Lincoln Steffens: A Biography

This is a great biography of the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens who exposed a number of corrupt practices by politicians in many of the large cities in America around the turn of the twentieth-century. Born in San Francisco and educated at the University of California and in Europe, he settled in NYC and began writing for the New York papers. In 1901 he joined McClure's Magazine and with other social critics working there (Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker) began writing about political corruption in St. Louis, Minneapolis, and other large cities. The articles were a tremendous success and were later brought out in book form, entitled THE SHAME OF THE CITIES. Theodore Roosevelt was impressed by the work of these journalists (at first, anyway) and tagged them "muckrakers," a reference to certain characters in PILGIM'S PROGRESS. Steffens, as Kaplan makes clear, was not just an exposer of political evils or a moralist, but raised more questions than he answered and made the public aware, through irony and other literary devices, of the paradoxes between public life and private affairs. His chief question, as Kaplan says, was "What are you going to do about it?" Later, when exposed to the Russian Revolution in 1917, Steffens became an advocate for communist principles. Losing much of his support in America because of his revolutionary beliefs, he spent much of the 1920s in Europe. In 1931 he published his AUTOBIOGRAPHY, which was a huge success, and he spent the next few years until his death in 1936 lecturing across the country. More than anything else, Steffens wanted people to think seriously about society and politics; he never joined the Communist party: "I am not a Communist," he said once. "I merely think that the next order of society will be socialist and that the Communists will bring it in and lead it." He was wrong about that, and not even Kaplan, writing in 1974, could know just how wrong. He's a beautiful writer, though, and makes his subject interesting and important. It's a delightful biography.