Lincoln Steffens

Lincoln Joseph Steffens
Born	Lincoln Joseph Steffens April 6, 1866 San Francisco, California, USA
Died	August 9, 1936 (aged 70) Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, USA
Other names	Lincoln Steffens
Occupation	Muckraker
Employer	New York Evening Post (until 1902) McClure's Magazine (until 1906) The American Magazine (1906 onward)
Known for	Part of the muckraking trio at the turn of the century. Having his articles written into books. See Works.

Steffens in 1894

Steffens in 1914

Steffens (right) with Senator La Follette (center) and maritime labor leader Andrew Furuseth (left), circa 1915.

Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) was a New York reporter who launched a series of articles in McClure’s titled the Shame of the Cities. He is famous for investigating corruption in municipal government.

Biography

Steffens was born April 6, 1866, in San Francisco. He grew up in a wealthy family and attended a military academy. He studied in France and Germany after graduating from the University of California.

Steffens began his career as a journalist at the New York Evening Post. He later became an editor of McClure's magazine, where he became part of a celebrated muckraking trio, along with Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker. He specialized in investigating government and political corruption, and two collections of his articles were published as The Shame of the Cities (1902) and The Struggle for Self-Government (1906). He also wrote The Traitor State, which criticized New Jersey for patronizing incorporation. In 1906, he left McClure's, along with Tarbell and Baker, to form The American Magazine.

In The Shame of the Cities, Steffens sought to bring about political reform in urban America by appealing to the emotions of Americans. He tried to provoke outrage with examples of corrupt governments throughout urban America.

In 1910 he covered the Mexican Revolution and began to see revolution as preferable to reform. In March 1919, he accompanied William C. Bullitt, a low-level State Department official, on a three-week visit to the Soviet Union and witnessed the "confusing and difficult" process of a society in the process of revolutionary change. He wrote that "Soviet Russia was a revolutionary government with an evolutionary plan", enduring "a temporary condition of evil, which is made tolerable by hope and a plan."

Upon his return, he promoted his view of the Soviet Revolution and in the course of campaigning for U.S. food aid for Russia made his famous remark about the new Soviet society: "I have seen the future, and it works", a phrase he repeated often with many variations.

His enthusiasm for communism soured by the time his memoirs appeared in 1931.

He was a member of the California Writers Project, a New Deal program.

He died on August 9, 1936, in Carmel, California.

Works

• The Shame of the Cities (1902)
• The Struggle for Self-Government, being an attempt to trace American political corruption to its sources in six states of the United States (1906)
• The Traitor State
• Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1958)

Further reading

Primary

• Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1958)
• The Letters of Lincoln Steffens, edited by Ella Winter and Granville Hicks, 2 vols. (1938)

Secondary

• Christopher Lasch, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (NY: Columbia University Press, 1962)
• Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1974)
• Stanley K. Schultz, "The Morality of Politics: The Muckrakers' Vision of Democracy," The Journal of American History, vol. 52, no. 3. (December 1965), 527–547, in Jstor
• Peter Hartshorn, I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens (Counterpoint, 2011)