institutions decline. Well, that's a big part of American social capital. So how are Americans going to, you know, we already have a problem getting along with each other. How are. When we're not even interacting in this kind of way through synagogues, mosques, churches anymore, is this just going to exacerbate polarization in the United States? And that was a concern of his, just kind of the social aspect. But I think what Lippman would suggest, too, is it's more than just the social absence of religions. It's the intellectual absence, too, that religions provide a kind of a sense of security, comfort, place, belonging in the cosmos for, for individuals and communities, that when we lose that, what's. What's going to take that place? And he never really finds that for himself. He. And he seemed to be pretty. Pretty comfortable not, not ever settling down in anything. He took a very pragmatic view. This is where I suggest that this is a post Christian attitude, right? It's not a truly secular attitude. It's a post Christian one where Lippmann is willing to kind of entertain that, yes, organized religions can still have functional values, both the social aspects that they provide, but intellectual aspects of helping individuals feel safe, secure, you know, integral, providing a kind of public morality like love your neighbor, you know, these kinds of things that they serve a functional, Functional value. Right? Very much a. I think very much a George Washington farewell address kind of thing that, you know, for. For America to work, the American people needed some kind of moral or religious traditions that they could. Could hope that they could hold to, not just to get along with each other, but really to. To. To feel whole in them, in themselves. And so Lippman never really gave up, I think, on that. On that kind of search for a kind of replacement or, or, well, to. To invoke his. His mentor, William James, a moral equivalent for orthodoxy. We can't have Christianity. We can't have Judaism. We can't have Islamic. What can we have? That is what we have to take its place. We need something there. We can't just be nuns. And this is interesting, the flood of articles, op eds and things that are research that's coming out suggesting that, yeah, we need something there. I think Walter Lippman would be. Walter Lippman would be like, yeah, but I told you guys this like 100 years ago. Yeah, He.
- [47:13]
C
He clearly then, his entire life was in some. On some level engaging with. With Nietzsche's thought and Nietzsche's concern about the death of God and the vacuum that. That might. Might leave people. Spiritual vacuum. You know, after people have. Oh, sorry, I'll.
- [47:28]
A
I'll let you. I was gonna say. Absolutely, yeah.
- [47:31]
C
Yeah. I. You know, after people. People have listened to this and, And. And. And read your book, you know, is there one particular book or essay or thing that. That lman wrote that you think it represents the very best of him? Like the one thing that you would recommend that anyone who's at all interested in Lippman should check out?
- [47:53]
A
Well, I think that the book that's most revealing of Lippmann himself, if you're interested in Lippmann, would be A Preface to Morals. If you just wanted to read Lippmann directly, talking about his views of the world and politics and self morality, religion, that. That would be the most. You know, that would be the most direct book. Book. If readers come away wanting to know more about. I mean, it's a very much an intellectual biography, they come away wanting to know more about Lippmann the person. You know, Ronald Steele's biography, you can't. You can't replace that. He had personal access to Helen France. Helen. Sorry. To Helen and Walter, all of their papers, and he had 13 years to write that. That. And it's a. It's an incredible biography. It's rightly won the. The Pulitzer and the Bancroft and, you know, I'm sorry not to Pulitzer National Book Award. It's a great biography. That's. So that's a great place for people to go, you know, to kind of learn more about Lippmann himself. But I think that the most enduring work for Lippman is still. Is Public Opinion. That's probably the one that, that, yeah, don't read Public Philosophy. It's a bit of a mess, but read Public Opinion. Public Opinion is. Is. Is. Is really good in terms of his applying a kind of Jamesian psychology to why democracies have a really hard time working or just can't work. Public Opinion is probably his. His most enduring, enduring work there. So if you want to learn more about Lippmann, read A Preface to Morals or read Steele's biography. If you want to learn more about. If you want to get his kind of best work, then I would say Public Opinion is that. But he's got something for everyone. If you're conservative, read, you know, read the. The Good Society. Read the first half of the good society his 1937 book where he's complaining about the New Deal Deal as a form of collectivism and stuff. Just don't read the second half where he's suggesting that the solution to the New Deal is Keynesianism.
- [50:10]
C
He really does have something for, for everyone. You know, I suppose that's what happens when you, you know, when you write non stop for, for your entire life, you know, with a, you know, with essentially inside, the inside track to world leaders and, you know, and, you know, want to talk about everything, you know. And of course, you know, listeners should definitely check out Walter Lippman, American Skeptic, American Pastor. Well, Mark, thank you so much for being a guest on the New Books Network. It was great to speak with you about Walter Lippmann. He really is just one of these fascinating American characters who just really is a person that if people don't know about him, they should really, really, really study up. But thank you so much.
- [50:58]
A
Hey, thanks so much. I appreciate it.
- [51:00]
C
Of course.
- [51:12]
D
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