LINCOLN STEFFENS
by JUSTIN KAPLAN
380 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10.
In 1892, after two years of drifting round Europe's universities as an American student prince, Lincoln Steffens, 26, disembarked at the port of New York. He was greeted by an envelope from his father, a self-made Sacramento businessman and community pillar. It contained a terminal $100, a few Polonian sentences about theory at the expense of practice, and the advice: "Stay in New York and hustle."
Steffens did so with an ambition and energy that had not been apparent during a boyhood largely spent riding horseback in the California countryside. By 1904 Steffens was one of the nation's best-known journalists. The Shame of the Cities, a book based on his exposes of big-city corruption, helped arm the short-lived reform movement whose grinning figurehead was Theodore Roosevelt. "The man with the muckrake" is what T.R. (borrowing from Pilgrim's Progress) called Steffens, thus giving generations of crossword-puzzle workers the nine-letter word muckraker.
The term only begins to describe Lincoln Steffens. Biographer Justin Kaplan does the rest with the same clarity, critical intelligence and warm grip on the American past that he demonstrated in his Pulitzer-prizewinning biography of Mark Twain. Lincoln Steffens appears at a time when the achievements of his particular brand of muckraking, like that of Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair and Ray Stannard Baker, are all but forgotten. Today is the age of megamuck and a more sophisticated breed of raker. With the exception of Watergate, the corrective campaigns of S.S. McClure's magazine, where Steffens and his colleagues launched their crusades, have been largely institutionalized. Now the work is done by civic-action groups—like Ralph Nader and his teams of faceless young researchers—as well as by lawyers, governmental agencies and the courts.
Awaiting the Messiah. Steffens belonged to what Kaplan calls "American grass-roots radicalism" which is marked by hunger for drastic solutions and "an inclination to spend their time and spirit cussing out the government and the bank while awaiting the arrival of the messiah." Steffens was inflamed by the redemptive possibilities of the Russian Revolution. He stumped for Bolshevism as the hope of Europe and in 1919 was even a member of William C. Bullitt's secret mission to Moscow to learn on what terms the Reds would negotiate with the Paris Peace Commission. Steffens' famous pronouncement, "I have seen the future and it works," came out of this trip—though, according to Bullitt, Steffens began honing the quote days before their train even reached the Russian frontier.