The System: Journalism 1897 - 1920

by Lincoln Steffens, Tom Streissguth (Editor)

The -muckraker- Lincoln Steffens dug deep into business criminality and political corruption in a powerful series of articles written for McClure's magazine. Establishment newspapers and -System- politicians dismissed his work as just another example of the decrepit modern journalism that could never pass for genuine writing. But Steffens' dogged quest for truth and justice set the bar high for investigative journalists in print, television and the Internet who follow in his footsteps. This new collection from The Archive includes the author's detailed and dramatic pieces on the civic troubles in Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, and New York. In addition, The System includes early pieces Steffens wrote on architecture and the newspaper business, three pen portraits of his friend Theodore Roosevelt, and eyewitness descriptions of the social turmoil in early Soviet Russia.

732 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2014

About the author

As managing editor of McClure's Magazine from 1902 to 1906, American journalist Joseph Lincoln Steffens exposed governmental corruption in a series of articles, inaugurating the era of muckraking.

In a wealthy family, he attended a military academy. Following graduation from the University of California, he studied in France and Germany.
Steffens began his career at the New York Evening Post. He later part of a celebrated trio with Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker. He specialized in investigating politics and published collections as The Shame of the Cities (1904) and The Struggle for Self-government (1906). In 1906, he left alongside Tarbell and Baker.

From 1914–1915, he covered the Mexican revolution and began to prefer it to reform. In March 1919, he accompanied William C. Bullitt, a low-level official of state Department, on a three-week visit to the Soviet Union 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." After return, he promoted his view of the Soviet revolution and in the course of campaigning for food aid of United States for Russia made his famous remark about the new Soviet society: "I have seen the future, and it works," a phrase he often repeated with many variations.

His enthusiasm for communism soured before the time of his memoirs in 1931. The autobiography, a bestseller, led to a short return to prominence for the writer, but Steffens ably capitalized not as illness cut his lecture tour short by 1933. He joined as a member of the California writers project, a program of New Deal. He died of heart failure in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.