Biography

Steffens was born April 6, 1866, in San Francisco. He grew up in a wealthy family and attended a military academy. He studied in France and Germany after graduating from the University of California

University of California

The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...

.

Steffens began his career as a journalist at the New York Evening Post

New York Post

The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...

. He later became an editor of McClure's

McClure's

McClure's or McClure's Magazine was an American illustrated monthly periodical popular at the turn of the 20th century. The magazine is credited with creating muckraking journalism. Ida Tarbell's series in 1902 exposing the monopoly abuses of John D...

magazine, where he became part of a celebrated muckraking

Muckraker

The term muckraker is closely associated with reform-oriented journalists who wrote largely for popular magazines, continued a tradition of investigative journalism reporting, and emerged in the United States after 1900 and continued to be influential until World War I, when through a combination...

 trio, along with Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker

Ray Stannard Baker

Ray Stannard Baker , also known by his pen name David Grayson, was an American journalist and author born in Lansing, Michigan...

. He specialized in investigating government and political corruption, and two collections of his articles were published as The Shame of the Cities

The Shame of the Cities

The Shame of the Cities was a work published in 1904 by Lincoln Steffens that sought to expose public corruption in many major cities throughout the United States. The work consists of articles written for the magazine McClure's in one collection. His goal was to provoke public outcry and thus...

(1902) and The Struggle for Self-Government (1906). He also wrote The Traitor State, which criticized New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

 for patronizing incorporation

Incorporation (business)

Incorporation is the forming of a new corporation . The corporation may be a business, a non-profit organisation, sports club, or a government of a new city or town...

. In 1906, he left McClure's, along with Tarbell and Baker, to form The 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 provoke outrage with examples of corrupt governments throughout urban America.

In 1910 he covered the Mexican Revolution

Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...

 and began to see revolution as preferable to reform. In March 1919, he accompanied William C. Bullitt, a low-level State Department official, on a three-week visit to the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 and witnessed the "confusing and difficult" process of a society in the process of revolutionary change. He wrote that "Soviet Russia was a revolutionary government with an evolutionary plan", enduring "a temporary condition of evil, which is made tolerable by hope and a plan."

Upon his return, he promoted his view of the Soviet Revolution and in the course of campaigning for U.S. food aid for Russia made his famous remark about the new Soviet society: "I have seen the future, and it works", a phrase he repeated often with many variations.

His enthusiasm for communism soured by the time his memoirs appeared in 1931.

He was a member of the California Writers Project, a New Deal

New Deal

The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...

 program.

He died on August 9, 1936, in Carmel, California.

Works

• The Shame of the Cities
  The Shame of the Cities
  The Shame of the Cities was a work published in 1904 by Lincoln Steffens that sought to expose public corruption in many major cities throughout the United States. The work consists of articles written for the magazine McClure's in one collection. His goal was to provoke public outcry and thus...
  
  (1902)
• The Struggle for Self-Government, being an attempt to trace American political corruption to its sources in six states of the United States (1906)
• The Traitor State
• Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1958)

Primary

• Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1958)
• The Letters of Lincoln Steffens, edited by Ella Winter and Granville Hicks, 2 vols. (1938)

Secondary

• Christopher Lasch, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (NY: Columbia University Press, 1962)
• Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1974)
• Stanley K. Schultz, "The Morality of Politics: The Muckrakers' Vision of Democracy," The Journal of American History, vol. 52, no. 3. (December 1965), 527–547, in Jstor
• Peter Hartshorn, I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens (Counterpoint, 2011)