Samuel Sidney McClure

• Sam S. McClure
• Born: February 17, 1857
• Died: March 21, 1949

Editor and publisher, revolutionized the American mass market, first by making good literature available to newspaper readers, then by popularizing the inexpensive magazine specializing in the kind of investigative journalism known as muckraking.

Born plain Samuel McClure, in County Antrim, Ireland, the eldest of the four sons of Thomas McClure and Elizabeth (Gaston) McClure, he was of old Irish Protestant stock, the McClures having migrated to Ulster from Scotland after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the Gastons having fled France as Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. McClure entered school at the age of four and from the start was engrossed with education. It was there, he said in his autobiography, that he first felt himself a “human entity.” By age seven he had advanced to the head of the school’s top class, alongside fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. There was little likelihood of a poor boy’s getting any further education in the Ireland of that day.

At this juncture McClure’s father, working at a shipyard, tumbled through a hatchway and was killed. For a year, his mother did her best to make ends meet, but in June 1866 felt compelled to emigrate; she went to Valparaiso, Indiana, where several of her brothers and sisters had preceded her, and there worked as a housemaid. In 1867 she married Thomas Simpson, a recent immigrant from Ulster with a hundred-acre farm half a mile out of town. They had four children.

In the summer of 1871, a new high school opened in Valparaiso, and with a single dollar as a stake young McClure enrolled, supporting himself by work so arduous as to have discouraged anyone less determined. (Since his classmates all had middle names, on an impulse he assumed that of Sherman, after the Civil War hero, but later switched to Sidney. In high school, and for the rest of his life, he never signed himself as anything but “S. S. McClure.”) When McClure was sixteen, Thomas Simpson died. McClure returned home and, with two younger brothers, put the farm on a paying basis—a feat their stepfather had been unable to accomplish.

At the suggestion of one of his Gaston uncles, McClure entered the preparatory department of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He progressed swiftly through the preparatory curriculum, made high marks in his college years, and by the fall of 1881, as a senior, became editor in chief of The Knox Student. Looking to turn a much-needed profit from his editorial work (which at first had not especially appealed to him), he founded an intercollegiate news bulletin that he could sell to commercial outlets and was elected president of the newly formed Western College Press Association. His future career was set; his chief editorial colleagues at Knox were to be associates in all his later publishing ventures.

McClure fell in love with Harriet Hurd, daughter of one of Knox’s most distinguished professors, but both families frowned on the match. The luckless suitor took a job in Boston with a bicycle manufacturer and shortly thereafter persuaded him to let him launch The Wheelman, a magazine aimed at capitalizing on the new cycling craze. Now regularly employed, he renewed his suit, and he and Harriet Hurd were married on September 4, 1883.

McClure next took a position in New York City with the DeVinne printing company, and then one in the dictionary department of the Century Company, but he soon found himself out of work when he volunteered suggestions on how to improve the running of the shop. Sensing that he was not cut out to work for others, he launched the McClure Syndicate (not the first feature syndicate, as he liked to claim) on October 4, 1884. His plan was to sell novels, stories, and other serialized literature cheaply to daily newspapers, in imitation of similar enterprises in England. By calling on each newspaper office to promote his offerings, he was finally successful. In 1887, seeking to assure a proper flow of material, he traveled to England to meet authors.

In the next six years, McClure crossed the Atlantic eight times and the United States an equal number of times, in the process acquiring works by leading British and American writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, A. Conan Doyle, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ouida, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. (Only the young George Bernard Shaw seems to have withstood his blandishments.) Stevenson repaid McClure’s fawning admiration by caricaturing him as Jim Pinkerton in The Wrecker, and William Dean Howells patterned the aggressive westerner Fulkerson in A Hazard of New Fortunes after him, but McClure unquestionably raised the literary appreciation of the mass American public.

With access to this flood of marketable material, McClure naturally thought of using some of it in a magazine of his own. Now the father of four—Eleanor, Elizabeth, Robert Louis Stevenson (named after his idol), and Mary (a fifth child, Enrico, or Henry, was later adopted)—McClure wanted a substantial venture and, as ever with him, a new challenge.

The first issue of McClure’s was planned for June 1893. It came out on May 28, a month after the onset of the panic of 1893, which he had been too busy to notice. Of the first run of 20,000 copies, 12,000 were returned (most were later sold to libraries or as part of full sets). McClure scraped together the money to continue. Having undercut his competitors by pricing his magazine at fifteen cents, he went down to a dime when they matched him, and circulation soared. By 1900 it was close to 400,000.

But price was not the only factor in the success of McClure’s. The period of 1890-1915 was the Golden Age of the American magazine, and as his biographer Peter Lyon writes, “McClure’s was the liveliest, the best illustrated, the most handsomely dressed, the most interesting, and the most successful of an abundance of superior magazines.” It was also the most effective and the hardest hitting in its articles on political and business corruption.

From a pile of unsolicited manuscripts that came to the syndicate, McClure had gleaned one with an unprepossessing title but a provocative style, signed Ida M. Tarbell. Though himself never much of a writer, he recognized her talent and assigned her to write a series on the life of Napoleon. When that caught on, he had her do the life of Lincoln. She was to become one of the mainstays of the magazine, her sensational history of the Standard Oil Company being one of the major exposes that established its national reputation and marked its editor as a leading antimonopoly crusader.

Combining business sense with reforming zeal, in the January 1903 issue he printed an installment of Tarbell’s work with Lincoln Stef-fens’s “The Shame of Minneapolis” and Ray Stannard Baker’s “The Right to Work.” Together, he pointed out in an editorial, these articles were an indictment of “the American contempt of law.” More than any other journal, although it did not originate the genre, McClure’s was now the home of the muckrakers—so stigmatized in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt because, he said, they concentrated solely on what was “vile and debasing.” (They were, nonetheless, his most effective allies against corruption.)

In addition to Tarbell, Steffens, and Baker, the magazine featured Samuel Hopkins Adams, Christopher P. Connolly, Burton J. Hendrick, Will Irwin, and George Kibbe Turner. Another writer who worked for him as an editor was Willa Cather. However, as each of the major writers gained stature, they inevitably came to a parting of the ways with McClure. Eventually, after they left, McClure’s lost its hold, suspended publication for a while in 1914, and was eventually absorbed by Hearst’s International Publications.

McClure lived to the age of ninety-two, and his judgment in public affairs did not always keep pace with his taste in running the magazine. In 1915 he joined Henry Ford’s Peace Ship, though he soon became disillusioned with it. He compiled some of his antiwar articles into a 191” book but then took on an assignment to write for the American war propaganda effort a series on “why we cannot make peace with Germany.” He championed Prohibition. He went to Mussolini’s Italy and became an apologist for the dictator who, as he was among the first to proclaim, had “made the trains run on time.” He became involved in various empty schemes and finally secluded himself in the Murray Hill Hotel in New York City and the Union League Club library, supported in his last years by friends and relatives.

In 1944 the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded McClure its Order of Merit, which carried with it a grant of f $1,000, to honor his work, “particularly in the recognition of new talent and in the creation of a new type of journalism.” He died at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx and was buried in Galesburg, Illinois.

McClure’s enduring significance in the history of American reform is that he discerned the voracious public appetite in the 1890s and the early 1900s for journalistic exposes of graft in government, of the misdeeds of business and industry, and of urban poverty. With the instincts of a businessman, he exploited the public’s hunger for social and economic justice and he became a reformer in spite of himself. If his own principles did not run deep, he provided the magazine in which such vigorous reformers as Steffens and Tarbell reached millions with their trenchant analyses of societal evils.

McClure’s published works include My Autobiography (1914), signed by McClure but actually an “as told to” work written by Willa Cather, who was a frequent contributor to the magazine; Obstacles to Peace (1917); The Achievement of Liberty (1935); and What Freedom Means to Man (1938). P. Lyon, Success Story: The Life and Times of S. S. McClure (1963; reprinted 1967), is the authoritative biography, containing, in addition to an excellent bibliography, a list of unpublished accounts by McClure’s early associates: C. P. Brady, “The High Cost of Impatience”; F. N. Doubleday, “Secret Memoirs of a Publisher”; and J. S. Phillips, “A Legacy to Youth.” See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1974), which provides an exhaustive bibliography of works about the muckrakers, and J. M. Harrison and H. H. Stein, eds., Muckraking: Past, Present, and Future (1974).