When a Journalist Took on Corruption, He Used a Tool That Hadn’t Been Used Much in American History: the Unvarnished Truth

Lincoln Steffens was a reporter so dogged that political party bosses called him a “born crook that’s gone straight.” He and his fellow muckrakers redefined modern journalism

Jon Grinspan | Curator, political history, National Museum of American History

Summer 2026

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While we might imagine 19th-century Americans living on isolated farmsteads, in fact, they were constantly receiving news from near and far. Trouble was, much of it was rotten. Openly partisan papers distorted nearly everything to suit the biases of their subscribers. The French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville was dismayed to find in the 1830s that the typical American reporter mostly resorted to a “coarse appeal to the passions of his readers.” For much of early American history, you just couldn’t trust the news.

The democratic innovation of accurate political reporting in the United States didn’t arrive until around the turn of the last century. It took the ceaseless inquiries of Lincoln Steffens—a journalist so dogged that party bosses called him “a born crook that’s gone straight”—to teach citizens to expect objectivity in news.

Steffens went to the finest schools but later wrote that his true education began with his reporting gigs, covering Wall Street and then crime for the New York Evening Post in the mid-1890s. The Post was a reformist paper, and Steffens was expected to produce condemnations of corrupt bigwigs and bent lawmen. Yet when he met crooks and cops, politicos and prostitutes, Steffens found their motivations far richer than the finger-waggers acknowledged. He became obsessed with the systems that allowed malfeasance.

Convinced that the country’s corruption was part of a deeper story, Steffens set out with his little dog, Mickey, reporting for McClure’s Magazine. He came to appreciate the “attractive candor of the ‘honest crooks’” who ran urban political machines and would kibitz over how to steal an election, or taxpayer funds. He became a regular at their headquarters, where party bosses petted Mickey while talking about the mechanics of corruption, “as one artist to another.” 

Steffens’ stories became a sensation, inspiring a wave of journalists who uncovered social ills by investigating them up close. There had been prior muckrakers—most notably Ida B. Wells and Henry Demarest Lloyd, who exposed lynchings and strikebreaking, respectively—but it was his “Shame of the Cities” series that drew the connections between democratic failures and readers sitting in their parlors.

Steffens discovered that his own middle-class audience was partly responsible for political corruption. In San Francisco, he found that nearly the whole business community was complicit with the party machine. In New York, he saw that Wall Street and Tammany Hall were deeply linked, and rolled his eyes at respectable New Yorkers’ occasional efforts to “throw the rascals out,” before losing interest and electing another crook as mayor. It was an innovation in self--criticism, asking readers to consider how “the misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people,” as Steffens put it in the introduction to his best-selling collection, The Shame of the Cities.

He capped off decades of work with a funny, humane autobiography published in 1931. According to the novelist and critic Granville Hicks, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens was “possibly the most influential book” of the New Deal era, prompting America to consider “the goodness of bad men and the badness of good men.” 

Steffens redefined journalism, guiding the work of investigators like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and advocates like Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader. For Steffens and other muckrakers, journalism meant speaking truth—not just to power but to one’s own subscribers. 

Jon Grinspan | Read More

Jon Grinspan, Ph.D., is a curator of political and military history at the National Museum of American History. His book The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915 traces Americans’ struggle with their political system in the decades after the Civil War.