ABSTRACT
Walter Lippmann got back to New York just in time to help with the last frantic efforts of getting the New Republic into print. Lippmann had developed a theory that allowed him to circumvent the conflict between capitalism and socialism. If the modern corporation had "sucked the life" out of private property, then the socialist argument had become irrelevant. Lippmann made a telling argument in scoring Edmund Wilson for trying to restore nineteenth-century competition to a world dominated by technology and mass markets. The condition that Lippmann described, the tension between reason and emotion, was affecting his own life, taking him ever farther from his downtown friends. Lippmann was never a serious iconoclast, and soon outgrew his early rebelliousness. While he felt things deeply, he shunned open display of emotion. At twenty-five Lippmann was still feeling his way. He had not fully cast off his youthful iconoclasm or totally embraced the "practicality" of the lawyers and financiers around him.
