(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.
(Lincoln Steffens was an integral part of the journalistic...)
Lincoln Steffens was an integral part of the journalistic movement of his time. On the cusp of the twentieth century he was part of a generation, trying to decipher the implications of huge social and economic change. In a changing world, the gentleman's agreement that existed between journalists and politicians had started melting away. As the United States grew and began obsessively examining itself, this style of 'muckraking' journalism was a way to propel a desire for reform into the mainstream debate.
Whilst Steffens may not have cared for the word, he and the Muckrakers used their column inches to demand change. He questioned economic policy, conventional attitudes to race relations and social policies which led to deprivation.
In this compendium of articles, Steffens focused on city governments. He toured the nation's largest cities, questioning great men and guttersnipes alike. Into his writing he poured the fervour of a social reformer and the empathy of a human interest story but most of all he decried the corruption he saw all around him.
In 'The Shame of Cities', Lincoln Steffens demonstrated his virtuoso talent for storytelling and grabbed the hearts of the public by showing them events in a new way, that highlighted the personal stake of every man and woman in being governed fairly. His appeal to the idealism hidden in the populous was answered with huge success and helped to usher in a new age of critical journalism. In any uncertain world, full of human error, this book has more than earned its place. It delights with style but lacks nothing in substance.
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Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Vol. 2: Muckraking/Revolution/Seeing America at Last
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One of America's greatest journalists, Lincoln Steffens...)
One of America's greatest journalists, Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) not only reported on events but also took part in them. This story is also the portrait of an entire era. Index.
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (California Legacy Book)
(The first of the muckrakers, in the finest tradition of A...)
The first of the muckrakers, in the finest tradition of American journalism
Here, in what The Nation publisher Victor Navasky says ''ought to be assigned reading,'' is the autobiography of one of the world's first celebrity journalists: Lincoln Steffens, a man whose writing was so notorious that President Theodore Roosevelt coined a term for it--muckraking.
Growing up in Sacramento, Steffens (1866-1936) was an editor at the New York Evening Post, and later at McClure's Magazine. As popular as he was cantankerous, he brushed shoulders with presidents and corporate barons, tsars and dictators. Inspiring, entertaining, and lyrical, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens is the story of a brilliant reporter with a passion for examining the complex and contradictory conditions that breed corruption, poverty, and misery.
Lincoln Joseph Steffens was a New York reporter who launched a series of articles in McClure's, called Tweed Days in St. Louis, that would later be published together in a book titled The Shame of the Cities.
Background
Lincoln was born on April 6, 1866 in San Francisco, California, United States, the eldest in a family of four children, the others all girls.
His father, Joseph Steffens, of Canadian birth but raised in Illinois, had come in 1862 by wagon-train to California, where he advanced from accountant to partner in a paint and oil concern.
Lincoln's mother, Elizabeth Louisa (Symes) Steffens, was, as he put it in his Autobiography, "an English girl who came from New York via the Isthmus of Panama to San Francisco in the sixties to get married. " The family moved to Sacramento in 1870 and prospered there; Steffens grew up in one of the city's most imposing mansions.
Education
As a boy he was more interested in individualistic explorations into the countryside than in schooling. He failed in his last year of grammar school and was sent to a military academy at San Mateo. Unsuccessful in his first attempt to pass the entrance examinations for the University of California in 1884, he spent a year at a private school in San Francisco where he learned a regard for study. He then entered the university and, though he did not enjoy his studies, acquired a Ph. B. in 1889 and a general interest in philosophy which took him after graduation to Germany.
There he visited Berlin and spent a semester in Heidelberg, where he audited the lectures of Kuno Fischer and questioned the reality of absolute ethics. He spent the summer of 1890 in Munich, concerned with art, and the winter semester of 1890-91 in Leipzig, involved in Wilhelm Wundt's experimental psychology.
Career
Following briefer visits to other countries, notably Italy, Steffens sailed for New York in October 1892. After an unsuccessful search for work, Steffens used an introduction his father had secured for him to Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of the Century magazine, to obtain a position on the New York Evening Post. Known as "the gentleman reporter, " he advanced from miscellaneous assignments to special work in Wall Street, where he covered the panic of 1893; he was not particularly impressed by the business men he met.
He was then given the police to cover and reported such news as the revelations of police corruption made by the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst and the sensations brought out by the Lexow Committee. His publicity materially aided the work of exposure; it also brought him into contact for the first time with the young Theodore Roosevelt, who became commissioner of police in the ensuing reform administration. Meanwhile Steffens had received a financial windfall. While in Germany he had made the acquaintance of a young German student, Johann Friedrich Krudewolf.
In 1894 news reached him that Krudewolf had died and left him sole heir to an estate which, after he had attended to considerations of sentiment and justice, left him with about $12, 000. This he invested with skill sufficient to give him an independent income. Late in 1897 Steffens left the Evening Past to become city editor of the Commercial Advertiser.
Here he headed a "Happy Newspaper Staff, " as he later called it, which included writers, rather than reporters, who sought to capture the life of the city, not its facade: Hutchins and Norman Hapgood, the many-sided Harry Thurston Peck, Abraham Cahan, a leader among the Jewish intelligentsia, Harvey O'Higgins, and Eugene Walter, among others.
Steffens himself at this point had a taste for character sketches and a concern for philosophic attitudes: like other intellectuals of his journalistic generation he was touched by the picturesque customs and religion of East Side Jewry, and he was impressed, though confused, by the city's labor strikes.
He continued, however, his interest in the police. By the middle of 1901 the long decade of journalism had depleted Steffens, mentally and physically. Both he and his wife, moreover, were ambitious to write fiction. Josephine Bontecou Steffens had already published Letitia Berkeley, A. M. (1899), a novel of female emancipation.
From June to October 1901 Steffens made a major effort to write a novel (his autobiography passes over this attempt) and, defeated, accepted an offer from S. S. McClure to join the staff of McClure's Magazine. Steffens thus became part of a publishing revolution which was changing the reading habits and perspectives of Americans. Such entrepreneurs as McClure were editing magazines remarkable for their low price and lively format as well as for their content.
They were providing a vehicle for newspaper-trained writers who could cope with the problems created by expanded urban and industrial conditions. McClure had in his office Ida M. Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker and was publishing "O. Henry" (William Sydney Porter) and Theodore Dreiser, among other American writers. Trying his hand at first as an editor, Steffens found his real metier when he left the McClure's office to search out material for its pages. The World of Graft (1901), by Josiah Flynt Willard, first serialized in McClure's, probably gave Steffens the inspiration to go out and dig up his own stories.
After a visit to St. Paul to interview Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the lumber magnate, he followed a random suggestion and traveled to St. Louis, where Joseph W. Folk, circuit attorney, was fighting municipal corruption. With a local journalist, Claude H. Wetmore, Steffens published in McClure's for October 1902 "Tweed Days in St. Louis. " Although probably not, as Steffens later claimed, the "first muckraking article, " it resounded in the press and focused national attention on a local situation. Steffens's second inquiry into municipal corruption, "The Shame of Minneapolis, " appeared in a significant issue of McClure's which also featured a new installment of The History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Tarbell and an article on "The Right to Work" by Ray Stannard Baker, together with an editorial on their import which officially begins the period of "muckraking. "
Although exposure of corruption quickly became almost a national vogue, with local newspapers vying with the magazines in the field, Steffens maintained a distinctive position because of his method, which seemed to avoid mere self-righteousness and to involve a scientific quest for causes. Though he found variations from city to city and occasional reform movements, Steffens contended that the process of corruption was universal and uniform.
Major conclusions he reached were that politics and business were one and that the enemy was privilege rather than corruptionists. Nevertheless, he maintained a note of optimism, of satisfaction with reform leaders, which tempered his dark accounts of abetted malfeasance in office. Collected in his first book, The Shame of the Cities (1904), his articles sounded a call to arms. Continuing his investigations on the state level, Steffens was won over to Tom L. Johnson of Ohio and Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, who had been depicted to him as demagogues but who appeared to him to be meeting the challenge of corruption realistically.
Although his next book, The Struggle for Self-Government (1906), began with an ironic dedication to the Czar of Russia, it exalted the reformers and found evidence of substantial gains achieved. This positive view, together with a growing belief in the importance of leadership, was underscored in Steffens's third volume, Upbuilders (1909), which offered hope in the careers of such men as Ben B. Lindsey, the "just judge" of Denver, Everett Colby, a New Jersey reformer, and William Simon U'Ren of Oregon.
In 1906 McClure conceived a plan of expansion which would have involved McClure's in life insurance, housing, and other practical reform efforts which, in the opinion of members of his staff, threatened their roles as editors and journalists, as well as the magazine's solvency. Miss Tarbell, Steffens, and Baker, among others, accordingly seceded and took over the lagging American Magazine. Joined by Finley Peter Dunne and William Allen White, they quickly pushed the American to the forefront of reform publications.
In the following year, however, Steffens, impatient with editorial restraints, left the American and became a free-lance writer, contributing articles to Everybody's (which he served as part-time editor) on reformers ranging from Roosevelt to Eugene V. Debs. In 1909 he eagerly accepted the invitation of Edward A. Filene to investigate Boston. Out of the association of Filene and Steffens grew the Boston City Club, which represented a wide variety of civic and commercial groups, together with the famous "Boston 1915" idea and the manuscript of a book on Boston. The book, however, was never published, for by this time Steffens had become convinced that exposure of evil was not enough to bring about reform.
The Golden Rule now became his keynote. The McNamara case gave him the chance to put this principle to the test. In Los Angeles a dynamite explosion had wrecked the headquarters of the strongly anti-union Times, with a loss of twenty-one lives. Two labor leaders, the McNamara brothers, were charged with the crime, and in an atmosphere of intense feeling for and against labor Clarence Darrow was retained as their counsel. Steffens went as a journalist to report the trial, which opened late in 1911, but he soon seized the opportunity to test his theory that the Golden Rule was practical and that only "principals" could make it work.
At one point he believed that he had won over General Harrison Gray Otis, proprietor of the Times, and other Los Angeles employers to a negotiated settlement whereby the McNamaras would plead guilty on the condition that the city's business leaders would thereafter institute a new era of cooperation with labor. The McNamaras confessed, but the plan collapsed. Steffens was branded as a radical by an increasingly anti-reformist press and condemned by his radical friends as an impertinent blunderer who did not understand the facts of life. Meanwhile his personal affairs likewise had taken a bad turn. Though disappointed that he and his wife had no children, Steffens had enjoyed a happy domestic life during his years of public renown.
But in January 1911 his wife died, and her mother, who had lived with them, died soon after. In the same period his own parents passed away. And with the sudden decline of muckraking his own first fame departed. Depressed by these events and devastated by the failure of his attempt to apply the Golden Rule, Steffens turned his hopes away from moral leadership and toward the man of action who would use force, if necessary, to bring about reform. The Mexican Revolution which broke out in 1914 gave him his first experience with violent social upheaval.
He traveled with Venustiano Carranza through Mexico and became convinced of the validity of his leadership. He later claimed credit for having persuaded President Wilson to resist pressure for war against Mexico, but this seems clearly an overstatement. In the spring of 1917 Steffens accompanied the industrialist and diplomat Charles R. Crane to Russia, where he studied the European war and the social forces freed by the February Revolution.
On his return he lectured in favor of a just peace - almost alone among the former muckrakers in treating the war as a matter for reason and reconstruction--and wrote an introduction to Leon Trotsky's The Bolsheviki and World Peace (1918) soliciting respect and consideration for the views it expressed. He covered the Armistice negotiations with little faith in their tenor and conclusions.
As a member of the William C. Bullitt mission to Russia (April 1919) he interviewed Lenin and returned radiant: "I have seen the future; and it works" (Letters, I, 442, 463). Out of the stream of American affairs, Steffens attended to matters of personal concern and interest. After his wife's death he had renewed a friendship with a woman friend of old Berkeley days. Since she was unable to obtain a divorce from her husband, Steffens felt justified in considering her his wife without marriage.
In 1926 a minor publishing firm issued Steffens's long-considered Moses in Red: The Revolt of Israel as a Typical Revolution, an effort to equate biblical circumstances with those of modern revolutions which was almost entirely ignored, both by critics and by readers.
In 1925, however, Steffens had begun work on his memoirs, and he continued his writing after he returned to the United States, in 1927, and set up a home in Carmel, California. The Autobiography was published in two volumes early in 1931 and became an increasing and continuing best-seller. Bestriding as it did pre-War and post-War decades, it was read as entertainment and (despite errors inevitable in a story dependent on memory) as history.
Returning from a lecture trip in December 1933 Steffens suffered a heart attack and was thereafter largely confined to bed. He died in August 1936.
Increasingly central to his thought, however, were the social ideals of Christianity. He had read the Bible, as he later wrote, "without reverence, with feet up on a desk and a pipe in the mouth, as news".
Politics
Hopeful at first about the United States after his return in 1927, he had changed his mind with the coming of the depression and become an increasing admirer of the Soviet Union, which, he felt, offered the only practical solution for the problem of progress, power, and the Golden Rule.
Views
Quotations:
"In a country where business is dominant, business men must and will corrupt a government. "
"One business man’s bribery was nothing but a crime, but a succession of business briberies over the years was a corruption of government to make it represent business. "
"I have never heard Christianity, as Jesus taught it in the New Testament, preached to the Christians. "
Connections
At Leipzig he fell in love with a fellow student, Josephine Bontecou (ten years his elder), the daughter of a Troy, New York, physician. They were married secretly in England in the fall of 1891. After his first wife died, early in 1919 he met in Paris a young instructor at the London School of Economics, Ella Winter, with whom he developed a friendship. In 1924 he married Ella Winter, and in that year their son, Pete Stanley Steffens, was born.