Buoyed by successes in the midterm elections of 1890, the Farmers’ Alliance sent delegates to a national convention in Omaha, Nebraska. There, in 1892, a new party, the People’s or Populist Party, was born. “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin,” the platform began. “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind.” The Populists called for a graduated income tax to shift the heavier burden to the wealthy, a silver standard to facilitate an easier discharge of their debts, and a federally administered system of postal savings banks where people could safely deposit their earnings. To circumvent the collusion of corporate interests and political bosses who, in turn, controlled the state legislatures, they demanded a constitutional amendment to elect U.S. senators by a direct vote of the people, as well as new techniques—the initiative and the referendum—which would enable voters to directly initiate or reject legislation.
Realizing the necessity of a coalition with more urban areas, organizers of the largely agrarian party tried to appeal to industrial workers. The platform endorsed labor’s fight for an eight-hour day and opposed the use of Pinkerton guards as strikebreakers. Finally, arguing that “the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads,” the Populists called for government ownership of the railroads. Though their 1892 presidential candidate, James Weaver, proved unable to unify support beyond the western states, the Populist message remained a rallying point for America’s working poor.
At first, the ruling classes—the bankers, the businessmen, and the lawyers—paid little attention to the members of the Farmers’ Alliance and the new Populist Party. “We prideful ones,” White later admitted, “considered the Alliance candidates as the dregs of Butler County society; farmers who had lost their farms, Courthouse hangers-on . . . political scapegraces.” White wrote stinging editorials to ridicule the uprising, convinced that the grassroots movement was “demagogic rabble-rousing” without any tie to reality. “A child of the governing classes, I was blinded by my birthright,” he later acknowledged. When the local Populists burned him in effigy, he proudly noted that their actions served only to aggrandize his standing with the local leaders of the Republican Party.
Like White, Theodore Roosevelt dismissed the members of the Farmers’ Alliance as “pinheaded, anarchistic crank[s]” and castigated the Populists as grandstanding demagogues. While Tarbell sympathized with the Populists’ outcry against monopoly after experiencing her father’s struggle with Standard Oil, and while Baker came to know personally the members of Coxey’s Army, the Pullman strikers, Governor Altgeld, and William Jennings Bryan, Roosevelt categorically denounced them all as “representatives of those forces which simmer beneath the surface of every civilized community, and which, if they could break out, would destroy not only property and civilization but finally even themselves.”
For genteel reformers like Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, “good government,” not economic reform, was the benchmark. “The ‘best citizens,’ ” White explained, “were supposed to desire honest men in office, men who would not take bribes, men who would appoint high-minded men as their subordinates, men who would look after the public interests, see that public charities were well supported.” The appearance of the Farmers’ Alliance, “the first wave of the shock troops of a revolution that was to gather force as the years went by,” reported White, “all this did not disturb either the Spring Chickens or their parents at the high-five clubs, the formal dances at the opera house given for the firemen, and the town charities.”
White’s jeering editorials against the Populists attracted widespread notice and prompted a job offer from the Kansas City Journal, a conservative Republican paper. During the next three years, from 1892 to 1895, he wrote for the Journal and then for the Kansas City Star. During these tumultuous years, as “the black hand of despair” fell over the countryside, he remained, by his own admission, “a supercilious young Pharisee, blinder than a bat to the great forces that were joining issue in our politics, forces that would be in combat for fifty years.” Although his attacks on the Populists did not abate, he also began to write short stories based on his early life in Kansas that would eventually attract the attention of Sam McClure.
In 1895, having married schoolteacher Sallie Lindsay, White decided to quit big city life and return to the small town of Emporia, with its population of 15,000, a Main Street and college, and simple neighborly life. Intent on becoming his “own master,” White purchased the Emporia Gazette, a local paper with a circulation of less than five hundred. He hoped to streamline the paper’s production and dedicate most of his time to writing poetry and fiction. Most important, he told a skeptical city friend at the time, “I want to live and work some place where I can sit down with the mayor on the edge of the sidewalk and we can let our feet hang off and can discuss local politics and the state of the nation and what we must do to be saved till it’s time to go home to dinner.”
In his very first editorial for the Gazette, White spelled out a manifesto that would define the rest of his life. “The new editor hopes to live here until he is the old editor,” he began. “He hopes always to sign ‘from Emporia’ after his name when he is abroad, and he trusts that he may so endear himself to the people that they will be as proud of the first words of the signature as he is of the last words.” The young idealist would make good on his pledge, living out his years in his beloved country town, even as he became “the best-known and most often quoted country journalist in the United States.”
While White never capitulated to Sam McClure’s repeated invitations to relocate to New York, the warm friendships he developed with McClure, Phillips, Tarbell, and Baker fundamentally altered his social and political attitudes. He began to understand the profound inequities that had produced the Populist uprising: how the growth of colossal corporations had strangled competition in one field after another; how these corporations blatantly wielded their power through venal politicians, widening the gap between the rich and the poor. Belatedly but surely, he came to recognize that Bryan’s platform in 1896 “was the beginning of a long fight for distributive justice, the opening of a campaign to bring to the common man . . . a larger and more equitable share in the commonwealth of our country.”
THE FINAL MEMBER OF THE celebrated quartet at the heart of McClure’s was Lincoln Steffens. As a police reporter for the New York Evening Post, Steffens covered Theodore Roosevelt’s activities as police commissioner. Early on, McClure had identified Roosevelt as a man of unusual potential: he “seems big from here,” McClure confided to Phillips, indicating his resolve to cultivate a connection with a public figure “just our size.” Aware of Steffens’s intimacy with Roosevelt, the editor hoped to secure that conduit to New York’s dynamic commissioner by adding Steffens to his staff.
When first approached by McClure’s, Steffens was reluctant to abandon the newspaper industry and the reputation he had built as “one of the best journalists New York ever had.” A long lunch with Phillips, followed by a visit to the bustling McClure’s office, began to conquer his hesitancy. McClure was out of town, but Steffens met with the rest of the staff and was particularly captivated by the art director, August Jaccaci. “Jaccaci probed me hard, took me to his home, talked with and drew me out,” he recalled. “That was his way. He could not be a friend; he had to be a lover.” Their discussions convinced Steffens that the format of a monthly magazine would allow him to “tell the whole, completed story,” providing time and space for details and implications he could not explore in a daily newspaper. That conversation “clinched” the deal.
Arriving at McClure’s, Steffens later recalled, was “like springing up from a bed and diving into the lake—and life.” S. S. McClure’s sheer, irrepressible drive astounded Steffens. “He was a flower that did not sit and wait for the bees to come and take his honey and leave their seed
s,” observed the new staff writer. “He flew forth to find and rob the bees.” Tensions invariably arose when McClure returned from his trips and assembled the staff to allocate new assignments gleaned from his travels. It was Ida Tarbell, Steffens recalled, who helped sort things out. Time and again, she managed to placate the staffers, to avoid battles, and find a path “to compromise and peace.”
Tarbell in turn came to consider the “young, handsome, self-confident” Steffens “the most brilliant addition to the McClure’s staff.” Though “incredibly outspoken” and “never doubtful of himself,” he demonstrated a disconcerting ability to analyze events and detect the underlying patterns, illuminating “the relations of police and politicians, politicians and the law, law and city officials, city officials and business, business and church, education, society, the press.” Tarbell found it “entirely in harmony with the McClure method of staff building that this able, fearless innocent should be marked for absorption.”
More reserved by nature than the cocksure Steffens, Ray Baker acknowledged they would not likely have been friends had they not been “associates in the same enterprise, eagerly engaged in similar tasks, meeting familiarly every day, discussing ideas and projects.” Nevertheless, the more he worked with Steffens, the greater his respect and affection grew. Staff luncheons and dinners, visits to each other’s homes, confidences shared, and letters exchanged combined to “make up the texture of a long friendship.” Baker thought of Steffens “as a kind of Socratic skeptic, asking deceptively simple questions . . . striving first of all to understand.” Indeed, his biographer Robert Stinson observes that throughout Steffens’s long career, “his most consistent pose was that of a student.” Projecting an earnest, unbiased, and questioning nature, he was able to gain the confidence and elicit the secrets of his subjects.
The qualities that made Steffens a first-rate reporter—his immense curiosity and self-assurance, his social ease and storytelling gifts—were perceptible even in his youth. “My story is of a happy life,” he observed in his famous Autobiography, beginning with a childhood surrounded by doting parents and three affectionate younger sisters. His mother, Elizabeth Symes, was a cheerful, quick-witted, warmhearted woman who adored him. His father, Joseph, owned a successful business dealing in “paints, oils and glass.” Later, as vice president of the California National Bank, president of the Board of Trade, and a Republican stalwart, he would become a leading figure in Sacramento, California. The “palatial residence” where Lincoln was raised was subsequently turned into the governor’s mansion.
Both intrepid and inquisitive, eight-year-old Steffens quickly capitalized on his newfound freedom when his parents gave him a pony. He could explore the countryside so long as he returned home in time for dinner. “If I left home promptly after breakfast on a no-school day and right after school on the other days,” Lincoln recalled, “I could see a good deal of the world.” His questing, precocious nature attracted a various and colorful assortment of acquaintances. He befriended a bridge-tender who let him follow along as he walked the tracks to extinguish the burning coals spewed by passing locomotives. In the course of their conversations, the bridge-tender shared his dreams of striking it rich as a gold miner. Watching an artist render a drab, leached-out river channel, he saw the scene transformed by small choices of color and light. Hanging out at the racetrack, the boy struck up a relationship with a jockey who dampened his ardor for horse racing by confiding that the races were frequently fixed—so that those “in on the know” would realize “big killings.” A friendly page at the state capitol took him to the smoke-filled committee rooms and hotel apartments where legislators and lobbyists hammered out compromises on the price to be paid for votes in a particular piece of legislation. “Bribery! I might as well have been shot,” he lamented. “Nothing was what it was supposed to be.”
Organized schooling frustrated young Lincoln’s quest for knowledge and information. Though he read more books than were required, he resisted the standardized curriculum that he perceived as irrelevant to his experience. Graduating at the bottom of his class from grammar school, he was sent to a military boarding school to remedy the problem. When he still failed the entrance examinations for the University of California at Berkeley, he required an additional year at “the best private school in San Francisco” and the aid of a private tutor in order to matriculate.
In his autobiography, Steffens blithely claimed that the enormous liberties he enjoyed as a child had not made him one of those boys “brought up to do their duty,” boys for whom the American educational system was designed. Knowledge at Berkeley, he complained, was “stored in compartments, categorical and independent.” He resented the requirements in higher mathematics, wishing only to pursue his passion for philosophy. “No one,” he insisted, “ever brought out for me the relation of anything I was studying to anything else.” Then, during his junior year, when a history professor demanded research in original documents, he discovered that the past was not a list of dates to be memorized but a series of questions to be continually debated. By the time he graduated from college, Steffens believed himself finally prepared to be a genuine student, an authentic intellectual, and decided to pursue graduate study in Europe.
“My father listened to my plan, and he was disappointed,” Steffens recalled. The older man had harbored hopes that his son would take over the business: “It was for that that he was staying in it. When I said that, whatever I might do, I would never go into business, he said, rather sadly, that he would sell out his interest and retire.” Facing the same irreconcilable demands of familial duty and personal desire that had plagued Baker, Lincoln Steffens was considerably more self-indulgent. He later postulated that having received love “so freely” as a child, he had never learned to reciprocate. Not until his own son was born, as Steffens approached sixty years old, did he feel any intimation of what unconditional love required.
A three-year interlude in Europe allowed Steffens to continue his philosophic study of man and society, first in Germany, then France, and finally in England. Through the works of Marx and Engels, he was exposed to the idea that the state had a responsibility to foster social welfare. He studied music and art, psychology and philosophy, attending lectures if and when he chose. He spent his days reading in cafés, wandering through museums, attending concerts, playing cards, drinking beer, and debating politics and philosophy with fellow students.
European social and sexual mores offered Steffens greater latitude to pursue unconventional relationships as well. In Leipzig, he became involved with Josephine Bontecou, a liberated woman ten years his senior. The daughter of a wealthy New York surgeon, she was studying psychology and anatomy to further her ambitions as both a scientist and a novelist. “She stands next to me as my equal in all respects,” he wrote at the time. “She will have a life and a life’s work of her own.” After a clandestine marriage in London, concealed to ensure his father would continue sending remittances, the two moved together to Paris. They found lodgings in the Latin Quarter where Ida Tarbell struggled to maintain her meager but exciting livelihood during those same months. Steffens savored a carefree intellectual existence for the better part of a year until summoned by his father’s letter: “My dear son: When you finished school you wanted to go to college. I sent you to Berkeley. When you got through there, you did not care to go into my business; so I sold out. You preferred to continue your studies in Berlin. I let you. After Berlin it was Heidelberg; after that Leipzig. And after the German universities you wanted to study at the French universities in Paris. I consented, and after a year with the French, you had to have half a year of the British Museum in London. All right. You had that too. By now you must know about all there is to know of the theory of life, but there’s a practical side as well. It’s worth knowing.”
So at last, determined to heed his father’s edict to find work and support himself, Steffens crossed the ocean, landed in New York, and found employment as a reporter. Armed with
a letter of introduction from a friend of his father’s to Joseph B. Bishop, an editor at the New York Evening Post, he was given a chance to prove himself “on space” in an unsalaried position that paid by the word once a piece was accepted for publication. Within weeks, he made good. Assigned to interview the partner of a stockbroker who had suddenly disappeared, he soon gained the man’s confidence: “I told him the story of my life; he told me his,” Steffens later related. Before long, he learned that the missing banker had absconded with all the firm’s funds. More work quickly followed this successful investigation, and soon Steffens was put on salary.
“I came to love New York,” he wrote. “In the course of a few months I had visited all parts of the city, called on all sorts of men (and women), politicians, business men, reformers; described all sorts of events, fires, accidents, fights, strikes, meetings. It was happy work for me.” Suddenly, “science and philosophy, like the theaters and books, seemed tame in comparison with the men and women, the unbelievable doings and the sayings of a live city.” Like Baker and Tarbell, whose early enthusiasm for science gave way to a fascination with human beings, Steffens had found his calling, a focus for his diverse intellectual interests in journalism.
Just as the Panic began during the winter of 1892–93, the city editor assigned Steffens to cover Wall Street. He was directed to develop relationships with leading financiers that would allow the conservative Evening Post to explain insolvent banks and railroads in “cool, dull, matter-of-fact terms,” rather than resort to the fearmongering and sensationalism practiced by competing papers. Recognizing that the Panic of 1893 “was a dismal time of radiating destruction” for millions of people, Steffens nevertheless noted that “it had its bright side, inside; it was good for the bears.” From the sidelines of the Stock Exchange, he dispassionately witnessed “the wild joy” of men who shorted stocks and “rejoiced in the ruin.” In later years, he would come to despise “successful men who seize such opportunities,” but “the practices of big business” were still a mystery, and he “was not thinking in those days; life was too, too interesting, the world as it was too fascinating, to stop to question.”