By Christopher B. Daly
The venerable opinion magazine The New Republic is getting a makeover. Here is a video report from the NYTimes about the new look.
TNR was founded in 1912 by Progressive journalist Herbert Croly. One of his first recruits was Walter Lippmann, who became one of the most prominent US journalists of the 20th Century. Here’s my take, from Covering America:
In 1912 a friend asked Lippmann if he would like to write a book. Lippmann
published A Preface to Politics the next year to favorable reviews, and while living
in New York and mingling with the leftist and bohemian crowd around the intellectual
and patron Mabel Dodge, he started another book. While he was working
on it, Lippmann got an invitation to lunch from Herbert Croly, a prominent Progressive
thinker and journalist. Croly, who had been impressed by Lippmann’s
debut book, had a proposition: How would Lippmann like to join the staff of a
new magazine Croly was putting together? The magazine was to be smart, literate,
and progressive. He could write and edit and make $60 a week. Lippmann
jumped at the offer. It was another stroke of good fortune. The magazine, which
still had no name, was eventually called the New Republic, and it became one of
the most influential journals of opinion and analysis of the twentieth century.14
Croly’s goal was to “be radical without being socialistic”15 and to advance his view
that the small, weak central government envisioned by Jefferson could not possibly
deal with the challenges posed by companies like Standard Oil or the big
meatpacking firms or the sugar trust. Instead, the country needed new agencies
like the Interstate Commerce Commission or the Food and Drug Administration,
staffed by a new class of expert public servants who would have the power
to police and guide these huge private enterprises. This was just the outlook that
Lippmann had been moving toward ever since he left Harvard, one that ultimately
drove him away from the socialists and muckrakers of his youth. . .
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