PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

that it seems less dangerous to fight than to keep on talking.
There are certain clues which often help in detecting the false
absolutism of a stereotype. In the case of the Ruritanian propaganda
the principles blanketed each other so rapidly that one could readily
see how the argument had been constructed. The series of
contradictions showed that for each sector that stereotype was
employed which would obliterate all the facts that interfered with the
claim. Contradiction of this sort is often a good clue.
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Inability to take account of space is another. In the spring of 1918,
for example, large numbers of people, appalled by the withdrawal of
Russia, demanded the "reestablishment of an Eastern Front." The war,
as they had conceived it, was on two fronts, and when one of them
disappeared there was an instant demand that it be recreated. The
unemployed Japanese army was to man the front, substituting for the
Russian. But there was one insuperable obstacle. Between Vladivostok
and the eastern battleline there were five thousand miles of country,
spanned by one broken down railway. Yet those five thousand miles
would not stay in the minds of the enthusiasts. So overwhelming was
their conviction that an eastern front was needed, and so great their
confidence in the valor of the Japanese army, that, mentally, they had
projected that army from Vladivostok to Poland on a magic carpet. In
vain our military authorities argued that to land troops on the rim of
Siberia had as little to do with reaching the Germans, as climbing
from the cellar to the roof of the Woolworth building had to do with
reaching the moon.
The stereotype in this instance was the war on two fronts. Ever since
men had begun to imagine the Great War they had conceived Germany held
between France and Russia. One generation of strategists, and perhaps
two, had lived with that visual image as the starting point of all
their calculations. For nearly four years every battle-map they saw
had deepened the impression that this was the war. When affairs took a
new turn, it was not easy to see them as they were then. They were
seen through the stereotype, and facts which conflicted with it, such
as the distance from Japan to Poland, were incapable of coming vividly
into consciousness.
It is interesting to note that the American authorities dealt with the
new facts more realistically than the French. In part, this was
because (previous to 1914) they had no preconception of a war upon the
continent; in part because the Americans, engrossed in the
mobilization of their forces, had a vision of the western front which
was itself a stereotype that excluded from _their_ consciousness
any very vivid sense of the other theatres of war. In the spring of