Masks of a Muckraker
WHITFIELD, STEPHEN J.
Masks of a Muckraker Lincoln Steffens By Justin Kaplan Simon and Schuster. 380 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brandeis In the early 20th...
...His various self-presentations never quite seemed in focus: Among New York's hard-boiled reporters of the 1890s, he was a cultivated gentleman, a dude...
...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brandeis In the early 20th century, Lincoln Steffens made a name for himself by investigating American cities -exposing their unsavory mixtures of business and politics, their corruption in the courts and the polling booth, their centers of vice and crime safeguarded by the police...
...The journalist's first marriage, to Josephine Bontecou, became hollow and humiliating, Kaplan tells us, with Steffens' realization that she was more free of self-delusion than he was, that his life had been cushioned by a dishonesty akin to crookedness...
...Indeed, the unresolved contradictions of his career demand the amplification of biography...
...Whatever he was, whatever he sought, the facts assembled in this book do not tell us, and Kaplan, unfortunately, does not explain them for us...
...After covering a couple of revolutions in Mexico and Russia, he discerned two alternatives?Christianity and Communism?which he merged into one...
...Steffens distrusted authority, yet he called Mussolini "the divine Dictator," and he praised Lenin...
...Armed with this vision, he proceeded to muckrake himself...
...introduced in the '20s as a "tired liberal," he conceded he was tired?of liberalism...
...Kaplan's earlier Mr...
...He does, on the other hand, make an effort to explain the psychological origins of Steffens' journalism, and he sensitively depicts Steffens' relations with women...
...He was a pro you couldn't put anything past, who knew what went on when the boys got together and pulled down the shades...
...Although Kaplan takes less than half as many pages as the Autobiography to describe Steffens' life, his meticulous research implicitly confirms the general accuracy of the muckraker's own account...
...Nor is an adequate explanation offered for the brief but remarkable popularity of the magazines that criticized American life at a time of general prosperity and national assertiveness...
...He exalted honesty above all other virtues, yet wanted crooks to think of him as their pal...
...His one memorable line?I have seen the future, and it works" -entwined American optimism and American pragmatism, yet he said it of Soviet Russia...
...He tried to put it all together, to comprehend a system, and to suggest a substitute for the sleazy union of wealth and power he continually turned up...
...at the same time, no mask really fit...
...As for Stef-fens himself, if the muckrakers were dedicated to "moral absolutes," then he was no muckraker, and his portrait should be removed from the gallery...
...Still, the 1966 biography was distinguished by its exposure of Twain's divided self?by its leitmotif of estrangement from one's own nature-whereas Kaplan's new study lacks such a controlling interpretation...
...Similarly, he was an intellectual who wrote and spoke against intellectuals for not doing anything, and although a champion of Bolshevism, he refused to join the Party...
...Though Kaplan emphasizes Steffens' imperiousness, it is striking how ill at ease the journalist was with himself...
...Then he studied the Federal government...
...This time, however, with Steffens' classic in the way, he has written a book that, for all its tact and sympathetic spirit, is ultimately unsatisfying...
...But beyond this confirmation the new book leaves too many questions dangling...
...Usually classified as a reformer, Steffens exhibited affection and admiration for political bosses and industrialists...
...Clemens and Mark Twain brilliantly recreated "the Lincoln of our literature," outdoing Twain's own gabby autobiography...
...later, politicians were surprised to be interviewed by a sort of bohemian, a self-proclaimed "artist...
...And his second marriage, to the 26-year-old Ella Winter-entered into when Steffens was 58?revolved primarily around their son...
...Steffens blamed an inability to reciprocate love upon his charmed boyhood, when he was too lavishly loved, but the emotional autonomy and self-confidence that were its consequences made him a devilishly smooth interviewer, capable of eliciting through his own detached curiosity the intimacies of strangers with reputations to protect...
...But soon it became too easy to detail urban graft in the family magazines, and Steffens went on to muckrake the states...
...Historians will glean few fresh insights into the old Progressives (who, by grunting and heaving everyone around while doing very little damage, bear a certain resemblance to modern professional wrestlers...
...The result appeared in 1931 as The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, and its tale-of a "boy on horseback" running wild in California who grew into a disenchanted liberal disbursing wisdom to young radicals-was told imposingly enough to discourage any biographer until Kaplan from attempting to retell it...
...So awesome was his reputation that civic organizations begged him and his muckraking cohorts to document the shame of their cities and the failures of municipal democracy...
...Kaplan is insufficiently attentive to these conflicts, which his subject never managed to resolve...
...This is especially odd because Steffens, the prototype of all investigative reporters, must, like Twain, be understood as a man split by internal conflict...
...Yet amid labor violence he expected magnanimity from avaricious capitalists, and he believed Bolshevik propaganda about the purges...
...To be sure, the fault is not wholly Kaplan's, for Twain, whose talent was of a much higher order than Steffens', is inherently a more fascinating subject...
...Often regarded as a radical, he speculated successfully on the stock market, and after hob nobbing with Wobblies would, apparently without breaking stride, return to his country home and servants near Greenwich, Connecticut...
...Steffens, as Huck Finn said of his creator, "told the truth, mainly...
...Steffens could not accustom himself to his own face...
...Before his death in 1936, he vaguely considered moving to the Soviet Union...
...the comrades, knowing their man, hinted at first-class accommodations...
Vol. 57 • June 1974 • No. 12
