The media's partisan leaning depends on what media you consume. Liberal intellectuals became a cog in the New Deal Coalition in the 1930s while the Republicans' Eastern Establishment gradually got pushed out by rural conservatives, who were later able to totally crowd them out with an influx of Southern segregationists in the 1960s. Technocrats liked the 1930s government expansion, Atlanticists flipped for World War II, and the Southern Strategy sealed the deal in the 1960s. Ironically, the Catholics who liberal Republican intellectuals were having a moral panic over in the Progressive Era started shifting to the Republicans with the rise of the religious right, and those same intellectuals joined the party of Tammany Hall.
I think there's always been a segment of the intellectual elite that supported Democrats, read NY Times archives from the early twentieth century for an example of it. Support for the League of Nations was very much an elite cause.
Theodore Roosevelt also proposed a "League of Peace" in the 1900s.
