October 1902 – McClure’s begins publishing Lincoln Steffens’ “Shame of the Cities” series. It uncovers corruption between businesses and government.
Lincoln Steffens had been born in San Francisco , and worked as a journalist in New York at the Evening Post and the Commercial Advertiser when McClure hired him to work for his magazine. He had been editor for four months when McClure told him to get out of the office and find out what was going on in the country.
Steffens spent months in some of the country’s largest cities, including St. Louis , Minneapolis , Chicago , Philadelphia and New York . When he returned to the magazine’s offices, he began writing a series of articles that appeared in McClure’s that explained the corruption occurring in local governments. The first – on St. Louis – appeared in the October 1902 issue, one month before Tarbell’s Standard Oil series began. The second, on Minneapolis , appeared in January 1903 in the same issue as one of Tarbell’s Standard Oil articles and a piece by Ray Stannard Baker about miners in Pennsylvania . Combined, the three presented a powerful message about the state of America , and McClure realized the connection. The issue included an editorial stating, “We are all doing our worst and making the public pay.”
At first glance, the articles from Steffens, which were later put into a book called The Shame of the Cities, don’t appear to have anything to do with business; uncovering wrongdoing in the corporate world was not Steffens’ intent. But anyone who has read them realizes that they’re a damning portrayal of how businesses operated at the turn of the 20 th century. In addition, Steffens believed that businessmen of principle could right the situation.