Lincoln Steffens
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Joseph Lincoln Steffens (April 6, 1866 – August 9, 1936) was an American journalist and one of the most famous and influential practitioners of the journalistic style called muckraking. He is also known for his 1921 statement, upon his return from the Soviet Union: "I have been over into the future, and it works." (Often misquoted as "I have seen the future, and it works.")
Steffens was born in San Francisco, California, the son of a wealthy businessman, grew up in Sacramento, and studied in France and Germany after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was first exposed to radical political views.
At McClure's magazine, Steffens became part of the celebrated muckraking trio of himself, Ida Tarbell, and Ray Stannard Baker. He specialized in investigating government and political corruption, and two collections of his articles were published as The Shame of the Cities (1904) and The Struggle for Self-Government (1906), he also wrote The Traitor State, which criticized New Jersey for patronizing incorporation. In 1906, he left McClure's, along with Tarbell and Baker, to form American Magazine.
In The Shame of the Cities, Steffens sought to bring about political reform in urban America by appealing to the emotions of Americans. He tried to make them feel very outraged and "shamed" by showing examples of corrupt governments throughout urban America.
In 1910 he covered the Mexican Revolution and began to see revolution as preferable to reform. In 1919, he visited the Soviet Union together with William C. Bullitt and the Swedish Communist Karl Kilbom, and Steffens developed a short-lived enthusiasm for communism that had soured by the time he wrote his memoirs, published in 1931. He was a member of a group that came to be known as the California Writers Project, funded by the New Deal. Some of its members were socialist or communists, while others had little formal interest in politics. In 1941 he died when he was run over by a car.
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Primary sources
- Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (2005).
- The Letters of Lincoln Steffens, edited by Ella Winter and Granville Hicks. 2 vol. 1938.
[edit] Secondary sources
- Christopher Lasch; The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution Columbia University Press, 1962
- Justin Kaplan; Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (2004)
- Stanley K. Schultz. "The Morality of Politics: The Muckrakers' Vision of Democracy," The Journal of American History, Vol. 52, No. 3. (Dec., 1965), pp. 527-547. in Jstor
