Lincoln Joseph Steffens

• Lincoln Steffens
• Born: April 6, 1866
• Died: August 9, 1936

Journalist and reformer, was born into a middle-class family in San Francisco, the only son of Joseph Steffens and Elizabeth Louisa (Symes) Steffens. His father, born in Canada, received a commercial education in Chicago, taught school in Illinois for three years before clerking, and in 1862 worked his way to California as a wagon-train scout. In San Francisco Joseph Steffens joined a paint, oil, and glass firm as a bookkeeper, eventually working his way up to partner and becoming prominent in state Republican politics. Steffens’s English-born mother grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, and saved enough money earned by sewing to sail to California by way of Panama. She married Joseph Steffens in January 1865.

Lincoln, their first child, had three sisters: Louise, Dorothy, and Laura. He grew up in Sacremento, where his family had moved in 1870. A pampered youth, he was a poor, sometimes rebellious, student until he learned discipline at a San Mateo military academy. Entering the University of California at Berkeley in 1885, he performed indifferently and was graduated in 1889 with a Ph.B. and interests in science, philosophy, and writing. Spurning his father’s offer of a business position, Steffens decided upon graduate studies in Europe. He visited Berlin and spent a semester at Heidelberg auditing ethics lectures; worked with art history in Munich during the summer of 1890; and studied experimental psychology during the winter of 1890-91 in Leipzig.

There he fell in love with another student, Josephine Bontecou, the daughter of a Troy, New York, physician, who was thirty-five and ten years his senior. After breaking his engagement to Gussie Burgess, a Berkeley student, Steffens secretly married Josephine Bontecou in England on November 4, 1891. Dependent upon his father for an income, Steffens and his wife studied in London at the British Museum, moved to the Latin Quarter in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne, and traveled widely in Europe.

Pursued by his father’s inquiries, they finally sailed to New York City in October 1892. There he received an envelope from his father containing $100 and a letter telling him to “stay in New York and hustle.” But his attempts at writing were unsuccessful, and the couple became financially dependent upon her mother.

Finally using his father’s connections, Steffens obtained a job as a reporter for The .New York Evening Post. He worked his way up to covering Wall Street and, in 1893, the police “beat”.The self-confident journalist, universally known as”Steff,” was not overawed by such famous bankers as J. P. Morgan or such corporate lawyers as James B. Dill. Soon reputed to be the “gentleman reporter,” Steffens usually won the confidence of his sources with his intelligence and his sympathetic approach. He developed his talent. for investigative journalism by writing in colorful, accurate detail about such topics as civic corruption in New York City and the reform ticket that won city office in 1894, including Theodore Roosevelt as head of the police board. Over the next twenty years Steffens covered Roosevelt’s meteoric career, seeing him as the prototype of the necessary “strong man” as reformer.

In 1894 Steffens received an independent income when Johann Friedrich Krudewolf,a friend whom he had known since his student days in Germany, died and left him sole heir to an estate worth $12,000. Steffens and his wife remained childless, and he blamed himself for their barren marriage.

Late in 1897, Steffens left his job to become city editor for The New York Commercial advertiser. In four years he helped turn this sluggish organ into a lively paper that sought to explain the city’s vitality. His excellent staff included Peter Finley Dunne, Harry Thurston Peck, and Abraham Cahan, a radical Jewish Socialist. Always attuned to philosophical attitudes and intellectual trends, Steffens’s topics of interest included the Jewish immigrant culture, police and crime, corruption in Tammany Hall, and labor struggles. But with increased profits came conservatism for the Commercial Advertiser’s owners, and Steffens, at thirty-five, was ready for new challenges. Josephine Steffens had already published Letitia Berkeley, A.M. (1899), a semiautobiographical novel about an emancipated woman. Being mentally and physically drained by a decade of journalism, Steffens left his job in June 1901 and spent several months vacationing and trying, in vain, to write his own novel.

In October 1901 Steffens accepted an offer to join McClure’s magazine as managing editor at $5,000 per year. S. S. McClure had on his notable staff Ida M. Tarbell and young Ray Stannard Baker and was publishing work by “O. Henry” (William Sydney Porter) and Theodore Dreiser, among others. McClure’s and similar inexpensive magazines were pioneering “muckraking” journalism by using newspaper-trained writers to expose and analyze the problems and corruption caused by modern industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. A poor editor, Steffens in 1902 was sent out to travel and write his own material. In St. Louis he interviewed Joseph W. Folk, a prosecuting attorney who was fighting municipal corruption. Steffens published his first noteworthy article, “Tweed Days in St. Louis,” in McClure’s October 1902 issue. In January 1903 he published “The Shame of Minneapolis,” in the same edition that carried an installment of Tarbell’s history of Standard Oil, Baker’s article on coal strikes, and McClure’s famed editorial summarizing corruption in America. The magazine sold out and Steffens’s reputation as the most celebrated of muckrakers was thereafter unchallenged.

In 1904 Steffens collected his articles on municipal corruption and published his best-known book, The Shame of the Cities. He had researched the facts and shrewdly interviewed key participants—always his forte. His chapters read like detective stories in which the corrupt acts of supposedly upstanding politicians and corporate leaders were eventually exposed. Politics was business, he concluded, and business always pursued self-interest. But he passionately desired to move the public to righteous action. His major thesis was that the moral apathy of ordinary citizens led to the corruption of politicians and business. Like most reformers, he assumed that an aroused public would elect honest leaders and government would become truly democratic.

As his first book was published, Steffens was working on the articles that produced his second and third books. Progressivism was shifting from the city to the state level, and, being determined to achieve fame as a journalist, Steffens too was shifting. He continued his travels and investigations, meeting, and admiring, such prominent reformers as Mayor Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland and Governor (later Senator) Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin. In April 1904 Steffens began publishing the series entitled “Enemies of the Republic.” He found that state corruption also was political, financial, and industrial in scope, extending even to Congress. He collected these articles in The Struggle for Self Government (1906), a book marred by an uncritical admiration of such strong progressives as La Follette. Progressivism had moved to the national level by 1906 and peaked by 1910; by then, muckraking was already in decline.

In his most underrated book, Upbuilders (1909), Steffens tried to turn the reform tide back toward civic awareness and strong leadership. He offered five heroes as models for problem-solving, including Republican Mayor Mark Fagan of Jersey City, Democratic Judge Ben Lindsey of Denver, and Oregon’s William S. U’Ren. The book was Steffens’s attempt to apply Christianity, or the golden rule, to contemporary politics and society. He was now arguing that almost every institution produced corruption, a position that took him close to anarchy. But his pragmatic solution was that “applied Christianity” could restore institutions such as government to their original unselfish purposes.

In 1906 he and other muckrakers departed McClure’s, and Steffens, Tarbell, Dunne, William Allen White, and others bought the sagging American Magazine and made it prosper. But by 1907 a dispute over editorial policy caused Steffens to sell out and become a free-lance journalist. By 1908 such work led him to accept a $10,000 fee to go to Boston as a lecturer, researcher, and writer of a program for civil reform; but the report was never published. Late in 1911 he traveled to Los Angeles to use the golden rule as a solution to the labor-capital disputes that resulted in the trial of the McNamara brothers after the bombing of the Los Angeles Times; but his efforts again failed. Partly as a result, Steffens’s career was threatened. After 1911 his articles were often rejected, while his progressive friends called him a blunderer and an increasingly anti-progressive press called him a radical.

Steffens’s personal life was also at low ebb. Josephine Steffens died in January 1911 after a long period as an invalid, and he moved to Greenwich Village and gradually absorbed its bohemian mixture of personal, political, and social radicalism. He befriended young writers such as Walter Lippmann, socialite Mabel Dodge, radicals such as Emma Goldman, and William D. (Big Bill) Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World. Steffens now fell out of touch with mainstream American reform. Where Christianity had helped make him a radical intellectual, discussions of Marx and Freud helped make Steffens an intellectual revolutionary. He never became disillusioned, but he shed old illusions as he tried to unlearn the past and master the present and future.

In 1914 Steffens was abroad as a muckraker in Europe, but his plans were interrupted by World War I. He journeyed to Mexico, observing and writing about the political and social forces that caused the Mexican revolution. There he added historical determinism to his thinking, arguing that the revolution and its leaders, Venustiano Carranza, for example, showed how progressive, historical forces worked themselves out in a society’s experiences—a reversal of his earlier belief that strong leaders shaped history. Back in America by 1917, Steffens witnessed the collapse of the Russian autocracy in March and the United States declaration of war in April.

In March President Woodrow Wilson was sending Chicago millionaire and Slavophile Charles R. Crane on a fact-finding mission to Russia. By coincidence, Steffens met his friend Crane in Washington and was invited along. Steffens spent six weeks in Russia and returned to lecture in favor of a just peace negotiated by liberal America and revolutionary Russia. For the rest of his life, he defended the “beautiful” Russian people, the revolution, and, especially, V. I. Lenin. In 1918 Steffens wrote an introduction to Leon Trotsky’s The Bolsheviki and World Peace, and in April 1919 he returned to the Soviet Union with the ill-fated William C. Bullitt diplomatic mission to explore recognition of the USSR.

After interviewing Lenin, Steffens returned to America, saying, “I have seen the future; and it works.” But his reasoning lacked the logic of his earlier thinking. He contended, for example, that the Russian people saw the “light” of revolution only after the Czarist government prohibited vodka during the war. Steffens’s faith in liberalism was shattered when Wilson repudiated the Bullitt mission’s findings in favor of recognition and then failed, in Steffens’s view, to negotiate at Versailles a just and lasting peace.

Steffens moved to Paris as an expatriate. Later, he defended Benito Mussolini’s action in Italy by reasoning that history had an inexorable logic; that revolutionaries such as Lenin and Mussolini knew the direction of history and could command its course, but that liberals such as Wilson, and himself, now a “failed liberal,” could only ride the crest of social change without affecting its direction. Steffens published his most complete defense of Lenin and the Russian revolution in Moses in Red (1926), a book that was almost entirely ignored by readers and reviewers. Still, while claiming to reject liberalism, throughout his life he stood for that doctrine’s principles, including open inquiry, positive hope, and rejection of dogma.

Shortly after the death of Josephine Steffens, Steffens’s personal life—which he always found difficult to merge with his professional life—had been somewhat revitalized when he renewed his relationship with Gussie Burgess Nobbes, now a music teacher at Hunter College and separated from her invalid husband. They lived together intermittently for years. At times the sexually liberated Steffens consorted with other women (one was the writer and mystic Mary Austin), but in Paris in early 1919 he met and became attached to Ella Winter, a highly educated twenty-one-year-old English woman. After three years apart, he joined her in England in October 1923. They moved to Paris, where she became pregnant—thereby fulfilling his longing for fatherhood, one of his deepest desires. At length they decided upon marriage, which occurred in Paris in August 1924.

Then fifty-eight, Steffens entered the happiest period of his life; his only child, Pete Stanley Steffens, was born that November. In 1925 Steffens began work on his memoirs, and in 1927 he moved his family from Italy to Carmel, California, to a new artist colony. In 1931, after six years of tedious work, his masterly Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens was published. During that period he also lectured and broadened his radical acquaintanceship, being more in demand than any time since his muckraking days. The Autobiography became a best seller, in part because Steffens questioned the political and social processes in a manner congenial to Great Depression readers of the 1930s. He also provided brilliant vignettes of the legendary leaders of his day; from his Socialist perspective, he rejected liberalism without attacking liberals personally; and he attempted to show the purpose of his career without making any “confession” of his personal trials and tribulations.

From 1928 until his death, Steffens wrote frequent columns for local newspapers in which he analyzed the failure of American politics and capitalism in the depression and gauged the Communist alternative. Many of these articles he collected in his final book, Lincoln Steffens Speaking (1936).

Steffens also relaxed and enjoyed his fame as an eminent man of American letters and a guru of radical politics. Even in old age, he was still engaging personally, stimulating intellectually, and provocative politically—often leaving his younger listeners with feelings of increased self-confidence as well as intellectual enlightenment. In December 1933 he suffered a heart attack and was largely confined to bed until he died, three years later, at seventy.

Although his grass-roots radicalism fell from favor during the 1940s and 1950s, Steffens had created an investigative, reform journalism that transcended his life and times. “He had consistently asked the right questions,” observed his biographer Justin Kaplan, “and his work and career as a whole were so powerfully marked by ethical fervor, compassion and good hope tempered with shrewd realism that he deserved to remain a considerable personage.” One of the greatest American reformers of the twentieth century, Steffens realized that the exposure of corruption, wrongs, and false thinking must be accompanied by demands for change and action. In that sense, Lincoln Steffens’s life and career helped illuminate the complexities of modern political and industrial America.

The Lincoln Steffens papers at Columbia University contain invaluable source materials on his life and career, including letters, manuscripts, and scrapbooks. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931) is a classic on the reformer’s early life and later public career, including his evolution from progressivism to radicalism; but it largely omits reference to his private life and his wives. It must be supplemented by the useful collection The Letters of Lincoln Steffens, 2 vols. (1938), ed. by E. W. Steffens and G. Hicks. The standard work on the history of muckrakers is L. Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (1964). An excellent brief analysis of Steffens’s career and writings is P. F. Palermo, Lincoln Steffens (1978). The only complete biography is J. Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974), which includes a wealth of detail and which is characterized by a Freudian approach that integrates Steffens’s complex private life with his increasingly radicalized personal values and professional career. See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1958).