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NOT OFTEN do the leading minds of academe anoint an amateurs philosophical treatise a masterpiece. But when the journalist Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion, his seminal 1922 meditation on democracy and modern life, the book met with admiring and even effusive reviews from eminent scholars, among them the sociologist Robert Park and the political scientist Charles Merriam. Most complimentary of all was the philosopher John Dewey, whose rave notice ran in the pages of the magazine Lippmann had cofounded and recently left, the New; Republic. Largely endorsing Lippmann s arguments about the ailments of representative government and tlie need for objective expertise in policy making, Dewey called Public Opinion "perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned."
But if Lippmann had reason to rejoice in his book's reception, one nasty and trenchant appraisal stuck in his craw. It came from Henry Louis Mencken, the literary slasher for the Baltimore Sun. Mencken maintained a cordial and sometimes friendly relationship with Lippmann and in 1920 and 1921 had written a few articles for the New Republic. But that association didn't deter the captious critic from rising to attack the journalistic Wunderkind. In April 1922, after reading Lippmann s treatise, Mencken politely informed a mutual acquaintance of the two men that Public Opinion was "an excellent piece of work" - apart from the small fact that it had managed "to dodge all the main facts." Referring to his own magazine, die Smart Set, Mencken pledged, "I shall perform upon it in the June S. S."
The review that appeared deemed Lippmann s work, not altogether unfairly, to be derivative of more substantial philosophical treatises by Graham Wallas, George Santayana, James Bryce, and H. G. Wells (some of whom had been Lippmann s teachers at Harvard). More pointedly, where most readers found Lippmanns grim assessment of democracy and its shortcomings to be bracing, Mencken found it tepid. He berated Lippmann for clinging to the liberal romance with popular self-government. Public Opinions conclusion, in particular, he derided as "mystical gurgle" - nothing more than "the old democratic answer" of "spreading enlightenment. . .democratizing information. . .combating what is adjudged to be false with what is adjudged to be true." Lippmann had flinched, he said, from facing...
