Men of Destiny
by . New York: The Macmillan Co. 1127. l2mo. 244 pp. Illus. $2.50.
MR. WALTER LIPPMANN guides what is on the whole the best editorial page in any American newspaper, that of the New York World. He also writes occasionally articles for the magazines, and in Men of Destiny he has collected a number of these papers and added a few new ones. I liked these observations on the current American scene when they first appeared; I like them even better assembled between the covers of a book, where the parts of the mosaic are put together to show the pattern of Mr. Lippmann’s mind.
This author has a characteristic which in itself makes him almost unique: he is an intelligent man who is nevertheless interested in American political life. For nearly two generations now it has been unfashionable for intellectual leaders to pay attention to politics. First there was a long period of domination by the radical theory that economic power is all that matters, that political life is unreal and therefore unimportant; and of late, especially since the war, the popular doctrine has been that beauty alone endures, that intelligence should turn its back on the hurlyburly and contemplate loveliness. Mr. Lippmann has refused to succumb to either of these theories; and, while still under forty, he is by way of becoming chief of a school of realistic writers who use the political approach as a clue to the understanding of the mass mind in America.
Mr. Lippmann’s other chief distinction is that he exhibits the attitude which is described as ‘scientific,’ though far too few scientific men are able to claim it. He is willing to be convinced by the facts even if they fall counter to the previous trend of his ideas. His intellectual history since his brilliant beginning with A Prefaceto Politics in 1913 has been one of steady departure from belief in the efficacy of a simple democratic organization of society, as he has become convinced by the evidence that aroused public opinion does not necessarily rectify wrongs, that there is not one public but many, each interested in its own set of affairs and more or less insulated against others, that the technique of propaganda has been perfected faster than, if not in the complete absence of, machinery to counteract it. It is an interesting road which Mr. Lippmann is thus candidly traveling. It is leading him, in my guess, not toward Mussolini, but toward the necessity for something like Mr. H. G. Wells’s ‘new order of samurai,’ an aristocracy of mind and character, whose members are dedicated to making democracy work for the best, whether the populace wants it or not.
In this volume, Mr. Lippmann’s philosophy serves as footlights for a stage peopled with the chief political figures of our day: Smith, Coolidge, Borah, Wilson, House, McAdoo, Harding, Mellon, and Kellogg. He includes a sound and hearty criticism of Mr. Mencken (not written, mirabile dictu, in Menckenese) and an excellent putting of Mr, Sinclair Lewis in his proper place, as an adolescent Main Streeter gone sour. With these personalities as points of departure, we learn of the new America which is arising among the sons of the recent immigrants in our great cities, for whom Al Smith is prototype and hero: of the coming conflict between urban and rural groups; of the probable overthrow of small-town Protestant Fundamentalism with the death of the Eighteenth Amendment. Mr. Lippmann argues that the new industrial organization, with its great prosperity for the middle classes and comparative ease even for many workingmen, has created a situation which has outrun our political thinking, leaving conservative spokesmen defending practices which big business has abandoned, and liberals uttering criticisms which were correct a quarter of a century ago but are now as out of date as the whatnot. He thinks the new American civilization is most inadequately reported by our newspapers and magazines, a statement with which I think all who know anything about that civilization must agree. He uses his realistic litmus paper also on the nonsense talked by some advocates of the outlawry of war; on Mr. Mellon as ‘the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Hamilton’; on the notion that our Latin American trade and investments can be forwarded by keeping the Latin Americans afraid of us; on the excessive use of the psychological doctrine of rationalization by those who thereby seek to escape all moral responsibility. And he ends with a charming birthday bouquet for Mr. Justice Holmes.
Some of these pieces are journalistic enough to have begun already to yellow; and necessarily a book of reprint has not the solid weight and velocity of a work like Public Opinion or The Phantom Public. Yet even such casual and occasional papers have much in them which the thoughtful American cannot overlook. And he will find them a welcome relief from the bad writing, shallow thinking, suppression, and distortion which nowadays characterize most discussion of political affairs in this republic.
BRUCE BLIVEN