Lincoln Steffens: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

Here, from the acclaimed biographer of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, is the life and world of Lincoln Steffens -- the Columbus of muckraking, the father of American investigative journalism, and a pivotal figure in the history of grassroots radicalism. Justin Kaplan brings alive early twentieth-century America -- a nation in the throes of becoming a great industrial power, a land dominated by big business and beset by social struggle and political corruption. It was the era of Lenin and Sinclair Lewis, of Emma Goldman and William Randolph Hearst, Teddy Roosevelt and John Reed. It was a time of union busting, anarchism, and Tammany Hall. Lincoln Steffens -- eternally curious, a worldwide celebrity, and a man of magnetic charm -- was part of all he reformism; the progressive movement; organized labor; Greenwich Village's intellectual, sexual, and artistic liberation; the women's suffrage movement; the Russian Revolution; World War I; the Great Depression. Lincoln Steffens was truly a man of his season, and his life reflects his impetuous, vital, creative, striving. In Lincoln Steffens, Justin Kaplan holds a mirror to an outsized American figure and to the tumult of turn-of-the-century America.

Genres: Biography, Journalism, American History, History

416 pages, Paperback

First published April 8, 1974

About the author

Justin Daniel "Joe" Kaplan was an American writer and editor. The general editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, he was best known as a biographer, particularly of Samuel Clemens, Lincoln Steffens, and Walt Whitman.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've long come across references to Steffens in other books but never read his famous autobiography or his 'The Shame of the Cities'. This served as a good introduction to his life and to the progressive milieu out of which he arose.

[RYD · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lincoln Steffens was a muckraking journalist now largely remembered for his unfortunate line about Soviet Russia: "I have seen the future and it works." This is a very good biography. I was surprised at how much of history Steffens experienced. The author does a good job with context, and with connecting Steffens' support of the Soviet Union to the horrors of World War I, Woodrow Wilson's squelching of civil liberties at home, and frustration on the left with the failure of reform movements. One passage I noted:

"The intellectual entente of 1913, now largely smashed by the war, received its death blow with the Russian revolution. That hopeful alliance had in part been held together by a shared rejection of bourgeois allegiances. Now, it seemed, one either went with the revolution and the proletariat, or, rejecting them, went back to the middle class. One was either a rebel or an accomplice. With alarming urgency and apparent finality one had to decide whether this 're-revolution' was the second coming or the catastrophe of modern times, a wedding or a funeral, a stage in an inexorable process or just a tragic fluke, an attempt to realize age-old dreams of abolishing war, poverty and suffering or a reversion to the blackest of tyrannies."

[Elliot Ratzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Talking over dinner with Adam Hochschild this week, I realized I only knew a few superficial tid-bits about the great “muckraking” journalist Lincoln Steffens, especially that he wrote a revolutionary account of Moses’s life. So I dove into this biography to get a better roadmap of Steffens’ life and times. From his early “The Shame of the Cities” to his late in life “Autobiography,” Steffens was a minor force on the liberal-left. His journalism centered around the corruption of municipal government, championing reformers and bold democratic experiments. He dined with presidents, was the confidante of civic minded businessmen like Filene, and espoused a sort of Christian anarchism. Yet by the end of his life, he was praising Communism—the ideal liberal fellow-traveler—who famously remarked after returning from Russia that “I’ve seen the future and it works” (inexplicably a line that is also a Prince song). In between he nurtured journalists like John Reed, Max Eastman and Walter Lippmann.

[Jim Gallen · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The President and the Assassin" tells the parallel stories of President William McKinley who was leading the United States to threshold of the American Century and Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist drifter who would gun him down in Buffalo. More than the stories of two people, it is the stories of movements that were pulling America in opposite directions.

The focus on McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt brings up much that is found in other volumes with an emphasis on the governing class' fear and concern about the anarchist movement. The reader comes to understand that, in his day, McKinley was a revered leader, not the generally forgotten predecessor of TR as he is now remembered.

The perspective of this book that I found to be most interesting is the explanation of the sources and significance of the anarchism that really threatened America as it strode onto the World Stage. This book reveals anarchism's roots in Europe and how the "propaganda of the deed" was used on both sides of the Atlantic. It enables the reader to understand that the assassination of McKinley was not an isolated incident but a blow by a Trans-Atlantic Angel of Death that snuffed out the lives of European leaders along with McKinley. There was a movement that saw the world in a struggle between the rulers and the ruled. Others who carried this virus to America play prominent roles in the story.

Besides recalling a tragic murder, "The President and the Assassin" tells the story of a struggle for the heart of America, a time when the stable, Shining City on a Hill was in the future, a time when a tumble into revolution and disorder was viewed as a real possibility, not a paranoid dream. While not a conspiracy per-se, the placement of this crime in the world-wide ferment makes author Scott Miller tale, in my view, a much more interesting one than the story of the Kennedy assassination and, perhaps, even the Lincoln conspiracy.

[Richard Hilliker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had difficulty finding my way through this biography. Kept losing interest but it was a well researched book.