HOMAGE TO LINCOLN STEFFENS

The Great Grand-Daddy of Investigative Reporting

This column was published in the Santa Barbara News-Press in August 2021.

Today we honor Lincoln Steffens, the American great-granddaddy of investigative journalism who passed away 87 years ago today. 

President Theodore Roosevelt was thinking muddy thoughts about Steffens when he conceived the word muckraker. Thereafter, the reporter wore that moniker as a badge of courage—and it endured into the lingo.

Investigations by Lincoln and his merry band of muckrakers were published in national magazines such as McClure’s and became the scourge of Wall Street, feared by the corrupt, adored by the man in the street. 

Lincoln and his contemporaries, including Ida Tarbell, persistently exposed how bankers and captains of commerce—especially in the oil and coal industry—had hijacked the democratic process while exploiting America’s labor force. (There are hardly any real reporters around to do this anymore since mass media is mostly owned by the captains of commerce—or hedge funds that benefit from captains of commerce.)

At least during his early years as a swashbuckling muckraker, Steffens believed the pen was mightier than the sword, believing that social change could be affected through the printed word.  

He grew up in Sacramento, a large Victorian house later sold to the State of California for use as the Governor’s Mansion (still is). Some in his silver-spooned social strata viewed Lincoln as a traitor to the privileged moneyed class into which he had been born. But what turned Steffens into a renegade was school—or, more precisely, his inability to learn in a classroom environment.

The young Lincoln suffered from attention deficit, which had not yet been identified as a disorder.  Like many afflicted with ADD or ADHD, he was born with an intense desire to learn—but not what teachers wanted to bang into his brain. Instead, he yearned to know what was really going on.

As we now know, persons with ADD and ADHD do not fare well in typical classroom environments.  These are the daydreamers, whose brains do not conform to rote learning.  Society strives to put such persons "on track" by prescribing Ritalin and Adderall to “focus” their minds into submission. Normal people generally stop learning by the time they reach the age of 20 and enter the groove in which they remain until retirement, as encouraged by society. Conversely, ADD and ADHD sufferers—or enjoyers—do not learn much until they’ve had a couple decades to process the world around them—and then they never stop learning—as discouraged by society (whose leaders prefer the hive mind).

Lincoln Steffens believed that most people needed “un-learning” before they could venture into truth questing.  He even wanted to title his autobiography My Life of Un-learning.  His publisher, however, preferred The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, which became an immediate bestseller when it was published in 1933.

This tome inspired me into a life of un-learning, of investigative journalism (later, intelligence, then back to reporting)—and of never settling for whichever narratives are being pushed by whatever powers-that-be. 

It is unfortunate that the term muckraker these days is negatively associated with supermarket tabloids.  It is further disappointing that mainstream media has come to eschew investigative reporting as too expensive to undertake and potentially litigious in our lawsuit-crazy culture often leading to the additional expense of lawyers to monitor what gets published. (The organs of mainstream media now publish political opinion disguised as investigative reporting—sadly, the new normal.)

Today's television networks, weekly newsmagazines and daily newspapers are largely owned by assorted corporate conglomerates—the same folks Lincoln sought to expose in his reportage.           

In 1927, having just turned 60, Steffens became weary of travel and desired to put his life as a muckraker into context.  For this he sought an ideal location to write his memoirs. 

The Lincoln Steffens House in Carmel

Carmel-by-the-Sea welcomed artists and eccentrics and had earned the nickname “Bohemia.”  

Lincoln was so taken by Bohemia, far removed from the mucky corruption he had bravely raked in the big cities, he moved his wife Ella and young son Pete into a cottage on San Antonio Street near the ocean. The living room of his final home, which he called The Getaway, hosted artists and authors, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis.  

Just as San Francisco’s Bohemian Club with its elite encampment 90 miles north of Carmel was corrupted by corporate executives and their select politicians—the sort Lincoln strove to expose—Bohemia is populated these days not by artists and writers but by high-end corporate retirees.