Charles Edward Russell

• Charles Edward Russell
• Born: September 25, 1860
• Died: April 23, 1941

Journalist, muckraker, and socialist, was born in Davenport, Iowa, the son of Edward Russell and Lydia (Rutledge) Russell, both of whose parents had emigrated from England. A carpenter by training, Edward Russell demonstrated a flair for writing and became editor of The Davenport Gazette. Angered by the Gazette’s uncompromising support of abolition, the town’s proslavery element terrorized Russell, who, nevertheless, persisted with his antislavery editorials. After the Civil War, Edward Russell expressed his reformer’s zeal by attacking the abuses of the railroads, particularly lawless manipulation of rates.

Young Charles Russell helped his father with the newspaper until he enrolled at St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont. Rebelling against enforced church attendance at the Congregational church (the persuasion of his father), Russell read the pamphlets of Robert G. Ingersoll, the professed agnostic. Also nourishing Russell’s spirit of insurgency was his awareness that the town of St. Johnsbury was controlled by a single family of wealthy manufacturers. This situation, which reminded Russell of a feudal barony, led him to ponder the power of accumulated wealth. At school Russell was impressed with the ideals of Wendell Phillips, abolitionist turned social critic.

After graduation in 1881, Russell returned to Iowa, where he helped to found the Iowa State Free Trade League. Russell sought to challenge privileged manufacturers and to protect farmers from prices artificially increased by tariffs. The agitation of the league led to the calling of a national free-trade convention in Detroit in 1883. In 1884 Russell married Abby Osborn Rust of St. Johnsbury; they had one child, John Russell, a playwright. Abby Russell died in 1901.

After serving as a reporter and editor on several Midwestern newspapers, Russell worked as a police reporter for The New York Times and The New York Herald. His experience in New York City impressed upon Russell, as he later wrote in his autobiography, Bare Hands and Stone Walls (1933), the fact that the “great majority of mankind lived in poverty, want, privation, and squalor; that what we called prosperity … was a savage jest, since … it meant only the welfare of a certain comparatively small class.” After serving as city editor of the&ISNew York World and managing editor of the New York American, Russell in 1900 helped William Randolph Hearst found The Chicago American. Shortly afterward he suffered a breakdown in health.

In 1905 Russell wrote a series of articles for Everybody’s magazine exposing the unfair practices of the Beef Trust. He disclosed how a group of packinghouse companies, through railway rebates and a monopoly over refrigerator cars, had built a vast economic and political empire with power “greater than the courts or judges, greater than the legislatures, superior to and independent of all authority of state or nation.” The Beef Trust compelled consumers to pay artificially high prices for food, ruthlessly eliminated all competition, and put cattlemen and farmers at their mercy. In these articles Russell evidenced a determination to strike at the rule of bosses and to assist the exploited—attitudes that remained with him for the rest of his life.

One day in 1905, while observing the U.S. Senate floor from the press gallery, Russell was struck by the thought that everyone of these “well-fed and portly gentlemen … was there to represent some private (and predatory) Interest. Each was supposed to represent the people; each was in fact representing some division of the people’s enemy.” Returning to New York City, he suggested to Hearst, who had recently bought Cosmopolitan, that this was a splendid theme for a magazine series. However, when Russell was assigned by Everybody’s to write about popular movements throughout the world, the project was given to David Graham Phillips, who completed a series of articles entitled “The Treason of the Senate.”

In 1907-08 Russell wrote another series for Everybody’s entitled “Where Did You Get It, Gentlemen?,” an expanded version of which was published in book form under the title Lawless Wealth: The Origins of Some Great American Fortunes (1908). Here Russell showed how some of the wealthiest families in New York had amassed fortunes in ways that brought “discredit upon the national name.” He continued his muckraking in a series of articles for Hampton’s describing how railroad men had accumulated great fortunes at public expense. In addition to his attacks on corporations, he crusaded for woman suffrage and prison reform.

In 1909 William English Walling, a socialist and old friend, approached Russell with the idea of establishing a national organization of whites and blacks that would protect blacks from mistreatment. As a result of the efforts of Walling, Russell, and a handful of others, there emerged the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Russell’s humanitarian sentiments and compassion for the underdog also led him to condemn British imperialism in India and to support independence for Ireland and the Philippines.

As the force of muckraking dwindled—strangled at the hands of the Interests, thought Russell—he joined the Socialist party, in 1908, regarding it as the most effective means of striking at the citadels of power. He had never read Marx and knew virtually nothing about scientific socialism, but two things impressed him about the Socialist party: its members included some of the best people he had ever met and big business was terrified of it. In 1910 and 1912 the Socialist party nominated Russell for governor of New York; in 1913 he ran for mayor of New York City and for state senator the following year. He was expelled from the party in 1917 for supporting American entry into World War I and for accepting an invitation by President Woodrow Wilson to serve with a diplomatic mission to Russia.

In his later years Russell took an active interest in the plight of Jews in Germany and served as vice president of the American Association Opposed to Capital Punishment. During this time he also wrote poetry, biographies, and a book on music, The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas (1927), which won a Pulitizer Prize. He died at eighty at his home in Washington, D.C., after a long illness; he was survived by his second wife, Theresa Hirschl, whom he had married in 1909, and by his son.

The Charles Edward Russell papers are in the Library of Congress. His autobiography, noted above, and his reminiscences of his father, A Pioneer Editor in Early Iowa (1941), are sources of biographical information. Providing insight into his thought are Why I Am a Socialist (1910), Socialism the Only Remedy (1912), and After the Whirlwind (1919). D. M. Chalmers, The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers (1964), contains an account of Russell’s career. See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973).