ABSTRACT
Toward the end of the 1930s, with the Depression continuing at home and the possibility of war threatening from abroad, Walter Lippmann saw a ray of hope in the “Great Books” program that had recently been inaugurated at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Lippmann praised the return to the classics at St. John’s as holding out promise that the principles that had guided the Founding Fathers at the time of the nation’s birth might once again be revived. He was encouraged that at St. John’s and a scattering of other institutions of higher education a rebirth of traditional liberal learning was underway. During the dark winter of 1938 Lippmann proclaimed in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune that:
…in this country and abroad there are men who see that the onset of barbarism must be met not only by programs of rearmament, but by another revival of learning. It is the fact, moreover, that after tentative beginnings in several of the American universities, Columbia, Virginia, and Chicago, a revival is actually begun-is not merely desired, talked about, and projected, but is in operation with teachers and students and a carefully planned course of study…. I venture to believe that…in the future men will point to St. John’s College and say that there was the seed-bed of the American Renaissance.1
