Steffens gained a reputation as “the gentleman reporter,” one who could be relied upon to present the news with “accuracy and politeness.” In a letter to his father, he proudly described the close relationships he had cultivated with the big bankers. They “confide in me,” he reflected, “saying they know I will report them accurately and without exaggeration.” The equanimity and clarity of his writing was gaining notice. “Above all,” he confessed to his father, “I want that you should be convinced that you were right in giving me the long training of college and that I am worthy of your long, patient help to a son who did not ever seem worth it all.”
In November 1893, a challenging new assignment inspired both elation and unease: “The Evening Post has never given any space to police news: fires, suicides, murders, and other crimes,” Steffens explained to his father. “Now I am to be tried.” He would be head of a new Post police bureau, “with an office on Mulberry Street across the street from Police Headquarters, fitted up with a desk, bookcase, paper racks and telephone, and an assistant and a boy.” From the outset, Steffens understood that he faced “beastly work, police, criminals and low-browed ‘heelers’ in the vilest part of the horrible East Side amid poverty, sin and depravity,” but he regarded the challenge with eager anticipation. “Will it degrade me? Will it make a man of me? Here is my field, my chance.”
Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, a respected minister, was responsible for the Post’s decision to cover the activities of the police department. Head of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, Parkhurst had undertaken an investigation into the relationship between Tammany Hall and the police force. He exposed a system of ubiquitous bribery and coercion that governed all aspects of municipal operation: appointments, promotions, liquor licenses, protection for houses of prostitution, gambling operations, and saloons operating illegally on Sundays. Long opposed to the Tammany regime, the Post editors were delighted to document Parkhurst’s findings in full detail.
Parkhurst’s allegations forced the state legislature in Albany to authorize its own investigating commission, headed by Republican state senator Clarence Lexow. The hearings of the Lexow Committee splashed headlines throughout the state, ultimately revealing a system of corruption even more widespread than Parkhurst had guessed. The shocking revelations produced a surge of support for reform candidates, precipitating the defeat of Tammany in the 1894 elections, the triumph of reform mayor William L. Strong, and the choice of Theodore Roosevelt as the new police commissioner. By the time Roosevelt arrived in New York, Steffens had learned a great deal about the workings of the police department, insights he readily shared in return for access to the new commissioner and his department. A complicated friendship was born that would give Steffens the unique perspective he would bring to McClure’s, where the “Big Four”—Ida Tarbell, Ray Baker, William Allen White, and Lincoln Steffens—would become the heart of the muckraking movement.
UNLIKE MCCLURE, WHO HAD BECOME acquainted with the crueler side of American prosperity through a childhood scarred by poverty and instability, the Big Four were the children of prominent and enterprising businessmen. Each of them had encountered the corrosive effects of the industrial system. Ida Tarbell had witnessed the economic ruin of her father and his fellow independent oil producers at the hands of an all-powerful monopoly. Ray Stannard Baker, in his dedicated pursuit of the human stories behind the Chicago labor conflicts, had developed a sympathetic attitude toward the workingman’s struggles that set him apart from his father’s laissez-faire views. Lincoln Steffens had absorbed radical social ideas during his intense interdisciplinary studies in Europe and would bring an open, inquisitive, analytic mind to his work as police reporter. Even William Allen White, despite a coddled, conservative upbringing, had begun to recognize injustices in the farming and freight industries that had crippled the regional economy and compromised a community he cared for deeply.
All four were extraordinary, independent thinkers. Tarbell defied the conventions of her gender, steadfastly refusing the path of marriage and braving poverty and alienation to pursue her ambitions as a writer. Baker, too, resisted the pressure of social and familial expectation, declining to make his father’s business his own life’s work. Steffens’s difficulty in conforming to a normal course of study allowed him to develop the rigorous and comprehensive understanding of human nature that rendered networks of power transparent. White’s passionate devotion to his state’s progress may have assumed a pugnacious form in the blistering editorials that brought him into prominence, but that same devotion led him to a progressive metamorphosis as he came to see the neglected underside of the new industrial order.
Each of the four journalists was deeply influenced by a teacher. Both Tarbell and Baker had pursued studies in biology, learning investigative principles and procedures they would later apply to human society. Steffens had discovered the joy of working with original documents and the exhilarating freedom when one is allowed to question established authorities. White had found a mentor whose influence would continue to grow in the years ahead. All passionately believed, with S. S. McClure, that “a vigilant and well-informed press, setting forth the truth,” could become “an infinitely greater guard to the people than any government officials.” The new fusion of journalism, literature, exposé, and human interest that emerged in the pages of McClure’s would turn the microscope on humanity, on the avarice and corruption that stunted the very possibility of social justice in America.
This revolutionary cadre of writers would soon play a vital role in Theodore Roosevelt’s political future as well, helping to generate the critical mass of public sentiment to implement progressive policies. Though the McClure’s team had not yet articulated a distinct progressive agenda, their novel, vivid, and fearless explorations of the American condition would sound a summons and quicken the Progressive movement.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Like a Boy on Roller Skates”
Theodore Roosevelt at work in the Navy Department, Harper’s Weekly, May 7, 1898.
ON MAY 6, 1895, LINCOLN Steffens was relaxing with fellow reporters on the front steps of the newsmen’s building across the street from police headquarters when a shout from veteran police reporter Jacob Riis heralded the story of the day. Theodore Roosevelt had been sworn in as police commissioner earlier that morning at City Hall. Accompanied by the three other board members, he was approaching his new headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street in the heart of Little Italy.
As the foursome came into view, Steffens noted that the new commissioner surged past the other gentlemen, “head forward, jaw set and looking straight and sharp out of his big round glasses.” Roosevelt greeted Jacob Riis, a friend of several years, with exuberance. “Hello, Jake,” he exclaimed, then continued to race up the stairs, signaling for all reporters to follow. “T.R. seized Riis, who introduced me,” Steffens recalled, “and still running, he asked questions: ‘Where are our offices? Where is the board room? What do we do first?’ ”
As agreed, the first order of business was to elect Roosevelt president of the four-man board (comprising two Republicans—Roosevelt and Frederick D. Grant, son of General Ulysses S. Grant—and two Democrats—West Pointer Avery D. Andrews and lawyer Andrew D. Parker). With this accomplished, Roosevelt pulled Riis and Steffens aside into his office. “It was all breathless and sudden,” Steffens recalled in The Autobiography, “but Riis and I were soon describing the situation to him, telling him which higher officers to consult, which to ignore and punish; what the forms were, the customs, rules, methods. It was just as if we three were the police board.”
Roosevelt could not have found two more valuable tutors than Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens. For nearly twenty years, Riis had covered police activities for the New York Tribune and the Evening Sun. An immigrant from Denmark, he had landed at Castle Garden the same year that the cosseted eleven-year-old Roosevelt docked in Manhattan after his family’s Grand European Tour. For three years, Riis had scraped togeth
er a living doing everything from carpentry and peddling to hunting and trapping. Finally, he found an opportunity to pursue his “life-work” in journalism, initially serving for several years as a general reporter. At the age of twenty-eight, he was assigned to the police department, where he remained for most of his professional life. “Being the ‘boss reporter’ in Mulberry Street,” Riis later wrote, was “the only renown I have ever coveted or cared to have.” The years spent covering fires, murders, and robberies in the immigrant slums fostered a keen awareness of the devastating conditions confronting families in these tenement districts. “The sights I saw there,” he recalled, “gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something.”
In newspaper exposés, Riis described overcrowded, unsanitary tenements with insufficient light and air, often the properties of absentee owners who neglected “repairs and necessary improvements.” Riis had witnessed these conditions in the course of his daily work as a police reporter. Although he documented the same criminal incidents that fellow journalists covered, his perspective was unique. “Only Riis wrote them as stories, with heart, humor, and understanding,” Steffens remarked, and “beautiful stories they were . . . for Riis could write.” When he narrated a suicide, fire, or outbreak of disease, Jacob Riis took down every detail of the building or the city block where it occurred, relentlessly pursuing the negligent landlords, holding them responsible for the abhorrent conditions and threatening further stories until the problems were redressed. “Why,” he asked, “should a man have a better right to kill his neighbor with a house than with an axe in the street?” “The remedy,” he concluded, “must proceed from the public conscience.”
How the Other Half Lives, Riis’s first book, was published in 1890. This visceral account traced the daily struggles he witnessed in the Italian tenements, the Jewish quarters, and the Bohemian ghetto. Riis guided readers to fetid corners of the city they had never visited—to Mulberry Bend, Bandit’s Roost, and Bottle Alley. The catchy title, Riis modestly acknowledged, had contributed to the book’s phenomenal success. “Truly, I lay no claim to eloquence,” he noted, “so it must have been the facts.” Humility notwithstanding, readers were captured by the power and empathy of the writing. “I cannot conceive how such a book should fail of doing great good, if it moves other people as it has moved me,” wrote the critic James Russell Lowell. “I found it hard to get asleep the night after I had been reading it.”
Theodore Roosevelt had read How the Other Half Lives while he was civil service commissioner. Calling it “both an enlightenment and an inspiration,” he was convinced the book would “go a long way toward removing the ignorance” of comfortable New Yorkers about the hardships confronting their less fortunate neighbors. Furthermore, he was hopeful that Riis’s disclosures would help engender a new spirit of reform. Roosevelt found the tone of the writing particularly admirable, lauding the manner in which Riis revealed social ills without stridency, never descending into “hysterical” negativity or “sentimental excess.”
When intrigued by the work of a writer or journalist, Roosevelt often endeavored to establish a personal connection; he called on Riis at the Evening Sun. Finding him out of the office, Roosevelt left a card, with a succinct message that he had read the book and “had come to help.” Riis had long tracked Roosevelt’s progress from his days as a young silk stocking legislator “exposing jobbery, fighting boss rule,” and “rattling dry bones” disinterred from the city’s closets. “I loved him from the day I first saw him,” Riis later wrote. Over the course of Roosevelt’s tenure as police commissioner, this affection and mutual respect would intensify until Roosevelt regarded Riis as “one of my truest and closest friends.”
Roosevelt later recalled “two sides” of his role as police commissioner: first, the daily work of managing the police department; second, the opportunity to use his position, which also encompassed membership on the health board, to make “the city a better place in which to live and work for those to whom the conditions of life and labor were hardest.” To comprehend the practical possibility for real change, Roosevelt relied on Jacob Riis. “He had the most flaming intensity of passion for righteousness,” Roosevelt recalled.
Never a “mere preacher,” he was among the few whose convictions proved a touchstone to action. In Riis, Roosevelt found a man “who looked at life and its problems from substantially the same standpoint” as he did: a moderate reformer seeking to rectify social ills through moral conviction and suasion.
ROOSEVELT’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE INTELLECTUAL Lincoln Steffens was more complex. They shared an irrepressible self-confidence, an immense curiosity, a driving ambition, and a sharp intelligence. Later, as Steffens entertained more radical ideas and began to question capitalism itself, Roosevelt lost patience with him. During the decade of Roosevelt’s boggling ascent from commissioner to governor and then president, however, they enjoyed a rich friendship that benefited both men substantially. After only four months’ acquaintance, Roosevelt gave Steffens an enthusiastic letter of recommendation. “He is a personal friend of mine; and he has seen all of our work at close quarters,” Roosevelt assured Horace Scudder, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. “He speaks at first hand as an expert.”
While Steffens later acknowledged that he might have overstated his influence in claiming that he and Riis functioned as working members of Roosevelt’s police board, he maintained that the statement had truly reflected his “state of mind.” So willing was Roosevelt to bring the two journalists into his inner circle, so candid was he in admitting ignorance about his new job, that both men naturally assumed the aura of “wise” mentors to the newcomer.
Steffens had begun his job on the police beat with the simplistic belief that if good men replaced dishonest men at the top of the organization, corruption would be defeated. Only after two years—through numerous days spent with the crusading Dr. Parkhurst and months of coverage devoted to the sensational Lexow Committee hearings documenting the relationship between Tammany Hall and the police department—would Steffens fathom a vast entrenched system of police corruption that would not yield so easily to reform.
Steffens’s initial interviews with Dr. Parkhurst began with a series of deceptively innocent questions, a technique that developed into his mode of operating. For what reason, when gambling enterprises and houses of prostitution were illegal, did the police officers of the law allow them to exist? Why were some saloons permitted to stay open beyond the designated hours while others were not? “With astonishment” Steffens learned that pervasive, systematic bribery allowed those businesses willing to pay Tammany Hall’s substantial monthly charge to operate unmolested, while those who refused to furnish protection money were closed down.
New police recruits were forced to pay Tammany a fixed fee for their appointments. The fee was well beyond the means of most, but every officer understood he would make the money back with plenty to spare once inside the system. Policemen who secured the confidence of Tammany were promoted, though each advancement required hefty additional fees. “One police captain,” Steffens told his father, “has confessed to having paid $15,000 for his promotion and said that, though he had to borrow the money,” he was able to repay his debt within two years. With each higher rank a policeman attained, his percentage of the blackmail fund grew. Superintendent Tom Byrnes had amassed what was then a sizable fortune of $350,000, while his chief inspector, Alec “Clubber” Williams, could not explain the unusual size of his bank account when forced to testify before the Lexow Committee.
Observers would later credit Steffens’s success as a journalist to his “supreme gift of making men tell—or try to tell—him the truth.” He always seemed able to coax people to “explain themselves,” even when their explanations implicated rather than vindicated them. After the Lexow Committee hearings, Steffens approached Captain Max Schmittberger, a pivotal witness who had made “a clean breast” of everything. As the two men became fr
iends, Schmittberger explained how, as an “honest” young policeman, he had been drawn into “the whole rotten business.” The substance of these long conversations would prove most instructive when Steffens later recounted them with Roosevelt. Immersed so gradually in the venality of the department, Schmittberger never realized the shamelessness of his actions until the Lexow Committee called upon him to testify. After many hours with Schmittberger, Steffens concluded that he was “on the square,” a decent man entangled in a crooked system. He persuaded Roosevelt to keep him on the force, a decision resulting in both a trusted ally and an insider who could teach the new commissioner things he could never have learned alone.
Joseph Bishop, the Evening Post’s editorial writer to whom Steffens had initially carried his letter of introduction, noted that Roosevelt opened the battle for reform wielding the same weapons he had used in his previous fights against corruption: “full publicity, strict enforcement of the law, and utter disregard of partisan political considerations.” Like Steffens, Bishop was “in almost daily confidential conference” with Roosevelt during his tenure as police commissioner. “There began between him and myself,” Bishop recalled a quarter century later, “a close personal friendship which continued unbroken throughout his career, growing steadily in mutual confidence and affection with time.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 30
