Walter Lippmann gave us stereotypes and the Cold War, as words
Two phrases you probably use came from one newspaperman. Walter Lippmann gave stereotype its modern psychological sense in 1922 and made Cold War common currency with a 1947 book. He also doubted that ordinary voters could steer a modern democracy, a claim that set off one of the century's great debates.
Lippmann was born on September 23, 1889, the only child of wealthy German-Jewish parents on New York's Upper East Side, and spent childhood summers in Europe. His private school required eleven hours of ancient Greek a week. At Harvard, which he entered just before turning 17, he studied philosophy under William James and George Santayana; he was rejected by the student newspaper, and the leading social clubs barred Jews.
He started on the left, joining the Socialist Party and briefly serving the socialist mayor of Schenectady in 1911, before quitting because the programme seemed too timid to count as socialism. In 1914 he co-founded The New Republic. During the First World War he was an Army intelligence captain in France, helped draft Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, and warned the president that censorship should never be handed to anyone intolerant or ignorant of the history of suppression. In 1920 he and Charles Merz showed that the New York Times had covered the Bolshevik Revolution inaccurately.
Public Opinion, published in 1922, argued that people form judgements before they know the facts and see the world through stereotypes. Lippmann likened the average citizen to a theatregoer who arrives in the third act and leaves before the end, and called the idea of a public competent to run affairs a false ideal; he wanted expert help instead. John Dewey agreed the public could be irrational but rejected rule by a technocratic elite, and the exchange is now studied as the Lippmann–Dewey debate. Some scholars call the book the founding text of modern journalism.
His syndicated column, Today and Tomorrow, won him a special Pulitzer in 1958, and his 1961 interview with Nikita Khrushchev earned another. Not every judgement aged well: in 1932 he dismissed Franklin Roosevelt as a pleasant man with no great qualifications. Lyndon Johnson gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, before the two fell out over Vietnam. He retired in 1967 and died in New York on December 14, 1974.
Source: Walter Lippmann
