Lincoln Steffens

Lincoln Steffens with Senator La Follette (center), with maritime labor leader Andrew Furuseth (left), circa 1915.

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." His more famous quote "I've seen the future, and it works" can be found on the titlepage of his wife's, Ella Winter, 1933 edition of Red Virtue.

Biography

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. He died in 1936.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (2005).
• The Letters of Lincoln Steffens, edited by Ella Winter and Granville Hicks. 2 vol. 1938.
• 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

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Lincoln Steffens  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Lincoln Steffens"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.