PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

They do not stand for specific ideas, but for a sort of truce or
junction between ideas. They are like a strategic railroad center
where many roads converge regardless of their ultimate origin or their
ultimate destination. But he who captures the symbols by which public
feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much the
approaches of public policy. And as long as a particular symbol has
the power of coalition, ambitious factions will fight for possession.
Think, for example, of Lincoln's name or of Roosevelt's. A leader or
an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is master
of the current situation. There are limits, of course. Too violent
abuse of the actualities which groups of people think the symbol
represents, or too great resistance in the name of that symbol to new
purposes, will, so to speak, burst the symbol. In this manner, during
the year 1917, the imposing symbol of Holy Russia and the Little
Father burst under the impact of suffering and defeat.
4
The tremendous consequences of Russia's collapse were felt on all the
fronts and among all the peoples. They led directly to a striking
experiment in the crystallization of a common opinion out of the
varieties of opinion churned up by the war. The Fourteen Points were
addressed to all the governments, allied, enemy, neutral, and to all
the peoples. They were an attempt to knit together the chief
imponderables of a world war. Necessarily this was a new departure,
because this was the first great war in which all the deciding
elements of mankind could be brought to think about the same ideas, or
at least about the same names for ideas, simultaneously. Without
cable, radio, telegraph, and daily press, the experiment of the
Fourteen Points would have been impossible. It was an attempt to
exploit the modern machinery of communication to start the return to a
"common consciousness" throughout the world.
But first we must examine some of the circumstances as they presented
themselves at the end of 1917. For in the form which the document
finally assumed, all these considerations are somehow represented.
During the summer and autumn a series of events had occurred which
profoundly affected the temper of the people and the course of the
war. In July the Russians had made a last offensive, had been
disastrously beaten, and the process of demoralization which led to
the Bolshevik revolution of November had begun. Somewhat earlier the
French had suffered a severe and almost disastrous defeat in Champagne
which produced mutinies in the army and a defeatist agitation among
the civilians. England was suffering from the effects of the submarine
raids, from the terrible losses of the Flanders battles, and in
November at Cambrai the British armies met a reverse that appalled the
troops at the front and the leaders at home. Extreme war weariness