Summary
American journalist (1889–1974) read in “Grey Eminence”, the eleventh essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, through Ronald Steel’s biography: the most powerful American journalist of the century, an insider who never held office, whose realism and balance rationalized the American Establishment and whose career exemplifies the authority of reassuring opinion over any concrete social vision (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.120-125).
Details
- Only son of very well-off German-Jewish parents; at Harvard his classmates included John Reed, T. S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken; he worked as a legman for Lincoln Steffens, debated socialism with Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, and became the éminence grise to Woodrow Wilson’s alter ego, Colonel House (PDF p.120).
- Steel, quoted by Said: the list of his connections “gave him an enormous power over public opinion.” (PDF p.120).
- He wrote regularly for the New Republic, the New York World, the Herald Tribune, the Washington Post and Newsweek; his keynote was dispassionate impartiality and a “remarkable facility for not straying too far from the thrust of public opinion” (PDF p.121).
- He upheld racial quotas in immigration, thought the inhabitants of the Caribbean “inferior races”, treated European Jews in 1938 as an “overpopulation” problem, and considered interning Japanese-Americans a congenial idea (PDF p.122).
- Lippmann is, in Said’s account, Gramsci’s organic intellectual and a secular evangelist of the cult of expertise and realism, who perfected democracy celebrated for, rather than by, the masses by a “specialized class” of insiders (PDF p.123).
- Steel’s assessment, quoted: he believed America’s cold war policies were essentially defensive and its informal empire acquired by “accident” (PDF p.124).
- In essay 13, “insiders” is the word first given wide social approbation by Lippmann in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public for those endowed with the privilege of knowing how things really work and of being close to power (PDF p.131).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, George Orwell