The Shame of the Cities
| Author | Lincoln Steffens |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | municipal government, political corruption |
| Genre | muckraking |
| Publisher | McClure, Philips, and Co. |
|
Publication date
|
1904 |
The Shame of the Cities is a book written by American author Lincoln Steffens. Published in 1904, it is a collection of articles which Steffens had written for McClure’s Magazine. It reports on the workings of corrupt political machines in several major U.S. cities, along with a few efforts to combat them. It is considered one of several early major pieces of muckraking journalism, though Steffens later claimed that this work made him "the first muckraker."
Though Steffens' subject was municipal corruption, he did not present his work as an exposé of corruption; rather, he wanted to draw attention to the public's complicity in allowing corruption to continue. Steffens tried to advance a theory of city corruption: corruption, he claimed, was the result of "big business men" who corrupted city government for their own ends, and "the typical business man"—average Americans—who ignored politics and allowed such corruption to continue. He framed his work as an attempt "to sound for the civic pride of an apparently shameless citizenship," by making the public face their responsibility in the persistence of municipal corruption.
Steffens began working on the articles that would become The Shame of the Cities after he joined the staff of McClure's in 1901. He had been hired as a managing editor for the magazine, but, as Steffens biographers note, he struggled with the job. Steffens writes that S. S. McClure, the magazine's co-founder, sent him on an open-ended assignment to learn how to become an editor. According to Steffens, McClure said, "Get out of here, travel, go—somewhere. Go out in the advertising department. Ask them where they have transportation credit. Buy a railroad ticket, get on a train, and there, where it lands you, there you will learn to edit a magazine."
After setting out in the spring of 1902, Steffens learned of and arranged a meeting with Joseph W. Folk, the recently elected circuit attorney of St. Louis. Folk had been elected thanks to a temporary alliance between a business-backed reform movement and Edward Butler, the boss of the city’s Democratic Party machine; Butler allied with the reformers, in part, to help get his son elected to Congress. After his election, though, Folk launched a massive investigation into the city’s corruption, arresting many prominent St. Louis legislators and businessmen, while scaring others into fleeing the state—and, in some cases, fleeing the country.
Steffens was not the first author of "Tweed Days in St. Louis", the McClure’s piece detailing Folk’s investigation of Butler’s machine; he initially commissioned Claude Wetmore, a St. Louis author, to write the piece. Wetmore, according to Steffens biographer Justin Kaplan, "was an honest reporter, but he happened to live in St. Louis and he wanted to continue to live there. And so Wetmore steered a middle course, left out crucial names and facts, went easy on prominent citizens went easy even on Butler, who was to come to trial that summer". Steffens rewrote the article from scratch, adding all of the details Wetmore had left out; Wetmore, in turn, insisted that Steffens sign the article as well, so that he too would be targeted when St. Louis citizens accused them of slander.
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