A great admirer of Theodore Roosevelt and later of Woodrow Wilson, Lippmann was one of the first American intellectuals and journalists to call for American intervention in World War I. In this context, Lippmann acquired a strong philosophical background, a genuine passion for Plato and Socrates, and a real interest for intellectual debates both in the United States and in Europe.ĤIn those same years, he was attracted to Socialism and Fabianism, but he soon converted to progressivism. At Harvard University, where he graduated in philosophy in 1910, he was deeply influenced by two of the most acclaimed professors of the discipline: the realist George Santayana and the pragmatist William James. Despite his important contributions to The New Republic, N ew York World, New York Herald Tribune, Washington Post, and several other magazines, Lippmann was not just a journalist, he was also an acute political thinker - or a public philosopher, as he would have probably defined himself - and an expert in international relations. Mostly known as a famous columnist, Lippmann was born in 1889 and died in 1974. The growing power of the Nazis as well as the threat of Fascisms and Communism in the Thirties, ideologies that seemed attractive to many Americans, illustrates how deep this crisis was getting.ģWalter Lippmann was one of the brightest and most influential of the many intellectuals who debated these topics, to the extent that his works can now be considered as “classics”.
The so-called red scare, the growth of right-wing and racist groups like the Ku-Klux-Klan, the controversy between evolutionism and creationism and the admiration for Mussolini and Italian fascism - all typical tracts of the Twenties - were clear signals of those difficulties. This crisis, which was mainly socio-economic, had been preceded and was then accompanied by a political crisis, which we may define as a crisis of democracy. The defeat of Wilsonianism granted the Republican party more than ten years of government, from 1920 to 1932, interrupted only by the consequences of the 1929 crisis and by the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The already strong shock of World War I, a conflict that involved different continents with political and economic consequences, was soon followed by the 1929 crisis and by the growth of totalitarianisms.ĢThe United States of America, which had previously abandoned the principle of isolationism to join the war, quickly returned to it, rejecting Wilsonian idealism. 1The interwar period was a moment of deep crisis everywhere.
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