Weyl wrote widely on issues of economics, labor, public policy, and international affairs in numerous books, articles, and editorials; he was a coeditor of the highly influential The New Republic magazine, 1914–1916.

His most influential book, The New Democracy (1912) was a classic statement of democratic meliorism, revealing his path to a future of progress and modernization based on middle class values, aspirations and brain work.

It articulated the general mood: His father, Nathan Weyl, had emigrated from the German Palatinate, but his death, when Walter was seven, left the boy in the care of five brothers and sisters at the home of his maternal grandmother, the widow of Philadelphia merchant Julius Stern.

Weyl had hoped but failed to be part of the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, but he traveled to Europe anyway in the winter and the spring of 1919 to bear witness to the postwar gathering.

He knew many of members of the Commission and spent a great deal of time composing numerous books in his head that might explain the complexities and tragedy of the conference.

"[5] In 1907 Weyl married Bertha Poole, a labor organizer, writer, and fellow settlement house worker who came from a wealthy Chicago family.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. included Weyl among important American political thinkers, among whom were Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Louis Brandeis; Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Charles A.

Beard; and Rexford Tugwell, Adolf Berle, William T. Foster, Paul Douglas, Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, and Felix Frankfurter.