Background

Ethnicity: McClure was the descendant of Scottish Lowlanders and French Huguenots.

Samuel Sidney McClure was born in County Antrim, Ireland, on February 17, 1857. He was the son of Thomas and Elizabeth (Gaston) McClure. Samuel emigrated with his widowed mother to Indiana when he was nine years old. Settled on a farm near Valparaiso, Indiana, the family struggled with poverty until Mrs. McClure remarried in 1867.

Education

McClure attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he was the editor of the Knox Student, formed the Western College Associated Press, and worked as a farm hand.

Career

In 1882, by good fortune, McClure became editor of the Wheelman; then he was associated with the De Vinne Press in New York. Wheelman gave McClure useful training in starting a magazine. McClure’s college friend John Phillips joined the enterprise, and the three men created a success, hailed by a reviewer writing in the Nation as “among the most attractive of the monthly magazines.”

In 1884, McClure left Wheelman to work in New York. While a junior editor for Century magazine, McClure was given two weeks’ leave for the birth of his first child; however, upon his return, his employer decided that a large operation was not the ideal work setting for McClure, urging him to start his own small business. With a generous severance package, McClure started a literary syndicate, the McClure Syndicate. His sharp instincts and boundless energy carried him through this business which was initially slow to make a profit. Continually visiting and wooing writers and editors, McClure barely kept his business afloat.

His first announcement was in October 1884, with writers such as William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. By June 1885, McClure had finally made a profit, thanks to Kate Field’s article on Mormonism, the patience of his writers, and the appeal of American realism among the readers of the provincial journals that had started to proliferate throughout the United States. John Phillips joined the business in 1887, and his gift for organization freed McClure to search for more writers and clients.

With the success of his syndication business, McClure decided to start a new magazine. Determined to provide a popular magazine that would be more appealing and affordable to the public, McClure traveled again searching for material. His plans were upset by the market panic of 1893; nevertheless, the first issue of McClure Magazine arrived in May of that year. It was not successful, but it encouraged Scottish theologian and author Henry Drummond, Colonel Pope, and Arthur Conan Doyle to invest in the magazine. McClure was dissatisfied with the content of the magazine until he found Ida Tarbell, whom he invited to work as an editor. While with McClure’s she wrote popular biographies of Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln. McClure also hired former actress Viola Roseboro as the main fiction editor (who discovered O. Henry and Willa Cather, among others), and Witter Bynner as poetry editor. Lincoln Steffens, however, became the star of the magazine with his controversial reporting.

In January 1903, McClure finally produced his land-mark issue. McClure modestly said that the issue was a “coincidence,” and that he had not planned it to be so powerful; but it was his editorial genius that generated the synergy of three important articles in the issue. Tarbell wrote about the Standard Oil Company’s soiled history (“The Oil War of 1872”), Ray Standard Baker on labor issues in the mining industry (“The Right to Work: The Story of Non-Striking Miners”), and most notably, Lincoln Steffens wrote “The Shame of Minneapolis,” an expose of the city’s widespread corruption. This last story was part of Steffens’ series “The Shame of the Cities.”

In 1906, Tarbell, Phillips, Baker, and Steffens parted from McClure's over a disagreement; McClure wanted to expand, but they feared this would diminish profits. Their departure brought new life to the magazine, but McClure’s never recovered financially. When the company reorganized McClure was dismissed as editor. Though he stayed busy, McClure’s prestige and prosperity suffered. During World War I his association for the pro-German New York Evening Mail was particularly damaging. In 1915, he sailed with the Peace Ship, a group organized by Henry Ford and, in 1917, he wrote Obstacles to Peace.

McClure had been long retired from public life, writing occasionally from his home in New York, when he died on March 21, 1949, at the age of ninety-two. He was buried with his wife in Galesburg, Illinois.

Achievements

• Samuel Sidney McClure is best known as the founder and editor of the influential muckraking McClure’s Magazine. The monthly journal of current affairs, poetry, and fiction featured new and established writers as well as some of the most gifted journalists of the early twentieth century. McClure engineered the team which, from the January 1903 issue through 1910, excited and provoked the nation in a way that indelibly marked the history of American journalism.

Works

More photos

• book

  • My Autobiography 1914
  • Obstacles to Peace 1917
  • McClure's Magazine, Vol. 10 1898
  • McClure's Magazine, Vol. 7: Reminiscences of Harriet Beecher Stowe 1896
  • McClure's Magazine, Vol. 5 1895
  • McClure's Magazine, Vol. 9 1897

Views

Quotations: “I had but one test for a story, and that was a wholly personal one - simply how much the story interested me. I always felt that I judged a story with my solar plexus rather than my brain; my only measure of it was the pull it exerted upon something inside me.”

Membership

McClure was a founding member of the Western College Associated Press.

Personality

McClure is remembered as an editor who expanded his role, affecting not only his publications but the reading public as well. His relentless drive and obsession with expansion brought him to maximize the full potentials of journalism during his time.

Quotes from others about the person

• “Mr. McClure has many faults. He is an incurable gossip. He writes with astonishing carelessness. He continually obtrudes his own personality into events where it has no place. But, again and again, he has some useful document to transcribe, some valuable fact to record; and for these alone his book would be worth reading. As an attempt at analyzing the real aims of the belligerents the book is a failure.” - H. J. Laski

Connections

McClure married Harriet Hurd, on September 4,1883. They had five children - Eleanor, Elizabeth, Mary, Robert Louis Stevenson and Enrico (adopted).

Father:

Thomas McClure

Mother:

Elizabeth (Gaston) McClure

Wife:

Harriet Hurd

Daughter:

Eleanor McClure

Daughter:

Elizabeth McClure

Daughter:

Mary McClure

Son:

Robert Louis Stevenson McClure

adopted son:

Enrico McClure

Partner:

Frank Nelson Doubleday

References

• Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature
  1991
• DLB 91: American Magazine Journalists, 1900-1960
  1990
• Success story: The life and times of S. S. McClure This is the first biography of an astonishing and important American, a man who sensed and sympathized with the hopes of Americans in the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
  1967
• McClure's Magazine and the Muckrakers McClure's was the leading muckraking journal among the many which flourished at the turn of the century. Both a literary and political magazine, it introduced exciting new writers to the American scene (Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, A. Conan Doyle) and fearlessly championed the important causes of the day (from betterment of conditions in the coal mines to antitrust measures).
  1970