Man with the Rake

By R. Z. Sheppard

LINCOLN STEFFENS

by JUSTIN KAPLAN

380 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10.

In 1892, after two years of drifting round Europe's universities as an American student prince, Lincoln Steffens, 26, disembarked at the port of New York. He was greeted by an envelope from his father, a self-made Sacramento businessman and community pillar. It contained a terminal $100, a few Polonian sentences about theory at the expense of practice, and the advice: "Stay in New York and hustle."

Steffens did so with an ambition and energy that had not been apparent during a boyhood largely spent riding horseback in the California countryside. By 1904 Steffens was one of the nation's best-known journalists. The Shame of the Cities, a book based on his exposes of big-city corruption, helped arm the short-lived reform movement whose grinning figurehead was Theodore Roosevelt. "The man with the muckrake" is what T.R. (borrowing from Pilgrim's Progress) called Steffens, thus giving generations of crossword-puzzle workers the nine-letter word muckraker.

The term only begins to describe Lincoln Steffens. Biographer Justin Kaplan does the rest with the same clarity, critical intelligence and warm grip on the American past that he demonstrated in his Pulitzer-prizewinning biography of Mark Twain. Lincoln Steffens appears at a time when the achievements of his particular brand of muckraking, like that of Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair and Ray Stannard Baker, are all but forgotten. Today is the age of megamuck and a more sophisticated breed of raker. With the exception of Watergate, the corrective campaigns of S.S. McClure's magazine, where Steffens and his colleagues launched their crusades, have been largely institutionalized. Now the work is done by civic-action groups--like Ralph Nader and his teams of faceless young researchers--as well as by lawyers, governmental agencies and the courts.

Awaiting the Messiah. Steffens belonged to what Kaplan calls "American grass-roots radicalism" which is marked by hunger for drastic solutions and "an inclination to spend their time and spirit cussing out the government and the bank while awaiting the arrival of the messiah." Steffens was inflamed by the redemptive possibilities of the Russian Revolution. He stumped for Bolshevism as the hope of Europe and in 1919 was even a member of William C. Bullitt's secret mission to Moscow to learn on what terms the Reds would negotiate with the Paris Peace Commission. Steffens' famous pronouncement, "I have seen the future and it works," came out of this trip--though, according to Bullitt, Steffens began honing the quote days before their train even reached the Russian frontier.

As time went on, the gaps in Steffens' thinking and the contradictions in his life became more obvious. In Europe, where he lived during the '20s, he continued to celebrate Communism while living on capitalist interest and stock-market profits. As always, he knew everyone of importance--young or old. In his Boston days there had been two Harvard proteges, Walter Lippmann and John Reed. In Paris there were Hemingway, Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In the early '30s in New York he frequented Mabel Dodge's radical-chic soirees. "His life is a charming enigma," said a newspaperman. "To great financiers he is a harmless radical; to radicals he is a harmless reactionary."

Steffens' first marriage, which ended with his wife's death in 1911, does not appear to have been happy. But at the age of 53, he wedded Ella Winters, a 21 -year-old British political-science student who bore him his first and only child, a son, a few months later. In 1931 he rescued himself from obscurity with his Autobiography, which became a Depression bestseller and a minor classic. The book recorded what Steffens called his "life of unlearning." But as Biographer Kaplan notes, the Autobiography is anything but a reliable source of information. With considerable kindness, he describes Steffens' book as a form of fiction through which the author at tempted to re-create himself.

Apart from those eight glorious years of early muckraking, Steffens' life does not easily admit sympathy. Its trajectory seems cold and predictable. It was full of talk about the promised land of Soviet socialism and full of theories about the betterment of the human species. But there is not much evidence that except in rhetoric the man ever warmly committed himself to practice, and like others at the time he was deluded enough to apologize for Stalin's purges. To Biographer Kaplan, the old Steffens is a sad figure, a "Moses in Red . . . living out his life on the near side of the future." His death at the age of 70 in 1936 was not badly timed. Three years more and he would have had to explain the promised land between the lines of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.