Steffens, Lincoln

Steffens, Lincoln (1866–1936), journalist.Son of a Sacramento banker, Joseph Lincoln Steffens attended the University of California at Berkeley and then studied ethics and philosophy at the University of Berlin, art history at Heidelberg, and psychology at Leipzig. He worked as a reporter and newspaper editor in New York before joining the staff of McClure's Magazine. His articles analyzing and documenting municipal corruption were published in book form in 1904 with the memorable title The Shame of the Cities. These and subsequent articles established him—along with Ray Stannard Baker, Upton Sinclair, and Ida M. Tarbell—as a leading practitioner of critical, investigative, adversarial journalism. Charging Steffens and the others with a single‐minded focus on the “vile and debasing,” President Theodore Roosevelt branded them “muckrakers,” a label they perforce embraced and which has endured.

The conclusions Steffens had reached in The Shame of the Cities, The Struggle for Self‐Government (1906), and other books concerning the linkage of corruption, business, and politics drove him leftward. In 1919, with William C. Bullitt, he visited Soviet Russia, then emerging from the chaos of revolution, and returned with the slogan ever after associated with him, “I have seen the future, and it works.” Assuming that the absolute dictatorships of Lenin and Stalin were evolutionary stages on the way to true democracy, Steffens never lost faith in that illusory future. His work and career are marked by ethical fervor and good hope. In 1931 he published a classic Autobiography.
See also Journalism; Magazines; Muckrakers; Municipal and County Governments; Progressive Era; Radicalism.

Bibliography

Louis Filler , Crusaders for American Liberalism, 1964.
Justin Kaplan , Lincoln Steffens, A Biography, 1974.

Justin Kaplan