Lincoln Steffens

One could argue that Lincoln Steffens is the best muckraking journalist during the progressive era. Born April 6 1866, in Sacramento, California. He’s son of Elisabeth Louisa Symes and Joseph Steffens. His full name was Lincoln Joseph Steffens, and he was named after his father and president Lincoln.1 In his early childhood Lincoln began to understand the ways of the world. He discovered, “The horse races his father bet on were fixed to take advantage of the “suckers” While he loved his father, he “did not care for suckers” — and determined never to be one.”2 After acquiring this knowledge Lincoln set out to go get an education at the University of California at Berkeley. After he graduated in 1889 he moved to Germany to continue his education. Following his journey for education, he searched for employment in New York City. With his father’s assistance Lincoln found a job at New York Evening Post as a reporter in which he learning how to investigate and make articles on local politics, economic conditions, and culture.3 On the job Lincoln met New York Evening Sun's veteran police reporter Jacob Riis. Riis taught Lincoln how to be an investigative reporter in corruption, reform, and urban politics.4 From then on Steffens began his trip to becoming a key progressive anarchist. Lincoln Steffens was an important progressive reformer because he was a muckraker who granted a name for the people who exposed corruption in municipal and state government, influenced Theodore Roosevelt to champion the cause of cleaning up corruption and his famous book The Shame of Cities led to widespread reform.

In 1901 Lincoln took the job at McClure’s Magazine. Lincoln began to write articles that uncovered political corruption about companies. The article became a way to combine an examination of American life with a belief in a need for reform. A couple years after a few of Lincoln and a couple of other corruption busters created so many articles revealing companies these group of people were given a name. On April 14, 1906 Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech, and in the speech he used a passage from John Bunyan’s, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Roosevelt used, “The Man with the Muckrake…who could look no way but downward,” from Bunyan’s passage, causing the term muckraker to be generated.5 Lincoln sharpened the criticism of the American society with his writings. Industrial monopolies, fraudulent business practices and political corruption were the cause of the articles that were published in McClure’s Magazine.

Theodore Roosevelt not only named people such as Lincoln Steffens, he also was influenced by them. Roosevelt began more interactive with political corruption issues. Roosevelt has many letters that he wrote and received relating to political corruption. Theodore obtained a letter from John Campbell that discussed corruption at the recent Colorado election of December 1903.6 Another letter came from John M. Barnes