Politics & Power Quote by Walter Lippmann

America, Lippmann argues, has traded its favorite myth for a harder assignment. The frontier story flatters the nation as solitary, self-made, and morally clarified by open land. By the early 20th century, that fantasy was wearing thin: the physical wilderness was largely mapped, fenced, and industrialized, while cities swelled with immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, alongside Black migrants fleeing Jim Crow. Lippmann’s line pivots the national drama from geography to sociology, insisting the real “adventure” now unfolds in tenements, factories, schools, and ballot boxes.

The phrasing does quiet, strategic work. “Conquest” is blunt, even martial, a word that admits domination and erasure; he doesn’t romanticize it. Then he replaces it with “absorption,” a term that sounds organic and painless but carries a coercive edge. Absorption can mean welcome and synthesis, but it can also mean dissolving difference into a single, approved American solvent. That tension is the subtext: pluralism is framed not as a mutual negotiation but as a task the nation performs on newcomers.

“Fifty different peoples” compresses diverse languages, religions, and class positions into a countable inventory, revealing the era’s habit of treating cultures as manageable units. Lippmann’s intent is both descriptive and prescriptive: to tell elite readers that the country’s next test is civic cohesion, not territorial expansion, and to imply that success depends on institutions strong enough to convert demographic flux into a stable public. The sentence reads like a warning disguised as a rallying cry.