hen Lippmann decided not to become a professor, he then trained himself to be a journalist. He started as a reporter for the Boston Common, a new reformist newspaper, a decision made with the help of the muckraker Lincoln Steffens. When Lippmann became bored with the job, he became Steffens's secretary. It seems certain that Lippmann learned much from the great muckraker and took with him a sense of the need to challenge authority and right wrongs, though Lippmann did become disenchanted with muckraking itself.
Lippmann developed a social conscience while studying at Harvard. He wrote at the time in a letter,
We have seen that the curse of great fortunes is the degradation of the poor, that social position is built upon the slum. . . In the work of uplifting we cannot do too much.
Lippmann would be a major critic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and of the New Deal, and his disaffection with the Roosevelts actually began when he was still at Harvard and decided he could not support Theodore Roosevelt in a second bid for the presidency and instead supported Woodrow Wilson. He wrote with reference to Roosevelt's supporters:
The kind of people who are turning out to support him are a crowd that I do not want to see in power in the United States.
D. Steven Blum refers to the attitude and viewpoint offered by Lippmann as "cosmopolitanism," by which he means that Lippmann was a man attuned to international as well as to domestic influences and affairs. This explains much of what Lippmann wrote in his career and also why he was often opposed to political leaders he saw as taking too narrow, and too parochial, an approach. Lippmann's greatest work and his strongest effort to influence policymakers came in the years between the two world wars. Blum explains,
Lippmann's thinking can be understood effectively in terms of his evolving search, spanning the period of the world Wars, for a cosmopolitan philosophy respons...