Steffens, Lincoln 1866-1936

STEFFENS, LINCOLN 1866-1936

Muckraker

A Privileged Boyhood

When they had a son the year after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, Lincoln Steffens's parents named their child in honor of the fallen leader. Steffens grew up in Sacramento with all the privileges of wealth. He loved horse-back riding, literature, and writing and attended the University of California, Berkeley. Afterward he went to Germany to study philosophy and then to Paris to study psychology. When he arrived home with a new wife, he found that his father expected him to make his own living immediately. He secured a job covering Wall Street for the New York Evening Post.

Business and Politics Mix

Covering the financial community, Steffens observed the strong and corrupt connections between powerful business interests and government at every level. He admired the men who, having been drawn into a corrupt system, used their knowledge to help clean it up. His greatest scorn was reserved for alleged reformers who lacked both the information and the character to follow through on their promises. Covering police headquarters, he got a first-hand education in the workings of the Democratic Tammany Hall political machine and the close ties that bound Tammany, the police, and criminal syndicates. At police headquarters he also met the legendary reporter Jacob Riis and the energetic police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt. Steffens soon went to the New York Commercial Advertiser as city editor.

A Move to McClure's .

S. S. McClure asked Steffens to cover Roosevelt's exploits as a Rough Rider during the Spanish-American War for McClure's magazine. In 1901 Steffens accepted McClure's offer of the managing editorship of the magazine, where Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker were already on the staff. With their solid educations, literary aspirations, and investigative zeal, these three young reporters revolutionized journalism.

The Shame of the Cities.

Steffens pursued the story of municipal corruption, and successful reform, in Saint Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. The most startling aspect of his exposés was the participation of each city's "best" citizens in elaborate systems of graft and payoffs. He wrote, "the source and sustenance of bad government [are] not the bribe taker, but the bribe giver, the man we are so proud of, the successful businessman." He chastised the apathetic public for failing to demand more principled government and cited a blind civic- and commercial-spiritedness for tolerating businesslike thievery. After publishing his municipal investigations in book form as The Shame of the Cities (1904), Steffens moved on to the shame of the states.

It Works

Writing as a freelance journalist after 1906, Steffens became interested in radicals and revolution. He covered the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917 and the Russian Revolution of 1917. After a visit to the new Soviet Union, he made the memorable observation, "I have seen the future, and it works." His 1931 autobiography is a classic of Progressive Era and journalism history. He died in 1936.

Sources:

David Mark Chalmers, The Muckrake Years (New York: Van Nostrand, 1974);

Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976);

Ellen Fitzpatrick, Muckraking: Three Landmark Articles (New York: Bedford Books/St. Martin's Press, 1994);

Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens, A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974);

Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931).