In April 1912, Walter Lippmann was feeling down. Four months earlier, he had taken what seemed to him like an exciting postcollegiate political gig: assistant to George Lunn, the newly elected Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York, a city of about 75,000 people twenty miles northwest of Albany.

Lippmann’s hopes of witnessing a revolution from the ground up were soon dashed, as he found that his work entailed more paper pushing than Marxist theorizing. So Lippmann quit. In a letter he wrote to a Socialist Party colleague a year later, he reflected on his time in Schenectady. The problem, Lippmann argued, was that Lunn had been elected by a town of progressives who wanted him to pass progressive, not socialist, policies. Concerned about his own political future, Lunn was happy to oblige.

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