Lincoln Steffens

Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) was the most famous of the American muckraker journalists of the period 1903-1910. His exposés of corruption in government and business helped build support for reform.

Lincoln Steffens was born on April 6, 1866, in Sacramento, Calif. The son of a wealthy businessman, he went to an expensive military academy where he began showing signs of the rebelliousness that would eventually lead him to political radicalism. After barely graduating from the academy, he went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he became convinced that the answers to the great questions of life and politics lay in the study of philosophy. Upon graduating in 1889, he continued his pursuit of "culture" in Europe, studying at universities in Germany and France.

When Steffens returned to New York in 1892, secretly married to an American girl he had met in Germany, he found a $100 check from his father and a note saying that this was the last subsidy. Steffens got a job as police reporter for the New York Evening Post. He soon became fascinated with the tangled web of corruption that ensnared the police department and municipal government in general. He wrote of this for the Evening Post in the 1890s, as did other journalists. But he became famous for this only in 1903, when, as an editor of McClure's Magazine, he began a series of articles on corruption in various American cities entitled "The Shame of St. Louis," "The Shame of Minneapolis," and so on, which portrayed a pattern of shocking corruption in municipal government throughout the country.

The publication of Steffen's articles, in conjunction with the first chapters of Ida Tarbell's exposé of the Standard Oil Company, led to a sharp climb in McClure's circulation, and soon many other magazines were competing to boost their circulations by exposing the ills of American government. This type of writing was derided by President Theodore Roosevelt as "muckrake" journalism, and the term stuck.

Steffen's series, published as The Shame of the Cities (1940), became a best seller. Its popularity was well deserved, for Steffens's work stood far above most of the other muckraking exposés of municipal corruption in terms of both literary style and intellectual perception. He was not interested in merely exposing corrupt bosses. Indeed, his affection for many of those colorful characters shows through in his work. He wanted to expose the pattern of corruption and the real villains, the supposedly respectable, honest businessmen whose bribes and greed fueled the whole system.

The decline of muckraking journalism about 1910 coincided with Steffens's growing doubts as to its effectiveness. He increasingly doubted the effectiveness of reform politics, which seemed to seek to eradicate the symptoms of corruption rather than its causes. With the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, he became fascinated by the idea of revolution and wrote many articles in the succeeding decade supporting the more radical revolutionaries. He saw the revolution as an attempt to uplift Mexico by eliminating the two most corrupting factors: American domination and capitalism.

Steffens was coming to associate the economic system of capitalism with the cause of social corruption; the apparent success of the Bolshevik Revolution seemed to bear him out. In 1921, returning from a trip to the Soviet Union, he uttered his famous words, "I have seen the future, and it works."

Like many liberals and radicals, Steffens found the United States of the 1920s a very uncongenial place. He moved to Europe and settled in a villa in Italy, where he became mildly enamored with Mussolini's revolution and began working on his autobiography. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens hit the United States at just the right time. Published in 1931, after 2 years of the Great Depression, it chronicled Steffens's mental journey from oversophisticated intellectual to reformer to revolutionary in a way that struck a deep chord among many people who felt that they should travel the same route. Although he never joined the Communist party, Steffens clearly indicated his thought that only something like a Communist revolution could save the United States. However, it was not just what he said but how he said it that made the book an instant success, for he wrote with wit, charm, and compassion. His autobiography is certainly one of the most interesting, literate, and thought-provoking autobiographies of the 20th century. He died in Carmel, Calif., on Aug. 9, 1936.

Further Reading

The best book on Steffens is his Autobiography (1931). His The Shame of the Cities (1904; repr. 1957) reveals that he was not as naive a muckraker as his Autobiography would indicate. Interesting insights can be gleaned from The Letters of Lincoln Steffens, edited by Ella Winter and Granville Hicks (2 vols., 1938). A useful collection of many of his articles is The World of Lincoln Steffens, edited by Ella Winter and Herbert Shapiro (1962). Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (1950), is a standard work on the muckrakers. Also useful is David M. Chalmers, The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers (1964). A provocative chapter on Steffens is in Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963 (1965), and a lively sketch of him is in Arthur and Lila Weinberg, Some Dissenting Voices (1969), a discussion of the American spokesmen for human dignity from 1833 to 1938.

Additional Sources

Horton, Russell M., Lincoln Steffen, New York, Twayne Publishers 1974.

Kaplan, Justin, Lincoln Steffens; a biography, New York, Simon and Schuster 1974.

Palermo, Patrick F., Lincoln Steffens, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

Stinson, Robert, Lincoln Steffens, New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1979. □

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).

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

Steffens, [Joseph] Lincoln (1866–1936),born in San Francisco, graduated from the University of California (1889), studied abroad, and entered New York journalism (1892). He is best known for his leadership of the muckraking movement. As managing editor of McClure's Magazine (1902–6) and associate editor of American Magazine and Everybody's (1906–11), he was a contributor to the journalistic exposé of business and government corruption. His articles are collected in The Shame of the Cities (1904), The Struggle for Self‐Government (1906), and Upbuilders (1909). His Autobiography (1931) tells the story of his gradual evolution of a theory of government and his transition from sensational reporting to the belief in a fundamental relation between the various forms of corruption he had discovered. It also contains an account of modern liberal and radical movements, with which he was affiliated during much of his life. Lincoln Steffens Speaking (1936) is a posthumous collection of articles written during his later years, and his Letters were collected in 1938.

Lincoln Steffens (Joseph Lincoln Steffens), 1866–1936, American editor and author, b. San Francisco, grad. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1889, and studied three years in Europe. Returning to the United States, he took successive reporting jobs on various New York City newspapers. Soon Steffens became one of America's leading muckrakers , and while he held (1902–11) successive editorial positions on McClure's, the American, and Everybody's magazines he wrote sensational articles exposing municipal corruption, corporate monopolies, and political machines, areas that had never been covered in this way by journalists. His pieces were later collected in The Shame of the Cities (1904), The Struggle for Self-Government (1906), Upbuilders (1909), and other volumes. His autobiography (1931) contains not only personal reminiscences but also valuable information on the leftist movements of his era.

Bibliography: See his Lincoln Steffens Speaking (1936) and his letters (ed. by E. Winters and G. Hicks, 2 vol., 1938); biographies by J. Kaplan (1974) and P. Hartshorn (2011).