Justin Kaplan - Lincoln Steffens: A Biography

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Copyright 1974 by Justin Kaplan

Copyright renewed 2002 by Justin Kaplan

Introduction copyright 2004 by Justin Kaplan

Quotations from previously unpublished letters by Ezra Pound copyright 1974 by the Estate of Ezra Pound

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Paperbacks Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

This Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition November 2013

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Interior design by Eve Metz
Cover design by Jason Heuer
Cover photo Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Touchstone edition as follows:

Kaplan, Justin.

Lincoln Steffens : portrait of a great American journalist.

(A Touchstone Book)

Includes index.

1. Steffens, Lincoln, 18661936. 2. JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

PN4874.S68K3 1988 070.924 [B] 886457

ISBN 978-1-4767-6638-6

ISBN 978-1-4767-7559-3 (eBook)

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from:

The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, copyright 1931 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; renewed 1959 by Peter Steffens.

Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

The Letters of Lincoln Steffens, edited by Ella Winter and Granville Hicks, copyright 1938 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; renewed 1966 by Ella Winter and Granville Hicks. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

Lincoln Steffens Speaking. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

The World of Lincoln Steffens, edited by Ella Winter and Herbert Shapiro, copyright 1962 by Hill and Wang, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

And Not to Yield, by Ella Winter. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Inc.

The Cantos, by Ezra Pound, copyright 1948 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Movers and Shakers, by Mabel Dodge Luhan, copyright 1936 by Mabel Dodge Luhan. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

THIS BOOK IS FOR

JOSEPH BARNES

1907-1970

By 1974, when this biography of Lincoln Steffens was first published, Americans had been rocked by successive exposs of gross misconduct in government and civil society. Defying Justice Department injunctions, The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers and laid bare blunders, arrogance, and deception in official accounts of the war in Southeast Asia. Sparked by reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post s relentless probing of the Watergate break-in eventually forced President Richard Nixon out of office. Some years earlier, Rachel Carsons Silent Spring examined the damage done by common insecticides, and Jessica Mitfords The American Way of Death showed how the funeral industry preyed on grief and gullibility. Ralph Naders Unsafe at Any Speed indicted the auto industry for its flagrant disregard of safety standards. Michael Harringtons The Other America revealed the extent of poverty in a supposedly prosperous and compassionate nation. Recently, the Boston Globe s Spotlight Team exposed a pattern of sexual abuse and suppressed evidence involving clergy on the highest level of the American Catholic Church. These and other instances of investigative reporting that made a difference are squarely in the muckraking tradition of Lincoln Steffens, whose classic study of municipal corruption and malfeasance, The Shame of the Cities, came out a century ago. Today, shaky justifications of the war in Iraq, big business primacy in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, and corporate and financial scandals would have demanded and received Steffens attention. He scorned an obedient press, as it is sometimes accused of being, that accepts official information at face value and transmits it to the American public.

The Shame of the Cities was not the first major event in the history of what became known in Steffens time as muckraking and, in our time, investigative journalism. But its publication was nonetheless a defining event, and Steffens remains one of the heroes and exemplary figures of his profession. A career journalist, Steffens (18661936) pulled together in his book a series of articles he had written for McClures, a large-circulation monthly magazine. His assignment had been to study the governments of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and three other major American cities. Relying on interviews, documents, insider sources, and legwork, he showed the extent to which organized misconductgraft, fraud, bribery, embezzlement, chicanery, the buying of votes and the selling of officeswas rampant in city halls and, by extension, in any activity, business or political, driven by gain. His duty as a reporter, as he saw it, was to get to the bottom of things to uncover the unofficial, unresponsible, invisible, actual governments back of the legal, constitutional fronts.

In the practice of exposure and either overt or implicit excoriation, Steffens distant predecessors were the Hebrew prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, and Jesus as he cast out the money changers. Among immediate predecessors were the historian Henry Adams, who raked over politics and high finance in the Gilded Age, and the reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd, whose subject was monopoly, stigmatized in the title of his book as Wealth Against Commonwealth . Among Steffens leading contemporaries in the literature of exposure were Ida Tarbell, historian of the Standard Oil Company; Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives, a report on New Yorks slums and their inhabitants; Ray Stannard Baker, author of Following the Color Line, a pioneering study of racism in the United States; and Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle described in gruesome detail the inner workings of the meat-packing industry. These writers had no collective name until 1907, when Theodore Roosevelt, borrowing an image from John Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress, referred to them as the men with the muckrakes, blind to the positive aspects of American life and able to see only the filth at their feet.

Instead of retreating in the face of this attack from the heights of Roosevelts bully pulpit, Steffens and the other muckrakers co-opted his dismissive label, wore it proudly, turned its negative into a positive, and went about their work of exposure and implicit protest. Eventually the reading public, having passed through one of its periodic phases of purging and self-flagellation (another was Prohibition), grew tired of a heavy diet of articles (an estimated two thousand of them by 1912) that revealed misconduct on almost every level of American life. Taken together, the work of the muckrakers seemed to depict a world that, according to Finley Peter Dunnes comic philosopher, Mr. Dooley, was a wicked, wicked, horrible, place, little better than a convicts camp.