Citizen Reporters by Stephanie Gorton

Author:Stephanie Gorton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

13

You Have the Moon Yet, Ain’t It?

Lincoln Steffens, looking out his train window as Manhattan’s sprawl fizzled into pastureland, mulled over his latest order from McClure. He was to travel—free of menial and managerial tasks at last—and, in theory, this would result in a story.

It was daunting. Ever since he had returned from Europe and started his career as a journalist, Steffens had been either a city reporter or a city editor. New York, overflowing with stories of crime, graft, black markets, and powerful characters, was his professional home. Now, going on tips and skill alone, he would have to start from scratch in a strange new landscape.

He quickly got a long-haul ticket in hand. McClure’s was owed an advertising fee from the Lackawanna Railroad, so in the summer of 1902 Steffens boarded a westbound train on that line, thinking he might disembark in either Cleveland or Chicago. The Midwest, after all, was exotic to a Californian-turned-expatriate-turned–New Yorker.

As the sky dimmed and he was pulled ever deeper into the heartland, Steffens hopped on and off around a dozen trains, stopping not just in Cleveland and Chicago, but also taking in Kansas City, Topeka, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, Louisville, and Cincinnati. He began to pursue ideas for features, going through jotted lists of topics and power brokers from other McClure’s staffers, working his way through other people’s address books. His targets were “writers, editors, leading citizens” who would connect him to promising material as yet unknown back east. This line of questioning eventually took him to St. Louis, and it was there that a path finally took shape. Rather than trailing after his colleagues and reporting on the trusts, or on labor, Steffens turned his eye on another rapidly changing and much-reviled hotbed of wrongdoing: the looming, festering American city. “I started something,” Steffens later wrote, claiming somewhat justifiable credit for himself, “which did ‘make’ not one but several magazines. I started our political muckraking.”

When he moved from the Advertiser to McClure’s, Steffens had hoped to finally get beyond the rhythm of the newspaper world. As long as he was confined to the daily news cycle, he knew that whatever he published today would be crumpled up to wrap fish tomorrow. In St. Louis, and in his mandate from McClure, he found the first opportunity to make the leap from daily news to something more substantial.

St. Louis was the fourth-largest American city, and one of the fastest growing. Between the Civil War and the turn of the century, the population rose from 160,000 to 600,000; city government could not scale up so fast. Instead, a rogue administration controlled by mob bosses stepped into the void and seized control. Shortly before Steffens’s arrival, the streetlamps of St. Louis were dark for a stretch of several weeks. Mayor “Uncle Henry” Ziegenhein ignored the dilapidated streets and left the “new” city hall unfinished as the money dedicated to the building was funneled to private interests. He famously scolded a group of citizens protesting the

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