Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T13:33:37.239Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Public Good and the Problem of Pluralism in Lincoln Steffens's Civic Imagination1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

James J. Connolly
James J. Connolly
Affiliation:
Ball State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The decades surrounding the opening of the twentieth century saw one of the most significant shifts in the character of American public life. A political order dominated by decentralized parties and a limited state gave way to one defined by interest group activism, weaker parties, and more vigorous government. Scholars argue over the degree and extent of these changes, but few quarrel with the claim that public life looked substantially different by the end of the Progressive Era. Americans accepted interest group pluralism in principle and in practice by the 1920s, and the ideal of a politics devoted to an undifferentiated common good lost much of its persuasive power.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 125 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

2 Key accounts of this transformation include McCormick, Richard L., From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893-1910 (Ithaca, 1981)Google Scholar; Burnham, Walter D., “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59 (1965): 7–28;Google ScholarMcGerr, Michael E., The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clemens, Elisabeth S., The People's Lobby: Organisational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925 (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar; Ethington, Philip J., The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar and idem, “The Metropolis and Multicultural Ethics: Direct Democracy versus Deliberative Democracy in the Progressive Era,” in Progressivism and the New Democracy, eds., Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (Amherst, 1999): 192-225. On the rhetorical dimensions of this phenomenon, see Rodgers, Daniel, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (New York, 1987), 176–211Google Scholar.

3 Theodore Roosevelt, Speech at Infantry Hall, Providence, Rhode Island” in Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Wilson quoted in , Rodgers, Contested Truths, 178Google Scholar.

4 , Rodgers, Contested Truths, 187.Google Scholar

5 Steffens, Lincoln, The Shame of the Cities (New York, 1904), 1.Google Scholar

6 My ideas about multiple publics are derived in particular from Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, Craig (Cambridge, 1992): 109–42;Google Scholar Mary P. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth-Century America,” in , Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 259–88;Google Scholar and Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cul tures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, 289–339.Google Scholar For a different perspective on the relationship between muckraking and political change, see Leonard, Thomas C., The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York, 1986), 193–221Google Scholar.

7 On career, Steffens's, see Kaplan, Justin, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (New York, 1977), esp. 82–88.Google Scholar On his approach to journalism see Wilson, Christopher, Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens, 1985), 168–91Google Scholar.

8 , Steffens, Shame of the Cities, 5-6, 179.Google Scholar

9 , Steffens, Shame of the Cities, 4–5, 17Google Scholar; Steffens, Lincoln, The Strugglefor Self Government: Being an Attempt to Trace American Political Corruption to its Sources in Six States of the United States, With a Dedication to the Czar (New York, 1906), iii-xxiii, 42.Google Scholar For overviews of the literature on republicanism see Rodgers, Daniel T., “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (june 1992): 11–38;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKloppenberg, James T., The Virtues of Liberalism (New York, 1998), 59–70.Google Scholar On republicanism and Progressivism see Diggins, John Patrick, “Republicanism and Progressivism,” American Quarterly 37 (Autumn 1985): 572–98;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMcCormick, Richard L., The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” American Historical Review 86 (April 1981): 247–74;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMorone, James A., The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Umits of American Government (New York, 1990), 126Google Scholar.

10 , Steffens, Strugglefor Self Government, 42; San Francisco Bulletin, March 11, 1906,Google Scholar clipping in Lincoln Steffens Papers, Series I, Scrapbooks Box 8, Folder 2, Columbia University, New York; , Steffens, Shame of the Cities, 74, 132Google Scholar; Lincoln Steffens, “Advice to the First Voter,” Steffens Papers, Series I, Manuscripts, Folder 2.

11 Hansen, Peter, “Muckraking,” in A Companion to American Thought, eds., Fox, Richard Wright man and Kloppenberg, James T. (Oxford, 1995): 473.Google Scholar

12 , Steffens, Shame of the Cities, 19, 57-58, 42, 167,Google Scholar, Steffens, Strugglefor Self Government, 95Google Scholar.

13 , Steffens, Shame of the Cities, 169.Google Scholar On gender and nineteenth-century politics, see Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-lntellectualism in American Life (New York, 1962), 185–96;Google ScholarTrachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982), 163–65;Google ScholarBaker, Paula, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620–44, n. 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edwards, Rebecca, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York, 1997), 153–58;Google ScholarGustafson, Melanie Susan, Women and the Republican Party, 1854-1924 (Urbana, 2001)Google Scholar.

14 Mattson, Kevin, Creating a Democratic Republic: The Strugglefor Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park, 1998), 36–47.Google Scholar

15 Frederic C. Howe, The City: The Hope of Democracy (orig. pub. 1905, repr. Seattle, 1967). On Howe's friendship with Steffens see Frederic C. Howe, The Confessions of a Reformer (orig. pub. 1925, repr. Chicago, 1967), 182-84; Steffens, LincolnThe Autobiography of Uncoln Steffens, vol. 2 (New York, 1931), 470–81;Google Scholar Edward Joshua Ward to Lincoln Steffens, November 17, 1908, December 29, 1908, November 11, 1909 in Steffens Papers, Series I. Correspondence.

16 , Steffens, Shame of the Cities, 2–3, 134-35, 139.Google Scholar

17 Steel, Ronald, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, 1980), 37–38;Google ScholarStansell, Christine, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2000), 20Google Scholar.

18 , Steffens, Struggle for Self Government, 115, 141Google Scholar; Lincoln Steffens, Upbuilders (orig. pub 1909, repr. Seattle, 1968), ix.

19 On the emergence of the mass literary market and Steffens's experience with it, see , Wilson, Labor of Words, 168–91Google Scholar.

20 On Steffens's writing, see Stinson, Robert. Lincoln Steffens (New York, 1979), 45–82;Google Scholar on role, McClure's, see Lyon, Peter, Success Story: The Life and Times of S.S. McClure (New York, 1963), 219, 225-26Google Scholar.

21 , Stinson, Lincoln Steffens, 63, 78.Google Scholar

22 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 24, 1903, March 11, 17, 1903; Joseph W Folk to Steffens, March 19, 1903 in Steffens Papers, Series I, Correspondence; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 2, 23, 1904Google Scholar.

23 Oliver McClintock to Steffens, May 21, 1903; John MacAlpine Siddall to Steffens, June 30, 1903; James H. Causey to Steffens, April 6, 1908; Frederic C. Howe to Steffens, February 29, 1908; Charles G. Sewall to Steffens, February 10, 1906, in Steffens Papers, Series I, Correspondence.

24 Joseph Folk to Steffens, November 9, 1905; Brand Whitlock to Steffens, November 8, 1905; Tom Johnson to Steffens, November 8, 1905; Everett Colby to Steffens, October 20, 1905; Robert LaFollette to Steffens, November 14, 1905, in Steffens Papers, Series I, Correspondence.

25 William Kent to Steffens, September 14, 1903 in Steffens Papers, Series I, Correspondence.

26 , McGerr, Decline of Popular Politics, 138–83.Google Scholar

27 See for example David P. Jones to Steffens, November 20, 1906, December 20, 1902, January 8, 1903; Charles S. Deforest to Steffens, June 3, 1904, November 7, 1904, November 14, 1908; William C. Bobbs to Steffens, October, 15, 1908, in Steffens Papers, Series I, Correspondence. See Schiesl, Martin J., The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1800-1920 (Berkeley, 1977),Google Scholar 190 for the long term impact of the nonpartisan ideal on city politics.

28 Flanagan, Maureen, Charter Reform in Chicago (Carbondale, 1987), 68.Google Scholar See also Pegram, Thomas, Partisans and Progressives: Private Interest and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870-1922 (Urbana, 1992), 115Google Scholar.

29 , Flanagan, Charter Reform, 79; Hartzez to Steffens, January 28, 1908, Steffens Papers, Series I, Correspondence.Google Scholar

30 Colorado Springs Gazette, January 9, 1907,Google Scholar clipping in Steffens Papers, Series I, Scrapbooks, Box 34, folder 2; Josephine Steffens, “Publicity Release about Lincoln Steffens, ca. 1909;” Edward A. Filene to Steffens, June 6, 1908, in Steffens Papers, Series I, Correspondence.

31 Steffens, “Statement about Boston,” in Steffens Papers, Series I, Manuscripts, p.l.

32 Connolly, James J., The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925 (Cambridge 1998), 133–34.Google Scholar

33 Steffens, Lincoln, “A Cure for Corruption,” Metropolitan Magazine (March, 1914): 13, 68.Google Scholar

34 Brighton Item, November 21, 1908Google Scholar; East Boston Free Press, January 23, 1909,Google Scholar clipping in Steffens Papers, Series I, Scrapbook 2.

35 Unidentified Typescript, box C36, folder 19, Allen-Lane Co. Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass., 3-4; Benjamin Lane to H. Findlay French, April 5, 1915, box C36, folder 18, Allen-Lane Co. Collection; United Improvement Association Bulletin (October, 1910), 3; Connolly, Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism, 112Google Scholar.

36 Boston Herald, November 10, 1908, clipping in Steffens Papers, Series I, Scrapbook 2.

37 , Steffens, Autobiography, vol. 2, 613–14.Google Scholar

38 Steffens, “Notes for a Statement to be Presented to the General Committee of the City Movement at its First Meeting,” in Steffens Papers, Series I, Manuscripts; Steffens to R. Bottomly, September 11, 1913, in Records of the Good Government Association, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Steffens File, folder 4.

39 Kellog, Paul, “A Plan for a Boston Plan,” The Survey 22:10 (June 5, 1909): 396Google Scholar; Edward A. Filene to Steffens, December 13, 1909, in Steffens Papers, Series I, Correspondence.

40 Steffens, “Notes for a Statement,” and Kellog, “A Plan for a Boston Plan,” 383.

41 “Boston-1915—Final Report,” Steffens Papers, Series II: Printed Materials, folder 4.

42 , Kaplan, Lincoln Stiffens, 183–95, 212-25, 297-300.Google Scholar On the relationship with , Debs, Letters of Eugene V. Debs, Volume I, 1874-1912, ed. Constantine, J. Robert (Chicago, 1990): 270–83Google Scholar.

43 Walter Iippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (orig. pub. 1914, repr. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1961), 96; Arthur Fisher Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (Chicago, 1908).