The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens by Lincoln Steffens

First published: 1931

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1866-1930

Locale: The United States, Europe, Mexico, and the Soviet Union

Principal Personage:

• Lincoln Steffens, a young American journalist

Form and Content

When The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens was first published, it was a surprising commercial success. Produced in two volumes, totaling nearly nine hundred pages, Lincoln Steffens’ story is a tribute to evolutionary and revolutionary thinking. To a world experiencing a catastrophic economic depression, such an expansive (and expensive) treatise on the changing political and social theories of a journalist whose popularity had reached its zenith some twenty-five years earlier might be considered somewhat excessive. Yet the autobiography achieved for Steffens a paramount commercial triumph and, more important, a great critical success as well. Given Steffens’ undisputed talents as a chronicler of the American and international political scenes, the critical acclaim accorded The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens could hardly have been unexpected. Even so, Steffens had long since arrived at the dubious honor of being too radical for the American journalism establishment and too philosophical for his socialist activist colleagues and friends. After World War I, he had found himself in a publishing no-man’s-land. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens served to restore Steffens to a place of honor among journalists and radicals and, moreover, affirmed his reputation as an important historian of the contemporary social and political picture.

Famed as a “muckraker”—to use Theodore Roosevelt’s colorful pejorative— and notorious as a champion of unpopular causes and an apologist for Bolshevism, Steffens by the 1920’s seemed a spent force. His life as a creative artist appeared to be over and a summation of it seemed appropriate. Yet it was a rebirth of the private man that probably forced the germ of the autobiography to life. Meeting the young Ella Winter, marrying her, and especially fathering his first child—his son Pete— all in his late fifties, Steffens found urgent reason to commit the story of his life and experiences to paper. The work is an exhortation to the young to reject the mistakes and outworn ideals of the past. It is unabashedly optimistic about the future; if Lincoln Steffens is the principal subject of the world depicted in the book, Pete Steffens is to be the hero of the world it promises.

The autobiography is divided into five parts. “A Boy on Horseback” portrays Steffens’ California boyhood, his undergraduate days at the University of California at Berkeley, his three years of postgraduate study at German universities, and his marriage to Josephine Bontecou. The second part, “Seeing New York First,” details Steffens’ return to the United States in 1892 and his apprenticeship as a newspaper reporter with The Evening Post, covering first Wall Street, then the police headquarters beats. Here Steffens’ interests in reform movements and “good government” developed and his friendships with powerful personalities such as Jacob Riis and Roosevelt began. “Muckraking,” the third, longest, and most detailed part of the autobiography, describes Steffens’ investigations of corruption in municipal and state governments across the United States, which he undertook as a writer for McClure’s Magazine and which he continued as an editor and part owner of The American Magazine. Part 4, “Revolution,” depicts Steffens, a financially secure free-lance writer, meddling disastrously in the McNamara dynamite trial, observing the collapse of Woodrow Wilson’s vision of world peace at Versailles in 1918-1919, and, most significant, engaging in the sociological study of revolution in Mexico and Russia. Finally, “Seeing America at Last” serves as an extended epilogue to Steffens’ intellectual journey, taking him up to 1930 and the onset of the Great Depression, yet concluding ultimately on a note of hope for the future.

Critical Context

The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens was an influential book in the 1930’s, providing all leftists, and Marxists in particular, with a way out of the American wilderness created by the prosperity of the 1920’s and the campaign of fear initiated by Attorney General Alexander Palmer. It remains important, even when more radical primers for revolution have been published.

It is first of all a lively history of the United States from 1895 to 1920, featuring vivid, unforgettable portraits of the famous men and women of the time, including Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, J. P. Morgan, Clarence Darrow, and Tarbell. Further, readers are introduced to or reminded of persons once famous, perhaps now forgotten: reformers such as Charles Parkhurst, Joe Folk, and Brand Whitlock; political bosses such as Richard Croker of Tammany Hall, Matthew Quay, and Martin Lomasny; press barons such as S.S. McClure, E.W. Scripps, and William Randolph Hearst; writers such as Walter Lippmann, John Reed, and Finley Peter Dunne; radicals such as Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, and Mabel Dodge; as well as international figures including Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Venustiano Carranza, and Benito Mussolini.

Beyond the personalities, however, this is the history of radicalism in the United States of Lincoln Steffens. The evolution of Steffens’ thinking parallels the movement of American liberalism from progressivism to socialism to communism. In The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, one sees the full panoply of reform movements, from the Lexow Commission in New York to Robert La Follette’s progressives in Wisconsin to the violence of the Industrial Workers of the World. The art world of Greenwich Village offers an iconoclastic vision of the future, while the lower East Side presents the vitality and stress of New York’s untrammeled immigration. Steffens’ life story mirrors the United States’ maturation, from an agrarian, insular country to a player in international politics, from a land of quiet villages to a country of giant cities.

The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens is a compendium of Steffens’ other works. The subjects and ideas of The Shame of the Cities (1904) and The Struggle for Self-Government (1906)—aside from his autobiography Steffens’ most important books—are summarized, and not sketchily so, in the muckraking section of the work. The argument of Moses in Red: The Result of Israel as a Typical Revolution (1926), the parable of an old-fashioned liberal’s response to Marxism, is more poignantly made through Steffens’ own reaction to it in his autobiography.

As a life narrative, the book is far from flawless. The reader learns little about the man Steffens apart from his intellectual life. His love life and marriages remain particularly obscure. Dates are routinely omitted, as are details concerning money, domestic arrangements, and family relationships and friendships. One might suppose that Steffens’ entire life consisted of working, traveling, and thinking; perhaps one would not be far wrong.

Yet this kind of criticism is asking for a different book. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens is the history of a man’s thinking and how it evolved over the course of his lifetime. In this respect, it itself provokes thought, and reading it is an exercise in the very process that Steffens celebrates.

Bibliography

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left, 1961.

Filler, Louis. Crusaders for American Liberalism, 1939.

Filler, Louis. Progressivism and Muckraking, 1976.

Kaplan, Justin. Lincoln Steffens: A Biography, 1974.

Lasch, Christopher. The New Radicalism in America, 1965.

Stinson, Robert. Lincoln Steffens, 1979.

Tarbell, Ida. All in the Day’s Work, 1939.

Winter, Ella, and Herbert Shapiro, eds. The World of Lincoln Steffens, 1962.