In October McClure’s Magazine published what many consider the first muckraking article, Lincoln Steffens’ “Tweed Days in St. Louis.” The “muckrakers” . The Shame of the Cities has 49 ratings and 8 reviews. Evan said: I started reading this a few years ago and found it distant and dry and fairly non-speci. The Shame of the Cities is a collection of articles written by Lincoln Stefferns for McClure’s Magazine. The articles were written to expose.

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And it is corruptible, this citizenship. American achievements in science, art, and business mean sound abilities at bottom, and our hypocrisy a race citiss of fundamental ethics. Louis that its bankers, brokers, corporation officers,—its business men are the sources of evil”. Sagamore Press,40, 3. Counterpoint,99; Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: All these things occur in most of these places.
Morgan, and a political boss like Matthew Ciies. It was impossible in the space of a magazine article to cover in any one city all the phases of municipal government, so I chose cities that typified most strikingly some particular phase or phases.
What I went to Minneapolis to write about was that democracy was a failure and that a good dictator was syame is needed.
Lincoln Steffens Shame of the Cities by Jason Tanner on Prezi
He grew up in a wealthy family and attended a military academy. Folk, who had nothing to do with the article, but the magazine ths me.

Bribery, Steffens noted, had become commonplace in city government by the turn of the century. But the bribe we pay to the janitor to prefer our interests to the landlord’s, is the little brother of the bribe passed to the alderman to sell a city street, and the father of the air-brake stock assigned to the president of a railroad lincol have this life-saving invention adopted on his road.
The Shame of the Cities
After Minneapolis, a description of administrative corruption in Chicago would have seemed like a repetition; Perhaps it was not just to treat only the conspicuous element in each situation. President Roosevelt has been sneered at for going about the country preaching, as a cure for our American evils, good conduct in the individual, simple honesty, courage, and efficiency.
He is concerned that popular reform movements are inadequate to really clean up government: Bullitt, a low-level State Department official, on a three-week visit to the Soviet Union and witnessed the “confusing and difficult” process of a society in the process of revolutionary change.
Louis felt about it all.

He launched an investigation into the city’s corruption after seeing a newspaper article which claimed that a bribe fund had been set up in a local bank to pay off city legislators who helped pass a streetcar bill. Trivia About The Shame of linfoln Tammany says they don’t.
Louisans decide between us. Magee, reports Steffens, found a partner in William Flinn: There is no patriotism in it, but treason. We are pathetically proud of our democratic institutions and our republican form of government, liincoln our grand Constitution and our just laws.
That’s what’s the matter with it. According to Steffens, before he left for Minneapolis, McClure told him that his next article would “point out that democracy is at fault [for urban corruption], that one man has to run a city just as one man has to run a cjties to make it a success.
The bosses have us split up into parties. Steffens stresses that in many of these cases the voters themselves turn a blind eye to fairly open criminal activity on the part of city government and tow the line rather than risk untried ideas, like reform. Democracy with us may be impossible and corruption inevitable, but these articles, if they have proved nothing else, have demonstrated beyond doubt that we can stand the truth; that there is pride in the character of American citizenship; and that this pride may be a power in the land.
This was against all the warnings and rules of demagogy.
But that one election was regarded as final. Steffens notes lincolb the end of this article that the city’s new mayor, John Weaverappears to be a good mayor: The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. Paul Brenzel rated it liked it Jan 06, The biggest shame for a reader today is that this book was written in and that just about everything depicted in it is still a problem today.
