Lincoln
Steffens was born in San Francisco,
California, on 6th April, 1866. The son of a wealthy businessman,
he studied in France and Germany
before graduating from the University of California, where he developed
radical political views.
In 1892 Steffens became a reporter on the New
York Evening Post. Later he became editor of McClure's
Magazine, where he became associated with the style of investigative
journalism that became known as muckraking.
One of Steffen's major investigations involved exposing local government
corruption. A collection of Steffen's articles appeared in the book
The Shame of the Cities (1904).
This was followed by an investigation into state politicians, The
Struggle for Self-Government (1906).
In 1906 Steffens joined with the investigative journalists, Ida
Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker to establish
the radical American Magazine. He continued to write about
corruption until 1910 when he reported the Mexican Revolution. He
became a strong supporter of the rebels and during this period developed
the view revolution, rather than reform, was the way to change capitalism.
Steffens visited Russia in 1919 and when he returned in 1921 made
the famous comment, "I have seen the future and it works."
Steffens enthusiasm for the Soviet form of government did not last
and by the time he wrote his memoirs, Autobiography
(1931), he was disillusioned with communism. Lincoln Steffens died
in 1936.
Art Young, Lincoln Steffens,
New Masses
(1932)
(1)
Lincoln Steffens, and Claude Wetmore, Corruption
and Reform in St. Louis, McClure's
Magazine (October, 1902)
Go
to St. Louis and you will find the habit of civic pride in them; they
still boast. The visitor is told of the wealth of the residents, of
the financial strength of the banks, and of the growing importance
of the industries; yet he sees poorly paved, refuse-burdened streets,
and dusty or mud-covered alleys; he passes a ramshackle firetrap crowded
with the sick and learns that it is the City Hospital: he enters the
Four Courts, and his nostrils are greeted with the odor of formaldehyde
used as a disinfectant and insect powder used to destroy vermin; he
calls at the new City Hall and finds half the entrance boarded with
pine planks to cover up the unfinished interior. Finally, he turns
a tap in the hotel to see liquid mud flow into wash basin or bathtub.
(2)
Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of Minneapolis, McClure's
Magazine (January, 1903)
Whenever anything extraordinary is done in American municipal
politics, whether for good or for evil, you can trace it almost invariably
to one man. The people do not do it. Neither do the "gangs",
"combines", or political parties. These are but instruments
by which bosses (not leaders; we Americans are not led, but driven)
rule the people, and commonly sell them out. But there are at least
two forms of the autocracy which has supplanted the democracy here
as it has everywhere it has been tried. One is that of the organized
majority by which, as in Tammamy Hall in New York and the Republican
machine in Philadelphia, the boss has normal control of more than
half the voters. The other is that of the adroitly managed minority.
The "good people" are herded into parties and stupefied
with convictions and a name, Republican or Democrat; while the "bad
people" are so organized or interested by the boss that he can
wield their votes to enforce terms with party managers and decide
elections. St. Louis is a conspicuous example of this form. Minneapolis
is another.
(3)
Lincoln Steffens, The Struggle for Self-Government
(1906)
"They" say in Wisconsin that La Follette is a demagogue,
and if it is , demagogy to go thus straight to the voters, then "they"
are right. But then Folk also is a demagogue, and so are all thoroughgoing
reformers. La Follette from the beginning has asked, not the bosses,
but the people for what he wanted, and after 1894 he simply broadened
his field and redoubled his efforts. He circularized the State, he
made speeches every chance he got, and it the test of demagogy is
the tone and style of a man's speeches, La Follette is the opposite
of a demagogue. Capable of fierce invective, his oratory is impersonal;
passionate and emotional himself, his speeches are temperate. Some
of them are so loaded with facts and such closely knit arguments that
they demand careful reading, and their effect is traced to his delivery,
which is forceful, emphatic, and fascinating.
(4) Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography
(1931)
The mayor of New York, Seth Low, was a business man and the son
of a business man, rich, educated, honest, and trained to his political
job. Seth Low and his party in power and his backers were not radicals
in any sense. Mr. Low himself was hardly a liberal; he was what would
be called in England a conservative. He accepted the system; he took
over the government as generations of corrupters had made it, and
he was trying, without any fundamental change, and made it an efficient,
orderly business-like organization for the protection and the furtherance
of all business, private and public.
(5)
Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography (1931)
Governor La Follette was a powerful man, who, short but solid, swift
and willful in motion, in speech, in decision, gave the impression
of a tall, a big, man. He had meant to be an actor; he was one always.
His lines were his own, but he consciously, artfully recited them
well and for effect which, like an artist, he calculated. But what
I saw at my first sight of him was a sincere, ardent man who, whether
standing, sitting, or in motion, but the grace of trained strength,
both physical and mental.
Bob La Follette was called a little giant. Rather short in stature,
but broad and strong, he had the gift of muscled, nervous power, he
kept himself in training all his life. His sincerity, his integrity,
his complete devotion to his ideal, were indubitable; no one who heard
could suspect his singleness of purpose or his courage. The strange
contradictions in him were that he was a fighter - for peace; he battered
his fist so terribly in one great speech for peace during the World
War that he had to be treated and then carried it in bandages for
weeks.
(6)
Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography (1931)
The gift of the gods to Theodore Roosevelt was joy, joy in life. He
took joy in everything he did, in hunting, camping, and ranching,
in politics, in reforming the police or the civil service, in organizing
and commanding the Rough Riders.
A tragedy in his life was President Wilson's refusal to give him and
General Wood commands in France, and I think that he enjoyed his hate
of Wilson; he expressed it so well; he indulged it so completely.
Yes, I think that he took joy in his utterly uncurbed loathing for
the Great War president.
(7)
Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography (1931)
Hearst, in journalism, was like a reformer
in politics; he was an innovator who was crashing into the business,
upsetting the settled order of things, and he was not doing it as
we would have done it (The American Magazine). He was doing
it his way. I thought that Hearst was a great man, able, self-dependent,
self-educated (though he had been to Harvard) and clear-headed; he
had no moral illusions; he saw straight as far as he saw, and he saw
pretty far, further than I did then; and, studious of the methods
which he adopted after experimentation, he was driving toward his
unannounced purpose: to establish some measure of democracy, with
patient but ruthless force.
(8)
Lincoln Steffens and Clarence
Darrow met Edward Wyllis Scripps
at his ranch near San Diego in 1911. Steffens wrote about the meeting
in his autobiography published in 1931.
His (E. W. Scripps) hulking body, in big boots and rough clothes,
carried a large grey head with a wide grey face which did not always
express, like Darrow's, the constant activity of the man's brain.
He was a hard student, whether he was working on newspaper make-up
or some inquiry in biology. That mind was not to be satisfied. It
read books and fed on the conversation of scientists, not to quench
an inquiry with the latest information, but to excite and make intelligent
the questions implied.
(9)
In his autobiography Lincoln Steffens explains how he visited
James and Joseph McNamara, who had been charged with the bombing of
the Los Angeles Times building.
I spoke to Darrow, who gave me permission to see his clients, and
that afternoon, when court adjourned, I called on them at the jail.
There were J. B. McNamara, who was charged with actually placing and
setting off the dynamite in Ink Alley that blew up part of the Times
building and set fire to the rest, bringing about the death of twenty-one
employees, and J. J. McNamara, J. B.'s brother, who was indicted on
some twenty counts for assisting at explosions as secretary of the
Structural Iron Workers' Union, directing the actual dynamiters. He
was supposed in labor circles to be the commanding man, the boss;
he looked it; a tall, strong, blond, he was a handsome figure of health
and personal power. But his brother, Jim, who looked sick and weak,
soon appeared as the man of decision. I had never met them before,
but when they came out of their cells they greeted and sat down beside
me as if I were an old friend.
(10)
George Seldes, interviewed by Randolph
T. Holhut (1992)
Lincoln Steffens was the godfather of us all. He was an older
man when I first met him (in 1919). He was the first of the muckrakers.
As he once said, "where there's muck, I'll rake it." He
often warned me that I was starting to get a bad reputation for myself.
I guess I never worried about that.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
