Lincoln Steffens

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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 (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).

(1866-1936)

1904	The Shame of the Cities. After publishing an article in 1902 on corruption in St. Louis, Steffens widens his investigation to other cities and collects his findings here, in the first of a series of muckraking exposés of corruption that include The Struggle of Self-Government (1906) and Upbuilders (1909).
1931	Autobiography. The muckraking journalist's extensive account of his career and his development as a reformer is significant not only for its insights into this important figure but in its depiction of his era and the various activist movements with which he was associated.

Quotes:

"Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it."

"Somebody must take a chance. The monkeys who became men, and the monkeys who didn't are still jumping around in trees making faces at the monkeys who did."

"So youve been over into Russia? said Bernard Baruch, and I answered very literally, I have been over into the future and it works."

"That what is true of business and politics is gloriously true of the professions, the arts and crafts, the sciences, the sports. That the best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has to be discovered. We know only a few streaks about astronomy. We are only beginning to imagine the force and composition of the atom. Physics has not yet found any indivisible matter, or psychology a sensible soul."

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