How Lincoln Steffens Made American Journalism Tell the Truth

When Lincoln Steffens walked into a corrupt politician's office in the 1890s, he brought his terrier Mickey and zero interest in finger-pointing. What he found there would transform American journalism forever.

Before Steffens, Americans couldn't trust their news. Partisan papers distorted nearly everything, and reporters mostly made "coarse appeals to the passions" of readers, as one French observer noted in the 1830s. Facts took a backseat to whatever bias sold papers.

Steffens started his career at the New York Evening Post covering Wall Street and crime. The paper wanted him to condemn corrupt officials, but when he actually talked to crooked cops and political bosses, he found something more interesting: complex people caught in corrupt systems. He became obsessed with understanding why good people did bad things.

So he hit the road with Mickey, reporting for McClure's Magazine. He sat in political machine headquarters while party bosses petted his dog and explained exactly how they stole elections and taxpayer money "as one artist to another." The candor shocked him, but he kept listening.

His "Shame of the Cities" series in 1903 became a sensation, but not for the reasons you'd expect. Steffens didn't just expose corrupt mayors. He showed his middle-class readers that they were part of the problem, complicit through their apathy and selective outrage.

In San Francisco, nearly the entire business community worked with the party machine. In New York, Wall Street and Tammany Hall were partners. Respectable citizens would occasionally "throw the rascals out," then lose interest and elect another crook as mayor.

Why This Inspires

Steffens created a new kind of journalism that asked uncomfortable questions of everyone, including the people reading. "The misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people," he wrote. It was an innovation in self-criticism that made readers look in the mirror.

His work inspired a generation of investigators, from Ida B. Wells to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. His 1931 autobiography became possibly the most influential book of the New Deal era, prompting Americans to consider "the goodness of bad men and the badness of good men."

Today, when we expect journalism to be objective and hold everyone accountable, we're living in the world Steffens built, one honest conversation at a time.