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As a young reporter, Lincoln Steffens learned that
successful police officers had a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the
law. Here’s how it worked in some New York City precincts in the late
19th century: Criminal syndicates did a thriving business in age-old vices
(gambling, prostitution, thievery) and the police protected them, as long
as they stayed within certain limits. If rich man lost his wallet to
pickpocket, a detective would call in a favor from his criminal associates,
the victim’s goods were returned, and the cop looked like a
crime-solving genius. Our hero detective, of course, looked the other way
when people of no consequence — blacks, immigrants, the poor —
were victims. And if his criminal buddies got competition — say, a
new theft ring moved in — our man in blue was there to crack a head
or two and restore “law and order.”
For Steffens, a college-educated naïf, learning
how some cops worked their beats helped launch him on a lifelong quest to
understand the difference between the righteous and the sinners.
Eventually he’d write “The Shame of the
Cities,” a magazine series about municipal corruption that made him
famous. He was a contemporary of such journalists as Ida Tarbell, who
dissected Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and Upton Sinclair, who sliced
and diced Chicago meatpackers. I’m fascinated by Steffens and the other
muckrakers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who showed what an
aggressive, independent press could do. So imagine my delight when I
recently found Steffens’ autobiography, published in 1931, on the
Prairie Archives discount table. I’ve been reading it, in bits and
pieces, ever since.
Steffens started his career, like many journalists,
just plain curious about how things work. And he believed, as have many
idealists, that simply exposing evil would be enough to kill it, like
sunlight on mold. So he went about the business of exposing corruption and
its consequences, and he named names.
And he tried to understand how corruption could
become so endemic. At first he believed that the younger a city — a
St. Louis or Chicago, for instance — the more prone it was to
tolerating bribery, vote-stealing, and crime, but that notion vanished when
he went back East, to such places as Philadelphia and Boston. The idea that
corruption was an urban phenomenon faded as he probed state governments.
The belief that business was somehow more ethical or efficient than
politics evaporated when reform-minded good-government businessmen took
charge of cities and things became worse. Stumped, Steffens sought to find out who was
responsible, who really called the shots. What he found is that things were
never really the way they seemed. On Wall Street, company presidents did
not control — they were puppets of such tycoons as J.P. Morgan. In
cities, it wasn’t the mayor who governed; he was a creature of the
local political boss. And so it went with governors and congressmen and
presidents and, yes, even newspaper editors and publishers. Steffens recounted what he told one boss about
political corruption: “It is not a temporary evil, not an accidental
wickedness, not a passing symptom of the youth of a people. It is a natural
process by which a democracy is made gradually into a plutocracy”
— government of the people becomes government for the wealthy.
He tried to understand the process, and what he found
pushed him to probe more deeply. The gulf, he discovered, between the
righteous and the sinners was not that wide — and that the sinners
often had more of the truth to them, and a greater potential for good, than
so-called pillars of society. It was not, he wrote, “a matter of men
or classes or education or character of any sort; it is a matter of
pressure. Wherever the pressure is brought to bear, society and government
cave in.”
Steffens never figured out the world — he was
often famously wrong — but he never stopped trying, either. He tested
his assumptions, reexamined his prejudices, and challenged his own right to
consider himself a good man.
As he grew older, he even wondered about the work
he’d done. Some muckrakers, he wrote, were content to keep exposing
bad deeds, but that wasn’t enough: “Some of the muckrakers had
not been thinking at all; they had their profession or their principles to
which they stuck throughout all their experiences. It’s amazing to me
to hear how little the muckrakers had learned from their muckraking. No
wonder our readers got only our facts and the thrills of our
sensations.”
Steffens represents modern American journalism at its
start, a time of hellraising and optimism and discovery. Sometimes I feel
as though I’m witnessing the end.
Newspapers where I spent most of my adult life are
circling the drain — the consequence of years of betrayal by owners
who sucked ungodly profits from their operations. Most news organizations
today are gripped by fear; if they’re not cutting back, they’re
selling out. The Wall Street Journal was just acquired by the disreputable Rupert Murdoch; the Chicago Reader has been sold
to an undistinguished chain of alternative weeklies. With retrenchment
comes weaker journalism, coupled with a crippling timidity and incuriosity.
I’m still trying to figure out why — and
so, like a true believer whose faith is tested, I find comfort and
encouragement in the ancient scriptures and by reading about the lives of
the early apostles. To find hope for the future, it doesn’t hurt to
look back.
Contact Roland Klose at editor@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2007.
