The academy had annual dinners that were attended by politicians, diplomats, scholars, and intellectuals. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding spoke to 1,400 men and women at a luncheon in the Hotel Astor declaring his intention for a drastic reorganization of government and radical cutting of expenditures, asserting that federal, state and municipal governments had been "spending without a thought of the morrow". In 1932, Walter Lippmann spoke about liberalism. "The great concern of the liberal spirit" he told the guests, "rests at last upon the conviction that at almost any cost men must keep open the channels of understanding and preserve unclouded, lucid and serene their perceptiveness of truth."