Lincoln Steffens

Lincoln Steffens (born April 6, 1866, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died August 9, 1936, Carmel, California) was an early American investigative journalist, lecturer, and political philosopher. Steffens helped shape public understanding of urban political corruption and contributed to the development of investigative reporting as a major tradition in American journalism.

He was part of a contingent of American journalists who came of age during the Progressive era and whose reporting on political connections between business and government led U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt to dub them “muckrakers.”

When he died in 1936, The New York Times called him “one of the best reporters and one of the most relentless searchers after truth in his generation.”

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Early life

Steffens was born in San Francisco, the only son of Joseph and Elizabeth Steffens. For most of his childhood, the family lived in Sacramento. His father was a very successful businessman, and the family was so wealthy that one of their homes later became the California governor’s mansion. Young Lincoln had a favorite pony that he rode regularly as a boy.

After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1889, Steffens studied psychology with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, Germany, and with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, which confirmed his basic positivist orientation. As Steffens, now newly married to Josephine Bontecou and having traveled throughout Europe, prepared to return home and perhaps follow his father’s footsteps into business, he received a letter from his father telling him to find a job in New York so that he could understand “the practical side” of life.

In 1892 he became a reporter at the New York Evening Post. He would spend the next nine years covering a variety of beats, including Wall Street, politics, and law enforcement. He came away with a sense of outrage that the wealthy and influential traded power with each other at the expense of the public’s needs. That sense of outrage would fuel the rest of his career.

The rise of the muckraker

In 1901, after becoming managing editor of McClure’s Magazine, Steffens began to publish a series of influential articles investigating public corruption in cities including St. Louis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis. His 1902 investigation of scandals in St. Louis, headlined “Tweed Days in St. Louis” in a nod to New York City’s notorious Boss Tweed, began this way:

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St. Louis, the fourth city in size in the United States, is making two announcements to the world: One that it is the worst governed city in the land; the other that it wishes all men to come and see it.

That article and others would be collected in a seminal work published in 1904, The Shame of the Cities. Embodying the values of the Progressive era—a period of reform that sought to address political corruption, the effects of rapid industrialization, and the challenges of urban growth—these articles examined the operation of political machines, party organizations that often exchanged jobs, services, and favors for political support and exercised substantial influence over municipal governments. Steffens argued that all of society bore responsibility for the malfeasance, writing in the introduction to Shame, “the misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people.”

This work would earn him, along with Ray Stannard Baker and Ida Tarbell, the name muckraker, from no less than the president of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt intended to disparage this new brand of crusading journalists who he said, echoing John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, “could look no way but downward.” Instead the term became something of a badge of honor.

Steffens’s later books included The Struggle for Self-Government (1906) and Upbuilders (1909). With Tarbell and others, Steffens cofounded The American Magazine in 1906.

Moving beyond journalism

Steffens’s work won him acclaim on the national lecture circuit, where he tried to encourage his listeners to question their own belief systems, but he was also becoming increasingly disillusioned with the notion that progressive ideology could change society. His 1909 book Upbuilders, the story of five people who tried to change society by using the Golden Rule, sold poorly. In 1911 his wife died, deepening his despair.

The Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the Russian Revolution of 1917 turned Steffens’s attention from reform to revolution. After a trip to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1919, he wrote to a friend, “I have seen the future; and it works.” It became one of the most quoted lines in the United States about the Bolshevik Revolution. Steffens was an admirer of Vladimir Lenin, but ultimately, he eschewed allegiance to any single party or doctrine.

Even as his unorthodoxy lost him his American audience during the 1920s, Steffens continued to study revolutionary politics in Europe and became something of a legendary character for younger expatriates.

In 1931 he published The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, in which, according to one critic, he posed an existential question about “the goodness of bad men and the badness of good men.” For his part, Steffens would sometimes offer this advice to young reporters: “Try always to be able to help people explain themselves.”