Tom Arnold Foster: Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography

Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder

Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography
by Tom Arnold-Forster
Princeton University Press
June 2025, 368 pp.

From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America. His words and ideas had a powerful impact on American liberalism and his writings on the media, particularly on stereotyping and journalistic objectivity, are still taught today.

For all his national reputation, and his years in Washington, DC, he was also very much a New Yorker. Lippmann was born in 1889 and raised in New York City. In the early years of his career he caught the allure of bohemian Greenwich Village, reported on Wall Street for the muckraker Lincoln Steffens, and worked as an editor at The New Republic. During the 1920s he was the editorial director and then executive editor of The World, where he championed Al Smith as the voice of a vigorous urban liberalism. In 1931 he became a columnist for the Herald Tribune, a newspaper associated with Wall Street Republicanism, but continued to ponder the nature of liberalism. His books analyzed politics and the significance of journalism and the media in politics.

Lippmann’s increasing engagement with national and international issues over the course of his career eventually made him more of a Washington journalist. He lived for decades in the nation’s capital, and his career helped established New York and Washington, DC as the domains of America’s power elite. He returned to New York City for the final years of his life and died in 1974.

Lippmann is now the subject of Tom Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography, published by Princeton University Press. Arnold-Forster explores Lippmann in his evolving historical context, from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. He argues that Lippmann was a much more complicated thinker than is usually recognized who went from being a liberal socialist to a conservative liberal. Arnold-Forster also contends that the famous “Dewey-Lippman debate,” a framing of Lippman’s work alongside that of the philosopher John Dewey that presents Lippmann as the voice of technocratic expertise and Dewey as the voice of democratic deliberation, is overdrawn and ignores where then two men were in agreement.

Arnold-Forster is a historian at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, where he works on the political and intellectual history of the modern United States and the history of political thought. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and general interest publications. His article on Lippmann and public opinion, published in American Journalism, won the 2024 Dorothy Ross Prize for best article from the Society for United States Intellectual History.

Host Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell UP, 2025). Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu.