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PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICE OF PERSONAL JOURNALISM

WITH MORAL CONCERN IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

THESIS

Presented to the Graduate Council of the

University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

MASTER OF JOURNALISM

By

Marshall N. Surratt, B.A. Denton, Texas

December, 1989 Surratt, Marshall N., Philosophy and Practice of

Personal Journalism with Moral Concern in the Twentieth Century. Master of Journalism (Journalism), December, 1989, 192 pp., bibliography, 115 titles.

This study seeks to show that a tradition exists of personal journalists who, more than supporting a partisan position, have moral concern and desire reconciliation.

Between the First World War and the Hutchins Commission report of 1947, Walter Lippmann and other media critics theorized that journalistic objectivity is impossible, but recognized journalists' responsibility to interpret events to their publics. In the 1930s these new theories coincided with historical events to encourage journalists' personal involvement with their subjects. The work of the best personal journalists, for example, George Orwell and James

Agee, resulted from moral concern. This tradition is furthered today in the journalism of Bill Moyers. Copyright by

Marshall Nash Surratt 1989

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study was aided by a grant from the Frank W. Mayborn Scholar Program, for which the author is sincerely grateful. That program, part of the Frank W. Mayborn

Foundation, helps journalism graduate students at three

Texas universities including the University of North Texas.

The program and foundation are named for the late Texas publisher and philanthropist. Of course, the foundation should not be held liable for the opinions expressed in this study.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Chapter

I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Statement of the Problem Purpose of the Study Questions Review of Literature Justification Definition of Terms Limitations of the Study Methodology Organization of the Thesis

II. PHILOSOPHICAL MODELS FOR A TRADITION OF PERSONAL JOURNALISM WITH MORAL

CONCERN ...... 18 III. HISTORICAL INFLUENCES ON PERSONAL JOURNALISM WITH MORAL CONCERN . ... # . . . . 52 IV. PERSONAL JOURNALISM WITH MORAL CONCERN SINCE THE 19303 ...... 100 V. INFLUENCE OF RELIGION AND MYTH ON PERSONAL JOURNALISTS ...... 133

VI. CONCLUSIONS ...... *.0. * * * 171 WORKS CITED - - - . - -. -0 ...... 178

WORKS CONSULTED ...... 188

V CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY

Is there a tradition in journalism of personal

journalism with moral concern? That is, has there been a tradition of journalists interested in an analytical

function of journalism and in moral concern for their

subject or their publics?

This study seeks to show a tradition of personal

journalism and a body of journalists dedicated to moral

concern. This study will show that political events, and new theories of what history is, influenced these

journalists to show moral concern and to examine the

function of media. It also will show that the new ideas about history and media and moral concern remain influential in journalism today.

More than one author has traced writers' use of experiences in World War I in writing about a feeling of the divided self, the self separated from an officialdom that is no longer trusted. The literary pulse that came in Europe from this war was not matched in the United States, which entered the war late and was not, as Britain was, fewer than fifty miles away from some of the fiercest action, or as

France and Belgium were--in the middle of the warfare from

1 2 trenches across "no man's land." But events of political and social upheaval that touched this country, such as the

Great Depression of the 1930s, encouraged literature here in which writers questioned official versions of history.

Those events, massive in their destruction and hardship, shook public confidence so much that the public could accept thoughts--and style--of writers considered too radical before.

Later, the Spanish Civil War influenced journalists and fiction writers. Many saw that conflict as a contest between a small group of good, democratic people against

Goliath forces of fascism. Writers such as George Orwell,

Ernest Hemingway, and Andre Malraux emphasized the individual integrity and stubborn bravery of the outnumbered, whose fight was ignored by Western democracies.

Orwell, especially, also came away with lessons about infighting among the resistance groups, "between initials," he said.

At the same time that political events encouraged skepticism about official histories, the philosophy of history was changing. The better-read journalists would have been influenced by the changing attitudes toward history and toward such notions as "science", and "objec- tivity." If they were not familiar with the philosophers, at least they would have been influenced by watered-down versions of the new ideas, just as people have ideas about 3

existentialism who have never read Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert

Camus or a religious proponent such as Jacques Maritain.

Much of this theoretical work had fruition between 1900

and 1940. In this country, in 1920 George Santayana, Arthur

0. Lovejoy, and five other philosophers published Essays in

Critical Realism as their manifesto. Briefly, they believed

certain ideas have always existed, but that contemporary

thinkers are wrong to believe that words expressing those

ideas mean the same today as the words once did. Rather, in

any given period in history, ideas are interpreted and

reinterpreted by media or other vehicles or essences. For

Santayana essences were the data by which reality is

revealed. Humanity understood the essences in a hybrid of

rationality and intuition. By reason humans distinguished

shades of excellence in explanations for the world, Santayana said, but the recognition of excellence depended on an irrational impulse.

Among those in England with similar views that explana-

tions for the world could not be completely objective were

R. G. Collingwood, whose Speculum Mentis, or The Map of

Knowledge, was published in 1924, and the philologist Owen

Barfield, whose History in English Words was published in

1926.

Outside the philosophy of history, but influential on historical interpretation, was another European, the

Viennese Sigmund Freud. The first English translation of 4

his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis was published in

1920, and it further influenced historians and other social

observers to think of events as layers of images to be unraveled.

Two quotes from historians of the 1930s are represen-

tative of the changing attitudes toward history. Writing in 1939 about the previous two decades, the political

scientist-historians Charles A. Beard and Mary Beard said about the press:

In truth the ideal of a completely "objective"

report on any complicated series of events was an

impossible ideal. Necessarily, if not at all by

intention, the slogan "all the news that's fit to

print" was repeatedly violated. At best the maxim

was merely a vague aspiration beyond the reach of the finest resolves. 1

Charles Beard had written a seminal paper on the new

historiographical theories in American Historical Review in 1934, "Written History as an Act of Faith."

And in American Heroes and Hero-Worship (1943)

journalist, journalism instructor, and historian Gerald

White Johnson wrote: "Nothing changes more constantly than

the past; for the past that influences our lives . . . does

not consist of what actually happened, but of what men

believe happened." 2 5

This paper seeks to show the influence of changing

ideas about history and objectivity on journalism and press

criticism. A preliminary search of texts shows an

increasing self-examination among the best writers, even in

the midst of prescribed party lines as in the 1930s.. Examples are John Steinbeck's documentary novel The Grapes

of Wrath (1939) and James Agee's nonfiction Let Us Now

Praise Famous Men (1941).

How much media criticism owes to the new historio-

graphical theories also will be examined. Walter Lippmann's

A Preface to Politics (1913), Public Opinion (1922), and A

Preface to Morals (1929) owe much to the new theories as well as to such political events as the First World War. At

Harvard University, he learned theories about history and

its use from such teachers as William James and Santayana, under whom Lippmann was a graduate assistant; and as a U. S.

Army captain in a propaganda unit during World War I, Lippmann saw firsthand how history was shaped.

Henry Luce, who with Britton Hadden began Time magazine in 1923, also thought questions about the freedom of the press and its role in society might be philosophical or moral ones. In the 1940s he funded The Commission on

Freedom of the Press to investigate mass communication in this country. The committee, which made its report in 1947, was composed not of journalists but of theoreticians. Its chairman was Robert M. Hutchins, then president of the 6

University of Chicago and on the board of directors of the

Encyclopaedia Britannica. Its members included Zechariah

Chafee Jr., a professor of law at Harvard University and a

First Amendment scholar; William E. Hocking, professor of

philosophy, emeritus, at Harvard; Harold D. Lasswell, a

political scientist and a researcher of public opinion and

propaganda; poet Archibald MacLeish; and theologian Reinhold

Neihbuhr, whose interest was ethics and a person's responsibility in society.

To bring the subject up to date, this paper concludes

by comparing the moral concern in personal journalism

between 1914 and 1947 with the intent in New Journalism, and

by asking if any journali-sts working today strive for a personal journalism with moral concern.

Statement of the Problem

The problem of this study is to identify and describe a tradition of personal journalism with moral concern. In the years between 1914 and 1947, Walter Lippmann and other media critics theorized that journalistic objectivity is impos- sible, but that nevertheless journalists have the respon- sibility to interpret events to their publics. Similarly, historians and philosophers of history formulated new theories about what history is.

In the 1930s the new theories coincided with political events in this country to encourage writers' personal involvement and moral concern in journalism and fiction 7 literature. The best personal journalists showed themes greater than party positions, for example, the use of propaganda and language in political control, and the individual's resistance to a society that seems brutal beyond rational explanation.

This moral concern can be seen today in the work of

Bill Moyers. As he has continued in his work, Moyers has moved closer to questions about morality and how it is represented in the framework of government, churches, and other bodies whose social aim is order and improvement, and in individuals whose life work has been for social order and improvement.

The Purpose of the Study

This study seeks to provide journalists and other writers with a historical study of personal journalism with moral concern. It also seeks to show an epistemology or epistemologies shared by these personal journalists in the twentieth century.

Questions

This study seeks answers to five questions:

1. What were the philosophical roots for a personal journalism with moral concern?

2. What were the historical and political roots for a personal journalism with moral concern? 8

3. Did personal journalism with moral concern extend beyond its historical and political circumstances?

4. If personal journalism with moral concern continues

to be practiced by some today, does it go beyond advocacy journalism or investigative journalism?

5. What has been the influence of religion and myth on personal journalists?

Review of Literature

Epistemologies of personal journalism have been

attempted, but they either are too brief, lacking in

historical research, or narrow in scope. Joseph M. Webb

describes a Romantic tradition in personal journalism,

writing in the second issue (Summer 1974) of Journalism

History. The short article is a proposal for a categorization and for future study.

John C. Merrill offers his conjectures about an

existential tradition in The Imperative of Freedom: A

Philosophy of Journalistic Autonomy (1974) and Existential

Journalism (1977). But his is a shotgun approach. Though

there are more than 300 pages in the two books combined, there is little historical framework provided in the pages.

The second book, which, because it is more narrow in focus should be the more specific, has little textual criticism.

Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) shows the influence of the First World War in writers' concern with the divided self. But most of Fussell's 9

attention is on European fiction writers. The divided self

in the United States is treated, for example, by T. J.

Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the

Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981), and by

Peter Conn in The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917 (1983). They find examples of the

divided mind in religion, philosophy, politics, and art. But neither gives much attention to journalism.

William Stott, in Documentary Expression and Thirties

America (1973), discusses the personal voice and documentary

influence in 1930s fiction and nonfiction writing and

photography. Many other books on 1930s writing exist.

However, many of them show preoccupation with defending a program or party line.

Of course, primary sources are most valuable in a study

like this. A milestone examination of how the press works and how it should function is A Free and Responsible Press, the best known of six reports from the Commission on Freedom

of the Press. (The mainstream press' reception of that 1947 report is the subject of the May 1977 Journalism

Monographs.) Unfortunately, the Hutchins Commission kept no

transcripts of members' arguments and witnesses' testimony,

so members' individual philosophies about the press can only 3 be guessed. William E. Hocking, a commission member, reports some opinions as footnotes in another commission 10

report, Freedom of the Press (1947), also valuable for

Hocking's elaboration on A Free and Responsible Press.

Other primary material is to be found in writers'

published memoirs, letters, and theoretical works.

Particularly important among Lippmann's books in tracing his

thought are A Preface to Politics (1913), Public Opinion

(1922), A Preface to Morals (1929), and Essays in the Public

Philosophy (1955). Also valuable is Public Philosopher:

Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann (1985).

Close attention will be paid to George Orwell's Homage

to Catalonia (1938) and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise

Famous Men (1941). More recently, some of Agee's magazine

articles have been collected, as James Agee: Selected Journalism (1985).

Justification

The news media have an integral part in dissemination

of ideas in the United States, which strives to be a democracy but is an increasingly complex society. However,

media are accused of unethical behavior, political bias, and

sloppy work. Most studies of media ethics have been limited

to case studies. But this study will be more of a

historical examination of journalists' attitudes toward moral concern and moral responsibility. 11

Definition of Terms

For the study, the following terms are defined:

Personal journalism - One purpose of the study is to show what personal journalism meant in different years. For example, in 1931 Eric W. Allen defined as personal journalism the years 1833-1872 in this country: individuals such as Horace Greeley, James Gordon Bennett, and Ben Day established newspapers without reliance on political parties.4

But in this study, a different definition of personal journalism is accepted. Practitioners are involved in their stories: either emotionally by empathy; or by technique, trying to show what the subjects are thinking or what is behind the process of events.

This more inclusive definition would be accepted by the author of a 1949 study, Walter Lippmann: A Study in Personal Journalism, who wrote:

The past century has often been referred to as the

"era of personal journalism." Greeley, Bennett, Raymond, Dana, and Pulitzer were giants in their day. These writer-publishers gave a strongly

individual quality to their papers; their passing

from the scene was widely interpreted as the end

of personal journalism. But as one of the

creative arts, journalism in its nature remains a

highly personal enterprise. Whereas formerly the

- ; , -kt , " , , 12

great editor-publishers dominated the editorial

field, today a group of individual writers,

"columnists," are fulfilling a function resembling

that of the nineteenth-century editors.5

Advocacy (or adversary) journalism - This study accepts

Morris Janowitz' definition of advocacy journalism. He believes journalists necessarily align with a point-of-view, most often that of whomever is in power, and that the alignment determines the definition of reality. "The role of the journalist," he said, "is to insure [sic] that all perspectives are adequately represented in the media, for the resolution of social conflict depends on effective representation of alternative definitions of reality." So, to even the odds in society, the advocacy journalist becomes an advocate for "the public interest or in the interest of submerged or repressed social groups." 6

Investigative journalism is the exposure of hidden wrongs that affect people's lives. It is defined separately from advocacy journalism because: (1) investigative journ- alists may not feel they are advocates for particular groups, even though they expose wrongs against those groups, and (2) investigative journalists do not necessarily examine a process of wrongdoing by those with power. For example, an investigative journalist might investigate substandard conditions at a housing project, but an advocacy journalist 13

might further believe a system of discrimination exists, or

that the fault is endemic to the political system.

Objectivism is the belief that all values, norms, and

events have an objective reality, that is, they have an

existence independent of people observing them. For

journalism the belief says journalists can tell the

objective truth about events if they remove value-laden

language and syntax.

Under this belief, objectivity is what the values,

norms, and events are said to have. Objectivity is the term

more used in journalism. For this study objectivism is used for the philosophical theories; objectivity is used in reference to journalism theories.

Limitations of the Study

The emphasis in this study is on personal journalism in the United States, though Orwell's journalism in England and

Spain also will be examined. Most attention is given to

practice and theory between 1914 and 1947. Those years encompass the time between the First World War and the 1947 report of The Commission on Freedom of the Press (also known as the Hutchins Commission). In the period since 1947, New

Journalism and the work of Bill Moyers will be examined.

All the works to be studied were written in English. 14

Methodology

Methodology will include analysis of journalists'

works, letters, and interviews, and examination of contem-

porary books, articles, and essays on journalistic practice and theory in different years.

Lippmann.'s absorption of philosophical and

historiographical ideas will be shown by comparing ideas in

his early books with those in other philosophical and

historiographical works of the early twentieth century.

Lippmann's subsequent influence on journalism philosophy and practice will be shown by studying references to his writings in then-current journalism texts.

The moral concern in Moyers' work will be shown by a look at his print and television journalism and what biographical information is available.

Organization of the Thesis Chapter 1: Introduction.

Chapter 2: Philosophical models for a tradition for personal journalism in the twentieth century.

In the past two decades John C. Merrill and Joseph M.

Webb have proposed philosophical models for journalism.

Their models seek to show an existential or Romantic tradition in personal journalism.

Earlier, Walter Lippmann and other media critics had theorized that journalistic objectivity is impossible, but that, nevertheless, journalists have the responsibility to 15

interpret events to their publics. Much of this theoretical work followed the First World War.

Similarly, historians and philosophers of history

formulated new theories about what history is, much of the

work between the turn of the century and 1940.

Chapter 3: Historical influences. Historical events

such as the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the

Great Depression shook journalists' confidence in official

opinion. Those events encouraged writers' personal

involvement in their stories. Writers used the personal

voice and showed empathy with their subjects, experimenting with documentary technique. But the best writers showed not

as much a partisan attitude as a moral concern. The writing

culminated with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).

Chapter 4. Though journalistic practice in the 1940s

became more conservative, doubts remained about objectivity.

Personal journalism that is emotional in style re-emerged in the 1960s. However, New Journalists such as Tom Wolfe accepted personal journalism but not moral concern. Wolfe said moral concern prevented the journalist from closely approaching the subject.

But this moral concern can be seen today in the work of

Bill Moyers. Over the years he has moved closer to questions about morality and how it is represented in the framework of government, churches, and other bodies whose 16 social aim is order and improvement, and in individuals whose life work has been for social order and improvement. Finally, Moyers is interested in the media's furthering moral consideration among people.

Chapter 5. As journalists doubted objectivity, their beliefs about religion and myth became more important epistemologically. Lippmann and Orwell rejected creeds, and

Agee struggled with his physical and religious selves, but all wanted a religious attitude in their work. Common to all was a desire for reconciliation, that is, an under- standing that can unite people in moral consideration.

Today Moyers continues that journalistic tradition.

Like those before him, he recognizes personal culpability, desires reconciliation, and respects the importance of myth and language in communicating with others.

Chapter 6. Conclusions: Summary of findings and suggestions for further study.

0 T '1 17

Notes 1 Beard, Charles A., and Mary R. Beard. America in Midpassage, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1939) 736. 2 Johnson, Gerald W., American Heroes and Hero-Worship

(1943; Port Washington: Kennikat P, 1966) 5. Blanchard, Margaret A., "The Hutchins Commission, The Press and the Responsibility Concept," Journalism Monographs 49 (May 1977): 56. 4 Allen, Eric W., "Economic Changes and Editorial Influence," Journalism Quarterly 8.2 (June 1931): 346-350. Weingast, David E., Walter Lippmann: A Study in Personal Journalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1949) xiv. 6 Janowitz, Morris, "Professional Models in Journalism: The Gatekeeper and the Advocate," Journalism Quarterly 52.4 (Winter 1975): 619. CHAPTER II

PHILOSOPHICAL MODELS FOR A TRADITION

OF PERSONAL JOURNALISM

WITH MORAL CONCERN

The purpose of this study is to show that philosophy,

religion, myth, and certain historical events shaped

journalism in this century. The influence of philosophy is

treated first since it largely has been overlooked by

scholars. Critics recognize that something had to have

influenced the practice of journalism, but they inaccurately

ascribe the whole influence to politics and history. As will be seen in the next chapter, critics have traced writers' use of experiences from World War I, the Spanish

Civil War, and the Great Depression. They see that the major historical events produced in writers a feeling of the divided self, the self separated from an officialdom that was no longer trusted. But most critics have missed the influence of philosophy on journalism, the scope of this chapter.

At the same time that these historical events encouraged skepticism about official histories, the philosophy of history was changing. Inevitably, some journalists began to use philosophical arguments to

18 19

question whether objectivity exists. At first, this might

seem paradoxical. Many people wanting to reform journalism

claimed objectivity as their weapon. By the turn of the

century, independent newspapers had emerged to challenge corrupt political machines.

Reacting against the sensationalistic Yellow

Journalism, critics and high-minded journalists urged

objectivity. And, as cities grew, and government and

business became more complicated, the individual needing to

make decisions necessarily relied more on accurate, second- hand information.

Yet some journalists saw that, despite claims of

objectivity, the reporter relied on someone's version of what happened. Most often, the reporter's sources were the people in charge of a governmental body or a business. The journalist Walter Lippmann recognized that subjectivity enters into journalism, even when reporters relay so-called facts to the readers. He summed up the thesis of his 1922 book Public Opinion: "I am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them."1

The better-read journalists were influenced by the changing attitudes toward history and toward such notions as

"science" and "objectivity." If they were not familiar with the philosophers, at least they were influenced by second- 20

hand versions of the new ideas, just as people have ideas about existentialism who have never read Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, or a religious proponent such as Jacques Maritain.

Indeed, many journalists have discovered media theory

in the writings of another journalist, Lippmann, who, in turn, was an intermediary for philosophers' ideas.

Lippmann's theory that official record is suspect and that

public opinion is untrustworthy was derived from the ideas

of three philosophical thinkers he met in his university years--the philosophers William James and George Santayana and the political philosopher Graham Wallas.

For a study of the contributions of philosophy to personal journalism several reasons make Lippmann the best starting place. First, no other twentieth century journalist was more influenced by philosophy, and no other modern journalist was as successful as Lippmann was in popularizing philosophical ideas. For example, when in

Public Opinion Lippmann writes of the uncertainty even of fact, he borrows from Santayana's belief that the senses do not allow in information without prejudice.

Second, to date, no other twentieth century journalist has had a greater influence than has Lippmann on the practice and theory of journalism. His analysis of journalism advanced the possibilities for personal journalism. What might have appeared in 1922 as only 21

Lippmann's musings emerged two years later as theory in the first book devoted to journalism ethics,2 and is still included in journalism textbooks.

Last, as will be seen in this chapter and the next,

Lippmann's understanding of philosophy influenced his interpretation of historical events and his own journalism.

Like George Orwell and James Agee, who will be considered in the next chapter, alongside his journalism Lippmann wrote his theories about reportage. And, like them, he applied his theories to his practice of personal journalism. He, too, theorized that objectivity is impossible; nevertheless, journalists have the responsibility to interpret events to their publics.

This study is about those personal journalists who struggled with how to communicate to readers the truth behind events. The personal journalists experimented with language, read philosophy to glean ideas about their craft, and influenced the larger body of journalists working at

"straight" news stories in newsrooms across the country.

Journalists had become dissatisfied with straight news stories before the twentieth century, among them Walt

Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, and Samuel Clements. But not until this century did journalists, such .as Lippmann, come to systematically analyze media. Some questioned whether

"objectivity" is possible, as Lippmann did. Those journalists then turned attention to how language is 22

manipulated, how journalistic writing styles sometimes are mere formulas, and how certain people, such as copper mine

strikers, are portrayed in news accounts as a threat to the community. This journalistic questioning was a contribution

of the changing philosophical ideas that were concurrent

with the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Great Depression.

Today debate occurs over political bias in media. For

example, Ben Bagdikian says a conservative media elit-e exists in this country, and Robert Lichter claims that a biased liberal media elite is in power. However, the themes running through this study go beyond any partisan debate.

This is an account of the philosophical and historical reasons why some journalists questioned objectivity, and is an evaluation of the qualities the best personal journalists have.

Since the 1960s there have been attempts to show this philosophical influence on journalism, but they either are too brief or, like Bagdikian's and Lichter's, are meant to defend or attack opposing political positions. In 1974, Joseph M. Webb contributed a short article in which he described a Romantic tradition in personal journalism.3

Webb saw a coming together of history and philosophy in journalism. As far back as Daniel Defoe, he said, the journalist who saw extreme hardship around him recorded his own reaction too. 23

Defoe had experimented in the use of the first person

voice to add authenticity to his autobiographical adventure novels, notably Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders

(1722). In The Journal of the Plague Year, written in 1721, by use of the personal voice he transformed reporting into art. Webb cites the following passage as an example:

I was indeed shocked with this sight; it almost

overwhelmed me, and I went away with my heart most

afflicted, and full of the afflicting thoughts,

such as I cannot describe. Just at my going out

of the church, and turning up the street towards

my own house, I saw another cart with links and a

bellman going before, coming out of Harrow Alley

in the Butcher Row, on the other side of the way,

and being, as I perceived, very full of dead bodies, it went directly over the street also

toward the church. I stood for awhile, but I had

no stomach to go back again to see the same dismal

scene over again, so I went directly home, where I could not but consider with thankfulness the

risque I had run, believing I had gotten no

injury, as indeed I had not . .. 4

Twentieth century journalists who experimented with the personal voice also attracted a following, Webb says. The emergence of writers such as Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe in the late 1950s and the 1960s was part of a larger Romantic 24

swelling throughout American culture, he says. "The surge upward in Romantic journalism," he says, "is only a part of this wider social upsurge of Romantic notions and ideas in numerous areas of intellectual work, cultural production and life style."5

The rational reporter, Webb says, believes in reporting external reality, and that objectivity, while not completely achievable, is the ideal. There is an atomistic view of reality: experience can be dissected for newspaper stories.

On the contrary, Webb says, the Romantic journalist believes

"life cannot be understood when it is cut up in little pieces." A tenet of Romantic reporting is that people are emotive, feeling, and instinctual, Webb says. The Romantic reporter feels he should "find his way 'inside' the specific individuals or groups about whom he was writing."6

John C. Merrill conjectured about an existential tradition in two books, published in 1974 and 1977.7

But, although he produces some provoking ideas, Merrill is hampered by his polemics. He seems not to be writing to document a historical tradition as much as to find proponents for his values.

For example, Merrill implies that theorists who postulate a social responsibility theory are incorrect when they say that the press can be independent of the government.8 But is Merrill fair in assuming that the press believes its social responsibility is to the government? 25

Must one's philosophy of the press always follow one's philosophy of government?

Merrill wants the journalist to be individualistic; dissonance and competition are necessary for freedom and

"creative tension," he says.9 Merrill worries that personal journalism is being replaced by an institutionalized, corporate journalism that hides behind professional codes.

The very complexity of society that prompted some journalists to preach objectivity will cost journalists their independence, he warns. There seems little doubt that there is a tendency toward institutionalization," he says, "and, as it takes place, the person increasingly loses his authenticity and individuality and becomes a mere cog in the social machine."1 0

Lippmann does not come off well in Merrill's analysis.

In a back-handed compliment, Merrill calls Lippmann "one of the foremost of the modern Platonic elitists."1 Merrill says Lippmann's 1955 position in The Public Philosophy is elitist. In that book Lippmann called for, rather than a cacophony of voices, a debate of intelligent, well-formed opinions. He worried that, without intelligent debate, the quiet, rational ideas would be overcome by loud, irrational ones. In the end, Lippmann cautioned, a plethora of ideas, rather than furthering freedom of speech, would destroy that freedom.12 26

A reader can understand why Merrill believes Lippmann's

call for civility is hostile to Merrill's desire for

dissonance in journalism. Merrill correctly sees that

Lippmann, by his mid-sixties, had become discouraged about

the public's ability to argue issues. But Merrill does not

appreciate that Lippmann, over his lifetime, did not change

his basic beliefs about journalism: that objectivity is

impossible, but that, nevertheless, journalists have the

responsibility to interpret events for their publics. As will be seen, Lippmann never wavered from those basic

beliefs because they were grounded in philosophical ideas he had deliberated many times.

At Harvard University three thinkers--James, Santayana, and Wallas--especially influenced Lippmann. He was an eager pupil who, from the three, furthered his aesthetic sensibility but also was guided to participate in a world of action. A look at those three thinkers shows the personal journalist absorbing the best philosophical ideas around him.

Materially, Lippmann learned the least from James. For one thing, by the time Lippmann met him James had retired from teaching. Lippmann wrote how one day the sixty-six- year-old James appeared at his door to compliment him on a magazine article that deflated one of Harvard's pious professors. James, who believed in being open to different ideas, was especially pleased with the nineteen-year-old 27

Lippmann's article. Lippmann walked back across the

courtyard with the venerable philosopher. After that, once a week, Lippmann met socially with James and his wife.1 3

Lippmann later wrote of James's eclectic mind. James was no doubt influenced by his father's spiritual wanderings. His father, the elder Henry James, a former theology student, had abandoned the orthodox church. He became a follower of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, who emphasized revelation, and a friend of transcendalists

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle. Also influencing

William James were the several careers he tried. Enabled by family money, he studied painting, medicine (taking a degree), psychology, and philosophy.

James also incorporated the scientist's and philosopher's attitude: he strove to consider the inadequacies of his own arguments. After James's death,

Lippmann wrote that "William James wasn't 'credulous.' He 1 4 was simply open-minded." Lippmann called him "perhaps the most tolerant man of our generation.,15 Lippmann later depreciated James' influence on him, saying he was "as a sophomore under the spell of William

James." 16 Perhaps Lippmann was influenced toward his conclusion by Santayana who described James as like:

Some impetuous bird [who] kept flying aloft, but

always stopped in mid-air, pulled back with a jerk

by an invisible wire tethering him to a peg in the 28

ground. . . . In fact, he got nowhere; and for that reason his influence could be great and

beneficent over those who knew him, but soon

seemed to become untraceable in the confused currents of the world.17

Nevertheless, Lippmann would use some of James's ideas,

including his religious pragmatism. Lippmann freely quoted

James in A Preface to Politics, and he acknowledged his debt

to James, Santayana, and Wallas in A Preface to Morals. Two

of James's ideas show up in that book. The first is that

the psychology of the individual is as important to

understanding behavior as is theory about the society as a 1 8 whole. (Wallas also preached this idea.) Lippmann would conclude in A Preface to Morals that individual experience proves something's validity.

James formulated this position to reconcile his religious beliefs and his open-mindedness. The result was a kind of religious pragmatism in which if something works for the individual it is valid. In The Will to Believe James said blind belief in God and unbelief are both dogmas. So the individual might as well choose the course that produces good behavior. In The Varieties of Religious Experience

James concluded that the individual finds religious certainty not from absolutism but from religious experience. He wrote: 29

That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he

privately feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel

may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered

at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality,

and any would-be existent that should lack such a

feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up.1 9

The second idea in A Preface to Morals that Lippmann took from James (and Wallas) is that people, to be rehabilitated, must replace an evil with a good. James had suggested such in his oft-quoted essay "The Moral Equivalent for War."

Santayana, however, deserves the most attention of the three Harvard thinkers in Lippmann's life, because Lippmann received most of his ideas about the.dangers of stereotypes and the impossibility of objectivity from him. In 1907, his sophomore year, Lippmann took Santayana's introductory course in Greek philosophy. Impressed by his teacher,

Lippmann read Santayana's five-volume The Life of Reason, published two years before. After finishing his undergraduate degree, Lippmann stayed another year at

Harvard as a graduate assistant to Santayana. Later,

Lippmann would write that in the philosophy department at

tow 30

Harvard "I, as a student, found all that was best at Harvard."20

The philosophical ideas Lippmann learned at Harvard

could have been found floating around in countless

intellectual communities in this country and Europe. For

Santayana was just one of many thinkers who spurned the

nineteenth century idealism of English and American

transcendentalists and German Romantics, but who resisted

the twentieth century trend toward symbolic logic to define philosophical knowledge.

Santayana was part of an argument in print between two groups, the Critical Realists, of which he was a member, and the New Realists. In 1920 Santayana, Arthur 0. Lovejoy,

Durant Drake, and four other philosophers would publish

Essays in Critical Realism as their manifesto.21 In the book, they positioned themselves against the New Realists.

The latter were represented in England by such philosophers as objective realists Bertrand Russell and

G. E. Moore. In this country they included such thinkers as W. P. Montague, a professor of philosophy at Columbia

University and one of six contributors to the 1912 volume of essays, The New Realism, which gave that movement its name.

In large part, the New Realists interpreted consciousness in mechanical terms. The American New

Realists were especially eager to adopt mechanical imagery to show the promise of the new country, that there could be 31

an ordered, efficient society. In philosophy they believed

all knowledge has total objectivity, and in psychology they moved toward behaviorism.

The Critical Realists, including Santayana, criticized

the American New Realists for devoting attention to what is

perceived as the "external reality," while ignoring the mental states of the persons doing the perceiving.

Consciousness of what is out there depends on already

existing, separate minds, Drake wrote in the introduction to Essays in Critical Realism:

You cannot deduce existence from logical terms and

propositions. . . . We must make room in our

picture of the universe for the separate mental

states of all the conscious beings in it, each

group of mental states forming a separate mind.2 2

In this philosophical milieu young intellectuals such as Lippmann could choose between an ordered, mechanistic world, in short, objectivity, and a world in which inner mental states are considered, in short, subjectivity.

Santayana would push Lippmann further toward the latter.

Santayana's three major ideas in The Life of Reason would appear in Lippmann's works. First was that knowledge is not easily identifiable but is ambiguous. Santayana taught his prize student to reach beyond the obvious facts to a wider, if more ambiguous, reality. Santayana was not a mystic or subjectivist; he positioned himself within the 32

realm of realism. But, while believing that there is such a thing as knowledge, he questioned what degree of

independence anything perceived or thought has from apprehension.

Santayana took from Heraclitus the idea of a world at

flux and from Democritus that practical intelligibility can

explain the flux. An absolute order would not allow for change and growth, Santayana said. So the physical order in the world at any moment cannot be constant, he said, else the next moment's order would not be different. Rather, Santayana said, the physical order at a given time may be termed a relative chaos: it contains values that will be the basis of the next moment's order.

Reason emerged after the individual could think of represented objects, he said. But to Santayana reason was not to be confused with logic. For, though on the surface logic seems indisputable, it arose as only one system to describe nature, he said. Santayana repudiated philosophers who said thought is static, which, he said, is true only of the ideals of objects.

Second, Santayana said, the senses do not allow in new information without prejudice. The senses first compare new information against images already known and then decide what the system needs:

The senses in their natural play revert constantly

to familiar objects, gaining impressions which 33

differ but slightly from one another. These

slight differences are submerged in apperception,

so that sensation comes to be not so much an

addition of new items to consciousness as a reburnishing there of some imbedded device.23

Third, Santayana said, rationality depends upon distinguishing the excellent, but knowledge of the excellent depends on an irrational impulse. Santayana combined the irrational and the practical. He said reason and a moral world are born out of distinctions by "a mind in love with the good" ESantayana's emphasis] followed by human actions based on those distinctions. He wrote:

When definite interests are recognized and the

values of things are estimated by that standard, action at the same time veering in harmony with

that estimation, then reason has been born and a moral world has arisen.24

The influence of Santayana's theory of the translation of ideas and events by the senses and other vehicles can be seen in Lippmann's early works. In Lippmann's first book, A

Preface to Politics (1913)--a thin volume in which he wove together his thoughts from the university and a short career in muckraking and socialist politics--Lippmann cited The Life of- Reason. He noted that Santayana believed rationality as an ideal of its own is arbitrary, that instead rationality reflects the needs of an organization. 34

Lippmann quoted Santayana that "what makes [rationality] a

good and indispensable thing and gives it all its authority,

is not its own nature, but our need of it both in safe and

economical action and in the pleasures of comprehension."2 5

Lippmann's use of Santayana's philosophy matured with

Public Opinion. The 1922 book opens with Plato's allegory

of the cave in which prisoners there could not see one

another but only saw one anothers' reflections cast by the

light of a fire onto the walls of the cave. Reminiscent of

Santayana's caveat that familiar objects prejudice the

senses against new information, Lippmann wrote in Public

Opinion that not even what we think is "fact" is certain:

It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing

our opinions as a partial experience seen through

our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant of

an opponent. Without that habit, we believe in

the absolution of our own vision, and consequently

in the treacherous character of all opposition.

For while men are willing to admit that there are

two sides to a "question," they do not believe

that there are two sides to what they regard as a

"fact." And they never do believe it until after

long critical education, they are fully conscious

of how second-hand and subjective is their

apprehension of their social data.2 6 35

Under Santayana's influence, Lippmann might have become a pure philosopher. But two circumstances propelled

Lippmann to apply philosophical ideas to analyzing politics.

First, Santayana did not give himself freely to others, perhaps because of his skepticism about ordinary life. In a 1911 magazine article, Lippmann conceded that Santayana withdrew from the people around him. However, Lippmann wrote, Santayana looked beyond immediate experience, and perhaps that higher vantage separated him from ordinary human relationships. Lippmann wrote:

You feel at times that his ability to see the

world steady and whole is a kind of tragic barrier

between him and the common hopes of ordinary men.

It's as if he saw all forests and no trees. He

filled active souls with a sense of the

unbridgeable chasm between any ideal of perfection

and the squeaky, rickety progress of human

affairs. There is something of the pathetic

loneliness of the spectator about him. You wish

he would jump on the stage and take part in the

show. Then you realize that he wouldn't be the

author of The Life of Reason if he did. Second, Santayana's influence on Lippmann would gradually be supplanted by the ideas of Wallas. James, sixty-six-years-old when he met Lippmann in 1908, would be dead two years later, and Santayana would return to Europe 36

in 1912 and retire to seclusion in an Italian convent. But

Wallas and Lippmann would correspond with each other until Wallas's death in 1932.

Wallas would influence Lippmann to become a commentator on political and social life. Lippmann would write Wallas's widow that ". . . I owe everything to him that enables me to understand at all the human problems of the Great Society and I have for him a loving gratitude which is boundless. I should also rather be known as a pupil of Graham Wallas than in other way . * 1"28

Wallas's reputation had preceded him by the time he arrived at Harvard University in the spring of 1910 as a visiting teacher. At the time Wallas was on the faculty of the London School of Economics and Political Science. But from 1886 to 1904 he had been on the ranks in England with the Fabian Society as a pamphleteer and speaker. As well, he was one of the group's leaders--intellectuals who believed socialism would be achieved gradually without a violent class struggle. Their strategy was not to set themselves up as a political party but to participate where they could have influence, notably in the Labour Party. The leaders, who also included Beatrice and Sydney Webb, H. G.

Wells, and George Bernard Shaw, believed a small group of selfless intellectuals were the people to lead the masses to campaign for a planned society. 37

However, Wallas came to believe that the Fabian

strategy did not recognize that people bring individual

needs--and sometimes irrational desires--to politics, and

Wallas came to view the Fabian leadership as anti-liberal.

He resigned from the executive committee in 1895, and in

1904, after a quarrel with the Webbs, Wallas resigned from

the Fabian Society. In 1908 he wrote a book, Human Nature

in Politics, in which he argued that people do not make political judgments after carefully looking at facts but

from prejudice and habit. In it Wallas called for more study of the psychological influences on political behavior.

In the spring of 1910 Lippmann was one of seven students who signed up for Wallas's seminar on psychology and politics. The 20-year-old Lippmann was then a member of and speaker for the Socialist Club at Harvard. He had not yet acquired his skepticism; just the opposite, he rejected it. Lippmann wrote a friend that a "Theory of Life" that

"would give the lie to pessimism" would include the beauty of friends, art, and music, "a passion for deed," and "progress, expressed in Socialism, Pragmatism and poetry."2 9

Initially, Lippmann may have been attracted to Wallas because he was a socialist and a teacher who also participated in the world of "deed." However, Lippmann also found Wallas's comments on the relation of psychology and politics exhilarating. Lippmann would add Wallas's ideas to 38

his own thinking on politics and public opinion. He was affected by Wallas's skepticism balanced against reform-

mindedness. He would build on Wallas's and James's framing of societal behavior in psychological terms. And Wallas's

disavowal of the Fabians, though Wallas remained sympathetic

to socialism, would give Lippmann arguments to quit socialism.

So, too, did Wallas find Lippmann's contributions to the seminar valuable. When four years later Wallas finished his book The Great Society: A Psychological Analysis, in which he questioned whether modern society is too large for any individual to understand it, he dedicated the book to

Lippmann. The preface was an open letter from Wallas to his student:

This book develops the material of that

discussion-course ("Government 31") which you

joined during my stay in the spring of 1910.

Now that the book is finished, I can see, more

clearly than I could while I was writing it, what

it is about: and in particular what its relation

is to my Human Nature in Politics (1908). I may,

therefore, say briefly that the earlier book was

an analysis of representative government, which turned into an argument against nineteenth-century

intellectualism; and that this book is an analy sis of the general social organization of a large 39

modern state, which has turned, at times, into an argument against certain forms of twentieth- century anti-intellectualism.

I send it to you in the hope that it may be of

some help when you write that sequel to your

Preface to Politics for which all your friends are looking. .*30

In A Preface to Politics, published the year before,

Lippmann had praised Wallas--for pointing out "that

political science to-day discusses institutions and ignores the nature of the men who make and live under them." 31

Lippmann said that, like James, Wallas understood that, to be successful, statesmanship must answer human needs, the needs of the individual.3 2

But, if in the preface to The Great Society Wallas was reciprocating Lippmann's attention, Wallas also was gently rebuking Lippmann for anti-intellectualism in A Preface to

Politics. In that short book, Lippmann had said that

"logical and orderly thinking" is a pattern placed, after the fact, on actions with irrational origins.33 Lippmann further maintained that it is untrue to believe that man's successes are explained "as rational acts and his failures as lapses of reason." 3 4 Still, there shows in Wallas' preface in The Great Society a teacher's pride in his student, and the best compliment Wallas could give Lippmann 40

is that he recognized Lippmann's talent enough to continue gently prodding him.

"The Great Society" was Wallas's somewhat ironic term for the world that the industrial revolution had brought.

Society had made a pact: in exchange for convenience, and security from famine, nations set up massive commercial centers. People migrated to the "huge commercial cities" or to "closely populated industrial districts threaded by systems of mechanical traction and covering hundreds of square miles." 3 5

Wallas saw that, to create the industrial system, society required a philosophy and found it in

Utilitarianism. Looking ahead, he worried that a large- scale industrial society would have occasional commercial catastrophes, and that stronger, faster battleships, larger fleets, and more destructive guns at sea and on land meant the next war would be ruinous, only won by attrition.3 6 But he rejected the extreme anti-intellectual reaction to

Utilitarianism from philosophers William Godwin and Jeremy

Bentham and Wallas's contemporary, psychologist William

McDougall. Wallas saw a danger that reason merely would be replaced, as the highest principle, by instinct.3 7

As if in a volleying with Lippmann's suggestion that order and rationality are a falsely fitted pattern, Wallas showed how apparently unconscious choices rely on what is already known. And he repudiated Georges Sorel's philosophy 38 of syndicalism that Lippmann defended in A Preface to 3 9 Politics. The anti-intellectual French social philosopher

Sorel (1847-1922) believed will and action are more important than ideology, which he explained away as false myth. Sorel called for a general workers' strike and eventual collectivism of property.

But Wallas did not want a socialism that removed personal incentive. Wallas wanted to recapture the personal relationships in small communities and the greater - satisfaction that craftsmen and artisans found in their work. He worried that F. W. Taylor's studies in "scientific management" would make each element in society interchangeable. Wallas wanted the state, instead, to plan for its citizens' happiness. Wallas's conclusion was that in the ideal community its city planners, sociologists, and psychologists would use their observations to see to the happiness of citizens. For example, they would determine where streets should be laid out and houses located, and what voluntary organizations could replace the natural visits among neighbors in small communities.

By Drift and Mastery, published in 1914, Sorel would be gone from Lippmann's musings, and Lippmann would argue for a strong central government. That was not Wallas's only contribution to Lippmann's next book. Wallas also found his student a place to write. At a village inn in Surrey, 42

England, in the summer of 1913 Lippmann began work on the book.

Lippmann's life can be seen as an effort to reconcile

Santayana's epistemological concern with James' pragmatism

and Wallas's reform-mindedness. Francine Curro Cary, in a 1977 study, theorized that a tension in Lippmann--between

pragmatism and pessimism enforced by two world wars and his attempts to transcend national interests with some public

philosophy--produced Lippmann's painful and self-conscious work.40

Some, however, see in Lippmann an opportunism in his

rise to syndicated columnist and equivocation when the world

most needed a moral voice, as in the debate over the pending

execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. But a better thesis is

that despite his proclivity to demureness Lippmann was

infected by the current intellectual postulations, that, despite his desire to be accepted and to be influential,

Lippmann felt doubts about official record and objective "fact."

Along with their rejection of objectivity, the personal

journalists felt a calling to a higher purpose. Lippmann

was no different; alongside his journalism he worked out

ideas about writing and moral responsibility. However, it

would be to other writers to combine the lessons about objectivity and human consciousness with personal involvement in a story and focus on individuals.

"r 4n" - 'o" i/ 43

By 1929 the United States and Europe would be in a

prolonged period of social upheaval that would be felt not

just by intellectuals but by many. It would affect the

average person and family. The new writers would follow in

Lippmann's tradition of personal journalism with overlying themes and moral concern. The upheaval in society also would give writers an excuse to experiment in personal journalism. However, Lippmann would not be part of the experimental literature. To many of the new writers the average person was the protagonist, but Lippmann was skeptical that the average person could see subtleties.

His A Preface to Morals, published in 1929, vividly captured the void felt in people who had lost faith in religious orthodoxy. Science and technology made orthodoxy seem irrelevant but offered no alternative system of values, he said. "If the advice of moralists is ignored, it is not because this generation is too proud to listen, or unaware that it has anything to learn," Lippmann said. "On the contrary there is such curiosity and questioning as never before engaged so large a number of men."4 1

Religious orthodoxy offered only sets of rules, he said, discouraging people from exploring the significance behind the external. For Lippmann, the answer was "secular humanism" (Lippmann's words). The teacher of morality under this system would not be weighed down by an appeal to

Pwwalk, ,.w 44

authority, as priests and princes are, he said. People

would heed the message only if experience verifies it. So, Lippmann said, those with access to information

should be made responsible for how they use it. The "teachers" (Lippmann's generic term, which includes

journalists) would be able to evaluate information because

they have a certain quality within them. "The ultimate

question is not how the populace is to be ruled, but what

the teachers are to think," Lippmann wrote. "That is the

question that has to be settled first: it is the preface to everything else." 42

Borrowing from Santayana, Lippmann called this quality

that teachers should have a "religion of the spirit." It is a quality that does not consider things as an objective,

external reality. Instead, the consideration itself is

important, part of an ongoing process--as Santayana had

said, the desire for the excellent. Lippmann wrote that this religion of the spirit:

Alone can endure the variety and complexity of

things, for the religion of the spirit has no

thesis to defend. It seeks excellence wherever it

may appear, and finds it in anything which is

inwardly understood; its motive is not acquisition but sympathy.4 3

Thus, it is seen that the philosophical questions in

the first part of the century suggested lines of thinking

", -- l- I , " - -4, , ,, I -r-jj L W- . -; , i - 45

for Lippmann. Indeed, philosophical questions form a thread

through his journalism. For like other personal journalists

Lippmann brought his own themes to his writing. He was not

interested in "news" but in information. He was interested

in how society can gain access to information to

intelligently form opinions. Or, if the toil to gain access

is prohibitive, who has best access, and therefore, can render the best decisions?

Perhaps, once more, the time in which Lippmann lived

should be considered. For, although Lippmann is a paradigm

for the philosophically-influenced journalist in this

country, his experience--books he read, teachers he had, and

positions he held--was specific. It would be remiss to talk

about Lippmann without once more placing him in that period

in philosophy from about the turn of the century to 1940. In that period, some thinkers rejected "objectivity" and, instead, asked how the human consciousness of each age

influences each society's view of history. Those thinkers rejected, as Lovejoy did in his 1933 lectures at Harvard, the idea of history as "the great chain of being."4 They rejected the idea that history is an infinite chain of events each of which can be logically and rationally

explained from previous events. Instead, they said, the

philosophy of history changes from age to age.

In his 1933 address to the American Historical

Association, "Written History as an Act of Faith," historian 46

Charles Beard (who had written for the New Republic at

Lippmann's request when Lippmann was on the editorial board)

declared that objectivity was on rocky ground, that the mechanistic imagery for history had been wrong. Scientific method is all right up to a limit, Beard allowed. It can be useful for rigidly bound studies, but it cannot explain the breadth and complexity of history. Beard said:

Contemporary thought about history, therefore,

repudiates the conception dominant among the

schoolmen during the latter part of the nineteenth

century and the opening years of the twentieth

century--the conception that it is possible to

describe the past as it actually was, somewhat as the engineer describes a single machine.4 5

The brevity of this philosophical understanding of how consciousness influences each age was seen by philologist

Owen Barfield. In History in English Words (1926) and

Poetic Diction (1928) he examined changes in language. He charted how attitudes toward consciousness had changed from early thought, where God and metaphysics are present in language, to scientific thought and mechanistic imagery. He saw that, in the first part of the century, thinkers had begun to see history as more than external reality.

Instead, they saw history as a history of ideas, or, as Barfield called it, an evolution of consciousness. But, looking back from 1952, he saw how linguistic analysis, a 47

descendent of empiricism and logical positivism, had overtaken concern about consciousness:

The conflicting theories of knowledge . . . show every sign of diverging more and more widely,

leaving a deeper and deeper gulf of incompre-

hension between them. Between those for whom 'knowledge' means ignorant but effective power, and those for whom the individual imagination is the medium of all knowledge from perception

upward, a truce will not readily be struck.4 6

In a later book, Barfield said that empiricism had taken root in most areas of mental consideration. But poetry had resisted, holding to Romanticism.48

The same could be said for personal journalism. It is, after all, the part of journalism that shares expressiveness with poetry, and, accordingly, was affected by the philosophical ideas floating around Lippmann, and, later,

Orwell and Agee. Likewise, it is the part of journalism that resisted the siren's call to an easier life for journalists. In short, the personal journalists resisted objectivity as too easy, as ill equipped to explain by itself the complexity of history.

For Lippmann, if events are symbols for a deeper reality, then thinkers are responsible to interpret the events. In his political theory, if individual mental states influence the behavior of the society, then perhaps 48 orthodox codes are irrelevant; leaders would be responsible

to study moral codes and to make suggestions.

It is important that Lippmann selected the word

"sympathy" to show the teacher's relationship to information. "Acquisition" would allow the mere collection of facts. "Sympathy" means that the teachers, including the good journalists, should understand the internal reality, too. But it is more than that. The word also suggests that teachers must have a quality within themselves, spiritual, if you will, before they can fully see the world around them.

In Lippmann's religion of the spirit, the teachers would put aside dogma before they could penetrate the complexity of history, but the teachers still would have a spiritual attitude. And journalists would have a moral responsibility to not only collect information but to explain it. This, then, is what made Lippmann a product of his philosophical age, and is what Lippmann had in common with the other personal journalists. He sought to get behind the external reality to find what was inside the "facts." 49

Notes 1 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922; New York: Macmillan, 1965) 82. 2 Crawford, Nelson A., The Ethics of Journalism (1924; New York: Greenwood, 1969).

Webb, James W., "Historical Perspective on the New Journalism," Journalism History 1.2 (Summer 1974): 38-42, 60.

4 Webb 40.

5 Webb 40. 6 Webb 41.

Merrill, John C., The Imperative of Freedom: A

Philosophy of Journalistic Autonomy (New York: Hastings, 1974)

Merrill, John C. Existential Journalism (New York: Hastings, 1977). 8 Merrill, Imperative 91. 9 Merrill, Imperative 65-66. 1Merrill, Imperative 128.

1Merrill, Imperative 81. 12 Lippmann, Walter, Essays in the Public Philosophy

(1955; New York: Mentor, 1961) 96-101. 13 Weingast 6.

Steel, Ronald, Walter Lippmann and the American Century

(Boston: Atlantic-Little, 1980) 17-18. 50

14 Lippmann, Walter, "An Open Mind: William James,"

Everybody's Magazine 23.6 (December 1910) 800. 15 Lippmann, "An Open Mind" 801. 16 Blum, John M., ed., Public Philosopher: The Selected

Letters of Walter Lippmann (New York: Ticknor, 1985) 62. 17 Santayana, George, Persons and Places (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard UP, 1986) 401. 18 Lippmann, Walter, A Preface to Politics (1913; Ann Arbor: U of MI P, 1969) 41, 67, 89. 19 James, William, "The Varieties of Religious

Experience," William James: Writings 1902-1920 (New York: Viking-Library of America, 1987) 447. 20 Blum 200. 21 Drake, Durant, Arthur 0. Lovejoy, James B. Pratt, Arthur K. Rogers, George Santayana, Roy W. Sellars, and C. A. Strong, Essays in Critical Realism: A Co-operative

Study of the Problem of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1920). 22 Drake, preface, Essays in Critical Realism 28. 23 Santayana, George, Reason in Common Sense (1905;

New York: Dover, 1980) 75, vol. 1 of The Life of Reason. 24 Santayana, Reason 47. 25 Lippmann, A Preface to Politics 163-164. 26 Lippmann, Public Opinion 82.

27 Lippmann, Walter, "George Santayana--A Sketch,"

International (August 1911) qtd. in Steel 21-11. 28 Blum 295.

- - -- 1 1, ll. 51

29 Blum 5.

30 Wallas, Graham, The Great Society: A Psychological

Analysis (New York: Macmillan, 1914) v. 31 Lippmann, A Preface to Politics 62.

32 Lippmann, A Preface to Politics 67. 3Lippmann, A Preface to Politics 163 Lippmann, A Preface to Politics 164.

35 Wallas 3-4. 36 Wallas 1-19,

37 Wallas 32-56. 38 Wallas 45.

Lippmann, A Preface to Politics 27-28, 75-76, 171- 175, 215-216. 40 Cary, Francine Curro, The Influence of War on Walter

Lippmann (Madison: State Historical Society, 1967). 41 Lippmann, Walter, A Preface to Morals (New York:

Macmillan, 1929) 316. 42 Lippmann, A Preface to Morals 321. 43 Lippmann, A Preface to Morals 327-328.

Lovejoy, Arthur 0. The Great Chain of Being (1936; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1964).

Beard, Charles A., "Written History as an Act of

Faith," The American Historical Review 39.2 (January 1934) 220-221. 46 Barfield, Owen, preface to 2nd ed., Poetic Diction:

A Study in Meaning (1928; Middletown: Wesleyan, 1973) 22. CHAPTER III

HISTORICAL INFLUENCES ON PERSONAL JOURNALISM

WITH MORAL CONCERN

Three major historical events shaped journalism in the first four decades of the twentieth century: the First World

War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Great Depression. Like any individual's discovery that those he or she reveres-- parents, teachers, etc.--are fallible, those two wars and that global economic crisis tried the public's faith in authority and official opinion. As will be seen in this chapter, the events also shook personal journalists' confidence in official opinion. As also will be seen, the best of these journalists, though they no longer believed in the infallibility of objectivity, still keenly felt a moral responsibility to convey truth.

For personal journalists these events became classrooms. The influence of each of these events on writing has elicited hundreds of books. To make a presentation in one chapter as tidy as possible, writers' responses will be represented by one person for each of the three events. While writers' political positions varied, especially in the Spanish Civil War, most writers had one

52

Ai 53

common response: no longer could they see issues as either wholly good or bad, but as "relative truths."

The three, then, are Walter Lippmann in the First World

War, George Orwell in the Spanish Civil War, and James Agee

in the Depression. No writer had as privileged a seat to

witness the First World War as did Lippmann, who began as a

journalist, then aided the U.S. propaganda effort, and later

helped draft the Fourteen Points intended to settle the

geographical inequities that fomented the war. Orwell's

book Homage to Catalonia is regarded as the finest

nonfiction (English language, at least) book from the

Spanish Civil War, as is Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men from the Depression.

Finally, when the events began that would -influence the

three, each was a journalist. That each of the three could not keep an objectivity about the events does not disqualify

them from study. Instead, it affirms their placement among

personal journalists who had a moral concern about events around them and how to report those events.

Lippmann is perhaps the most difficult of the three to describe. As seen in the previous chapter, he was

influenced not only by the historical events but by

extensive philosophical studies. Those studies were- made

possible by his privileged start in life: his family could

spend for his private schools, travel abroad, and Harvard

University education.

De'lWpo - - - , 54

But despite his privileged background, his life was given to liberal ideas. In his university years Lippmann espoused socialism. By the First World War, Lippmann would be a seasoned political thinker, having worked himself from socialism, past the more reformist Progressivism, to a liberal pragmatism. (Later he would be a vocal Cold War liberal, until he became disillusioned by the Vietnam War.)

He had two jobs as a socialist, in a short-lived city administration in upperstate New York and on a socialist

Boston weekly newspaper. But, concluding that socialism was a naive and impotent ideal, in 1910 Lippmann asked the journalist Lincoln Steffens if he needed an assistant.

In seeking out Steffens, Lippmann moved away from socialists toward the position of the Progressives. The latter believed the country did not need an overhaul but only reforming. At that time, Steffens was the best-known of the muckraking journalists who made an occupation of uncovering corruption and cataloging inequities to be rectified.

However, Lippmann stayed only a year with Steffens, whom he also saw as well-intentioned but disorganized and outdated. In 1913, Lippmann's first book, A Preface to Politics, was published. In it he distanced himself somewhat from the Progressives' wish for a marketplace of small businesses and their belief that the wishes of the 55

majority make the best policies. Instead, Lippmann argued

for a pragmatic liberalism. Big business could be harnessed

and directed, he said. Too, he said, the government should learn how to redirect human desires to useful actions.2

In part it was that book that led Herbert Croly in the fall of that year to invite Lippmann to join the six-member editorial board of a new weekly magazine, The New Republic, targeted at Progressives and pragmatic liberals. Croly, who would be the editor, found in Lippmann a sympathy for the direction he felt the nation should take. Croly had argued in his 1909 book, The Promise of American Life, that big business was inevitable and that a strong national government was needed to regulate business. It was a similar argument as that in Lippmann's first book and in

Lippmann's 1914 follow-up, Drift and Ma

Though Lippmann was only one of six persons who regularly contributed columns and articles to the magazine, he soon became the most conspicuous writer. In 1915 The New

Republic advertised, as an incentive to new subscribers,

Lippmann's A Preface to Politics and Drift and Ma and

Croly's Progressive Democracy, a 1914 supplement to Croly's first book. "No better reflection can be found than in these volumes of the spirit and point of view of The New Republic," the advertisement read.3 56

It was a choice position at which Lippmann could

practice the political analysis that later would serve him as a syndicated columnist. The announcement in the first issue was for The New Republic to be "a journal of interpretation and opinion." The editors of The New

Republic announced theirs would be the American journal with accurate information analyzed to make sense of political events for readers "who feel the challenge of our time."

The editors claimed for the magazine not objectivity but independent analysis--"sound and disinterested thinking."4

In part it was the pre-war chaos that called for analysis and made The New Republic successful. The year

1913 signaled an impending political and social crescendo in

Europe and in the United States. In England on Derby Day a young suffragette shocked that nation by martyring herself, throwing herself under the king's horses. The year also saw the formation of a "Triple Alliance" of British miners, railway workers and transport employees, each with a list of grievances. A general strike to bring a greater voice for workers seemed imminent for the following year.

In this country, paradoxically, Progressivism seemed in maturity, though the signs of its coming decline were there. In 1912, the Republican Party, which had been the more attractive of the two major political parties to

Progressives and other liberals, refused to give its 57

presidential nomination to former President Theodore

Roosevelt and instead invested incumbent President William

Howard Taft. It was a clear signal to Republicans of the party's more sedate direction.

In his 1901-1909 administration, Roosevelt upset business interests by "trust busting." His successor, Taft, continued some of Roosevelt's policies but was more gentle with big business. Taft especially disillusioned Republican

Progressives by favoring the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of

1909, which Progressives saw would protect trusts while passing tariff costs on to consumers. The editors at one of the Progressive magazines to which Lippmann had contributed,

Everybody's Magazine, felt so strongly that after a five- page denunciation of the Act they ran a list of congressmen who voted for and against it. The former, the author said, were "on the side of the Privilege." The latter, he said, "represented Progressive ideas rather than Privilege."5

Turned down by the party bosses, in 1912 Roosevelt bolted the Republican Party to the Progressive Party (Bull Moose Party). In the fall election, as the Progressive candidate, Roosevelt polled ahead of Republican nominee Taft but lost to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, then New Jersey governor and a former president of Princeton

University.

4z- 58

This brief look at the fate of the Progressive movement

and, later, preparations for the First World War, is

important because Lippmann's life was inextricably linked

with political events. As he wrote in A Preface to Morals,

the "teacher" has an obligation to determine correct action.

Lippmann believed he could weigh what is the proper course

for the nation. And he was in a position to be heard. In 1914, Lippmann was an editor at the New Republic.

It was a position of influence among thinking liberals.

Lippmann personally had been disappointed, first by socialists and then by Progressives. For a time he had conferred with and supported Theodore Roosevelt, who then disappointed Lippmann. So in 1914 Lippmann was ready for a liberalism that would have an effect.

The assassination on June 28, 1914, of Archduke Francis

Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary at Sarajevo, in what is now Yugoslavia, further diverted energy from the Progressive movement. The world war rallied people beyond other causes. At first liberals in this country opposed entering the war, since Russia--with England and France part of the Triple

Entente that became the Allied Powers--was a dictatorship.

But the Russian Revolution of 1917 eliminated this last qualm.

In 1916 and 1917 Lippmann used his editorial columns and personal relationships at The New Republic to maneuver 59

it to call for the United States to enter the war. It might have seemed a strange position for an intellectual who began as a socialist and then had become a Progressive. But Lippmann envisioned that, after the war, land in Europe, Asia, and Africa would be redistributed to ethnic groups to prevent future wars. Lippmann also believed that, after the

German ruling class was deposed, Europeans would work together through a world organization such as President

Wilson's League of Nations. That idealistic world order appealed to Lippmann as both an intellectual and a liberal.

At the same time Lippmann worked for the magazine to use its influence among liberals, he offered his personal services in correspondence with President Wilson and the president's adviser, Edward M. House. The United States entered the war on April.6, 1917. In September, House invited Lippmann to contribute to plans for a postwar peace conference. Lippmann replied:

Nothing has ever pleased me more or come as a

greater surprise. The work you outlined is

exactly that which I have dreamed of since the

very beginning of the war, but dreamed of as

something beyond reach. I'd literally rather be

connected with you in this work in no matter what

capacity than do anything else there is to do in the world.6 60

But like European thinkers, Lippmann found in the Great War disillusionment and took away examples to show that the media inadequately report events. Before the United

States entered the war, Lippmann, in The New Republic, had worked for liberals' approval of the war, assuring them that the war would be the first fought for noble reasons.

Privately, he had advised President Wilson for conscription

(though Lippmann later asked for Secretary of War Newton D. Baker to exempt him). 7 Later during the war he was connected with a propaganda unit in Europe. But at the war's end Lippmann felt betrayed. He had helped mold public opinion for the war, and for what? Wilson's Fourteen Points were impotent when placed against the other Allied powers' secret treaties that split the spoils among them.

Lippmann never admitted he might have been wrong to join in the war propaganda machine. He said President

Wilson, if better prepared at the peace conference, could have realized European cooperation. However, though he could not bring himself to see any personal culpability,

Lippmann was changed by seeing the way public opinion was shaped in the war. In Public Opinion he said that the vehicles that translate the actual events are more noticeable in war:

The symbols of public opinion, in times of moderate security, are subject to check and 61

comparison and argument. They come and go, coalesce and are forgotten, never organizing

perfectly the emotion of the whole group. There

is, after all, just one human activity left in

which whole populations accomplish the union

sacree. It occurs in those middle phases of a war when fear, pugnacity, and hatred have secured

complete dominion of the spirit, either to crush

every other instinct or to enlist it, and before weariness is felt. 8

Lippmann's conclusions in Public Opinion have been noted in the previous chapter. Briefly, he concluded that the journalist's work is incomplete when merely recording the event. The journalist should try for news that reflects truth, and the journalist should understand that the official record does not necessarily give an accurate record of an event.

Lippmann's retiring nature suited a journalism of detachment, or "sound and disinterested thinking," and he believed that people need accurate information to make sound decisions. But his philosophical studies also taught him to question objectivity, and his political leanings were liberal. So, he reacted to the war in his curious, seemingly paradoxical way. On one hand, Lippmann said objectivity should be the aim in journalism. For people to 62

"spontaneously arrive at sound public opinions on the

business of government," he said, then information should be

"objectively measured."9 He called for journalists as individuals to be professionals and as a group to support something like a news council that would gather accurate, unbiased information.

On the other hand, Lippmann indicted the press for lacking objectivity. And he went so far as to say that perhaps objectivity is impossible, because people arrange information to fit stereotypes. As seen in the previous chapter, by A Preface to Morals, Lippmann would decide that orthodoxy was unattainable. Instead of orthodoxy, he said, the "teachers" should find the proper attitude to personally observe the world around them; they should strive for a spirit of reason. Or, put another way, the more that journalists evaluate their own honesty to the events around them, and seek to understand the events, the better the journalists will communicate to their audiences.

Other writers reacted more emotionally to the war than

Lippmann did. Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern

Memory, admirably traces how the First World War produced in people a feeling of the divided self, the self separated from officialdom no longer trusted. Fussell says:

In looking at writing and at rhetorical

formulations and conventions following the war, it 63

is easy to see division everywhere, and one must

be careful not to impute all of it to the impact

of four years of dichotomizing. But some special

ways the modern world chooses to put things do

appear profoundly affected by the sense of adversary proceedings to which the war accustomed

both those who had fought and those who had not.1 0

In 1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley talked of a

"consciousness disjunct," Fussell notes, and in 1921 T. S.

Eliot described a "dissociation of sensibility." Fussell

finds an accompanying desire to heal the divided self, for

example, in E. M. Forster's injunction on the title page of

Howard's End (1910), "Only connect," which became a popular phrase at Cambridge University after the war.

When these new historiographical ideas were translated

into literature, they became Modernism. It was actually

antimodernism; the name was a reference to the contemporary

doubts about the Modern age., Writers, like the theoreticians Beard and Lovejoy, rejected the idea that history is a record of continuous improvement for society.

The poets Eliot and Ezra Pound reached back to Graeco-Roman history for symbols for the decay of European civilization.

The historical events around writers did not cause new literature, but, rather, allowed it and fostered it. The

First World War and, later, the Great Depression shook 64 public confidence so much that the public could accept thoughts--and styles--of writers considered too radical just a few years before.

In 1914 and 1915, shortly before the war, English poet Wyndham Lewis and friends published a quarterly journal- manifesto they called Blast. The name was meant to elicit roughly the feeling Allen Ginsberg would want with "Howl" four decades later. For example, Lewis wrote:

BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND . . . BLAST

HUMOR/Quack ENGLISH drug for stupidity and

sleepiness . . . BLAST/years 1837 to 1900 .. 0.

DAMN/all those to-day who . . . still crack their

whips and tumble in Piccadilly Circus as though London were a provincial town.1 1

Looking back, in 1933 English literary critic Compton McKenzie wrote:

In spite of the poseurs, charlatans, and hangers-

on which any new movement inevitably collects, it

was obvious that Blast stood for a genuine impulse

of fresh creative energy, and nobody who took the

trouble to study that publication should have been

astonished by a rapid development of the arts

after the war along the new lines which it was laying down. So far from precipitating artistic

change the war delayed it. What the war did 65

effect was such an unsettlement of the general

public as made the task of revolutionary artists a

great deal easier than it might otherwise have

been. People who had grown accustomed to the

upsetting of so many modern mental, spiritual, and

physical standards were no longer capable of being shocked as they were capable of being shocked in the peaceful and prosperous 'nineties.1 2

Orwell was too young to fight in the First World War. But from other experiences he began to distrust official opinion. From 1922 to 1928, he served in Burma in the

Indian Imperial Police. There, he experienced the shallow smugness of English officials and property owners, and he saw that British colonialism could not last much longer.13

After quitting the police, he sought to live a proletarian life. He outfitted himself as a member of the underclass, from which came a first-person, documentary-style book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). In The Road to Wigan

Pier (1937), Orwell documented the lives of coal miners in the north of England, and for the first time he.wrote about his socialist beliefs.

But in Homage to Catalonia (1938), his book from the Spanish Civil War, Orwell best demonstrates what he has in common with the other journalists studied here. As history, the book is a reasonably accurate memoir of the war years 66

1937-1938, and it is an incisive record of the differences

between the insurgents under Franco and the troops under the Loyalists, and of the differences among the different

Loyalist factions. But the book is more than that. Part of

its strength comes from Orwell's record of his own reaction

to the tediousness, discomfort, fear, betrayal, and

suffering in war. More important, though, to the book's

strength is Orwell's candid record of his attempts to convey

the war and the factions fighting. Like Lippmann and Agee,

Orwell analyzes his prejudices and how accurately he can report what he saw and heard.

For, like the other two, Orwell recognized that history

is elusive. Only after an event does the memory select and

construct experiences so that a person can understand that event:

It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up

in war or politics--I am conscious of nothing save

physical discomfort and a deep desire for this

damned nonsense to be over. Afterwards I can see

the significance of events, but while they are

happening I merely want to be out of them--an ignoble trait, perhaps.1 4

And, like Lippmann, Orwell understood that ideas the individual already holds will influence the selective process:

-1 - I , . '4101,94"1., 67

I hope the account I have given is not too

misleading. I believe that on such an issue as

this no one is or can be completely truthful. It

is difficult to be certain about anything except

what you have seen with your own eyes, and

consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. 15

So he warns the reader:

In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in

the book I, will say it now: beware of my

partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the

distortion inevitably caused by my having seen

only one corner of events. And beware of exactly

the same things when. you read any other book on

this period of the Spanish war.1 6

The events leading to the civil war are

straightforward. In 1930, the Spanish people had deposed

the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and established a republic.

The following year, they elected a coalition government of

leftist Republicans and socialists. In 1934, the Republican government, split over whether to cooperate with the upper classes, lost power. But in the elections of February

1936, the Popular Front coalition of Republicans, socialists, and Communists (helped by anarchist votes) resumed power.

.... ------68

The new government threatened the interests of the upper classes, military, and Catholic church. Added to these resentful groups was the Falange Espanola

Tradicionalista, the fascist political party founded in

1933. In July 1936, these interests joined together under General Francisco Franco to depose the government.

From there, though, the facts are less certain. The

coalition governments must bear some of the blame for the

confusion, Orwell correctly says. From the beginning, the government did not have a firm control on decision-making.

For -example, in 1936, amid the confusion brought by Franco's rebellion, workers in the northeastern area of Catalonia

appropriated some of the factories and large feudal estates.

As the war continued, two thoughts about how the war should be fought emerged among the Loyalists. The anarchists

believed that democracy necessarily meant a clean sweep of

the structural feudalism, in effect, a people's revolution.

Most of those in the Popular Front believed the anarchists were wrong to seize land, that the anarchists had unwisely alienated the upper class and some of the middle class.17

And, as the communists were also Stalinists, they also believed in a strong central government.

However, if part of the confusion was due to the factionalism within Spain, as much was due to parties outside the country. "The outcome of the Spanish war was 69 settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin--at any rate not in Spain," Orwell wrote later:1 8 The communists increased their influence in the Loyalist government (and good feeling around the world) because western democracies refused to help the Spanish government. Great Britain pushed a nonintervention treaty, which 27 countries signed, including the United States, France, Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union.

The last three countries ignored the treaty. Germany and Italy, which had fascist governments, sent abundant troops and arms to Franco. The Soviet Union supplied the

Loyalists until it withdrew support in September 1938. The- following year, the Loyalist government fell.

So each country and faction involved had a different reason for fighting. For some, it was fascism. For some, it was the Catholic church and integrity of property. For others, it was communism or social equality or stopping the spread of fascism.

The war is seen now as a testing ground and portender for what was to come. Western democracies sought neutrality. Germany and Italy developed military strategies for new equipment, particularly in the air. The Stalinists continued to eliminate Trotskyite groups--or any they believed were sympathetic to Leon Trotsky's idea that 70

communism is best served by world revolution rather than by concentration under one government.

Those were the ideas in competition with each other

when Orwell alighted in Spain in late December 1936. He

writes that in the beginning he was ignorant that the

Loyalists were fighting for anything other than "equality and freedom." 1 9 His first impression was:

There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized

it immediately as a state of affairs worth

fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers'

State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either

fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the

workers' side; I did not realize that great

numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying

low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.2 0

The first pages of Homage to Catalonia do not tell the reader that this will be a serious book. Orwell makes much about circumstances that overtook him; he joined the P.O.U.M. (Partido Obrero de Unifacacion Marxista) because it was the most readily available militia.21 He makes light of the disorganized, ill-equipped, and ill-trained militia: 71

The answer was always a harassed smile and a

promise that there should be machine-gun

instruction manana [Orwell's italics]. Needless

to say manana [Orwell's italics] never came.

Several days passed and the recruits learned to

march in step and spring to attention almost

smartly, but if they knew which end of a rifle the

bullet came out of, that was all they knew. One

day an armed Carabinero strolled up to us when we

were halting and allowed us to examine his rifle.

It turned out that in the whole of my section no

one except myself even knew how to load the rifle, much less how to take aim.2 2 And, with irony, he portrays himself as a foreigner put down in a land he respects but little understands. He writes, "In theory I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our Northern time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself."2 3

Circumstances continued to overtake him. On leave in

Barcelona in April 1937, he considered joining the popular army, sponsored by the communists. Orwell realized that the popular army was better organized and better armed than the militias. However, Orwell decided to wait to transfer. Back with his militia the following month, Orwell was shot in the throat. Recuperating in Barcelona, he learned from 72 his wife, who was staying there, that the communists had suppressed the P.O.U.M. The police were arresting anarchists, accusing them of collaborating with fascists.

Some anarchists escaped, some lingered in jail, and others

died there. The Orwells attempted to help a P.O.U.M. officer who had been arrested. Then the two fled by train to France and returned to England.

These facts of Orwell's time in Spain are laid out in the book. The first half is a record of his time in training and at the front; the second half is an account of the feuding among the Loyalist factions. But beyond the facts are two themes: Orwell's regard for comraderie, that is, social .equality, and for truth.

How the Stalinists got away from the ideal of social equality would later be parodied in Animal Farm (1944). But in his militia in Spain, Orwell glimpsed what social equality might be like:

In every country in the world a huge tribe of

party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy

'proving' that socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a

vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism

and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, 73

the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of

equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism

means a classless society, or it means nothing at

all. And it was here that those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish

militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society.2 4

Orwell opens and closes the book with instances of

comraderie, two stories of handshakes that convey an

understanding between two strangers. Orwell begins the

book, "In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I

joined the militia, I' saw an Italian militiaman standing in

front of the officers' table."25 Orwell shapes an opinion that the man in his mid-twenties is tough-looking and

probably ill-educated. Yet, when the Italian learns that

Orwell is a foreigner, the young man instinctively steps

across the room and firmly grasps Orwell's hand:

As we went out he stepped across the room and

gripped my hand very hard. Queer, the affection

you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his

spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in

bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy.2 6

Orwell's last act before fleeing Barcelona is to retrieve a letter to help free an imprisoned P.O.U.M. 74

officer. He asks help from a Spanish police officer who, after he learns Orwell was in the P.O.U.M., says little:

He would only tell me that the proper enquiries

would be made. There was no more to be said; it

was time to part. Both of us bowed slightly. And

then there happened a strange and moving thing.

The little officer hesitated a moment, then

stepped across and shook hands with me. 27

It is unlikely that Orwell accidentally framed his book

with two stories of handshakes between strangers. Probably,

he was saying that there is a comradely recognition and

understanding--a sincerity--that can reach across confusion and lies.

This is the same concern Agee will have--how can one

communicate with others? Specifically, how does the

intellectual, the reporter, the writer communicate with an audience? For Orwell, it was by becoming one of the people

and adhering to simple truth. He knew the P.O.U.M. was less efficient than the Popular Army, but he felt more

comfortable in the militia. The popular army had an enforced hierarchy; the militia was an experience in social equality.

Truth is the other great theme of Orwell's book. "War suffers a kind of progressive degradation" because war is not compatible with "individual liberty and a truthful

41" -t : - - 14RMIR"W".1 WR i 75

press," Orwell says.28 He pokes fun at journalists, who, he says, shape stories to prove their positions: "Throughout

the fighting I never made the correct 'analysis' of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles 2 9 away." He says of a Russian agent whose job was to spread rumors about anarchists: "I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person

whose profession was telling lies--unless one counts journalism. ,,30

But Orwell's immediate concern was that lies would

split the "world working-class movement,"3 and he gives the brunt of his criticism to the leftist press. Orwell devotes a chapter to showing contradictions in coverage of the war in the factional papers on the left, such as the Daily Worker. 3 2

Truth is not just a theoretical concern for Orwell, but it is a personal one. He does not let the theft of some

personal belongings color his opinion of the Loyalist cause; he sees stealing as a natural consequence of war.3 3 Neither does he let the Loyalists' rude treatment of captured feudal houses and church buildings prejudice him; he decides it is no worse than conquerors who desecrated the statuary of the vanquished.3 4

The partisan writing of the 1930s, which Orwell and Agee both resisted, celebrated the collective body as the

, I , - 4 - ,, , 1 76

protagonist. But, like Lippmann before them, Orwell and Agee hoped for a brotherhood of man that would not be gained at the expense of the individual. In studying the miners' hard lives in the north of England, Orwell had resisted the Communist line. In the Spanish Civil War, he further crystallized his belief that the writers who give first allegiance to political doctrine cannot see truth. Looking back from 1946, Orwell wrote, "The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus- untruth is as far as possible kept in the background."3 Not only does political dogma rob literature of truth, but it discourages any personal style, Orwell wrote. "Freedom of the intellect," he wrote, "means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be "36 obligated to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings. Terms such as "conscious" and "memory" are sprinkled throughout Homage to Catalonia, testament to Orwell's concern that he can be truthful to the events. At one point he talks about his memories as having a "magic quality" hard to convey:

This period which then seemed so futile and

eventless is now of great importance to me. It is so different from the rest of my life that already

it has taken on the magic quality which, as a 77

rule, belongs only to memories that are years old.

. . .. I wish I could convey to you the atmosphere of that time.37

So, like other personal journalists, Orwell offers descriptions to appeal to the senses:

It is all bound up in my mind with the winter

cold, the ragged uniform of militiamen, the oval

Spanish faces, the Morse-like tapping of machine-

guns, the smells of urine and rotting bread, the

tinny taste of bean-stews wolfed hurriedly out of unclean pannikins. 3 8

And, like other personal journalists, he invites readers into the story by use of a confessional, first- person voice:

The whole period stays by me with curious

vividness. In my memory I live over incidents

that might seem too petty to be worth recalling.

I am in the dug-out at Monte Pocero again, on the

ledge of limestone that serves as a bed, and young

Ramon is snoring with his nose flattened between

my shoulder-blades. I am stumbling up the mucky

trench, through the mist that twirls round me like

cold steam. I am halfway up a crack in the

mountain-side, struggling to keep my balance 78

and to tug a root of wild rosemary out of the

ground. High overhead some meaningless bullets

,fly. . . . 39

What makes Orwell's writing still of interest today is his concern with social equality and truth. Orwell was a

late bloomer in his career. He himself criticized his early novels. Certainly, his writing cannot be described as fancy. But in his political writing he found his voice.

"All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia,"

Orwell wrote in 1946 in "Politics and the English

Language."0 In that often-quoted essay, Orwell made a link between corrupt thinking and corrupt writing. It is a theme in his books, essays, and fables. They all show a thinking individual's concern with social equality, truth, and how language can convey truth.

The strength of the literary pulse in Europe from the two wars was not matched in the United States. This country entered the First World War late and was not, as Britain was, fewer than 50 miles away from some of the fiercest action, or as France, in the middle of the warfare from trenches across "no man's land." Gilbert Seldes, then a correspondent in Europe for the Chicago Tribune, said U.S. coverage also suffered from "an American angle." Editors cared more for stories about hometown soldiers or U.S. 79

expatriates than about the war's effect on Europe's future.4

Neither were newspapers here, outside of places such as

New York, concerned much with the Spanish Civil War. But

similar events in this country fostered self-examination in literature here. In the previous century it had been the Civil War and industrialization. In this century it was the Great Depression.

The 1930s Depression followed what seemed by comparison a decade of riotous living. Many intellectuals at the time

saw the Depression as a reckoning for the country that in the 1920s had languished in commercialism and frivolity.

Writers turned against that materialism and hedonism. It made for somber, soul-searching documentary work.

To understand Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, one must understand two practices in writing in the 1930s. In

his book Agee ridiculed both practices as affected, and the

book's strength partially derives from Agee's reaction.

The first was social protest writing. The writing is

often identified with writers who followed a Communist or socialist line in their books, though they were only a minority of writers. For these writers, the 1930s provided a reason, or an excuse, to publicly express their radical ideas. Other writers began their social protest writing 80

after they were brought into contact with disadvantaged

people for the first time. Unfortunately, social protest

writing would have a bad name by the late 1930s. The reason was intellectuals' growing discomfort with Marxist criticism and Stalin's purges, by then indisputable.

The second practice was the documentary feel in magazine articles and books. The 1930s were ripe for an

interest in documentary writing for several reasons. The

Depression, eventual government intervention in the U.S. economy, and social experiments abroad--not only the Soviet

Union's but also the more moderate social planning of Great

Britain's Labour Party, which American theologian Reinhold

Neibuhr saw as the application of Christian charity to politics42--produced an interest in government policy shared by intellectuals and average citizens. And the Depression, with its effect on people, stimulated a search across the country for the small stories that together formed the tableau of a battered country.

In the Federal Writer's Project, 1935-1942, politically liberal writers and photographers saw that systemic expose and commercialism could achieve a parity, however tenuous. In their documentary projects, they revealed capitalism's failure to provide prosperity. But the FWP relied on commercial publishers to print the American Guidebook Series and local histories. 81

The road became necessary training for documentary journalists in the 1930s. The road has long been a

narrative thread for writers. It was a symbol of an

exploration of new lands and philosophies in Samuel

Johnson's Rasselas. For John Bunyan in The Pilgrim's

Progress, it was a path for pilgrims. But not until the

twentieth century in the United States did the road become such a metaphor for disillusionment and searching.

James Rorty combined the irony of the government's

reassurances with the promise that he would tell the truth traveling across the country in the title of his 1936 book, Where Life Is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey.

Other notable titles were Sherwood Anderson's Puzzled

America (1935), Theodore Dreiser's Tragic America (1935),

Nathan Asch's The Road: In Search of America (1937), and Louis Adamic's My America (1938).

The road was not only a path for the. jobless (and the writer), but it was also a commercial endeavor and an equalizer. Road systems were improved for delivery of goods to the nearest market. In a 1934 Fortune article, Agee described how roads and automobiles had changed the structure of businesses, removing many from downtowns to' places 4 3 beside roads. In The Grapes of Wrath the road was a symbol of the uprooting of Americans to search for work, family members' trying to maintain ties with each other and 82

among generations, a portender of the mobile society. But the automobile also freed people and made them temporarily

"equal." On the road, the person in an old jalopy was

"equal" to the person in a Cadillac, and could be a more romantic figure.

Documentary expression, or realism, was not only in writing but in photography, film, and even advertising which emphasized testimonials.4 In the United States, still photographers copied the candid photography of German magazine photographers such as Erich Salamon. Documentary motion picture films had been a sub-genre in the 1920s.

Robert Flaherty made "Nanook of the North" in 1922 and "Moana" in 1926. During the 1930s, the U.S. government sponsored documentaries such as Pare Lorentz's "The Plow

That Broke The Plains" (1936), about the misuse of land that caused the Dust Bowl, and "The River" (1937), about the

Mississippi River Basin and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

After the Depression, even films intended for popular release showed documentary influence, such as Mervyn Leroy's

"I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932) and King Vidor's "Our Daily Bread" (1934), with a romance set against work to bring irrigation to a farm collective. By the end of the decade, documentary technique was an overt part of some story lines. Director Frank Capra made a series of populist films in the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps his most politically 83

sophisticated, "Meet John Doe" (1941), involves a man (Gary

Cooper) picked from a hobo camp to represent the desires and

desperation of the average man. He is chosen by a reporter (Barbara Stanwyck) who does not realize her fascist-like media boss intends to exploit the man for a political campaign. In "Sullivan's Travels" (1941), director Preston

Sturges poked fun at media exploitation, particularly the quick on-the-road documentary projects. Looking back, what marked 1930s social protest fiction, besides the documentary influence and personal voice, was hope. The writers did not show workers' winning in fights with management but maintaining hope for a worker-decided society. Or in the end the uncommitted individual realized that business owners and management oppressed workers to the point of violence, even murder. "They can shoot some of us down, they can't shoot all of us down, they can't shoot all of us," a rally speaker concludes Josephine Herbst's 1934 novel The Executioner Waits. 4 5

In The Grapes of Wrath, the brotherhood of man becomes an extension of what the family offers. Tom Joad, who reluctantly joins the workers' organization only after police violence, tells his mother that he feels a part of something bigger than him:

Then I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be

ever'where--wherever you look. Wherever they's a

-NUNN.% 84

fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there.

Wherever they's a cop beating' up a guy, I'll be

there. If Casy knowed, why, I'll be in the way

guys yell when 'they're mad an'--I'll be in the way

kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know

supper's ready. An' when our folks eat the stuff

they raise an' live in the houses they build--why, I'll be there.4 6

The writing matured with the decade. The best fiction work representative of the 1930s, John Steinbeck's The

Grapes of Wrath, was published in 1939 and received the

Pulitzer Prize the following year. The best nonfiction work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, written by James Agee with photographs from Walker Evans, was published in 1941.

Though a novel, The Grapes of Wrath began as a documentary book. In March 1938, Steinbeck and a Life photographer visited federal camps in California for people

in the diaspora from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. He intended to do a Life article and then a book with photographs.

Steinbeck's and Agee's books show documentary work and use of personal voice at its highest in the 1930s; the result was not polemics but works of art.

"Personal voice" means that the author's point-of-view can be seen in the writing. Sometimes in the 1930s, the author used "I" (as in Tom Joad's speech) or "we" in a 85 story. Other times, the author used "you" as if to grab the reader by the lapel to say, "You! Look here at these other people!"

Writing in 1935 for New Masses, Ernest Hemingway wrote about 450 World War I veterans working on a Work Projects

Administration project in Florida who were killed in a hurricane. His tone makes the article a conversation between the narrator and the readers, who are made to feel at once the revulsion at finding the rotting bodies, one with a "face tumefied beyond recognition" and a thumb eaten by crabs, and the veterans' betrayal and deaths:

You could find them face down and face up in the

mangroves. The biggest bunch of the dead were in

the tangled, always green but now brown, mangroves

behind the tank cars and the water towers. They

hung out there, in shelter, until the wind and the

rising water carried them away. They didn't all

go at once but only when they could hold on no

longer. Then further on you found them high in

the trees where the water had swept them. You

found them everywhere and in the sun all of them

were beginning to be too big for their blue jeans

and jackets that they could never fill when they

were on the bum and hungry. 4 7 86

Hemingway wanted readers to feel the deaths of the men left in the Florida Keys during the hurricane months:

The high wall of water rolls you over and over and then, whatever it is, you get it and we find you,

now of no importance, stinking in the mangroves.

You're dead now, brother . . . 48 The personal voice is even in the book titles, such as

These Are Our Lives (1939) and You Have Seen Their Faces, the latter a 1937 book with Margaret Bourke-White's somewhat stylized photographs and written text by Erskine Caldwell.

In 1936, in The Nation magazine, Bourke-White theorized that artists, because they also had been affected by the

Depression, understood the average person. "It is my own conviction," she wrote, "that defense of their economic needs, as well as their liberty of artistic expression, will inevitably draw artists closer to the struggle of the great masses of American people for security and the abundant life."4 9

In an interview in the early 1960s, Nelson Algren said much the same thing, though in less formal vocabulary. He had simply recorded his own impressions of what was around him:

Well, I wrote the books I wrote because, because I

was living in the middle of these books when,

before they were books, when they were merely 87

scenes in which human beings were involved in

conflict, I was in the middle of them and simply

recorded my own reactions and tried to catch the

ebb and flow and something of the fear and terror

and the dangers and the kind of life that

multitudes of people had been forced into . . . 50

However, when Agee used the personal voice, it was more

than to bring the reader into the author's experience. It

was also to admit his uncertainty that he was able to tell

the story--the truth. The Federal Writers Project had

brought fresh journalistic attention to the South and forced

different classes of people together. Agee and Evans' Let

Us Now Praise Famous Men was influenced by the photography

of the FWP and the Farm Security Administration (for which

Evans worked). In the text and photographs, the writer and photographer show that they realize they cannot be detached

observers. But, knowing that, then they ask what kind of observers they should be.

Agee, and even more, Evans, came from privileged

backgrounds. Agee's family did not have much money, but he had attended a private, parochial school, and his talent

provided him entry into Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard

University. When he stayed with the Alabama sharecroppers he was. working for Fortune magazine. 88

Around the poor Alabama families, Agee appears ill at

ease. He writes of a landlord having three black man in

their thirties sing songs for Agee and Evans. Agee writes of his inability to communicate with the three men:

Meanwhile, and during all this singing, I had been

sick in the knowledge that they felt they were

here at our demand, mine and Walker's, and I could

communicate nothing otherwise; and now, in a perversion of self-torture, I played my part

through. I gave their leader fifty cents, trying

at the same time, through my eyes, to communicate

much more, and said I was sorry we had held them

up and that I hoped they would not be late; and he

thanked me for them in a dead voice, not looking

me in the eye, and they went away, putting their

white hats on their heads as they walked into the sunlight .51

Orwell had experienced the same embarrassment in Burma, best captured in his essay "Shooting An Elephant." 5 2 He, too, realized a gulf existed between him and the people of the country, no matter what his good intentions were. In the story, the British policeman feels he must shoot a magnificent creature because it is the only way he can communicate his authority to the native people. Orwell

A . wpm 89 eventually quit his job and vowed to become one of the working class.

Like Orwell, Agee hoped for a brotherhood of man. But, though he would try, Agee was less successful than Orwell in becoming "proletarian." In writing of the Ricketts, Gudgers, and Woods, the pseudonyms for the three white families with whom Agee and Evans stayed, Agee confesses that all he can accomplish are "relative truths."5 3 Agee writes:

George Gudger is a man, et cetera. But obviously,

in the effort to tell of him (by example) as

truthfully as I can, I am limited. I know him

only so far as I know him, and only in those terms

in which I know him; and all of that depends as

fully on who I am as on who he is.54 An incisive comment on Agee's character comes from

Evans. He wrote later that Agee, though he masked it, was a poet, an intellectual, an artist, and a Christian, and he had a "paralyzing, self-lacerating anger."55 Agee's attitude toward his subjects is essentially religious and poetic. "To him, human beings were at least possibly immortal and literally sacred souls," Evans wrote. 56 With the humble sharecroppers, Agee is in awe of the subtlety of life, and he wonders how words can ever reproduce the subtlety of what is experienced. 90

Coming at the end of the decade, Agee's book profits

from his reactions to partisan writing and quick documentaries. To make his feelings about the two excesses of 1930s writing absolutely clear, Agee sardonically reprints his replies to questions from Partisan Review about his writing57 and a story from the New York Post that portrays a fashion-conscious Margaret Bourke-White who talks about paying a black preacher to pose for her "documentary" photography.58

In contrast to the sharecroppers' simple toils and honest feelings, Agee seems to say, "I'm not certain I am getting this right." He knows what will not convey what he has seen and heard. Certainly, the political writing of the

1930s would not. It poisons "the air against good writing" and "the development of ferocity in personal integrity."5 9

Neither can the usual journalism, with its formulas, convey what he has seen and heard:

Who, what, where, when and why (or how) is the

primal cliche and complacency of journalism: but I

do not wish to appear to speak favorably of

journalism. I have never yet seen a piece of

journalism which conveyed more than the slightest

fraction of what any even moderately reflective

and sensitive person would mean and intend by

those inachievable words, and that fraction itself 91

I have never seen clean of one or another degree

of patent, to say nothing of essential, falsehood.6 0

Nor should writers strive to show their imaginative skills. Description too easily can lie; it can be merely a symbol or other artifice. "Most young writers and artists roll around in description like honeymooners on a bed," he says.61 Instead, writers should be confident in their subjects' "intrinsic beauty and stature." 6 2

The natural question is how Agee can reject both neutral journalism and imaginative writing. His answer is that the writer interested in conveying the people around him will become like a poet. Agee, like a poet, will try to appreciate the person who is Gudger, and to that degree he can reproduce Gudger in words.6 3 So Agee begins to catalogue the items in the family's cabin, the clothes they wear, and the work they do, and he asks readers to make their own conclusions (as the reader of a poem pieces together images) .

What is it that Lippmann, Orwell, and Agee have in common? Of course, each witnessed political and social upheaval and wrote better for it. But why were they better writers than others who saw the same events? It is because each developed empathy for the victims and for the people trying for solutions. 92

First, each was unappeased by official explanations.

"I am willing to believe that history is for the most part

inaccurate and biased," Orwell wrote, "but what is peculiar

to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could [Orwell's italics] be truthfully written."6 4

Therefore, each believed, the individual must be concerned with truth and how to communicate it to others.

This concern of theirs cannot be appreciated too much. Each took a side and cared about his side. But, ultimately, each was more concerned with the process of decision-making rather than with his side's winning. Lippmann asked how an individual can acquire the information necessary to make sound decisions, or, if that is not possible, who should have access to the information. Orwell was concerned with the complicity of language and propaganda in the political control of people. Agee felt, nearly tortuously, the responsibility to communicate his subjects' lives.

As important to the development of their thinking and writing, the three writers resisted, each to his own degree, tilting the other way, toward partisan writing. "If he has any honesty or talent at all he cannot be that," Orwell said. The propagandist, he said, not only tells lies about facts but about "his own feelings." For Agee also, the good writer will examine his own feelings and reactions.

Subservience to a prearranged political position not only 93 brings lies but prevents good writing, he said. It poisons

"the development of ferocity in personal integrity." 6 6

And, if the writer does not have a prearranged political position, what should the reporter's relationship with the subject be? Lippmann, Orwell, and Agee each believed the reporter must have a moral relationship with the subject. They were sometimes inconsistent in their own lives, but each believed he should work within an ethos.

For Lippmann, who rejected orthodoxy and, specifically, his Jewish religion, this ethos was a "spirit of reason."

Orwell called it "a vision of life., 6 7 Agee tried to keep a religious and poetic attitude toward his subjects.

That moral attitude added to each's concern with truth and communicating it. Each struggled to remove stereotypes and cliches from his writing. More important, each writer looked inward to see whether he was worthy to tell a story.

That introspection in their journalism was not egocentric but was soul searching and personal, in short, a moral concern. 94

NOTES

After the experiences described here, the three

continued in journalism. From 1920 to 1934, Lippmann wrote

a regular column for Vanity Fair. From 1922 to 1931, he

wrote for the editorial page of the New York World, becoming

page editor in 1924. In 1931 he began a syndicated

newspaper column that he continued until 1967. He also

wrote a column for Newsweek from 1963 to 1971. Lippmann died in 1974.

After the Spanish Civil War, Orwell supported himself

by contributing essays and book reviews to periodicals.

From 1941 to 1943, as part of the war effort, he worked for

the British Broadcasting Corporation. From 1943 to 1945, he

was literary editor of the (London) Tribune. Sales of

Animal Farm, published that year, let him reduce his

journalistic work. Orwell died in 1950. (Though Eric Blair

remained his legal name, the pseudonym George Orwell is used

in this study, for consistency and because George Orwell became Blair's public persona.)

After his time in Alabama, Agee wrote articles for

Fortune and Time. Later he reviewed books for Time and then films for Time and The Nation. He was writing film scripts, notably "The African Queen" with John Huston, until shortly before his death in 1955.

2 Lippmann, A Preface to Politics.

-~ - I 95

3 "All Four for $5.00 Four Dollars Saved, 1 advertisement, The New Republic April 17, 1915: iii.

Editorial, The New Republic Nov. 7, 1914: 3. Howe, Frederick C., "Choose Your Congressman,"

Everybody's Magazine Nov. 7, 1910: 593-601. 6 Blum 72.

Steel 116-117. 8 Lippmann, Public-Opinion 8. Lippmann, Public Opinion 197. 10 Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (New

York and London: Oxford UP, 1975) 105.

Lewis, Wyndham, ed., "Manifesto-I," Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex 1 (1914): 11-19. 12 MacKenzie, Compton, Literature in My Time (London:

Rich & Cowan, 1933) 201. 13 Orwell used his experiences for a novel, Burmese

Days, published in 1931. 14 Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia (1938; New York and London: Harcourt, 1952) 212. 15 Orwell,H 230.

16 Orwell, Homage 231. 17 In his essay "Spilling the Spanish Beans" and elsewhere, Orwell said the Loyalist government also wanted to ease foreign concern about a workers' revolution. 96

18 Orwell, George, "Looking Back at the Spanish War,"

My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943 262, vol. 2 of The

Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell

ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, 1968). 19 Orwell, Homag 6. 20 Orwell, Homage 5. 21 See Crick, Bernard, George Orwell: A Life (Boston:

Atlantic-Little, 1980) 208. Crick says that Orwell, before

departing from England for Spain, contacted the British

Communist Party's general secretary for introductory papers.

But the Communist official did not think Orwell was

sufficiently doctrinaire. Orwell then obtained papers from

the Independent Labour Party, which was aligned with the P.O.U.M., an independent Marxist militia. 22 Orwell, Homage 11. 23 Orwell, Homage 13. 24 Orwell, Homage 104-105. Until his death, Orwell

continued to believe in democratic socialism and to abhor totalitarianism, whether on the left or the right. 25 Orwell, Homage 3. 26 Orwell, Homage 3-4. 27 Orwell, Homage 222-223. 28 Orwell, Homage 180. 29 Orwell, Homage 139.

30 Orwell, Homage 140. 31 Orwell, Homage 178. 97

32 Orwell, Homage 150-179.

Orwell, Homage 77.

Orwell, Homage 78.

35 Orwell, George, "The Prevention of Literature," In

Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950 61, vol. 4 of The Collected

Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, 1968). 36 Orwell, "Prevention" 62.

Orwell, Homage 105. 38 Orwell, Homae 105.

Orwell, Homage 105-106. 40 Orwell, George, "Politics and the English Language,

In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950, 137, vol. 4 of The

Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell

ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, 1968). 41 Seldes, George, Witness to a Century: Encounters

with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs (New York: Ballantine, 1987) 161. 42 Fox, Richard, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography

(San Francisco: Harper, 1987) 78, 84-85.

43 Agee, James, "The American Roadside," James Agee: Selected Journalism, ed. Paul Ashdown (Knoxville: U of TN P, 1985) 42-62.

Stott, William, Documentary Expression and Thirties

America (New York: Oxford UP, 1973).

, -, - M- --- k, ,-, -- I " d , I in 4 1- - aMOW W 04MWAMM "I ammomm.- 98

Herbst, Josephine, The Executioner Waits (1934; New York: Warner, 1985) 340. 46 Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath (1939; New York: Viking, 1989) 572.

47 Hemingway, Ernest, "Who Murdered the Vets?," New Masses Sept. 17, 1935: 10. 48 Hemingway 10.

49 Bourke-White, Margaret, "Photographing This World," The Nation Feb. 19, 1936: 218.

Algren, Nelson, Conversations with Nelson Algren ed. H. E. F. Donahue (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964) 93-94. 51 Agee, James, and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise

Famous Men (1941; Boston: Houghton, 1980) 31. 52 Orwell, George, "Shooting An Elephant," An Age Like

This, 1920-1940, vol. 1 of The Collected Essays, Journalism

and Letters of George Orwell ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, 1968) 235-241. 53Evans and Agee, Famous Men 239 Evans and Agee, Famous Men 239. 55 Evans, Walker, "James Agee in 1936," foreword, Agee and Evans, Famous Men ix. Evans' 1960 essay is used as a foreword to the book in later editions.

56 Evans, "Agee" xii.

Agee, James, "Intermission: Conversations in the

Lobby," Agee and Evans, Famous Men 349-357. 58 Agee and Evans, Famous Men pp. 450-454. 99

Agee and Evans, Famous Men 356. 60 Agee and Evans, Famous Men 234. 61 Agee and Evans, Famous Men 238-239. 62Agee and Evans, Famous Men 239

63 Agee and Evans, Famous Men 239.240, 244n,

64 Orwell, George, "Looking Back at the Spanish War" 258. 65 Orwell, George, "The Proletarian Writer," My Country

Right or Left, 1940-1943, vol. 2 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York, 1968) 41. 66 Agee and Evans, Famous Men 356. 67 Orwell, George, "The Proletarian Writer" 41. CHAPTER IV

PERSONAL JOURNALISM WITH MORAL CONCERN

SINCE THE 1930s

This chapter is a brief look at what has happened to

personal journalism with moral concern since the 1930s.

Personal journalism that is emotional in style disappeared

in the 1940s, to be rejuvenated by the 1960s. Why was this

so? In part, it was a reaction against partisan writing of

the 1930s. But beyond that, in the middle of a world war, journalists could not afford the luxury of experimenting in

style and genre. Journalistic practice became more conservative.

The three writers studied in the previous chapter are

instructive examples. Lippmann, who valued reason over

emotion, did not change his journalism much in the 1940s.

He was not so affected as Orwell and Agee were by the 1940s.

For one thing, Lippmann was better prepared than the other

two for conservatism. As a pragmatic liberal, he often

seemed a fence-sitter. Sometimes he willingly crossed the

fence to the conservative side. For example, Lippmann

supported the New Deal in its first two years, but grew to

oppose President Franklin Roosevelt's legal maneuvering.1

In February 1937 Lippmann opposed Roosevelt's plan to expand

100

" I '?tl,4i**KI,4W--, -- * - , -, 4, , - , , , -. --- l-, _ I - RPNFNNM 101 the Supreme Court. Over the next five months Lippmann devoted 37 of his newspaper columns--half of the total--to denouncing the president's plan.2

Nor in the late 1930s did Lippmann sympathize with the Loyalists in Spain. He later said:

I never took a passionate, partisan interest in

the Spanish civil war. I feared it as a thing

which was going to start a European war. . . . My

hope was that it could be quieted, pacified, rather than exacerbated. I thought the non-

intervention program was critical and futile, but

I didn't concern myself with it. My mind works

like a spotlight on things, and it wasn't one of

the things that I was interested in at that time.3 So in the 1940s Lippmann continued his syndicated column "Today and Tomorrow" uninterrupted. During World

War II, Lippmann played much the same role that he had in the First World War. Though not a commissioned officer this time, still he crisscrossed between the United States and

Europe as much as was safe. Here and abroad, he met with influential leaders and thinkers. Lippmann continued to float political ideas in his columns and books. In U.S. War

Aims (1944) he gave his ideas for a postwar settlement that would not depend on a world body for enforcement, but on military power and spheres of influence. Still feeling 102 betrayed by his experiences with the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, Lippmann willingly joined the Cold War.

Orwell, too, joined the war effort. In Spain and after returning to England, he had harshly criticized the British government. He had opposed Britain's preparation for war against Germany, saying the two countries were not so different; capitalism was simply an early stage of fascism.

But seeing the possibility of a fascist victory, he rediscovered his British patriotism.

Though he continued to call himself a democratic socialist, Orwell put aside his political differences to join the war effort. He quietly parted with the Independent

Labour Party. From 1941 to 1943 he was Talks Producer in the India Section for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Part of the broadcasting to India was cultural reviews and readings, but much of it was war news written in collaboration with wartime censors.4

Orwell later used his wartime experiences. The

"newspeak" in Animal Farm and 1984 partly originates from

BBC censorship (from the Ministry of Information which oversaw the BBC during the war). Also discernible in the bureaucrats' love of newspeak is Orwell's experience with Basic English, officially encouraged for BBC broadcasts.

Winston Churchill and others envisioned Basic English as a 103 lingua franca for the Commonwealth and other Allied countries.

But much more abhorrent to Orwell was Stalinism. He had witnessed what Stalin had done in Spain and in the

Moscow purge trials of 1936-1938. The heartless bureaucracy in Animal Farm and 1984 could be English or Soviet; the brutality is Stalin's.

Together, Orwell's experiences with the wartime BBC and with Stalin's purges influenced Orwell's journalistic ideas; they crystallized Orwell's distaste for partisan writing, even from friendly ideologues. Most of Orwell's important essays on writing are from that- time: "The Proletarian

Writer" (1940), "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius," "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," and

"Literature and Totalitarianism" (1941), "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943), "Propaganda and Demotic Speech"

(1944), and "Politics and the English Language" (1946).

But, in the end, Orwell looked to fiction to show the horrible day-to-day dealing with deception and distrust.

The BBC censorship and the Communist code words show up in the newspeak. Stalin's bloody purges would be parodied in

Animal Farm and would be part of the atmosphere of deceit, fear, and foreboding in 1984.

Agee remained in journalism, but the 1940s brought setbacks for him, and he would be an itinerant writer the 104 rest of his life. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men did not fare well. When Agee began the book in 1936, the documentary book was a major genre. But by the time the book was published in 1941, critics and readers were not much interested in tenant families. The war in Europe not only distracted emotional attention, but the war economy eased the widespread poverty Agee wrote about.

Except for critics in literary journals, most reviewers criticized Agee for his difficult prose and his personal involvement in the story. A New York Times reviewer said the book was "good in parts and very sharp in parts. For the rest, it is the choicest recent example of how to write self-inspired, self-conscious and self-indulgent prose."5

By the end of 1941 Houghton Mifflin had sold only 600 copies. The publisher ridded itself of leftover copies by remaindering the book to stores at a large discount.6 Not until 1960, when the publisher reissued the book amid a cultural revolution and New Journalism, did Let Us Now

Praise Famous Men achieve stable sales and respect as a minor classic.

Though the emotional personal journalism of Orwell and

Agee was not fashionable in the 1940s, the existence of objectivity in journalism still was doubted. At the end of the 1930s even the conservative publishing magnate Henry 105

Luce said he doubted objectivity. Addressing his advertising salesmen in 1939, Luce said:

Never, at least with my knowledge and consent did

Time ever claim impartiality. Time's charter is

that Time will tell--will tell the truth about

what happened, the truth as it sees it.

Impartiality is often an impediment to truth.

Time will not allow the stuffed dummy of

impartiality to stand in the way of telling the

truth as it sees it.7

Addressing Time editors in 1952, Luce said he believed in objectivity but not in "journalistic objectivity." He believed instead in a higher moral truth. "The Truth, the full Truth about the human adventure, will forever elude our finite intelligence, however clever," he said.8 Objective truth is not found in facts, but in analysis of the facts that approaches eternal truth:

Majorities do not make truth. Intellectual

fashions do not nake truth. Individual prophets

come nearer to it--Amos or John the Baptist or

Walt Whitman. We are not prophets, not intuitive

seers--yet it's a bad editor who doesn't see a

couple of jumps ahead. Mainly, we seek objective

truth by ceaseless search for facts, by analysis

and by making fact analyses come to life by the 106

deepest understanding we can achieve of human

nature and destiny.9

Luce said ",journalistic objectivity" is only a literary

device, a "detached, nondidactic, unemotional" facade for

journalists. Journalists cannot escape making value

judgments; what journalists should do is have "correct value judgments," he said.1 0

But Luce, in framing his questions about the press, did not criticize, as Orwell and Agee did, the tenets of

capitalism. Nor did he believe that individual journalists

should be more powerful than publishers. Though he had

experimented with hiring poetic writers (including Agee) to

improve the writing in his magazines, he believed "the head

man--the owner-publisher-editor" should ultimately shape the magazine or newspaper.1 1

Luce shaped the question about the press's role in

social terms: Can the press remain free, and what should be

its responsibility in society? In 1943 Luce funded a body

to study the question. Through Time Inc. and in cooperation

with the Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. at the University of

Chicago, Luce funded what would become the Commission on the

Freedom of the Press. (The commission more commonly is

called the Hutchins Commission, after its chairman, Robert

M. Hutchins, the university chancellor and a member of the board of Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

- - , . *'I .. , , 514 - - 107

The Hutchins Commission should be studied in some detail for it was a milestone in journalism theory. The commission's findings indicted the past for economic interests and stereotyped news, and anointed a hoped-for future of professional standards and analytical journalism.

But the commission should also be seen in perspective.

Today the Hutchins Commission is known for legitimizing interpretive journalism, but few people at the time could have foreseen that outcome. Most journalists then, at least the publishers and editors, worried little about what their philosophical purpose was. Instead, they worried about governmental regulation at home and abroad, and at first they believed the Hutchins Commission would answer these threats of regulation.

Abroad, during the war some countries drew around them curtains of secrecy, which they kept closed at war's end.

In 1945, U.S. and British correspondents in Moscow wrote a letter to Foreign Commissar Vyacheslaff M. Molotoff, decrying the Soviet Union's continuance of censorship in peacetime. In 1946, a writer in The New Republic warned that most of the world had censorship:

This, in fact, is what happens to the vast

majority of readers in the world. For 65 percent

of the World's population--some one billion 108

people--are living under government press censorship of one kind of other.1 2

So the first of the Hutchins Commission's six reports was about the U.S. press's rights and responsibilities

abroad in a postwar world. Peoples Speaking to Peoples was

released in April 1946. The commission supported the right

of the U.S. press to have unencumbered information abroad, free from censorship. It called for a United Nations treaty

that assured the free flow of information. The commission

also said the press could, and should, regulate itself for

the quality of imported news products, and that a foreign

correspondents corps could, and should, pursue its own talks with foreign governments about censorship.

But the Hutchins Commission's report titled A Free and

Responsible Press (1947) stirred the most controversy. Why was it aggressively met by the press? As noted, the press

already felt on the defensive. Abroad, the U.S. press was fighting countries trying to hamper Western correspondents.

But publishers also worried that the U.S. government might

regulate the press for social values or business practices.

Here, newspaper publishers traditionally had felt that

the first amendment protected them from any governmental regulation. But under the Roosevelt administration they learned differently. Newspapers were included in the

National Industrial Recovery Act (1933-34), designed to 109 increase employment by businesses' raising wages, shortening work hours, and hiring more employees. So were newspapers included in the auspices of the National Labor Relations Board (1935).

Encouraged by the new laws, in 1933 newspaper employees organized a union, the American Newspaper Guild. In 1937 the Supreme Court, in Associated Press v. National Labor

Relations Board, declared that newspaper publishers are not immune from general laws, including anti-trust laws.

(Similarly, the Federal Communications Commission began supervising the fast-growing broadcasting industry.)

The Hutchins Commission included in its report only one suggestion for legislation, a law that would provide a remedy outside court for libel. But, though the commission did not ask for governmental regulation, it did suggest that the press could do better. The commission accused the press of treating news superficially, for pandering to "the interests and tastes of the mass audience." 13 Already- worried publishers and broadcasters might mistakenly assume the commission favored government involvement.

What the commission favored was a more intelligent, socially responsible press. The commission listed five requirements for such a press. The first requirement could be a summation of the commission's conclusions: the press should provide "a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent

"Now 110 account of the day's events in a context which gives them meaning."

The other four requirements were that the press should offer a forum for divergent ideas, should project "a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society," should present and clarify goals and values in society, and should offer "full access to the day's intelligence." Vexing to media owners, the commission in elaborating on the last suggestion criticized the growing concentration of local media outlets.

(In specific recommendations, the commission said private enterprise should support and subsidize high cultural standards. As well, the press should have the means, perhaps an independent body, for self-criticism.

Finally, the press should increase "the competence, independence and effectiveness of its staff.")

Most magazines criticized the Hutchins Commission report. The trade publication Editor & Publisher led the attack. Its March 29 issue had seven articles, plus a full- page editorial, devoted to the report and press reaction.1 4

The harshest words came from Wilbur Forrest, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The commission, he said, was hindered by left-wing leanings and an academic irrelevancy. Forrest said the report clearly bore: 111

The imprint of having been influenced by a pattern of thought long designed to undermine public

confidence in the American press as an

institution. Certain left wing individuals and

groups have long sought to weaken the American

press, possibly with a view to eventual government

regulation and control. . . . The press is under

criticism by amateurs who would like to reform the

American press system along lines of their own thinking. Possibly not one in 10 of these

authorities could run a newspaper and stay out of bankruptcy over 12 months.15

A news writer in Luce's Time made an obligatory bow to the learned commission members but dismissed much of the findings: "For the time and money, and the caliber of the men, it was a disappointing report." 1 6

Newspaper editorials were mixed. The Wall Street

Journal claimed the commission advocated a propaganda 17r- agency, and the Columbus State Journal read into the report a call for governmental regulation. 1 But most admitted that the press could use some self-examination.

And though critics such as Forrest claimed the commission members were "amateurs"--mere academicians and government bureaucrats, the members were not without experience in journalism. 19 Zechariah Chafee Jr. was the 112 leading first amendment scholar. In March 1947, he was appointed to the United Nations subcommittee that would draft an international freedom of the press treaty. Arthur

M. Schlesinger, besides being an outstanding historian, was on the Neiman Foundation committee which awards fellowships to working journalists to study at Harvard University for a year. Harold Lasswell was a pioneer researcher of public opinion and propaganda. The poet Archibald MacLeish had been a writer for Fortune (at the same time as Agee).

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote books about ethics and the individual's responsibility in society. But he also understood the value of journalism in disseminating good ideas. As a young man he worked at his older brother's newspaper. His editorials and articles in the Christian

Century in the 1920s and 1930s established that weekly as the leading periodical of liberal theological discussion.

In 1939 Niebuhr became founding editor of the biweekly Christianity and Crisis.

Granted, though, none had experienced the pressures of daily journalism. Rather, what is evident in these members' journalistic work is their hope for the press to disseminate good ideas and to teach moral responsibility.

Luce wrote some of his opinions to Hutchins in a critique of a semifinal draft of the report. Luce said the commission was wrong to assert that some constituencies do 113

not have access to the press. And he asked what moral

standards the commission wanted to guide the press' moral responsibility.2 0

The second criticism is valid. The commission had not

spelled out a moral code, but said only that the press

should be morally responsible in reporting on society.

(More will be said on this in the next chapter.) Hutchins's

remarks on education, a year later, show his thinking on

moral teaching. Of course, Hutchins said, students should

learn moral values. But colleges and universities cannot

prescribe those values--they can only teach the intellectual

foundations of morals and religion, he said. Specifically,

he said, schools can show that any discipline has truth as

its aim, and with that in mind schools should help students

work through the great ideas in history.2 1

But Luce's critique also betrays his political

conservatism. In his second criticism, he showed that, like

Forrest, he would be more comfortable with an etched moral code rather.than with what Hutchins advocated.

In defending the access the press already provided groups, Luce expressed surprise at the commission's

findings. "Churches, schools, basketball teams, art

galleries, bowling alleys, sewing circles, sororities--they

all have their 'right' to space," Luce said.22 In other words, he said groups deemed acceptable already had access. 114

Apparently, he did not see that he omitted the disen-

franchised groups Orwell and Agee described, such as anarchists and tenant farmers.

Hutchins, the principal author of the report, may not

have intended the effect the report would have. In later

speeches he said his highest hope was for the press to

voluntarily foster its own tradition of responsibility, like

universities had. And his favorite recommendation was for

the press to set up an independent agency to examine

2 3 itself. But the latter did not happen.24 So the report had a different legacy. Reporters, editors, and journalism

students learned that the report legitimized social

responsibility--and, subsequently, an interpretive function

in news reporting. Personal journalists, especially those

concerned with their moral responsibility, could now quote a

Luce-funded study to defend their role.

Few journalists served as models for personal

journalism in the 1940s and early 1950s. Maverick

journalists George Seldes and the late I.F. Stone continued

to write. Seldes published the newsletter In Fact from 1940 to 1950, and Stone began his one-man newsletter I.F. Stone's

Weekly in 1953 (to continue until 1971).

In the 1940s, for example, Seldes regularly carried stories about the link between smoking and lung disease.

Stone regularly carried alternative sources to information

4wxw- , "I", - 1-11 11 .. . - - - f ,Q 115 about the Korean conflict and the Cold War. He told the

following story to a biographer to illustrate his research. In 1957, physicist Dr. Edward Teller was saying any disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union was foolish since instruments could not pick up any unauthorized bomb tests.

That fall the United States had an underground test. Other magazines dutifully quoted the Atomic Energy Commission that instruments far away from the site could not detect the detonation. Stone went to the Department of Commerce's

Coast and Geodetic Survey seismologists. Yes, they told

Stone, they had picked up the- underground nuclear test at their field stations throughout the country.2 5

Stone acknowledged his debt to Seldes for the idea of a personal newsletter, but Stone departed in style and content from Seldes. Where Seldes mixed facts with invectives against his targets, Stone prided himself on his careful file keeping, research, and documentation. Stone was a consummate reporter. He relied on his research and analysis of the facts for the power of his stories.

However, neither regularly showed self-examination in his writing (which is not to say that neither felt morally about his subjects). Seldes said what he was against and why. But while Orwell wanted moral discussion rather than partisan writing, Seldes is a partisan, an advocate in the tradition of muckraking journalism. Politically, Stone was 116 a socialist and nonconformist. However, he was a pragmatist as much as an idealist; for example, he defended the popular front in Spain.2 6

But both Seldes and Stone kept personal journalism alive by demonstrating that facts can be assembled and interpreted differently. Stone said he looked at mainstream newspapers for front-page stories, but he never knew on what pages he would find the "front-page stories." Both were aware they were writing alternatives to official history.

Seldes titled his 1967 memoir Even the Gods Can't Change

History. The six volumes of Stone's collected news stories from 1939 to 1970D are subtitled "A Nonconformist History of

Our Times." The first volume published in the series (and the only one that is not a compilation of Stone's newspaper and magazine articles) is called The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951.

Both Seldes and Stone realized they could only write outside the system. But by the 1960s a new group of personal journalists would find commercial success. As the

1930s were, so the 1960s were ready for experimentation in writing, but with differences. At first glance, New

Journalists are in the tradition of Orwell and Agee. But they were more stylistically concerned than morally concerned. New Journalists willingly borrowed literary devices from the personal journalists before them, such as 117

the first-person voice, but they did not always share the moral concern of earlier writers.

Indeed, Tom Wolfe, New Journalism's most famous

practitioner, said as much in a 1972 essay.2 7 He said the

different writers grouped as New Journalists learned

realistic technique from nonfiction and fiction chroniclers

before them, but the New Journalists were no longer encumbered by moral servitude.

In the 1960s, Wolfe wrote, the New Journalists, not the

fiction writers, understood the realistic resources left

behind by Honore de Balzac, Henry Fielding, Anthony Trollope,

and Charles Dickens. Newspaper and magazine writers simply

claimed the ground vacated by fiction writers, Wolfe wrote.

Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, et al. could refine this "new

journalism" to describe the decade because fiction novelists

had relinquished the literary field of Social Realism.

In forsaking realism, fiction writers missed an

opportunity in the 1960s, Wolfe said. Fiction writers

veered away to experiment in novels of alienation at a time when publishers:

Had been practically crying for novels by the new

writers who must be out there somewhere, the new

writers who would do the big novels of the hippie

life or campus life or radical movements or the war

in Vietnam or dope or sex or black militancy 118

or encounter groups or the whole whirlpool all at

once. They waited, and all they got was the Prince of Alienation . . . [Wolfe's ellipses]

sailing off to Lonesome Island on his Tarot boat

with his back turned and his Timeless cape on, reeking of camphor balls.2 8

The novelists had miscalculated, Wolfe wrote. "The novelists had been kind enough to leave behind for our boys quite a nice little body of material: the whole of American 29 society, in effect," he wrote. Realism was not a passing literary device, but the epitome of what writers had been approaching in the path from the Homeric epic to the novel, he said. "It was not just another device. It raised the state of the art to a new magnitude," he said.3 0

By scene-by-scene construction, extensive, indigenous dialogue, presentation of action and attitudes through the subjects' and (authors') points-of-view, and exhaustive rendering of furniture, clothes, and other symbols of status, the New Journalists realized their "extraordinary power," he said.31

Wolfe went further. No longer need the more ambitious journalistic writing be handmaiden to moral concerns, he declared. Personal journalism need not serve a didactic function to move readers to good actions, he said, but could describe each scene with its frenetic energy and style that was that place and time. "The proof of one's technical 119 mastery as a writer becomes paramount," he said, "and the demonstration of moral points becomes secondary." 3 2

Thus, the almost-winners in Wolfe's grouping of Social

Realism writers were those, he said, who strived to set the scene but remained too removed from it. The Literary

Gentlemen in the Grandstand, he called them. Particularly disappointing to him was Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous

Men. Wolfe said that Agee "showed enterprise enough, going to the mountains and moving in briefly with a mountain family. Reading between the lines Iwould say his problem was extreme personal diffidence." 3

Wolfe called for "saturation reporting." Journalists were to accumulate details about their subjects' status and idiosyncracies. "It is mainly a matter of one's own personality," he wrote. "If a reporter stays with a person or group long enough, they--reporter and subject--will develop a personal relationship of some sort, even if it is hostility."

But alas for journalists who "become stricken with a sense of guilt, responsibility, obligation," Wolfe wrote, and he concluded:

People who become overly sensitive on this score

should never take up the new style of journalism.

They inevitably turn out second-rate work, biased

in such banal ways that they embarrass even the

subjects they think they are "protecting."3 5 120

Wolfe's crystallization of New Journalism theory shows

the lessons learned and the lessons ignored by the

practitioners. While he demonstrated that writers

understood the power of realism that Balzac and Dickens

already had proved, Wolfe distanced himself from the

agonized morality of Agee. Wolfe chose to go further with

realistic technique, but not to develop moral searching.

So why was Agee's moral searching not furthered by

later nonfiction writers such as Wolfe? One reason is that

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was the culmination of 1930s documentary writing that by the 1940s was viewed as polemics

rather than art. But the documentary writing of the 1960s

coincided with a decade of style, celebrated that style, and

marketed that style. The 1960s, for Wolfe, was "the decade

when manners and morals, styles of living, attitudes toward

the world changed the country more crucially than any

political events . . ."6

It was an age of counterculture and consumerism. Wolfe

wrote in 1976 in "The Me Decade and the Third Great

Awakening" that:

Meanwhile, ordinary people in America were breaking-off

from conventional society, from family, neighborhood,

and community, and creating worlds of their own. This

had no parallel in history, certainly considering the

scale of it." 3 7

" !.- 4 , ." .tw ,, :, - . , , 5 - i aim- im4amm-l._.-____ mapmm-- now 121

What the human potential movements meant, what everyone wanted, he said, was, "Let's talk about me." And Wolfe offered readers that.

New Journalism technique included setting of the scene, reconstructed dialogue, and entering the subjects' minds--

Wolfe and Talese claimed they could even reconstruct subjects' thoughts by asking them what they had been thinking. "The whole Freudian revolution is not about sex, it's about the effect of subjective reality on people's actions," Wolfe said. "And that's why I think it is a tremendous breakthrough to be able to have people writing in nonfiction to get into that."3 8

Just as psychoanalytic theories influenced writers of

Lippmann's and Agee's generations, the widespread acceptance of psychoanalysis by the 1950s and 1960s affected a new generation of writers. New Journalist Dan Wakefield, in later describing his own analysis in the mid-1950s, said he believed it would approach a religious experience:

I believed I had started a journey that would

guide me to the truth, and I believed that any

process involving the pursuit and discovery of the

truth was ennobling, if not sacred. . .

The answer would be there hidden in childhood

I would finally--like Galahad reaching the

grail--come upon it, recapture it, and in so doing

dispel its power, making myself whole and free as

I i . I. ". -A-t " .z4: I -, I . 122

I intoned the magic name for whatever moment had

turned the screws on my developing psyche. I

would shout it from the rooftops with a happy ring of personal freedom, a name unlocked from memory

that would open the past as dramatically as it did

in recalling the life of "Citizen Kane": Rosebud!39

But all this distraction by psychoanalysis, human

potential movements, consumerism, and status cannot alone

explain why Wolfe and others did not share Agee's moral

agonizing. Something else was happening: New Journalists

were purposefully chipping away at the rigid moral codes and nationalistic icons of the Cold War and the comfortableness

of the middle class. Wolfe, for example, showed his

educated readers the subcultures of lower income whites,

while he skewered the practiced primitivism of the middle

and upper classes. Personally he was absorbed in what was

new--modern art, modern architecture, and the New Frontier.

Another writer, Mailer, described the "White Negro," that

is, the American existentialist no longer confident in

authority, now seeking authentication through his own actions.

And what these writers wanted to do corresponded with

the needs of magazine publishers and editors. Luce in the

Depression had tried poetic, sociological writing to spice up and convey the times for the new Fortune. Just so, in 123

the late 1950s and the 1960s Esquire needed new talent and a

bold style to capture the new mood, and employed writers such as Wolfe and Mailer.

But though the New Journalists rejuvenated a personal

journalism that was emotional in style, their intention was. different from that of Orwell and Agee. The New Journalists

were more interested to convey moral uncertainty than moral

concern. Looking back from 1989, Esquire writer Thomas B. Morgan described the magazine's journalism as Ideconstruc- tionist." Morgan said:

I think that there was something going on

underneath the desire to make the magazine a success--which was to dismantle images of America

that had been created during the forties and

fifties--that we were all sick of--we thought they were hypocritical.4 0

So some New Journalists, and some fiction- writers,

offered ambiguous or conflicting versions of what they saw. They believed, as "post-Modernist" writer Donald Barthelme

wrote later, that "writing is a process of dealing with not- knowing, a forcing of what and how."4 1

Other writers asked readers to trust their version of

an event, and they thrust themselves into the scene. George

Plimpton played professional football. Hunter S. Thompson

ran with the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. Mailer took part in the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. (He 124 subtitled- The Armies of the Night, which won a Pulitzer

Prize, "History as a Novel/The Novel as History.")

Wolfe and others entered into what they wrote and were emotional, as were Orwell and Agee, though with a difference. Wolfe's presence is visible because he is hip and on the scene and aggressively reporting, but Agee had set himself up as his own foil as he agonized over his subjects. Wolfe's subjects react to his mildly aggressive questions (and his all-white suit). But part of the moral core in Agee's book is his growing concern that he cannot transcend his subjects' lives, which he feels responsible to communicate.

So Wolfe chose not to be bequeathed that tradition of personal journalism with a moral concern in which Orwell and

Agee worked. But as Wolfe was beginning his New Journalism, another journalist was starting his education that would place him in the tradition of Orwell and Agee. That person is Bill Moyers, working mostly in the comparatively new medium of television. Moyers is the writer, executive editor, and driving force behind what he sometimes calls "journals" or "personal essays."

Just as Wolfe exhorted the New Journalists, Moyers has lived with his subject. But his subject is a large one, moral consideration. His chosen career put him in touch with the country's more ambitious ethical considerations 125 during the time New Journalists began writing: He was associate director in charge of public affairs for the newly formed Peace Corps, and later was its deputy director.

Subsequently, he was special assistant and finally press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson during the Great

Society program.

Moyers also has a strong religious background. He followed his bachelor's degree in journalism with a bachelor's degree in divinity studies, and was a student minister four years. Moyers's feeling of personal responsibility owes much to his religious, specifically

Southern Baptist, upbringing. Growing up he would have learned that Rhode Island governor Roger Williams helped establish Baptists in this country on the principle of separation of church and state, and that church members should respect the state but remain at a critical distance.

He also would have learned, from the Protestant Reformation, the idea of "priesthood of believers," that each member individually can study scriptures for meaning and can have a relationship with God (and moral knowledge). In 1971 Moyers wrote, "Collective guilt, like a trillion-dollar economy, is of such scope as to stagger my mind. I grew up believing in personal responsibility and individual guilt." 42 For

Moyers, religion is "perhaps the most determinative force in shaping a social vision. It is at least equal to, and maybe greater than, economic forces."4 3 126

Moyers's journalism is personal, like Wolfe's, but he goes a step further in wanting to understand morality. Like

Agee, he senses and is not afraid to confess his own guilt in the unfolding of an event, or his inability to communicate. He practices a personal journalism, but he seeks honesty in his feelings about what he writes and reports. He does not show a political point-of-view as much as a moral point-of-view.

In "The Secret Government . . . The Constitution in

Crisis" (1987), 4 Moyers goes beyond investigative journalism about the Reagan administration's secret involvement in Central America wars. He also examines the patterns of secrecy. What a government official called "the technology of control" was made secret from the public following World War II--following recruitment of former

Nazis, which perhaps the public would have considered immoral.

Nor is Moyers simply practicing advocacy journalism for one side. He does not indiscriminately attack Washington insiders; he was an insider. What he advocates is moral concern. Moyers ends "The Secret Government" by showing citizens interested in moral concerns--a Wisconsin dairy farmer involved with his neighbors and pastor in discussion of foreign policy issues.

Wolfe was wrong to say that journalists who "become stricken with a sense of guilt, responsibility, obligation" 127 necessarily must turn out second-rate work. Moyers proves that in the 1980s and the 1990s, for journalists to explain

"truth" as well as "news," as Lippmann encouraged,4 5 they can, and they need to, further not only realistic technique but also moral concern. 128

NOTES Weingast examines Lippmann's columns during the New Deal. 2 Steel 319.

3 Steel 338,

Some of Orwell's BBC scripts are collected in a book:

West, W.J., ed. Orwell: The War Commentaries (London:

Duckworth/BBC, 1985). The book, with minor changes, was reprinted in a U.S. edition: West, W. J., ed., Orwell: The

Lost Writings (New York: Arbor House, 1985).

Thompson, Ralph, "Books of the Times," New York Times Aug. 19, 1941: 19. 6 Bergreen, Laurence, James Agee: A Life (1984; New

York: Penguin, 1985) 260.

Luce, Henry, "Causes, Causes," The Ideasof Henry Luce ed. John K. Jessup (New York: Atheneum, 1969) 56-57. 8 Luce, Henry, "Objectivity," The Ideas of Henry Luce ed. John K. Jessup (New York: Atheneum, 1969) 71.

9 Luce, "Objectivity" 70. 10 Luce, "Objectivity" 71.

11 Luce, Henry, "Journalism and Responsibility," The

Ideas of Henry Luce ed. John K. Jessup (New York: Atheneum, 1969) 76. 12 Whiteside, Thomas, "The World News Blackout," New

Republic Dec. 2, 1946: 720. 129

13 Leigh, Robert D., ed., A Free and Responsible Press:

A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio,

Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books (1947; Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1974) 91.

14 Blanchard outlines the events leading to Luce's funding of the commission, plus the commission's conclusions and the press' reception of the report. 15 Forrest, Wilbur, "Forrest Says Report Helps Destroy

Prestige of Press," Editor & Publisher March 29, 1947: 11. 16 "Let Freedom Ring True," Time March 31, 1947: 67. 17 qtd. in Blanchard 43. 18 qtd. in Hutchins, Robert M., "Freedom and the

Responsibility of the Press: 1948," Freedom, Education, and the Fund, Essays and Addresses: 1946-1956 (New York:

Meridian, 1956) 46. 19 The members besides Hutchins were Zechariah Chafee,

Jr., professor of law, Harvard University; John M. Clark, professor of economics, Columbia University; John Dickinson, professor, University of Pennsylvania and general counsel,

Pennsylvania Railroad; William E. Hocking, professor of philosophy, emeritus, Harvard; Harold D. Lasswell, professor of law, Yale University; Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress and later assistant secretary of state for public and cultural relations; Charles E. Merriam, professor of political science, emeritus, University of Chicago; Reinhold Neibuhr, professor of ethics and philosophy of religion, 130

Union Theological Seminary; Robert Redfield, professor of anthropology, University of Chicago; Beardsley Ruml, chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Arthur M.

Schlesinger, professor of history, Harvard; and George N. Shuster, president, Hunter College.

20 Luce, Henry, "Critique of A Commission," The Ideas of Henry Luce ed. John K. Jessup (New York: Atheneum, 1969) 61-69. 21 Hutchins, Robert M., "Moral Religion, and Higher

Education," Freedom, Education, and the Fund: Essays and

Addresses, 1946-1956 (New York: Meridian, 1956) 81-100. The essay is dated October 24, 1948. 22 Hutchins, "Moral Religion" 62.

23 Hutchins, "Freedom and the Responsibility of the

Press: 1948" 46-56.

Hutchins, Robert, "Freedom and the Responsibility of the Press: 1956," Freedom, Education, and the Fund: Essays and Addresses, 1946-1956 (New York: Meridian, 1956) 57-67. Hutchins delivered the first speech to the National

Conference of Editorial Writers and the second to the

American Society of Newspaper Editors. 24 In 1953, the British newspaper industry founded the

British council--in reaction to a report from the Royal

Commission on the Press, created in 1947. (The latter's report was similar to that of the Hutchins Commission.) The

British council comprised an equal number of members from 131 inside and outside the press. It takes complaints about the press, recommends standards, and otherwise monitors the press and laws affecting it.

The National News Council was organized in the United

States in 1973 but was dissolved after large newspapers, notably the New York Times, refused to participate. 25 Patner, Andrew, I. F. Stone: A Portrait (New York:

Pantheon, 1988) 55-58. 26 Patner 39-53. 27 Wolfe, Tom, "Why They Aren't Writing the Great

American Novel Anymore," Esquire December 1972: 152-158,

272; "Appendices to the Foregoing Work," Esquire December 1972: 159, 274, 276, 278, 280. 28 Wolfe, "Great American Novel" 157.

29 Wolfe, "Great American Novel" 157.

30 Wolfe, "Great American Novel" 157. 32 Wolfe, "Great American Novel" 277.

32 Wolfe, "Great American Novel" e"2.

34 Wolfe, "Great American Novel" 277. Wolfe, "Great American Novel" 277. 36 Wolfe, "Great American Novel" 157.

Wolfe, Tom, "The Me Decade and the Third Great

Awakening," The Purple Decades (1982; New York: Berkley,

1984) 274. Earlier versions of the article appeared in 1973 and 1976. 132

38 Robinson, L. W., ed., "The New Journalism: A Panel

Discussion with Harold Hayes, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and

Professor L. W. Robinson," The Reporter as Artist: A Look at

the New Journalism Controversy, ed. Ronald Weber (New York:

Hastings, 1974) 66-75. Originally published January 1970 in

Writer's Digest.

Wakefield, Dan, Returning: A Spiritual Journey (New

York: Doubleday, 1988) 158-159.

Morgan, Thomas B., interview, Weekend Edition, National Public Radio, July 16, 1989.

41 Barthelme, Donald, "Not-knowing," The Pushcart Prize

XI (1986; New York: Penguin, 1987) 24. Originally published

Fall 1985 in Georgia Review. 42 Moyers, Bill, "Vietnam: What is Left of Conscience,"

Saturday Review Feb. 13, 1971: 20.

43 Roberts, Tim, "TV series examines social role of

religion," Religious News Service [c. December 1987].

Roberts's article is a review of God and Politics and an interveiw with Moyers.

The Secret Government . . . The Constitution in Crisis, writer, ex. prod. Bill Moyers, Public Affairs

Television, Inc., PBS, Nov. 4, 1987.

Lippmann, Public Opinion 358. CHAPTER V

THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION AND MYTH

ON PERSONAL JOURNALISTS

As already seen, personal journalists doubted that objectivity is possible, but the best of them moved beyond mere disillusionment with objectivity. They understood that stepping out of a neutral, objective reporting role they incurred enormous personal moral responsibility. They asked what their responsibility should be to the subjects of their stories. And they sought new means to understand the events around them. The purpose of this chapter is to determine how their personal values influenced the journalists' epistemologies.

The political beliefs of Lippmann, Orwell, and Agee already have been mentioned. Briefly, they saw the incumbent power from a detached point. Though for a time

Lippmann had inside positions, he brought with him political experiences from outside the power structures. The remaining question then is, what from their religious backgrounds did the personal journalists with moral concern bring to their reporting? And if they had beliefs in common does that explain further the journalism they practiced?

133 134

Religious beliefs of personal journalists would become

important epistemologically, as Leo Rosten suggested in a 1937 doctoral thesis on the emergence of the Washington

correspondents. He concluded that complicated events

during the Depression necessitated a new journalist who

could intelligently interpret those events. The

jurisdiction of the government had overtaken economic and social areas hitherto thought out of bounds for the

government, Rosten wrote. To correct the nation's economic

problems, the Roosevelt administration had "assumed new

powers, invaded new fields, and challenged ancient

jurisdictions," Rosten wrote.2 "And in describing the

conduct and philosophy of the Roosevelt regime," he wrote,

"the Washington correspondents were forced to use new

perspectives and re-cast old conceptions."3

To test his hypothesis that the correspondents knew they were interpreting events, Rosten asked Washington

correspondents whether they agreed with the following statement about.objectivity:

It is almost impossible to be objective. You read

your paper, notice its editorials, get praised for some stories and criticized for others. You

'sense policy' and are psychologically driven to slant your stories accordingly.

Of the 70 who replied, 60 percent agreed that objectivity is 135 impossible. Another 5.6 percent said they were uncertain. Only 34.2 percent disagreed with the statement.4

Rosten saw that if correspondents doubted objectivity their personal values would become more important in their reporting. "Since absolute objectivity in journalism is an impossibility," Rosten wrote, "the social heritage, the

'professional reflexes,' the individual temperament, and the economic status of reporters assume a fundamental significance."5

Not surprisingly, Rosten discovered that the correspondents diverged from the public in political and religious attitudes. In both areas, the correspondents showed more independence than the average person. Asked their fathers' political affiliation, as an indication of the correspondents' formative influences, 72.7 percent said their fathers were either Democrats or Republicans, nearly evenly divided between the two. But another 13.6 percent of the fathers were Independent, and another 12.6 percent were

Liberal, Socialist, Progressive, Radical, Labor, or "no party."6 So more than one-fourth of the journalists had grown up in households with independent or liberal politics,

Rosten says. By comparison, he says, in the formative years of the correspondents only 2 percent of the nation's voters had chosen outside the Republican and Democratic parties.7

This same independent thinking expressed itself in religion. Though 96.6 percent of the correspondents had at 136 least some religious training, at the time of the questionnaire 64.4 percent either never or rarely attended church. Only 9.4 percent attended church regularly.8

Rosten concluded that journalism attracted reformers and iconoclasts. "The personalities who enter journalism," he wrote, "are often men who revolt against the authority symbols of their youth; newspaper work fosters iconoclasm, or buttresses it . .. "9

The Washington correspondents surveyed by Rosten were affiliated with either a newspaper or a news syndicate. The personal journalists in this study offered their opinions as individuals, who only affiliated with an organization for convenience.1 0 However, the same independence in politics and religion is seen in Lippmann, Orwell, Agee, and Moyers.

So what are the religious beliefs of Lippmann, Orwell,

Agee, and Moyers that Rosten foresaw would be important?

More to the point, how did personal values affect the journalists' epistemology? If they doubted the objectivity of facts, how did they perceive, arrange, and judge what happened around them?

Some evidence is found in what the personal journalists said about their work and in their work. Another good source is the journalists' studies outside journalism. Not surprising, all were well read in not just current events but philosophy, religion, psychology, political theory, etc.

These extracurricular studies not only broadened the 137

writers' knowledge but provided them with metaphors and analogies for journalism.

In the summer of 1912 Lippmann secluded himself in a

cabin in the Maine woods to complete a small theoretical

book on why politics sometimes seems irrational. Lippmann

began the book, which would become A Preface to Politics,

largely influenced by Graham Wallas's ideas. But in finding

terminology and models to demonstrate the irrational in

human nature, Lippmann was influenced by his companion in

the cabin. That companion was a friend from Harvard, Alfred

Booth Kuttner, who also was working on a book.' Around the

fire at night, biographer Steel writes, the two read to each

other from their works in progress. So it came that

Lippmann worked out his early theory alongside a friend

attempting a translation into English of Sigmund Freud's

The Interpretation of Dreams. 1

In October of that year Lippmann wrote Wallas:

Are you in your new book making much use of the

Freudian psychology? I have been studying it with

a great deal of enthusiasm for several months now,

and I feel about it as men might have felt about

"The Origin of Species." . . . The dream

interpretations, the book on wit, the esthetics,

the child psychology do for the first time in any

psychology I know furnish a picture of human 138

nature in the act, so to speak, of venting and expressing its character.12

For Lippmann and other thinkers, Freud helped to dispose of

the fallacy that a person is a completely rational creature,

that an individual by reason alone can understand and solve

all his problems. In place of this rational model Freud

offered a myth of the person who, by analyzing his dreams,

heroically conquers anxiety and understands his irrational

side. As Lippmann wrote Wallas, Freud provided a valuable

picture of myth making, of humanity's expressing its character.

Organized religion had never been important to

Lippmann, born into a wealthy Jewish family in an upper-

middle-class New York neighborhood. Then cosmopolitan Jews

found more in common with Protestant and Catholic society

than with the Jewish immigrants teeming into the poorer

sections of inner cities. Part of it was also the desire to

discretely assimilate.1 3 When Lippmann entered Harvard, the

university still had- quotas for Jews. Also, Judaism did not yet offer much intellectual stimulation outside Rabbinic

instruction. Jewish thinkers could not yet discourse on Zionism or the state of Israel.

Religion has given many, even nonbelievers, an ideal of how people can get along with one another. Lippmann evolved a theistic belief during his life. Seeing two world wars compelled him to believe people have a fallen nature. But 139 reason was still paramount for Lippmann. By reason people could overcome their base instincts, he hoped. The chief value of religion, for Lippmann, was to sustain a moral education in society.14 (Personally, Lippmann considered converting to Catholicism.)15

Religion was relevant to Lippmann to the extent that religion provides myth, that is, an interpretation into concrete language of the spiritual or abstract. In

A Preface to Morals the nonbeliever Lippmann criticizes not the conservative clergy for their dogma but the liberal theologians for the subtle threat of their Modernism. In trying to make religion relevant, the latter corroded religious faith. "For the modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere," Lippmann wrote. 16 As noted already, Lippmann concluded that science and Modernism had destroyed orthodoxy, but people should purposely acquire a new attitude that is humanistic yet spiritual in attitude toward the phenomena around them.

Lippmann would grow less dependent on psychoanalysis and more so on religion for models. The value of religion as myth for Lippmann reaches fruition in Essays in the

Public Philo in 1955. The theme of the book is reconciliation or accommodation. How to reconcile extremes in plurality in a democratic society? How to reconcile uneducated, emotional public opinion with the demands on the 140

average person to make good decisions in a democratic

society? An implied question is how can intellectuals such

as Lippmann "make concrete and real [for the public) what is abstract and immaterial?"17

The answer, Lippmann concluded, lies in "the language

of accommodation."18 Philosophers and theologians alike

translate the ethereal into the tangible by seizing on the

allegory in myth, he says. Using the devil as an example,

Lippmann says it makes no difference whether the devil is a personified apostate spirit or a representation of the

apostasy that is in every human. What is important,

Lippmann says, is whether a myth can affect and accommodate

disparate persons in a pluralistic society.

As in 1929 he had charged liberal theologians with

corrupting the public, so in 1955 Lippmann accuses the

"death of God"1 9 philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre of a

dangerous influence. Lippmann does not criticize Sartre for

doing away with an anthropomorphic God. Rather he

criticizes Sartre for disposing of values people hold in

common, for calling on each individual to reinvent his or her own values. Lippmann writes:

With this, Sartre has done away not only with God

the Father but with the recognition that beyond

our private worlds there is a public world to

which we belong. If what is good, what is right,

what is true, is only what the individual 141

"chooses" to "invent," then we are outside the

traditions of civility.2 0

Succinctly, Sartre, in overthrowing collective myth and moral authority, plunders the public philosophy, Lippmann says.

At first glance, Orwell would seem the least receptive to religion and myth. Like Lippmann, he came of age in a society where intellectuals sublimated their religious backgrounds or lightly disposed of them. Orwell, the young

Eric Blair, grandson of a vicar, was confirmed into the

Church of England that he would call "cold" and "moribund."

When he was 15, Orwell sent a poem titled "The Pagan" to a friend at the University of Oxford as a show of their mutual resolve to remain courageously independent of false religion.2 1

Yet after this early period of challenging unthinking ritual in the church, Orwell softened his attitude. While teaching in Middlesex from 1932 to 1933, Orwell served

Communion twice a week at the local church and on several occasions helped -the curate administer last rites to the 22 dying. He never forgave the Catholic church for its collusion with Franco in Spain, but he came to take a sympathetic view toward the Anglican church, which he felt at least tried to serve people. 2 3

Orwell has left some clues to his religious beliefs in an early novel, The Clergyman's Daughter, written the year 142

after he left his teaching position in Middlesex. Taking

communion one day, the rector's daughter feels disgust for

one of the parishioners and has her faith shaken. Soon

afterward, by some rather coincidental plot devices, she

suffers amnesia. As Orwell had, she falls in with the poor

and dispossessed. Gradually she regains her memory (as

Blair re-created himself as Orwell?) and then reflects on

faith. She realizes that nothing but faith can provide

meaning for her life. She will return to her life of

service at the rectory. But her faith will come from her actions, not empty ritual. Orwell writes:

She did not reflect, consciously, that the

solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the

fact that there was no solution; that if one gets

on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate

purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that

faith and no faith are very much the same provided

that one is doing what is customary, useful and acceptable. She could not formulate these

thoughts as yet, she could only live them.2 4

Another clue to Orwell's view of religion is found in his socialism and his empathy. The church, used wrongly, postpones social improvements in this life, he felt. Seen correctly, it is a model of the empathy to be felt for others. As noted, in the opening and closing pages of

Homage to Catalonia Orwell celebrates the unspoken, 143 unformulated, metaphysical exchange possible between strangers. Orwell rejected organized religion but wanted to retain a religious attitude. In 1945 he wrote:

The only easy way out is that of the religious

believer, who regards this life merely as a

preparation for the next. But few thinking people

now believe in life after death . . . The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude

while accepting death as final.2 5

A religious sensibility also is found in Agee's attitude toward reporting events around him. Like Lippmann, Agee finds metaphors in religion and myth. Let Us Now

Praise Famous Men owes much to the Episcopal liturgy in The

Book of Common Prayer as well as to the style of the King

James Bible. In the Episcopal liturgy, in which he was reared, Agee learned a fusion of language, icon, and deed that is replicated in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Like the liturgy, Agee's book is confessional, too. The subject is not just the people he observes. Agee also writes about his ability, sometimes inability, to communicate with these people and to then communicate their lives to readers.

Also like Lippmann, Agee was influenced by psychological analysis. The year before staying with the Alabama 'families, Agee had read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams plus Frances Wickes's The Inner World of

Childhood,2 6 and he had kept notebooks of his dreams for 144

awhile. He also had studied Marcel Proust's2 7 and James

Joyce's2 8 use of the subconscious in their writings. From

his interests in the psychological subconscious and in the

self-realization possible in religion, Agee would try to

evoke the intrinsic inner meaning of the people's hard work

and the cumulative meaning of their few clothes and possessions.

Agee combines Freudian analysis with the liturgy in the

opening, dreamlike description of the members of the tenant

family asleep in their house at night. He takes an analogy

from the Eucharist (where the worshiper drinks from the

chalice "the blood of Christ, the cup of Salvation" and in

the wafer partakes of "the body of Christ, the Bread of

Heaven"). There the worshiper shares Christ's suffering and feels his presence. Agee wants the reader to compare the

suffering of the family, forsaken by the powers that be, to

Christ's suffering. So Agee writes that here in the house

"the bone pine hung on its nails like an abandoned

Christ."2 9 As if reciting a liturgy, Agee describes "bone and bone, blood and blood, life and life disjointed and

abandoned .. "30

Later Agee describes as an altar, the fireplace mantle where Mrs. Gudger has pinned "white tissue pattern-paper" along the edges "as her last effort to make this house

3 1 pretty." And he describes a dresser, whose drawers hold family memorabilia, as a tabernacle,32 an allusion to the 145

place where the Hebrews held the reminders of their past and their covenant with God.

Mark A. Doty theorizes that Agee struggled all his life

to reconcile the physical and religious worlds--his loud,

gregarious, hard-living, hard-drinking father, who died when

the boy was six, with his religious mother who came from a

family of artists.3 3 This struggle is evident in Let Us Now

Praise Famous Men, where at times Agee places sexual imagery alongside religious imagery.

The philologist Owen Barfield has written of this

desire to reconcile the two sides of a person or society,

the side that is reflective qr spiritual with the side that

is physical or material. By demonstrating changes in

language, Barfield shows how consciousness has changed over

the centuries--from people's selfless participation with

nature, to people's growing self-consciousness, then the hubris of the scientific revolution where nature became

"objects" for study, and, finally, alienation from nature,34

Why is this important to the journalism studied here? Barfield shows how objectivity as a philosophy (objectivism) was necessary to support the current Reality Principle

(Barfield borrows the phrase from Theodore Roszak). If current thought is static, people do not have to consider that consciousness has changed over time and that a metaphysical participation with nature and with others once existed and may be possible again.3 5 146

Conversely, those who reject static objectivism must

look elsewhere for an epistemology. Barfield believes that

in any generation some thinkers and writers try to recapture

the original metaphysical attitude. He sees a desire for

reconciliation, for example, in Romantic poets such as

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, more currently, in human

potential movements.36 For Barfield, humanity's recon-

ciliation with nature and with each other was made possible

in religion, specifically in Christ's incarnation.3 7 A

religious or metaphysical attitude provides the necessary, new epistemology.

Mitchell Stephens in a study of the evolution of news

demonstrates the trade-offs that "progress" brought. News,

as it had to be disseminated farther and quicker, changed

from personal news, often with religious meaning, delivered

by runners, to news with supposedly dispassionate

objectivity, delivered mechanically:

The effort modern reporters make to reach,

somewhat clumsily, for the unreachable ideal of

objectivity not only involves them in something of

a sham but forces them to surrender what can be a powerful weapon in the search for understanding-- an above-board point of view.38

It is not odd that personal journalists would want to return

to news with intrinsic meaning, what Coleridge had sought in his poetry. 147

Before looking at Moyers's religious beliefs, what can

be said collectively about Lippmann, Orwell, and Agee? Do

they have any beliefs in common? Surprisingly, yes. Though

Lippmann and Orwell rejected creeds, and Agee struggled with

his physical and religious selves, all wanted a religious

attitude in their work. And what is common to each

religious attitude is a desire for reconciliation. That is

the epistemology their' religious attitude offers. It lets

them see the division in subjects and events plus the possibilities for reconciliation.

Lippmann wanted moral authority and myth that could

unite disparate people. Orwell and Agee wrote about the

unspoken understanding possible among strangers. For Orwell, democratic socialism or a life of service might

reconcile people in a "brotherhood of man." Agee not only

wanted to write how the Alabama families shared Christ's

suffering, but he wanted to share that suffering himself.

This journalism of reconciliation that carries with it

a religious attitude toward subjects and events could be

called the unfinished business of the Hutchins Commission.

Reconciliation is an ideal in Freedom of the Press, the supplementary book intended to flesh out the Hutchins

Commission's report. Commission member William E. Hocking, a philosopher of religion, was primary author.3 9 Writing closely on the end of what was seen as the war against fascism, Hocking cautioned that a common ethos, "standards 148

which unite men," might no longer provide the world with a

"unity of purpose." Instead, Hocking warned, the will of a

dictator or a loud and active minority might provide "unity of purpose."

As a philosopher, Hocking had said as early as 1912

that people to have meaning cannot be content to just think,

as Rene Descartes formulated. Rather, Hocking said, people must think of something, on an object of common concern.4 0

In Freedom of the Press he repeated this idea:

It is a part of the groping state of thought in our time that there are cries for unity, movements

for unity, demands for world unification, with a

complete ignoring of the only ground upon which a

spiritual being can come into unison with any

other. What is that ground? A common object of

thought and regard, an object which, being

different from both minds and yet common to both,

can give rules to both, as, governed by the same

target, the shots of two marksmen converge and may

actually meet. Such objects are the standards of

right thinking, the requirement of justice, the firm code of an honest beauty.4 1

Through the commission Hocking would apply this idea to the press. By appealing to both "thought" and "regard,"

Hocking explained, he meant that "the meeting of minds is not purely intellectual." Just as necessary, he said, is "a 149 common object of devotion."42 We are not just intellectual but are also spiritual beings, he said. By "thought" we know truth as an object the intellect can grasp, and by

"regard" we know truth as a process like religious devotion.

There is no inconsistency. Hocking believed, as did fellow Commission member Reinhold Neibuhr and journalist

Lippmann, that the unfathomable is fathomable through the historical process. And he believed, as did Agee, that the here and now is raised to its intrinsic meaning through religious-like devotion.

The three major functions of the press, Hocking said, are to offer publicity; subsequently, to umpire competing ideas; and, finally, to give society an emotional interpretation. Hocking gave most attention to the latter.

Like Lippmann, he worried that the press reduces events to superficial entertainment and drama. He saw the inconsistency between the dramatized but formulized news on the front page and the noble ideas on the editorial page.43

"The press, whose emotional strategy must veer toward the noncommittal," he wrote, "tends to avert itself from the 44 existence of moral concern." This lazy attitude toward reporting events, he said:

Is a practice of emotional untruth. It robs the event of its genuine depth. It deprives the

reader of contact with his own civilization; for 150

civilization is the just emotional appraisal of event.4 5

Hocking is not alone in warning that "objectivity" might mean journalism becomes dehumanized and events are robbed of their intrinsic meaning. Dennis Chase describes

"the aphilosophy of journalism."4 6 Most of the time, he says, journalists act as if philosophy does not exist. Thus journalists imply that no moral context or value system exists, Chase says. And journalists and readers, he warns, are left with only pragmatism and feeble means to evaluate events.

No wonder then that at a time of impersonal science personal journalism offers something more satisfying than objective journalism. Personal journalists can bridge the gulf between the so-called objective--the "rational" self-- and the spiritual or "irrational" self they know exists.

What has been shown to this point? Lippmann, Orwell, and Agee had in common a religious attitude and a desire for reconciliation, and thinkers such as Hocking proposed a corresponding model of journalism. But if the previous statements are valid, new questions present themselves.

Does a model of a journalism of reconciliation still exist today? Or was it simply a product of political and historiographical uprooting in the 1920s and 1930s?

If it is still valid, then an example might exist today of a journalist working in the model. And if an example 151 exists what would the journalist have in common with the model left by others?

Hypothesizing how this model of a journalism of reconciliation would work today is not necessary. An example is found in the work of Bill Moyers, who in common with those before him recognizes personal culpability, desires reconciliation, and respects the importance of myth and language in communicating with others.

Like Orwell and Agee, Moyers derives much of the moral strength of his journalism by admitting his own culpability.

In "An Essay on Watergate" in 1973 he admitted that in his

East Texas childhood he, too, made icons of the nation's government:

Like so many of my peers, I had, of course, come out of school with a one-sided view of American

history, and these splendid monuments and scenes

merely confirmed the altruism we had been taught

to believe was the essence of the American

experience. To this day, I remember' one teacher

insisting, and I'm quoting him, that "In the five

thousand years .of the human race, there has never

been a more principled, moral or virtuous nation than the United States of America." He believed

it, and we believed him. The books and legends

told a romantic tale of selfless people in the

service of God and nation. Where I grew up, the 152

Almighty and Uncle Sam were inseparable, and the

preacher on Sunday seldom failed to remind us that we Americans were the Chosen People--because we deserved to be.4 7

In 1987 Moyers again asked how members of an administration could rationalize lying to the public. This time it was about a secret war in Central America. Again

Moyers, a former press secretary to President Johnson, returned to personal responsibility, and he was not above admitting his culpability:

Once I wrote a speech for LBJ which implied a

striking coincidence between the President's wish

and God's will. A wise older man from my past

called me to gently upbraid me. He reminded me

that it's very important how we talk about God,

because there can be disastrous consequences to what we say.4 8

Moyers understands that any morality in institutions is posited in the individuals within those institutions.

Talking about his work, Moyers says: "Essentially I try to satisfy the critic within myself as to the soundness, appropriateness, and truthfulness (its correspondence to the reality disclosed in the evidence) of what I am producing or saying."49

How individuals react to the limitations of their institutions is a major theme for Moyers. Since the late 153

1960s people in this country have seen their governmental

institutions unravel, he has said.50 In his journalism

Moyers asks: How then is morality represented in the

framework of government, churches and other bodies whose social aim is order and improvement? And how have

individuals worked within or without those institutions?

"An Essay on Watergate" was a powerful commentary on

the Nixon administration's actions because Moyers did not

limit himself to the events. He asked whether the events

signaled a frustration some had with the democratic process,

whether anti-war protesters or officials who were secretly planning bombings. Moyers asked:

Was Watergate a string of deplorable incidents by

a handful of men or an attitude toward power and

law that could recur? Were the men linked to it acting out of character with the times or

responding to something intrinsic in American life today?5 1

Among journalists working in this country today, Moyers

perhaps is the journalist best prepared to tackle moral

questions. He divided his academic studies between

journalism and moral issues. After finishing a journalism degree, he went abroad a year to study ecclesiastical history, then returned and completed a divinity degree (and

was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister), and planned to

teach Christian ethics at a university. But he was picked 154 for Senator Johnson's campaign. Later Moyers was deputy director of the Peace Corps, then an aide to President

Johnson, and finally press secretary.

In his own career Moyers has tried to find how the individual can work within institutions for social improvement. He sought the Peace Corps job over'a position with Johnson, then vice president. His resignation from

President Johnson's administration was triggered in part by his estrangement from the administration. He felt his influence waning and was troubled over the war in Vietnam and what he saw as the too-slow pace of domestic social programs.52 Subsequently, as Newsday publisher, Moyers increased the investigative reporting and gained awards for the newspaper but fell out of favor with the politically conservative owner. The logical next step in Moyers's theoretical and professional quests was his work as a personal journalist examining institutions' and individuals' effect for change.

In fall 1988, as an alternative to the presidential campaign rhetoric Moyers offered "World of Ideas," 50 half- hour interviews with filmmakers, writers, sociologists, historians, and other thinkers. Common to the people interviewed was a concern with where society is headed. The effect, said a New York Times writer, was a "collective moral appraisal" of the nation.5 3 155

Moyers explained to a television columnist, "The

pressure to obfuscate, to trivialize, to minimize and avoid

the life-and-death ethical, moral, legal and medical issues

we face . . . is costing us greatly in terms of our ability to function as a society.

"So I thought, modestly, we would attempt to put people

up there who've been thinking about these matters all their

lives, but are never really consulted about television when

it comes to talking about the issues." 5 4

The people to whom Moyers gives most attention not only

have thought about these matters all their lives, but they

are interested in how to involve others in moral

consideration. Two of his longest series of interviews were

with Mortimer Adler about "great ideas" and self-education, and with the late Joseph Campbell about myth and how people can see meaning in birth, living, and death.

One person Moyers devoted a two-hour interview to, in

1981, was Myles Horton, director of Highlander Center

(formerly Highland Folk School), now outside Knoxville,

Tennessee. Horton understands his life's calling is to help people educate and empower themselves. As a young

seminarian, Horton was attracted to a theoretical Christian

socialism. But he believed that he must get people to think

through injustice with their own metaphors. So he studied

the Danish folk school system and returned to Tennessee to

W.- -- 7- , - - %,- -. , I " GalwWWWWWWO". W, , , , " , 156 found a folk school that would train union organizers and, later, freedom-school teachers and civil-rights workers.55

Moyers begins the interview by asking Horton why he thinks he has upset people such as a Georgia governor and

Tennessee state officials. Horton replies that it is by empowering people, by helping "people grow and be creative, and fulfill themselves as people." 5 6 Horton believes disenfranchised people too often waste time and lives fighting among themselves. Influenced by his religious beliefs and his educational and political theories, Horton seeks reconciliation between peoples.

At one point Moyers asks Horton to tell a story about a farmers' union workshop. Some white farmers warn Horton that black people are walking toward the workshop, and the white farmers ask Horton whether the black people should be there. Horton suggests the white farmers ask the blacks if they are farmers, which the white farmers do:

I said, what'd they say--do they belong here, are

they farmers? The fellow goes, Yeah, and I said, Good, I'm relieved, and I said, I thought we were

going to have to send them away. And I just

turned and walked off. . . . I just left that with

them. And then they had to internalize that, you see, and deal with it. 57

Moyers presses Horton as to the meaning of the story, a meaning -Moyers already knows. Horton explains: 157

Well, they couldn't deal with the problem I posed

for them, people not being welcome if they were

farmers, not having a right if they were farmers.

I put them in a different category. They weren't

blacks, they were farmers. We do that all the

time, you help people perceive things differently.

You enable them to break out of their encrustation

of thinking and perceive things a different way.5 8

Increasingly, Moyers, too, is interested that his audience experience the process of moral consideration together. People should be able to perceive hidden meanings and see the other side. In 1970, after leaving Newsday, where he was publisher three years, Moyers traveled the country. In his travels he met not just scholars but also

"ordinary" people, and he wrote a book from the conversations and his observations.5 9 In 1987, before writing the conclusion of a study of churches' support of different sides in Central America, Moyers said, "I don't want to indict either side. At the same time, I don't want to be a foil. I think what I am going to say is that I just wish each could cross the lines and look through the other's eyes."60 Like the personal journalists before him, Moyers realizes that to bring people to talk together he must also elucidate myth and language. He began the "World of Ideas" series talking with an image maker. But the stage today 158 has shifted somewhat from the philosophers and theologians to whom Lippmann looked for myth and the government propagandists of which Orwell warned. Moyers introduced

David Puttman, a British film producer who most recently had finished an unhappy year in Hollywood as chairman of

Columbia Pictures.

In introducing Puttman, Moyers said:

The transition from things imagined to things real

is a very easy one, and men no less than children

will suit action to fancy. . . . In the age of the visual image, popular culture can make attractive

the vice or virtue that politics then imitates.

. . . I decided to begin this series of

discussions on values and beliefs, ideas and

issues by talking to somebody who knows firsthand how movies can shape imagination and culture.6 1

Puttman has tried to make films that are at once entertaining and with a moral core. "Chariots of Fire". is about the friendship between two British Olympians, one

Christian and the other Jewish. "The Killing Fields" is about a journalist's responsibility to a Cambodian assistant left behind after the Vietnam war. "The Mission" is about

Jesuit priests who must decide whether to take up arms in a

Central American country. Moyers asks Puttman whether people should expect moral instruction when attending a film, and Puttman replies: 159

I've never accepted that there is any dichotomy at

all between entertaining you, Bill Moyers, and

also dealing in an issue, addressing you with 'an

issue. I don't think there's any dichotomy at

all, and I think it's the job of the responsible

filmmaker--or of the good filmmaker, forget "responsible"--to deal in both.6 2

That opening program was a contrast with the final days

in office of a president who came from Hollywood and a

political campaign marked by images--flags, the pledge of allegiance, references to a Clint Eastwood film, television

commercials that got more coverage than candidates' records

as public servants, the introduction of a candidate by his

actress cousin, and whistle stops that have become little

more than backdrops for television sound bites. The program

with Puttman showed how too few image makers feel a

responsibility for what they communicate. And it warned

viewers to not only be wise to ideas communicated but to the

imagery at work.

"All communicators today in any field must be enter-

tainers to a degree, and true intellectuals are reluctant to

compete on those terms," Moyers told a New York Times writer.6 3 Moyers went on to explain why many intellectuals

cannot communicate their ideas through the media. He said:

The media don't want them anyway unless they can

speak in 30-second sound bites or two-minute or

,L W-tv- -,, , - 4" , " , A, -, , A , 440'" B - - 1,; 19- I 11 " , ,-. , ", I 160

five-minute segments on one of the talk shows, or

debate in strict oppositional format, a liberal on

one side and a conservative on the other, which is

a caricature itself of debate. So, many

intellectuals find it distasteful or dishonest to

perform under a label that has been put on them by the media.6 4

In this age of celebrity journalists, Moyers has been

almost uniquely reticent to comment on his work, perhaps

wanting to protect its spirit. "When the runner finishes the

race is the time to study the films and examine the

components of the process by which he crossed the distance,"

Moyers has said. "On the track he should just run as

naturally as possible without looking at himself as if he were in the stands." 6 5

However, Moyers's occasional comments and the body of his work show him in the lineage of personal journalists

from Lippmann to Orwell to Agee. Like them (and theore-

ticians such as Hutchins and Hocking), Moyers does not

believe personal journalism means abandoning truth. Rather, it means seeing journalism as a process that involves moral

discussion together. In summing up "World of Ideas," Moyers

said society needs to "recover a sense of public and private morality.,66

From the personal journalists before him Moyers has inherited a sense of moral concern and a respect for 161 communicating to others. "I've realized that language is all you and I have to describe reality," Moyers said on that last program. "It's the medium in which citizens like you and me discuss commonplace problems and decide together what to do about them.

Echoing Orwell, Moyers continued, "When words become inaccurate and deceptive they poison our comprehension, we distort the truth until we're no longer in touch with reality. That way, it seems, lies ruin." 6 7

No doubt Moyers would agree with Lippmann that a public philosophy is desirable. But Moyers does not want to create myth for the public. Rather, he wants to help the audience connect with myth. A person's life becomes process-centered by the person's experiencing consciousness in action. In

"Facing Evil" in 1988, for example, Moyers asked his audience to do just that, to face evil, to know evil exists, and to see how some people chose between right and wrong.

That same year in six hours of televised interviews with Campbell, Moyers asked viewers to think about values and beliefs handed down in myth. In an interview Moyers explained, "Nobody believes nothing, everybody believes something. And if you go inside us we find the remnants of these old stories, the same way as if you're digging in archeological expeditions you find chards and fragments of pottery.,68 162

Moyers, like Hutchins and Hocking, and the personal journalists before him, understands that people do not find understanding in a code but in a process. "Moral absolutism" worried him, he told the New York Herald Tribune in 1964. "Those that peddle this line, under whatever label, subvert the very thing they want to obtain," he said then.69

In 1987, Moyers spoke about the faith he learned as a boy in a Southern Baptist church in East Texas:

Everything I first learned about faith and democracy I learned from this congregation. I

didn't learn a creed from these people; there was

no creed and no coercion. They practiced the

priesthood of the believer: every Christian is

competent to deal directly with God, no human

being and no institution comes between you.

They taught me to read the Bible for myself. It was central to faith, our source of devotional

strength and moral guidance. The important thing

was my own experience with the Bible; not what

anyone said about the Bible, but what the Bible

said to me.7 0

Moyers worried about what was happening to that faith--that a faction of fundamentalists in the denomination wanted to establish a creed, "to make one view of the Bible--their view--the test of religious and political truth."7 1 163

About the same time, Moyers expressed some of these concerns about religion and creed to Campbell. Moyers suggested to Campbell:

Religion begins with the sense of wonder and awe

and the attempt to tell stories that will connect

to God. Then it becomes a set of theological

works in which everything is reduced to a code, to

a creed.7 2

Thus Moyers comes full circle. For people to be reconciled with one another and with God, or myth, they cannot be content with creeds, he says. They must participate in a process in which each person experiences consciousness and self-analysis.

This also is the conclusion of "World of Ideas." But if the thinking people on "World of Ideas" realize their responsibility to discuss solutions together, the mass media still is satisfied with stereotypes, Moyers laments.

Echoing Hocking's concerns, Moyers concludes:

Our big story isn't being heard. People are

hungry to talk about our common destiny, but

there's not much opportunity to connect. The mass

media seems especially intolerant of ideas, when in fact they could bring our tribe together around

the national campfire.73

Moyers, through television's penetration, would have moral discussion be commonplace. Taken up by more 164 journalists, this journalistic tradition could beget the moral discussion that would connect people.

I - , W-- wowo*. 165

NOTES 1 Rosten, Leo C., The Washington Correspondents (New

York: Harcourt, 1937). 2 Rosten 265.

3 Rosten 265.

4 Rosten 351.

5 Rosten 149-150. 6 Rosten 157-158, 331.

Rosten 158. 8 Rosten 167-168, 329-330.

9 Rosten 168. 10 An exception might be Bill Moyers's relationship with the Public Broadcasting Service.

Steel 45-46. In 1913 an English translation by

A. A. Brill of The Interpretation of Dreams was published. 12 Blum 13. 13 Steel 6-9.

14 Charles Wellborn traced Lippmann's philosophical and religious beliefs with the help of Lippmann:

Wellborn, Charles, Twentieth Century Pilgrimage: Walter

Li pmann and the Public Philosoph (Baton Rouge, LA State

UP, 1968).

In a speech to Catholic philosophers, Lippmann called for a discipline that is both rational and transcending of humans' base instincts: 166

Lippmann, Walter, "Man's Image of Man: An Address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association," Commonweal

Feb. 13, 1942: 406-409. 15 Steel 491-492.

16 Lippmann, Walter, A Preface to Morals (New York:

Macmillan, 1929) 9. 17 Lippmann, Public Philosoh 131.

18 Lippmann, Public Philosophy 131.

19 Lippmann, Public Philosophy 134.

20 Lippmann, Public Philosophy 134. 21 Crick 56-57.

22 Crick 141-142.

23 In his will Orwell requested his body "shall be buried (not cremated) [Orwell's parentheses] according to the rites of the Church of England in the nearest convenient cemetery (church yard]." 24 Orwell, George, A Clergyman's Daughter (New York:

Harcourt, 1935) 318-319.

25 Orwell, George, "Arthur Koestler," As I Please,

1943-1945 243-244, vol. 3 of The Collected Essays,

Journalism and Letters of George Orwell ed. Sonia Orwell and

Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, 1968). 26 Bergreen 152-153.

27 Bergreen 92, 135. 28 Bergreen 148-149.

29 Agee and Evans, Famous Men 19. 167

30 Agee and Evans, Famous Men 19-20. 31 Agee and Evans, Famous Men 163-165.

32 Agee and Evans, Famous Men 165-169.

Doty, Mark A., Tell Me Who I Am: James Agee's Search for Selfhood (Baton Rouge: LA State UP, 1981) 1-10, 47-48,

51-52, 54.

Barfield, Owen, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt, 1957).

Barfield, Owen, "The Coming Trauma of Materialism,"

The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays (Middletown:

Wesleyan, 1977) 187-200. 36 Barfield, Owen, Romanticism Comes of Age, rev. ed

(1944; Middletown: Wesleyan, 1966).

Barfield, Owen, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown:

Wesleyan, 1971).

Barfield, Saving the Appearances 167-186. 38 Stephens, Mitchell, A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite (New York: Viking, 1988) 268.

39 Other commission members added their comments as footnotes. 40 Hocking, William E., The Meaning of God in Human

Experience (New Haven: Yale UP, 1912). 41 Hocking, William E., Freedom of the Press: A

Framework of Principle, a report from the Commission on

Freedom of the Press (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1947) 9. 42 Hocking, Freedom 19-20. 168

43Hocking, Freedom 16 Hocking, Freedom 45. Hocking, Freedom 45. 46 Chase, Dennis J., "The Aphilosophy of Journalism,"

Quill 59.9 (September 1971) 15-17. "Essay on Watergate," Bill Moyers' Journal, ts. of

television program, writer Bill Moyers, Educational

Broadcasting Corp., Oct. 31, 1973, p. 1. 48 "The Secret Government . . . The Constitution in

Crisis," Bill Moyers Special Report, ts. of television

program, writer and exec. ed. Bill Moyers, PBS, Nov. 4, 1987, p. 12.

49 Moyers, Bill, letter to the author, Feb. 17, 1988. 50 "Our Times," Bill Moyers' Journal, ts. of television

program, ex. ed. Bill Moyers, PBS, Aug. 14, 1980, updated

version of original broadcast Jan 31, 1980.

"Vietnam Remembered," Bill Moyers Journal, ts. of

television program, ex. ed. Bill Moyers, PBS, Sept. 4, 1980, updated version of original broadcast March 20, 1980. 51 "Essay on Watergate" 1. 52 "Bill Moyers," Current Biography 275-276.

Bernstein, Richard, "Moyers Designs A Talk Show for Thinkers," New York Times Sept. 11, 1988: 32.

54 Sharbutt, Jay, "Bill Moyers' New 'World of Ideas' Debuts on Monday," Los Angeles Times Sept. 9, 1988: VI/18. 169

Adams, Frank with Myles Horton, Unearthing Seeds of

Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Winston-Salem: Blair, 1975).

The work of Zilphia Horton, Myles's wife, perhaps is better known. She and Pete Seeger modified the words and

tune to a labor song, "We Shall Not Be Moved," to create "We Shall Overcome." 56 "The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly, Part I and

Part II," Bill Moyers' Journal, ts. of television program,

exec. ed. Bill Moyers, PBS, June 5, 1981, p. 1. 57"The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly" 20. 58 "The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly" 21.

Moyers, Bill, Listening to America: A Traveler

Rediscovers His Country (New York: Delta, 1971).. 60 Roberts. 61 "David Puttnam - Part I," The World of Ideas with

Bill ex. ed. Bill Moyers, PBS, Sept. 12, 1988. 62 "Puttnam."

63 Bernstein 33. 64 Bernstein 33. 65 Moyers, Bill, letter to the author, Feb. 17, 1988. 66 "Summing Up," World of Ideas with Bill Moyers, ex.

ed. Bill Moyers, PBS, KERA, Dallas, Nov. 18, 1988. 67 "Summing Up." 68 Moyers, Bill, interview, Good Morning America,

ABC-TV, May 25, 1988.

mM------170

69 Haddad, William, "Mr. Johnson's Right Arm," New York Herald-Tribune Jan. 4, 1964: 10. 70 "The Battle for the Bible," God and Politics, ts. of television program, ex. ed. Bill Moyers, PBS, Dec. 16, 1987, p. 2.

71 "The Battle for the Bible." 72 Campbell, Joseph with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988) 141. The book is edited from transcipts of the six-part series that appeared on PBS the same year.

"Summing Up." CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSIONS

A brief survey such as this can only suggest that a

tradition exists and, then, invite further study and

comment. In this case, the problem of the study was to

identify and describe a body of personal journalists who

have a moral concern about their subjects. Furthermore,

according to the hypothesis, those journalists had some

values in common so that a tradition in journalism exists.

But beyond this, some answers to specific questions were

sought. The study revealed these answers to those questions:

1. Philosophical roots exist for a personal journalism with moral concern. The dissatisfaction that twentieth

century journalists felt toward "straight" news stories was not merely something personal. Journalists' doubts about objectivity reflected the current philosophical and historiographical ideas. Thinkers such as Santayana,

Wallas, Lovejoy, and Beard saw that implicit in objectivism is the idea that thought has remained in stasis. And they saw that such a philosophy not only precludes personal desires or needs, but also leads people to accept without

171 172 question the idea of a continuously improving industrial society.

In short, an antimodernist impulse brought a crisis in cultural authority. Journalists such as Lippmann wanted to invoke in readers a critical thinking about events around them and the official explanations for those events. In 1922 Lippmann encouraged readers to question not only the official opinions but the unspoken premises. "For while men are willing to admit that there are two sides to a

'question,' they do not believe that there are two sides to what they regard as a 'fact,'" Lippmann said. "And they never do believe it until after long critical education, they are fully conscious of how second-hand and subjective is their apprehension of their social data."1

2. Three major historical and political events in the twentieth century furthered doubts about objectivity and were roots for a personal journalism with moral concern: the

First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Great

Depression. Those two wars and that global economic crisis tried the public faith in authority and official opinion.

As Compton McKenzie wrote of literature and the First World

War, the events did not so much precipitate different journalism as they unsettled the general public which, then, was more receptive to journalists' involvement with their subjects and journalists' experimental writing. 173

3. However, the best of the personal journalism

extended beyond its historical and political circumstances.

Though the personal journalists no longer believed in the

infallibility of objectivity, they still keenly felt a moral

responsibility to convey truth. Lippmann asked how an

individual can acquire the information necessary to make

sound decisions, or, if that is not possible, who should

have access to the information. Orwell was concerned with

the complicity of language and propaganda in the political

control of people. Agee felt, nearly tortuously, the

responsibility to communicate his subjects' lives.

4. Personal journalism with moral concern, then, goes

beyond investigative journalism and advocacy journalism. It

does not inherently preclude either. Indeed, sometimes the

sides are so clearly delineated that the partisan position

seems necessary, as it seemed for Lippmann in the First

World War, or maybe for Moyers briefly in the Great Society

program. But the journalists studied here ultimately were not as interested in prescribing actions for their audiences

as in helping their audiences become morally concerned.

Each asked how writers should communicate with their subjects and audiences. For Orwell, it was by becoming one of the people and adhering to simple truth. Part of the moral core in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is Agee's growing concern that he cannot transcend his subects' lives, which he feels responsible to communicate.

MO. 174

Of journalists today, Moyers best represents this

tradition of personal journalism with moral concern. He

also chose to live with his subject. But his subject is a

large one--moral consideration. The first part of his

career, in politics, put him in touch with the country's

more ambitious ethical considerations during that time. Now

in his journalism, Moyers asks how individuals can work within'and without institutions for social improvement.

Increasingly, he also asks how people can experience the process of moral consideration together.

5. The influences of religion and myth on personal

journalists were identified in the study as follows: each of the journalists studied here understood that collective myth shapes the way people perceive events. This realization has greatly benefited the journalists. They do not report on an isolated people in an isolated event. Rather, they seek to understand the process at work. They try to get to the moral core of an event.

This sensibility, which is essentially a matter of faith, provided an epistemology for the personal journalists- who already had rejected objectivism. It let them see the division in subjects and events plus the possibilities for reconciliation. On one hand, the journalists point with disdain when myth is used to further a political aim.

Lippmann pointed out the use of stereotypes; Orwell, propaganda, from whichever side; Agee, the commercialization 175

of documentary writing and photography; and Moyers, meciia imagery at work.

On the other hand, they are interested in

reconciliation for their subjects and audiences. Lippmann

wanted moral authority and. myth that could unite disparate

people. Orwell and Agee wrote about the unspoken

understanding possible among strangers. Through television,

Moyers would bring to the camera people who are conscious of

such things as personal responsibility, evil, myth, and

moral concern.

As well, these journalists realized their own

culpability in events. Wolfe recommended a slightly

abrasive reporter, so as to jar the status quo and, then, to

record the reactions. But the journalists studied here

observed what was happening around them by becoming

something of a moral or ethical presence. This was not so

much egotistical as it was soul searching. Indeed, what is apparent in the journalists cited here is self-examination,

whether Orwell in Spain, Agee in Alabama, or Moyers

examining Watergate and himself.

Suggestions for Further Study

Finally, this survey has shown two areas that need

further scrutiny. Studies in these two areas could refine

our theories about personal journalism, social responsibility, and objectivity. First, scholarship about the Hutchins Commission is sadly lacking. No one yet has 176 thoroughly studied what people such as Hutchins, Hocking, and Neibuhr brought to the report. The Hutchins Commission documents lie at the University of Chicago like yet- undiscovered Nag-Hammadi or Qumran records. Missing is scholarship about the Hutchins Commission papers, and other clues commission members have left in other books and personal papers. Such scholarship might amplify our understanding of the spirit behind the Commission's suggestions for social responsibility, which today largely have passed into creeds and canons.

Second, philosophy in.journalism should be studied more. Currently, most studies of philosophy in journalism have been framed around the question of free speech. And most studies of media ethics are simply case studies. But this investigation has suggested something more complex. On one hand, journalists can never isolate themselves from the ambient philosophy of a time and place. They are influenced like anyone else. On the other hand, the more thoughtful journalists somehow have been able to see philosophy and myth at work. The journalists studied here realize that society's daily questions ultimately are based on philosophical, mythical, and religious questions.

Recognition and study of this tradition of personal journalism with moral concern could provide a valuable model for present and future journalists. 177

Notes

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