Journalists’ pro-market shift was read as gradual corruption, not intellectual conviction

Evidence

The most savage of these assessments came in a private letter from the historian Charles Beard to Maury Maverick, a Demo cratic congressman from Texas who had been asked to review The Good Society for Little, Brown. Since joining the Herald Tribune, Beard wrote, Lippmann had “been going Right as fast as his supple legs will take him.” But he rejected “the idea that Lippmann has sold out to the rich. Some men do not sell out. They go over gradually through association. They are buttered by fl attery. They sink softly into soft carpets and cushions. Having no steel in their systems, having never slept on the hard ground, they hanker after those things that tend to effeminacy, and plutocracy provides just those things.” Lippmann’s writing, Beard asserted, exhibited the “odor of a sickly humanism as thick as the smell of magnolia blossoms which apologists of the good old days in the South spread over the sweat of slave gangs.” — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 155

Categorization

• SEED: A possible essay on how intellectual converts to market thinking were socially pathologized—environments causing erosion rather than evidence persuading.
• XREF: connects to: The behavioral-economics-revolution narrative was manufactured by journalists and political appointees — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 744; Mainstream journalists now openly suspect economic crisis analysis was deliberately manipulated — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 826

Broader Connections

• Mainstream journalists now openly suspect economic crisis analysis was deliberately manipulated #complicates (0.82) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 826
• The behavioral-economics-revolution narrative was manufactured by journalists and political appointees #qualifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 744