George Kibbe Turner

Background

George Kibbe Turner was born on March 23, 1869 in Quincy, Ill. He was the son of Rhodolphus K. and Sarah Ella Kibbe Turner. His father, who was a real estate broker, died when Turner was young; his mother subsequently married James Dayton of Quincy.

Education

Turner graduated from Williams College with the A. B. in 1890.

Career

After graduation he began his journalistic career the following year as a reporter on the Springfield (Massachussets) Republican, then under the editorial leadership of the younger Samuel Bowles.

In his early twenties Turner began to write for magazines; and by 1899 he had placed stories in McClure's, which also published his first novel, The Taskmaster (1902), in which he conveyed his concern over the unsatisfactory relations between employers and their workers.

After Lincoln Steffens, Ida M. Tarbell, and Ray Stannard Baker left McClure's to publish American Magazine, editor S. S. McClure enlisted Turner in 1906 as a staff member and writer, a connection that continued until 1916. Turner quickly became McClure's specialist on urban problems.

His first major assignment was to report on the new commission form of municipal government set up in Galveston, Tex. , after the devastating hurricane of September 1900. Turner's article, "Galveston: A Business Corporation, " was published in October 1906. The first report to the nation on the Galveston reform, it told how the ward system, with its self-serving local aldermen, had been supplanted, under pressure of the disaster, by a city-wide commission of departmental experts, similar to a corporation's board of directors. The response was immediate and dramatic. Leaders in many cities sought reprints--Seattle called for 20, 000 copies--and Philadelphia issued its own pamphlet. Some newspapers ran the article in full. The total circulation was estimated at 12 million. Many states amended their statutes to permit adoption of the commission form. For months Turner and McClure's operated an informal headquarters for the movement.

By 1914 more than 350 cities, with one-fifth of the urban population, had been influenced by the 1906 article. The Galveston triumph led McClure's to send Turner to Chicago, where he prepared the preface for a collection of articles from Chicago newspapers recording day-to-day criminality and violence. Digging into hidden causes, Turner produced an analytical report so revealing and convincing that McClure's printed it as a long article, "The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities, " in the April 1907 issue. Chicago's "business of dissipation, " Turner asserted, was based on a powerful liquor trade, prostitution, and gambling. Louis Filler, a leading historian of the muckraking era, found "the effect of this single article indescribable. " While journalistic treatment of prostitution had previously been veiled in generalities, Turner's article brought the white slave traffic into the open for public discussion. Introduced to the nation for the first time were political spoilsmen Michael ("Hinky Dink") Kenna and John J. ("Bathhouse") Coughlin.

Chicago's reformers demanded action; and in 1910 the mayor appointed a commission on vice composed of prominent educators, clergymen, industrialists, and civic leaders. Turner's disclosures were pursued in the commission's plainspoken report, "The Social Evil in Chicago. " It was widely noted in other cities that set up their own investigations into commercialized vice. Turner next trained his searchlight on New York City.

In June 1909 he contended in "Tammany's Control of New York by Professional Criminals, " also published in McClure's, that prostitution had been virtually legalized in the city. That November, in "The Daughters of the Poor, " he said bluntly that New York City had become "the leader of the world" in the "recruiting and sale of young girls of the poorer classes by procurers" who operated a nationwide network as well as a trade in immigrants. This article, probably the most memorable of Turner's contributions to McClure's, was followed only one month later by the introduction in Congress of the bill that became the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, banning the white slave traffic from interstate commerce. Within two months reform forces had established a New York grand jury headed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , to investigate Turner's charges.

In the May 1910 issue of Fortnightly Review, William Archer, a British critic of American life, described Turner's work as presenting "without rhetoric or emphases of any kind, the most amazing picture of organized, police-protected vice and crime every line of which was evidently the result of penetrating investigation, and intimate personal knowledge. " Turner backed up his writings with fearless testimony before grand juries in New York and other cities.

Turner scored a notable scoop in 1907, when he went to Boise, Idaho, and obtained a jail-cell confession from Harry Orchard that he had assassinated the state's governor, Frank R. Steunenberg, in 1905 at the instigation of William Dudley ("Big Bill") Haywood. This sensational revelation was published as a McClure book, The Confession and Autobiography of Harry Orchard, in 1907. With John E. Lathrop, Turner entered the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy with "Billions of Treasure", which accused the secretary of the interior of ignoring the public interest in turning over the Alaska mineral lands to the Guggenheim trust.

Before President Theodore Roosevelt sent the American navy on its round-the-world cruise in 1907, Turner criticized the navy's ability to defend the nation in "Our Navy on Land". In "A Temperance Campaign, " he exposed those politicians who encouraged temperance campaigns in order to extort saloon owners. His "The City of Chicago" was an expose of the immoralities of drink, gambling, and prostitution. He also hailed the achievements of the Wright brothers.

After the decline of muckraking, Turner returned to fiction and also wrote film scripts. In the novel Red Friday (1919) he sought to prophesy what would happen if a Lenin appeared in America, abandoning his usual objectivity "to portray his fear of class war on the Russian model. " Other books included Memories of a Doctor (1913), The Last Christian (1914), The Biography of a Million Dollars (1918), Hagar's Hoard (1920), White Shoulders (1921), and The Girl in the Glass Cage (1927).

Unfortunately, unlike so many of his colleagues, he failed to assemble his achievements in an autobiography. He died on February 15, 1952 in Miami, Fla.

Achievements

• George Kibbe Turner was the most effective of the muckrakers. His most important articles are "Galveston: A Business Corporation", "The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities" and "Tammany's Control of New York by Professional Criminals. "

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Taskmasters

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • White Shoulders

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • The Biography of a Million Dollars

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

Personality

A "gentle, diffident man with mousy hair and a mousy personality, " the deceptively self-effacing Turner possessed the control that enabled him to spell out his most offensive discoveries in "cool disgust. "

Connections

On October 19, 1892, he married Julia Hawks Parker of Bennington, Vt. ; they had no children.

Father:

Rhodolphus K. Turner

Mother:

Sarah Ella Kibbe Turner

Spouse:

Julia Hawks Parker

References

• Farewell to reform;: The rise, life and decay of the progressive mind in America
• The Muckrakers
• The Muckrakers
• Crusaders for American Liberalism
• The Era of the Muckrakers