Charles
Edward Russell was born in Davenport, Iowa in 1860. After an education
at St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont, Russell joined his father, who
was editor
of the Davenport Gazette. In 1881
he moved to the Minneapolis Journal,
and during the next twenty years worked for the Detroit
Tribune, the New
York World, the New York Herald
and the Chicago Examiner.
In 1905 Russell wrote an article entitled The
Greatest Trust in the World for Everybody's
Magazine. The article revealled how the Beef Trust had used
its economic position to increase the price of beef. At the same time
Russell argued that the development of technology had substantially
reduced the cost of producing meat. He followed this with Lawless
Wealth (1908), a book about the American
Tobacco Trust.
William Randolph Hearst, the owner of
Cosmopolitan
also employed Russell. Articles written by Russell for the magazine
included two collections of articles: At
the Throat of the Republic (December, 1907 - March, 1908)
and What Are You Going to Do About It?
(July, 1910 - January, 1911). Other articles written by Russell for
Cosmopolitan
included The Growth of Caste in America
(March, 1907) and Colarado
- New Tricks in an Old Game (December, 1910).
Other investigations carried out by Russell included Georgia's prison
system (Everybody's Magazine,
June, 1908) and how big business controlled the content of newspapers
(Pearson's Weekly, How
Business Controls News, May, 1914). A member of the Socialist
Party, on two occasions he was unsuccessful in his attempt to
be elected as Governor of the State of New York.
Russell wrote several books including The
Uprising of Many
(1907), Why
I Am a Socialist
(1910), These
Shifting Scenes
(1914), the Pulitzer Prize winning, The
American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas
(1927)
and an autobiography, Bare
Hands and Stone Walls
(1933). Charles
Edward Russell died in 1941.
Art Young, Charles Edward Russell (1912)
(1)
Charles
Edward Russell, Why I am a Socialist (1910)
Suppose
each of the stockholders of the United States Steel Corporation to
be a most kind-hearted, compassionate man. If you could by any means
make him understand the hell that this company maintains, he would
be powerless to change it. Let the officers be wholly unselfish philanthropists,
and they shall be equally impotent. Let the managers be moved to tears
by every accident, they can do nothing that shall prevent accidents.
The whole organization is utterly impersonal; it is hard, mechanical,
inhuman, relentless, and must be so, and cannot possibly be otherwise.
To make profits, to declare dividends, to meet the interest on the
outstanding securities, to produce steel, to produce it with the least
possible expenditure of money: these are the only considerations that
can be entertained everywhere, at any time, by any person in the organization.
Little children in the process of being first robbed and then murdered
in the sacred cause of profits. If you like the system of which this
is the certain fruit, come here and like the fruit also. You should
not like the one without the other. And if you accept both, let me
ask you one question. How if this robbed and tortured child were your
daughter, or your little sister? How would you like that? And if it
would be bad for your daughter, or your sister, do you think it can
be good for another man's daughter and another man's sister?
This is the offer of Socialism: the righting
of the centuries of wrong the producers have suffered, the dawn of
a genuine democracy, peace instead of war, sufficiency instead of
suffering, life raised above the level of appetite, a chance at last
for the good in people to attain their normal development.
(2)
Benjamin
Flower, Progressive Me, Women and Movements (1914)
Charles Edward Russell, Upton Sinclair and Jack London are three very
popular authors who have become outspoken Socialists and with the
pen and voice have contributed materially to the general educational
campaign along radical social lines.
Mr. Russell was for many years, or until he became so uncompromisingly
radical in his utterances as to arouse the enmity of the great interests,
he was one of the most popular of our magazine writers. He travelled
around the world, writing a series of admirable articles under the
general heading of Soldiers of the Common Good. His expose
of the Beef Trust was one of the ablest and most important of the
contributions of recent years to the literature of exposure.
(3)
Lincoln Steffens wrote about Charles Edward
Russell in his autobiography published in 1931.
I recall vividly meeting Charles
Edward Russell and asking him what he had got out of it all. He was
the most earnest, emotional, and gifted of the muckrakers. There was
something of the martyr in him; he had given up better jobs to go
forth, rake in hand, to show things up; and he wanted them to be changed.
His face looked as if he had suffered from the facts he saw and reported.
"I couldn't keep it up," he said passionately. "It
was too fierce, the conditions, the facts, and what was worse, I couldn't
understand them. I'd form a theory, then go out and find that the
theory was all wrong. I'd set up another theory, see it blow up, and
so think again and again, till I couldn't stand it. I joined the Socialist
Party. I had to have something to believe."
(4)
In
his book, The Era of the Muckrakers, C.
C. Regier wrote about the Charles Edward Russell's article on the
Beef Trust (1932)
To show that the perfection
of the packer's organization had not meant cheaper food for the public,
he quoted statistics too the effect that the value of beef cattle
had declined $163,000,000 in the three years ending with January 1,
1905, whereas the retail price of meat had gradually increased.
(5)
Charles Edward Russell, letter to C. C. Regier (1931)
Looking back, it seems to
me clear that the muckraking magazine was the greatest single power
that ever appeared in this country. The mere mention in one of these
magazines of something that was wrong was usually sufficient to bring
about at least an ostensible reformation.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
