A Non-Conformist of the Power Elite:  Lewis Lapham, 1935-2024

Following his death at age 89 on July 23 in Rome, Harper’s today compares its long-time editor and essayist Lewis H. Lapham to Montaigne, Twain, and Mencken, and quotes from him a truism as relevant as ever in these days of interminable praises for Biden farewell speeches and worse: “What so annoys people about the media is not its rudeness or its stupidity but its sanctimony.”[1]

A fine chunk of my own life has been spent reading and rereading Lewis Lapham’s unsanctimonious thoughts in Notebook, the opening column in Harper’s, and most everything else in the great American magazine he revived and reshaped into a monthly pleasure as its editor-in-chief from 1976 until 2006, except for an interregnum in 1981-83.[2]

To hear him tell it, Lapham’s non-conformism almost cost him the Harper’s job soon after he started it. “I’m the editor who refused to print the scoop poured into the ears, or if you like a different metaphor, stuffed into the mouths of Woodward and Bernstein.” He rejected an offer for Harper’s to excerpt All the President’s Men, the best-selling book by the reporters who famously broke the Watergate scandal. “They didn’t name a single source,” Lapham recalls in his 2005 film, The American Ruling Class, likening this to Pravda.

A consummate insider as media critic, it is apropos Lapham authored an introduction to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, in which he wrote:

Much of what McLuhan had to say makes a good deal more sense in 1994 than it did in 1964, and even as his book was being remanded to the backlist, its more profound implications were beginning to make themselves manifest on MTV and the Internet, in Ronald Reagan’s political image and the re-animation of Richard Nixon, via television shopping networks and e-mail—all of them technologies that McLuhan had presupposed but didn’t live to see shaped in silicon or glass.

Thirty years further on and McLuhan, and Lapham’s riffs on his work—on how politics has been supplanted by prophecy, how in the electronic world sequence becomes additive not causative as it allegedly is with print—both make even more sense; in lieu of summary or further excerpt, I direct the reader to Lapham’s own words on what we now call by names like post-reality or post-truth, online.[3]

Also online and recommended is The American Ruling Class,[4] advertised as “the world’s first documentary musical.” Before everything was online, I had to arrange to screen it at an Episcopal Church in Queens during an “Occupy” film festival in 2012, and that gave me occasion to write the following review:

Lapham plays a tweed-jacketed Mephistopheles who takes two Yale graduates of differing temperaments (played by acting students who actually went to Harvard) on a guided tour of key institutions of American power: Wall Street, the Pentagon, Hollywood, the Council on Foreign Relations, the right country clubs, etc.

The boys meet real-life members of the American ruling class: bankers, potentates, and the all-important consultants, fixers and lawyers to bankers and potentates. Among the latter is James Baker, the former Secretary of State and Bush Family consigliere who rendered legal services for the 2000 Florida electoral coup that placed George W. Bush in the White House.

Baker and the other big shots interviewed by Lapham all ritually insist that this country is a democracy, that, of course, there is no ruling class. This invocation out of the way, they are then happy to explain how this ruling class works. Their careers consistently display a knack for moving seamlessly, and shamelessly, back and forth between high public and private functions.

As the two young men consider what they should do with their own lives, and the value of their own souls, Lapham introduces them also to Howard Zinn, Walter Cronkite, Pete Seeger and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. We meet journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who reprises for the film an earlier job she held as a waitress, which she had taken while on assignment from Harper’s for an article on the life of low-wage labor.

As her editor, Lapham told Ehrenreich that if she was going to write about the most precarious and lowest-paid people of the working class, she’d have to get a job and report from the field while trying to live on the wages she was earning from it. The results were later expanded into her book, Nickel and Dimed (2001). In Lapham’s film,

soon enough the waiters, the kitchen staff, the taxi driver, the hotel cleaning lady and what finally looks like the entirety of the US service sector sing a number with the chorus of “Nickel and Dimed,” adding up their wages, expenses and tribulations in verse. Ehrenreich explains that the real philanthropists are the ones who work for less than they need to get by, so that the more fortunate are well-served.

Other memorable numbers include “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” on the relationship of the corporate media and the imperial state… What results is a low-budget cross between C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite and Guys and Dolls [a Hollywood classic musical with Frank Sinatra].

A Life

Lapham was the child of a San Francisco old-money banking and oil family. Brought along starting at age 10 to teas where he reportedly met Allen Dulles, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, Saudi Prince Faisal, and Prime Minister Nehru, among others, he got to watch the creation of the United Nations and the postwar world order.

Being born to the power elite does not force one to fulfill its pedestrian fate, to become one of its enterprising yet interchangeable villains, or to join its rent-collecting “self-made” nobility. As he recollected in an interview with Le Figaro, in 1957 Lapham applied to the CIA, as young (Anglo) men of means were supposed to do after graduating from Yale if they were idealistic and foolish enough. He came prepared to impress, to discourse on Lenin, Stalin, and the geostrategic significance of the Black Sea, but the interviewer instead asked him which golf club he’d choose for driving on the 13th hole of the National Golf Links at Southhampton.[5]

The CIA rejected him, and his subsequent work indicates a move beyond the desire to please their likes. His books and the lion’s share of his essays were dedicated to dissecting the madness and folly of the American ruling class. Like Gore Vidal or Henry Wallace, Lapham’s is the case of an American leadership that could have been, that might have helped make a better world, or that might have failed in the effort for being too genuinely civilized. His role instead, like Montaine, Twain and Mencken, was as a witty and worthy and acute curmudgeon, a chain-smoker of high conscience to the end.

Having been hired to edit the venerable and declining Harper’s in the years before it was rescued and converted into a non-profit by the MacArthur Foundation and a philanthropic oil company,(!) Lapham was bounced out again in 1981-1983 for being too “harshly critical of American society,” according to John Otis in the Washington Post.[6] It may not be incidental that those years corresponded to the Reagan-Thatcher-Volcker “revolution,” when almost every major periodical in the Anglo-American world that was not already on the right just happened to adopt a neocon or neoliberal editorial line.

Harper’s sales numbers tanked, and Lapham, who turned out to be the favorite among the subscribers after all, was brought back to save it, this time with carte blanche. Ten years before the World Wide Web would initiate the mass Internet revolution, he introduced a set of snappy, short-form collage features like the famed Harper’s Index, Annotations, and Readings (a variety of documentary excerpts), making for unpredictable, often brilliant and drily humorous opening pages that usually served also as an oblique rundown of enough of the recent news fit to think about.

But Harper’s never seemed to skimp on writers’ fees, or on allocating adequate space for the long-form investigative journalism, essays, “forums” (debate rounds among big thinkers and scoundrels), and short stories that still filled most of the magazine.

The overall formula worked, at least well enough that despite serious crises the magazine has survived the first 30 years of the Internet maelstrom, did not fall to enshittification, and is still in print today. I’m not sure if the latter can be said of certain American Pravdas that once seemed to be eternal fixtures of the newsstand and the mailbox, like Time and Newsweek.

In 2006, entering his 70s, Lapham went emiritus and turned to tilling and editing his own garden journal, Lapham’s Quarterly, each issue a themed collage of longer excerpts from several thousand years of historical source material and world literature. Allow me for a moment the corny projection, inspired by the place of his death, to think of this move as akin to Marcus Aurelius retiring to his villa to meditate, grumble, and stay away from all that noise.

As it happened, however, Lapham’s actual move to Italy earlier this year came right after his 15-year project to counteract “the hyperactive pace and frivolous emphasis of internet culture” was forced to go on a “temporary hiatus” due to “financial challenges,” as Otis reports.

Lapham is survived by “his wife of more than 50 years, the former Joan Reeves, of Rome; three children, Andrew Lapham of Toronto, Delphina Boncompagni Ludovisi of Rome, and Winston Lapham of Denver; and 10 grandchildren.”[7]

Notes

[1] “Lewis Lapham, 1935-2024,” Harper’s online, July 24, 2022, at https://harpers.org/2024/07/remembering-lewis-lapham/

[2] I first picked up on Harper’s around 1983, while in college.

[3] Lewis H. Lapham (1994), “The Eternal Now,” introduction to the 30th anniversary edition of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, MIT Press, accessed at https://worrydream.com/refs/Lapham_1994_-_The_Eternal_Now.pdf.

[4] The American Ruling Class, dir. John Kirby, viewable at https://archive.org/details/the-american-ruling-class.

[5] Charles Jaigu, «Ploutocratie en Amérique», Le Figaro Magazine, semaine du 23 mars 2018, p. 40, accessed at https://editions-saintsimon.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/FMAG_20180323_page040.pdf.

[6] John Otis, “Lewis Lapham, editor who revived Harper’s magazine, dies at 89,” The Washington Post, July 24, 2024, accessed via Boston Globe online, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/07/24/metro/lewis-lapham-editor-who-revived-harpers-magazine-dies-89/

[7] Otis, ibid.

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