ABSTRACT
Walter Lippmann found himself writing about the war with a set of secondhand ideas. Initially he drew on what he had been taught: that war stemmed from colonialism and imperialism that America must not become enmeshed in Europe's quarrels, that evil or stupid rulers led the people into war. He could hardly be neutral in thought, even though he felt that the Allies might be as much to blame for the war as the Germans. On May 7, 1915, the British liner Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine, with the loss of 1,100 civilians, among them 128 Americans. Shunning emotion, Lippmann pointed out to the New Republic’s (NR's) readers that the Lusitania incident dramatized that the United States did not have the naval power to enforce its rights of neutrality. The equation of neutrality with "irresponsibility" was one that Lippmann was to make increasingly as the war dragged on.
