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LINCOLN STEFFENS DOCUMENT #1 Lincoln Steffens Steffens, Lincoln (1866-1936), journalist, was born Joseph Lincoln Steffens in San Francisco, California, the son of Joseph Steffens, a banker, and Elizabeth Louisa Symes. In 1870 the Steffens family moved to Sacramento, where Steffens and his three sisters grew to adulthood in an upwardly mobile middle-class family. After an undistinguished educational experience at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he graduated in 1889, Steffens traveled to Germany to continue his education. During 1889 and 1890 he studied ethics, philosophy, and art history at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg. The following year he explored psychology and fell in love with fellow American student Josephine Bontecou at Leipzig University. They moved to Paris in 1891 and studied at the Sorbonne. They secretly married in London in 1891 and returned to the United States in 1892. Steffens launched a search for employment in New York City. Aided by an introduction provided by his father to Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of Century Magazine, he secured a position as a reporter with the New York Evening Post, where he worked on a number of different beats and learned firsthand how to investigate and craft newsworthy articles on local politics, economic conditions, and culture. Steffens soon became the newspaper's first police reporter. Assigned to cover Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst's crusade against vice and the state legislature's Lexow Committee on police corruption, Steffens regularly prowled lower Manhattan's Mulberry Street, the nerve center of the police and detective forces. There, with the New York Evening Sun's veteran police reporter Jacob Riis as his mentor, Steffens sharpened his skills as an investigative reporter and as a student of corruption, reform, and urban politics. The investigations into police corruption resulted in the defeat of the Tammany political machine's mayor by a reform candidate, William L. Strong, in 1894. When he assumed the mayor's office in 1895, Strong appointed a board of police commissioners headed by Theodore Roosevelt. As part of his own education, Roosevelt gathered information from a variety of individuals, including Riis and Steffens. While covering Roosevelt's assault on corruption in the police department, Steffens used his column to champion police reform. Roosevelt's departure in the spring of 1897 for Washington, D.C., and the return of the Tammany forces to city hall in the fall dampened the fires of reform and led Steffens to seek a new position where he could more fully utilize his European education, investigative skills, and reform politics. Steffens concentrated first on urban government. He traveled from city to city talking with politicians, reformers, crooks, and editors. Based on his investigations, he crafted articles that combined the human-interest approach to writing with the enthusiasm of the crusader and the purposefulness of the reformer. The compelling nature of his articles captured the reading public's interest. His articles on the battle between corruption and reform explored Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Published separately in McClure's in 1902 and 1903, they appeared together as The Shame of the Cities in 1904. In many cases he was summarizing information already available to the public, yet Steffens revealed in a striking fashion the abundant nature of government corruption and the equally widespread apathy on the part of the public. By 1905 the reform impulse had begun to move from the municipal to the state level, and Steffens shifted his attention to the battle for good government in the nation's state capitals. A new series of his articles took shape and in 1906 became The Struggle for Self-Government. Steffens detailed the challenge posed by the ascendancy of business interests over the public interest. Just whom did state legislators represent? Were "the people" going to take back their governments? DOCUMENT #2 Excerpt from The Shame of the Cities, by Lincoln Steffens Now, the typical American citizen is the business man. The typical business man is a bad citizen; he is busy. If he is a “big business man” and very busy, he does not neglect, he is busy with politics, oh, very busy and very businesslike. I found him in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government with corruption funds in New York. He is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if he would neglect politics. But he is not the business man that neglects politics; that worthy is the good citizen, the typical business man. He too is busy, he is the one that has no use and therefore no time for politics. When his neglect has permitted bad government to go so far that he can be stirred to action, he is unhappy, and he looks around for a cure that shall be quick, so that he may hurry back to the shop. The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade not principle. “My business is sacred,” says the business man in his heart. “Whatever prospers my business, is good; it must be. Whatever hinders it, is wrong; it must be. A bribe is bad, that is, it is a bad thing to take; but it is not so bad to give one, not if it is necessary to my business.” “Business is business” is not a political sentiment, but our politician has caught it. He takes essentially the same view of the bribe, only he saves his self-respect by piling all his contempt upon the bribe-giver and he has the great advantage of candor. “It is wrong, maybe,” he says, ‘but if a rich merchant can afford to do business with me for the sake of a convenience or to increase his already great wealth, I can afford, for the sake of living, to meet him half way. I make no pretensions to virtue, not even on Sunday.” And as for giving bad government or good, how about the merchant who gives bad goods or good goods, according to the demand? If our political leaders are to be always a lot of political merchants, they will supply any demand we may create. All we have to do is to establish a steady demand for good government. The boss has us split up into parties. To him parties are nothing but means to his corrupt ends. He ‘bolts” his party, but we must not; the bribe-giver changes his party, from one election to another, from one county to another, from one city to another, but the honest voter must not. Why? Because if the honest voter cared no more for his party than the politician and the grafter, then the honest vote would govern, and that would be bad—for graft. It is idiotic, this devotion to a machine that is used to take our sovereignty from us. If we would leave parties to the politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for the city, and the State, and the nation, we should rule parties, and cities, and States, and nation. If we would vote in mass on the more promising ticket, or, if the two are equally bad, would throw out the party that is in, and wait till the next election and then throw out the other parry that is in—then, I say, the commercial politician would feel a demand for good government and he would supply it. That process would take a generation or more to complete, for the politicians now really do not know what good government is. But it has taken as long to develop bad government, and the politicians know what that is. If it would not “go,” they would offer something else, and, if the demand were steady, they, being so commercial, would “deliver the goods.” DOCUMENT #3 Cartoon was created by Thomas Nast. Cartoon shows William Tweed, Peter Sweeney, Richard Connolly and Oakley Hall (all New York city politicians); appeared in Harper's Weekly. DOCUMENT #4 Lincoln Steffens The Shame of Cities The Shame of the Cities is a book written by American author Lincoln Steffens. Published in 1904, it is a collection of articles which Steffens had written for McClure’s Magazine. It reports on the workings of corrupt political machines in several major U.S. cities, along with a few efforts to combat them. It is considered one of several early major pieces of muckraking journalism, though Steffens later claimed that this work made him "the first muckraker." Though Steffens' subject was municipal corruption, he did not present his work as an exposé of corruption; rather, he wanted to draw attention to the public's complicity in allowing corruption to continue. Steffens tried to advance a theory of city corruption: corruption, he claimed, was the result of "big business men" who corrupted city government for their own ends, and "the typical business man"—average Americans—who ignored politics and allowed such corruption to continue. He framed his work as an attempt "to sound for the civic pride of an apparently shameless citizenship," by making the public face their responsibility in the persistence of municipal corruption Steffens' account of a Missouri politician helped him rise to political prominence in Missouri. The two St. Louis articles, along with another follow-up piece Steffens wrote in April 1904, helped rally support for the politician and helped him be elected governor of Missouri later that year.
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