Piano v. Bugle

(See front cover)

Home last week from a trip to Hawaii, Publisher Adolph Ochs, 73, of the New York Times, called the end of the New York World "an unfortunate and calamitous chapter in the history of American journalism. . . . Had I been in New York ... I should have saved it for the employes. . . .''

Promptly retorted Publisher Roy Wilson Howard of the new World-Telegram: "I am afraid Mr. Ochs. like several others, waited for the World to die and waited too long. . . . The old World isn't dead. It isn't the building or the press that makes the newspaper; it is the spirit of its writers."

Crumped Arthur Brisbane in his Hearst colyum: "The New York World is 'dead as mutton.'"

The reason the coroner's jury continues to debate whether or not the World is dead, is because the World signified Liberalism. And a great question for a decade has been whether there was any future for Liberalism in the U. S. Even conservatives such as Publisher Ochs feel disturbed when Liberalism totters for, in British terms, His Majesty's Government requires His Majesty's Opposition.

"The World" always meant, of course, the morning newspaper, though in the last years it was the Evening World that paid the bills. It was on the editorial page of his morning editions that old Joseph Pulitzer's torch was carried most high and brightly until his death in 1911 and thereafter. And it was to the man in charge of that editorial page that other U. S. newspapermen, insofar as they regarded the World as the Law & the Prophets, paid homage as to their Moses, their prophet of Liberalism. This week a great dinner was given by the Academy of Political Science in Manhattan for 41-year-old Walter Lippmann, the past seven years the World's chief editorial writer. He announced as the subject of his address: "Journalism and the Liberal Spirit."

U. S. Liberalism: Where Is it? An inquisitive foreigner might have been prompted by Mr. Lippmann's subject to ask: What and where is U. S. Liberalism? Is there any such thing?

An obliging bystander might point to the Norrises, La Follettes and Borahs of politics;* the Fosdicks and Wises of the pulpit; to Associate Justices Holmes and Brandeis on the bench; to John Dewey and Alexander Meiklejohn in pedagogy; to Henry Ford and Owen D. Young as businessmen; to the Crusaders as Liberals on Prohibition; to The Nation, New Republic, St. Louis Post Dispatch and Scripps-Howard chainpapers, and to Will Rogers--all of them exponents of one or another kind of U. S. Liberalism. But for an exemplar and spokesman whose Liberalism would be little disputed and least necessary to define, Walter Lippmann of the late World would serve the inquisitive foreigner best of all.

A Testament. To the Academy of Political Science, Liberal Lippmann offered no definitions or solutions. Instead he sounded like a political philosopher wearied after a long fight, reminiscent:

"The journalistic interpretation of current affairs is becoming an increasingly difficult task. The working journalist today is confronted with a double and cumulative complexity. The facts themselves have multiplied enormously. The accepted standards of judgment have dissolved. . . . There does not exist today in the official mind at Washington or in Congress, or in either political party, or among the voters themselves any clear conception of our interests or our obligations. . . .

"A mechanical and industrial revolution has altered the whole pattern of American life. It has uprooted millions from the land and thrust them into a strange, incomprehensible and rapidly changing environment. So vast, so deep, so pervasive are the effects of this upon the premises of our conduct, upon the internal economy of our own spirits, that we find ourselves not only without common publicly acknowledged standards of action but oftener than not without clear personal conviction as well.

"It is no longer enough to keep down prices, to prevent discrimination, to establish minimum standards in working conditions. Much more is demanded of the economic system today. ... I know of no formula and of no program by which such objectives can be obtained in a social system which is as complex as our own. It may be possible for the Russians, who have started from zero, to build up a satisfactory social system by centralized initiative. We have no right to prejudice them. . . . [But] while the Russians may be building a very modern house on very modern foundations, they are building their house on a vacant lot; we have to reconstruct our old house while we continue to live in it. . . .

"It is vain to suppose that our problems can be dealt with by rallying the people to some crusade that can be expressed in a symbol, a phrase, a set of 16 principles, or a program. If that is what progressives are looking for today they will look in vain. . . .

"We are explorers in a strange world, and what we must depend upon is not a map of the country--for there is no map-- but upon those qualities of mind and heart and those distillations of experience which men have learned to depend upon when they faced the unknown.

"This, perhaps, is the testament of Liberalism. For underlying all the specific projects which men espouse who think of themselves as Liberals there is always, it seems to me, a deeper concern. It is fixed upon the importance of remaining free in mind and in action before changing circumstances. That is why Liberalism has always been associated with a passionate interest in freedom of thought and freedom of speech, in scientific research, in experiment, in the liberty of teaching, in an independent and unbiased press, in the right of men to differ in their opinions and to be different in their conduct. . . .

"It requires an adjustment of the human spirit which it is difficult for men to maintain: a capacity to act resolutely while maintaining a skeptical mind. . . .

The question, however, is not wh"ether it is easier or more exciting or more immediately effective for results to be illiberal, but whether the world we live in can be brought under civilized control without the gifts of the liberal spirit. I think it cannot be. In a stable, settled, and unchanging society, custom and established truth may suffice. But in an unstable and changing society like ours, the unceasing discovery of truth is a necessity."

Theorist v. Editor. Not a few of those present were reminded, by Mr. Lippmann's air of patient detachment, of an article in last fortnight's New Freeman by James M. Cain, an editorial associate and admirer of Mr. Lippmann's on the World, who ascribed to him a part at least in the World's downfall. Cain declared that Lippmann was not a natural editor, that the job bored him, that his page reflected his boredom:

"Lippmann ... is a poet of ideas. He stews out theories, hypotheses, explanations as profusely as a scenarist stews out gags. If you read his books, you will see that he seldom bothers to prove any of them. . . . Obviousness is almost indispensable to a newspaper. . . . But Lippmann recoils from the obvious as a cat recoils from water. He was always trying to get away from the plain banalities of polemic and find the grain of ultimate truth. ... I can illustrate. . . . We were having lunch. ... I said . . . 'You are always trying to dredge up basic principles. . . . It won't work. For example turn to music. A piano has eight octaves, a violin three, a cornet two and a ... bugle has only four notes. Now if what you've got to blow is a bugle, there isn't any sense in camping yourself down in front of piano music.'

" 'You may be right,' he said. 'But God damn it, I'm not going to spend my life writing bugle calls.' "

If James Cain's strictures were fair to Walter Lippmann as a practical journalist, they could cheerfully be accepted and dismissed by Walter Lippmann, political scientist. Few men of his years have had such a range of experience out of which to "stew out" a political philosophy.

Preface to Roosevelt Born in New York City, he went to Harvard with the famed class of 1910. Among his classmates were John Reed, Alan Seeger, Robert Edmond Jones, Edward Sheldon, Clarence Cook Little, Heywood Broun. Graduated in three years, he spent a fourth taking a course in modern philosophy. His first real job was with Everybody's Magazine where he served as an investigator for Lincoln Steffens, one of the first of the "Muckrakers." Because the Lippmann mind was then of youthfully radical cast, Rev. George Richard Lunn, a Presbyterian minister who in 1911 was elected Socialist Mayor of Schenectady, hired him as his secretary. For three months under Mayor Lunn, Secretary Lippmann got a look at politics from the inside. That was enough. He went off to the Maine woods and wrote his first book, A Preface to Politics.

Lippmann's Preface was suddenly hailed by Theodore Roosevelt from the River of Doubt. It became the unofficial bible of the Bull Moosers. In 1914, with the "New Nationalism" doctrines of Theodore Roosevelt fresh in mind, Lippmann helped launch the Liberal New Republic.

From Wilson to the World. But Lippmann was moving gradually from Left to Right. By 1916 the New Republic was behind President Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt was flaying it. When the War came, after brief service as an assistant to Secretary of War Baker, Walter Lippmann was named secretary of an organization called The Inquiry, under Col. House. The Inquiry's purpose was to ascertain and formulate the peace aims and claims of all parties to the War. So well did Secretary Lippmann do his job--his abstract ideas filtered through to President Wilson's speeches--that he was sent overseas as a captain of military intelligence. There he met and worked with Editor Frank Irving Cobb-- of the World. At the Peace Conference, Lippmann's memoranda became in the U. S. delegation the authoritative commentary on Wilson's 14 Points.

Lippmann went to work as a World editorial writer on Jan. i. 1921. Editor Cobb died in 1923. Lippmann was put in charge of the editorial page in 1924. Five years later the full title of Editor was conferred upon him.

What the profession admired most about Lippmann editorials was their compelling logic and persuasive reasonableness. But at times--as during the crusade against Peonage and the attacks on the Harding Gang and the "Aluminum Trust'' --he could put by his composed objectivity and then the World would lash out with its oldtime fire. It is common knowledge that the editorials read most regularly and closely by President Hoover were those in the arch-Democratic New York World. Reason: Besides being close friends and mutual admirers, Herbert Hoover and Walter Lippmann have in common a passion for fairness which each respects. Also in common are their sense of bewilderment at the complexities of national life, their hunger for facts.

The evolution of Liberal Lippmann's political ideas is charted less clearly in his editorials than in his books (Drift and Mastery, The Political Scene, Public Opinion, The Phantom Public, Men of Destiny, American Inquisitors, A Preface to Morals). And it is a paradox that his exercise of the Liberal Spirit has brought him to a position which most Liberals would excoriate. He began with a stout faith in the workings of popular democracy and the benefits of collective action. But his newspaper experience gradually bred in him a distrust (again, like Hoover's) of so-called Public Opinion, the judgments of the Mass. As editor of the World, public ignorance was his field. As idealist, organized public intelligence was his dream. Pessimistic passages in his writing give the same impression that one gets from hearing the precise, clipped accents of his speaking voice, an impression of the intellectual aristocrat who sometimes despairs of public ignorance ever being cured, thus throwing the public's right to participate fully in Government open to question. 'With actual life outrunning politics and theories. Editor Lippmann has arrived at a state of mind where he believes, in effect, that a class of wholly "disinterested"' men should govern with the consent of the People, if not with their advice. What would save such a brainpower oligarchy from becoming tryannous would be public education and the Liberal Spirit.

"At almost any cost." the Lippmann speech last week concluded, "men must keep open the channels of understanding and preserve unclouded, lucid and serene their receptiveness to truth."

*Last week Senator Borah, after scrutinizing Secretary of Commerce Lament's estimate of 6,050,000 unemployed (see p. 10), cried, "We should be legislating!" and took the lead in calling a meeting at Washington this week of ten Liberal organizations, to try to force a special session of Congress.

*Not to be confused with Humorist Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, who worked for the World as a special feature writer from 1905 to 1911.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.