CHAPTER SEVEN

The Invention of McClure’s

S. S. McClure (left) and John S. Phillips (right), in the offices of McClure’s magazine, 1895.

IN THE MID-1890S, THE GENTEEL world of patrician reformers and civil service enthusiasts that Taft and Roosevelt initially typified had begun a seismic shift. Widespread discontent with the industrial order, building for over a decade, threatened now to flare into open revolution. The growth of colossal corporations in the aftermath of the Civil War had produced immense, consolidated wealth for business owners, but the lives of the working people, western farmers and eastern factory workers alike, had become increasingly difficult. “We plow new fields, we open new mines, we found new cities,” Roosevelt’s mayoral rival, Henry George, observed; “we girdle the land with iron roads and lace the air with telegraph wires; we add knowledge to knowledge and utilize invention after invention.” Yet despite such vaunted progress, he declared, “it becomes no easier for the masses of our people to make a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder.”

The captains of industry, George acknowledged, had fueled unprecedented innovations: “the steamship taking the place of the sailing vessel, the railroad train of the wagon, the reaping machine of the scythe.” To confirm the positive changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, he continued, one need only visit “the great workshops where boots and shoes are turned out by the case with less labour than the old fashioned cobbler could have put on a sole; the factories where, under the eye of a girl, cotton becomes cloth faster than hundreds of stalwart weavers could have turned it out with their hand-looms.” With this transfiguring mechanization and the development of mass production, however, “the gulf between the employed and the employer is growing wider; social contrasts are becoming sharper; as liveried carriages appear, so do barefooted children.”

Far from heralding an age of plenty, these wondrous savings of time and labor served only to diminish the ability of many Americans to procure the goods they needed to sustain their families. So long as the frontier remained open, restless Americans could escape hardships by moving west, lured by promises of free land and equal opportunity. By the 1890s, this option had withered. As Frederick Jackson Turner observed in a seminal paper delivered during the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago in 1893, the frontier had closed, and a distinctive phase of American history had thereby come to an end.

A mood of rebellion began to spread among the laboring class. The late eighties and nineties witnessed an unprecedented number of violent strikes in the nation’s factories, mines, and railroads. The combination of meager wages for twelve-hour working days in unsafe, unsanitary conditions had spurred millions of workers to join unions. “It was a time of strikes and riots, pitting troops against desperate workers,” the historian Frank Latham observed, “of tense meetings where businessmen talked fearfully of ‘a coming revolution.’ ”

In the year 1886 alone, more than 600,000 workers walked out on strike, disrupting thousands of businesses and railroad lines for weeks at a time. At the McCormick Reaper plant in Chicago, police were called in to break up a confrontation between strikers and scabs. In the brutal clash, four workers were killed. On May 4, a group of anarchists gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest those deaths. The peaceful demonstration turned violent when police ordered the protesters to disperse. A bomb thrown into the officers’ formation killed eight policemen and four protesters and wounded more than seventy others.

Although police never determined who threw the bomb, they promptly arrested eight anarchists, several of whom had not even attended the demonstration. At their trial, the judge ruled that the anarchists’ belief in violence made them as guilty as the murderous bomb thrower. Four were put to death by hanging, the others sentenced to jail. Citing an unprecedented miscarriage of justice, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining prisoners. History has vindicated Altgeld, but the pardon was widely condemned at the time.

News of the Haymarket riot reached Roosevelt at his ranch in Medora. Drawing no distinction between the strikers and the anarchist protestors, Roosevelt railed against the breakdown of law and order. “My men here are hardworking, laboring men, who work longer hours for no greater wages than many of the strikers; but they are Americans through and through,” he told Bamie. “I believe nothing would give them greater pleasure than a chance with their rifles at one of the mobs. When we get the papers, especially in relation to the dynamite business they become more furiously angry and excited than I do. I wish I had them with me, and a fair show at ten times our number of rioters; my men shoot well and fear very little.”

While some union supporters regarded the condemned anarchists as heroes, Roosevelt judged them the “foulest of criminals, the men whose crimes take the form of assassination.” He denounced Governor Altgeld, along with all those who followed Leo Tolstoy’s collectivist longings, Edward Bellamy’s Utopian socialism, and Henry George’s “wild and illogical doctrines,” men who mistakenly believed “that at this stage of the world’s progress it is possible to make every one happy by an immense social revolution, just as other enthusiasts of similar mental caliber believe in the possibility of constructing a perpetual-motion machine.”

In 1893, the most serious depression the nation had yet experienced settled over the land. The downturn began when the railroads, having borrowed heavily from banks, rashly expanded their operations beyond current demand. More than seventy overbuilt railroads fell into bankruptcy, compromising banks unable to recoup their loans. Scrambling to shore up capital, these institutions called in the loans of all their borrowers. Small businesses and heavily mortgaged farmers unable to cover their notes followed railroads into bankruptcy. As the economic situation deteriorated, frightened depositors rushed to withdraw funds and hundreds of insolvent banks were forced to close their doors. Within twelve months, more than 4 million jobs had been lost. At the nadir of this collapse, nearly one in four workers was unemployed. Jobless men begged for food; homeless families slept on streets; farmers burned their crops rather than send them to market at a loss. Millions feared that in the wreckage of the Gilded Age, democracy itself would crumble.

AMID SUCH PANGS OF RAMPANT anxiety and latent insurrection, McClure’s magazine was born. This acclaimed muckraking journal would play a signal role in rousing the country to the need for political and economic reform, animating the Progressive movement with which Theodore Roosevelt’s name would forever be linked.

The descriptions of thirty-six-year-old Samuel S. McClure, the magazine’s founder, bear an uncanny resemblance to accounts of Theodore Roosevelt himself. McClure was termed a “genius,” with “a highly creative mind, and a great deal of excitable energy.” He impressed all who knew him as a prodigious character, “a vibrant, eager, indomitable personality that electrified even the experienced and the cynical.” His frenetic style, though, made him often appear “a bundle of tensions, keyed up, impetuous, impatient, impulsive.” While Roosevelt’s tumultuous energy elicited comparison to that force and marvel of nature, Niagara Falls, McClure, ever threatening to erupt in “a stream of words,” was likened to a volcano. Indeed, McClure cut such a compelling figure that novelists as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Willa Cather, Upton Sinclair, William Dean Howells, and Alice Hegan Rice all incorporated him as a character in their fiction.

McClure was capable of wild bursts of creative productivity, episodes during which his mind tumbled from one idea to the next while he prowled the room “like a caged lion.” Rudyard Kipling later recalled that his first conversation with McClure “lasted some twelve—or it may have been seventeen—hours.” But such euphoria was often punctuated by periods of exhaustion and depression when he could not bring himself to eat, sleep, or concentrate. For months at a time, he was forced into sanitariums, where he was kept in total isolation, on continuous bed rest.

Born the same year as Taft, on a struggling farm in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, Sam McClure faced obstacles unimaginable to Roosevelt or Taft. The first of four sons, he was raised in a stone house with a dirt floor and a straw-covered roof. His father, Thomas, was a rough carpenter; his mother, Elizabeth, worked the fields of their farm. While the coddled childhoods enjoyed by Roosevelt and Taft were calculated to launch them on the road to achievement, the pain and penury of McClure’s early life make his convoluted journey to success more unexpected and striking.

Even as a toddler, Sam displayed unusual curiosity, a fierce precocity that convinced his parents to send him to school when he was only four years of age. “That was the first important event in my life,” he later wrote. “It was then that I first felt myself a human entity.” Teachers recognized his astonishing aptitude and were soon furnishing materials suited for boys twice his age. “For a long while,” he recalled, “I was convinced that long division was the most exciting exercise a boy could find.” Several times each year, a large box of new books was delivered to his school. For a child whose family possessed a scant three works—the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs—the experience of “opening those boxes and looking into the fresh books that still had the smell of the press, was about the most delightful thing that happened during the year.” Weekends often found the boy depressed; the excitement of his studies “seemed to die down” the moment he returned home.

Sam was seven when his father fell through an open ship’s deck where he worked and suffered a fatal head injury. His death left the family destitute, bereft of the small wages his carpentry work had provided. Sam “began for the first time to be conscious of the pressure of poverty.” His mother returned temporarily to her father’s home as the family debated how to divide the four boys among relatives. Determined to keep her sons together, Elizabeth used her remaining funds to purchase steerage passage across the Atlantic. From Quebec, she shepherded her children to Indiana, where two of her brothers and a married sister with six children had settled. For a time, she stayed with her sister, but the home proved too small to accommodate four additional children. In desperation, she moved with her boys into an empty room in a commercial building undergoing repairs. Before long, the owner evicted them; twice more, they were forced to move until, finally, she found a home for her children by marrying a struggling local farmer, Thomas Simpson.

Sam and his brothers spent so many hours toiling from planting until harvest on his stepfather’s farm that they could attend school only during the winter months. Furthermore, the county school was unable to accommodate Sam’s searching intellect. Hearing of “a kind of ‘arithmetic’ in which letters were used instead of figures,” the avid pupil asked his teacher to tutor him in algebra. The teacher “had never studied it and had no text-book.” The years passed slowly for Sam until, at fourteen, he learned of a new high school opened in Valparaiso. Straightaway, his mother decided that to have a chance in life, he must venture out on his own. If he could find work to pay for room and board, Sam had her blessing to leave. He departed that very day with one dollar in his pocket.

Learning that Dr. Levi Cass was Valparaiso’s wealthiest citizen, Sam knocked on his door and inquired if he could exchange work for room and board. Cass accepted the enterprising young man, but his terms were not especially generous: in return for food and a basement room, Sam was expected to build up the fires before dawn, feed the livestock, and do the household laundry. Once the school day was over, a second round of arduous chores left him only a few hours late in the evening to study. In his cellar room, he recalled, “I used to waken up in the night and cry from the sense of my loss.” It was in these straitened circumstances that Sam initially suffered “attacks of restlessness,” when he “simply had to run away for a day, for half a day, for two days,” a compulsion he “seemed to have no control over.” Indeed, he acknowledged forty years later, “I have had to reckon with it all my life.” Sam persevered in his schooling for two years, until his stepfather’s death from typhoid fever forced his return home to help his mother manage the farm.

Sam and his brothers worked the farm well, producing a profit for the first time in years. Still, his mother wanted her eldest son to continue his education. Her brother Joseph Gaston was studying at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, about two hundred miles away. In September 1874, as Taft traveled east to Yale, McClure headed west to Galesburg. Upon his arrival, he was informed that his prior fragmentary schooling would require the completion of three full years at Knox Academy before he could even begin college. The news did not deter him. “I was seventeen,” he recalled, “and it was a seven years’ job that I was starting upon, with fifteen cents in my pocket.” Finally realizing the opportunity to pursue a serious education, he “felt complete self-reliance.” Once again, he had to work hard for room and board but managed to keep up with his studies, moving toward the day when he would become a freshman at the college.

At seventeen, a shock of blond hair over his forehead and blue eyes bright and clear, the painfully thin Sam had reached his full height of five feet six inches. One classmate remarked that he had “never seen so much enthusiasm and life in such a small carcass.” All his subjects interested him, Greek and mathematics most of all. “Everything went well with me until Friday night,” he recalled, when the “blank stretch” of the weekend rendered him disconsolate. Without the focal point of classes, he felt lonely and isolated.

During his second preparatory year, Sam fell in love with eighteen-year-old Harriet Hurd, considered by many “the most beautiful and gifted girl in town.” The willowy, blue-eyed daughter of Knox College’s star professor, Albert Hurd, Hattie, as she was called, was then a sophomore in the college. A brilliant student, she would graduate at the top of her class with the highest academic record ever obtained at Knox. “Don’t cry for the moon,” the kindly wife of the town’s minister told Sam. Hattie had been her father’s assistant since childhood, working by his side as he gathered geological specimens and prepared materials for his classes in science, religion, and Latin. Professor Hurd, a graduate of Middlebury College, had studied under Louis Agassiz at Harvard before embarking upon a long and distinguished career at Knox. A commanding figure in Hattie’s life, Professor Hurd adamantly opposed his daughter’s relationship with an impoverished immigrant. The professor’s opposition seemed to embolden rather than discourage Sam. “My feeling for her,” he later recalled, “became a despairing obsession, as fixed as my longing to get an education had been.”

From the start, Hattie was drawn to Sam’s peculiar intensity. After a series of furtive meetings and a surreptitious exchange of romantic letters, she agreed to a secret engagement. Torn between her father’s implacable disapproval and her adoration for Sam, she repeatedly broke the engagement, only to realize that she couldn’t resist the magnetism of Sam’s personality. But when she graduated from Knox and prepared for graduate school in Canada, her father forbade Hattie to disclose her destination to Sam. Secrecy was the price for her continued education. “You mustn’t write to me or expect to hear from me, as long as I am dependent on my father,” she told Sam. “If I should bring his displeasure on me it would kill me. Oh, Sam, it is very hard to bear.” For nearly four years, all communication in this odd and fervent relationship ceased.

Sam immersed himself in his studies, eventually graduating second in his college class. More important, he developed lifelong friendships with two classmates, John S. Phillips and Albert Brady, that one day would be instrumental to the success of McClure’s magazine. Sam was closer to John Phillips, the quiet, steady, and intellectual son of a respected local physician and a relative of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Phillips, McClure proudly noted, “was easily the best read student in the college, a boy with a great natural aptitude for letters.” At Phillips’s house, McClure first encountered a copy of Scribner’s, the sophisticated literary magazine that would soon become the Century. Returning numerous times to his friend’s home, he was thrilled to read the new serialized novel by William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance, from start to finish.

Sam McClure’s enterprising spirit and unique knack for finding partners with complementary abilities was already evident. In the summer between his junior and senior years, the young man canvassed the Great Lakes region, peddling microscopes with Albert Brady, the son of the editor of the Davenport (Iowa) Daily Times. Enabled by Brady’s shrewdness, the two Knox students bought microscopes wholesale at $25 each and turned them at a profit. McClure would later credit this experience of traveling through villages and knocking on doors with fostering a “close acquaintance with the people of the small towns and the farming communities, the people who afterward bought McClure’s Magazine.”

In his senior year, McClure was chosen as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. His unconventional working style both troubled and amazed his colleagues on the paper. “He works by fits and starts,” a fellow student noted; “weeks, almost months go by, and he does no work to amount to anything and then crowds all into a few days and nights.” With Phillips providing daily editorial support and Brady as the advertising virtuoso, the publication produced quality articles and successfully solicited an abundance of advertising from local businesses. In the years ahead, observed the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, this same triumvirate would be responsible for the triumph of McClure’s. While McClure provided the foundation work of creative genius, the magazine would never have realized its historic status without the insightful editing of Phillips and the business acumen of Albert Brady. “The three together,” Baker marveled, “who had been friends since their college days—made the perfect publishing organization.”

After an absence of four years, Hattie returned briefly to Galesburg in 1881. She had completed her graduate training and was preparing to depart for Massachusetts, where she had accepted a teaching position at Abbott Academy in Andover. A chance encounter with Sam apparently summoned old feelings, and the young couple recommitted themselves to one another. “My present and future are completely changed,” Sam told her. “My soul is filled with love and peace and joy.” Although she soon left for Massachusetts, they revived their secret correspondence. Sam filled his letters with grandiose intentions, entertaining various careers as diplomat, philosopher, and writer/ publisher. As the date of his June graduation approached, however, Hattie’s letters stopped coming. Sensing that something was wrong, Sam consulted Phillips, who recommended that he head for Massachusetts the moment his graduation ceremonies ended. A letter from Hattie arrived just after Sam left Galesburg. “Mr. McClure,” it formally declared, “I have come to the unalterable conclusion that I have not and never can have any respect or affection for you . . . I wish never to meet you again.”

Once again, Hattie had succumbed to pressure from her father, who vowed that he “would never receive [McClure] as his son-in law,” and that if Hattie chose to marry him, he would never be allowed into the house. Everything about McClure was anathema to Professor Hurd, who objected to “his personal appearance, his bearing, his address,” adding for good measure that he found Sam “conceited, impertinent, meddlesome.” In sum, he concluded, “I regard it as a misfortune that you ever made his acquaintance.” Forced to choose between her father and Sam, Hattie could not betray her father. Unaware of the reception that awaited him, McClure knocked on the door where Hattie was staying. Told that she did not wish to see him, he refused to leave the parlor until she finally came down. “I do not love you,” she said flatly, adding icily, “and I never can. Please be good enough to return to me any of my letters that you may still have.”

“This dismissal,” McClure recounted later, “I accepted as final.” With no definite plans and no place to stay, he took a train to Boston, where the offices of the Pope Manufacturing Company were located. This company had recently produced a newfangled sensation with the Columbia Roadster, America’s first bicycle. The owner, Colonel Albert Pope, had purchased advertising space in Sam’s student publication, furnishing him with an opening to meet the entrepreneur. Finding McClure’s enthusiasm and determination irresistible, Pope put him in charge of the bicycle rink where beginners came to learn how to ride. Although McClure himself had never ridden a bicycle, he was soon teaching others to operate the unwieldy contraption with a high front wheel nearly twice the size of the rear wheel.

When Pope revealed to McClure his determination to publish a magazine devoted to bicycling, fire was touched to kindling. On the basis of his experience at the Knox Student, McClure convinced Pope that he could edit the magazine Pope envisioned, to “weave the bicycle into the best in literature and art.” Just at this time, McClure received a fortuitous letter from his friend John Phillips, who was struggling to plot his own future career. “You are the surest fellow I ever saw,” Phillips wrote McClure. “You always alight on your feet. I wish I had one half your push and business ability. Great Heavens, I wish I was with you. If you think I can make a living . . . I’ll come.” So Phillips joined McClure as co-editor of the Wheelman, as the surprisingly professional, illustrated monthly magazine was titled.

Reviews of the new magazine, which included short stories, articles, and book reviews, were positive; the Nation rated it “among the most attractive of the monthly magazines.” While Phillips ran the office, McClure took to the road, hoping to persuade New England writers such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich to barter articles for a new bicycle. “I was in the big game, in the real business of the world,” he recalled. “Up to this time I had always lived in the future and felt that I was simply getting ready for something. Now I began to live in the present.”

Wheelman was the first professional enterprise into which McClure poured his astounding energy. Ascending the steps to that office at 597 Washington Street in Boston, he bid a final farewell to his youthful self. “When I have passed that place in later years,” he recalled in his autobiography in a haunting passage, “I have fairly seen him standing there—a thin boy, with a face somewhat worn from loneliness and wanting things he couldn’t get, a little hurt at being left so unceremoniously. When I went up the steps, he stopped outside; and it now seems to me that I stopped on the steps and looked at him, and that when he looked at me I turned and never spoke to him and went into the building. I came out with a job, but I never saw him again, and now I have no sense of identity with that boy.”

McClure had not seen Hattie since her brutal rejection; then, as he worked hard to produce Wheelman in the fall, she reached out to him, insisting that she had deceived him because she simply “could not” bring herself to disobey her father. “I felt that you would take nothing as a reason for our separation,” she endeavored to explain, “as long as you believed that I loved you—and so I gave you, falsely, the only reason that I knew would be valid in your eyes . . . I perjured myself . . . I loved you then, and love you still.” In September 1883, they were quietly married, with John Phillips serving as McClure’s best man. Sam and Hattie began their married life in Boston, but only three months later, when Sam was offered a position as an editorial assistant with the prestigious Century magazine, they moved to New York.

The following summer, after the birth of the first of his four children, Sam found himself increasingly restless in his new job. He yearned for independent control of some venture and finally hit upon an idea he shared with Roswell Smith, the editor of the Century. He proposed that theCentury underwrite a Literary Associated Press, a syndicate that would purchase stories and articles from well-known authors and then sell them at reduced rates to numerous newspapers for simultaneous publication, usually in their new Sunday supplements. “I saw it, in all its ramifications, as completely as I ever did afterward,” McClure later explained, “and I don’t think I ever added anything to my first conception.” Roswell Smith liked the idea but thought it unsuitable for his magazine. He offered McClure “a month’s vacation with full pay” to see if he could launch the project on his own, with the opportunity to return to the Century should the venture fail.

In a matter of weeks, McClure’s syndicate was up and running. His first sale was a short story by the popular writer Hjalmar H. Boyesen, which he bought for $150 and promptly sold to a sufficient number of newspapers to make “a handsome profit.” He then utilized the proceeds to send a thousand circulars to editors across the nation. This flyer explained how “a dozen, or twenty, or fifty newspapers—selected so as to avoid conflict in circulation—can thus secure a story for a sum which will be very small for each paper, but which will in the aggregate be sufficiently large to secure the best work by the best authors.”

The syndicate grew so steadily that by 1887, his biographer Peter Lyon estimates, McClure was “distributing fifty thousand words a week to well over one hundred newspapers.” John Phillips, after three years in graduate school, first at Harvard and then in Leipzig, Germany, once again joined his friend and assumed responsibility for the daily management of the syndicate, a role for which he was “much better fitted” than McClure. “He had an orderly and organizing mind—which I had not,” McClure acknowledged. “I usually lost interest in a scheme as soon as it was started, and had no power of developing a plan and carrying it out to its least detail, as Mr. Phillips had.” With his trusted friend at the helm, McClure was free to travel “from one end of the country to the other” and eventually “from one end of Europe to the other—always seeking new material, and always, like the retriever, coming back with a treasure-trove in his teeth.”

“McClure was a Columbus among editors,” proclaimed the writer and critic Jeannette L. Gilder. “I doubt if there is any man in his profession who has to his credit the discovery of more big writers.” At the time, three principal literary journals—Century, Atlantic, and Harper’s—had a stranglehold on America’s literary market. They were defenders of everything “dignified and conservative in the magazine world.” Young writers, particularly those who embraced the new realistic style scorned by established critics, had difficulty publishing their stories. McClure gave them a chance. “My qualifications for being an editor,” he explained, “were that I was open-minded, naturally enthusiastic, and not afraid to experiment with a new man.”

McClure, who had adopted the designation “S. S.” rather than Sam, is credited with introducing Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, and Arthur Conan Doyle to American readers. “He secured the best writers in the world,” one reviewer noted. “He had the discernment in some cases and the good luck in others to establish connections with rising authors at the happy moment when they were about to step across the threshold of fame. He helped them and they helped him. His treatment of them was both honorable and generous.” McClure noted proudly that he had purchased Kipling’s work “before the name of Kipling had been printed in a newspaper in this country.” After reading one of Conan Doyle’s short stories, McClure promptly purchased a dozen Sherlock Holmes mysteries at the bargain price of $60 apiece. “To find the best authors,” he boasted, “is like being able to tell good wine without the labels.”

The McClure syndicate serialized The Quality of Mercy, a novel by the controversial champion of realism, William Dean Howells; they printed stories by Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola which shocked genteel readers, and published a series of polemics by William Morris on socialism, Hamlin Garland on wheat farmers, and Henry Harland on life in the slums of New York’s Jewish East Side. Even as he provided a platform for new voices and radical topics, McClure filled the preponderance of his pages with stories and poems from established writers and more staid articles on standard subjects of interest—religion, adventure, travel, Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War.

By the early 1890s, the success of the McClure syndicate was assured. “I propose to down all competition, and in a short time I can dominate the world in my line,” he bragged headily. “My blood is like champagne.” Such unqualified success, however, seemed a harbinger to the restlessness that had plagued him since childhood, the compulsive drive to stave off depression through ceaseless activity. He felt compelled to tackle something new lest depression, always waiting in the wings, resume center stage. In 1892, he and Phillips began discussing the creation of a new low-priced, high-quality illustrated magazine. “I would rather edit a magazine,” McClure told Hattie, “than be President of the United States a hundred thousand times over.”

Conventional wisdom held that 35 cents was the lowest price a publisher of a quality magazine could charge and still anticipate “a reasonable profit.” At 35 cents, a magazine was necessarily targeted to the “moneyed and well-educated classes,” a parameter which kept the contents “leisurely in habit, literary in tone, retrospective rather than timely, and friendly to the interests of the upper classes.” McClure’s resolve to put a quality magazine “within reach of all who care about good literature” at 15 cents per copy was tantamount to revolution.

New technology made his rash endeavor to compete with publications like the Century or the Atlantic feasible. “The impregnability of the older magazines,” McClure explained, “was largely due to the costliness of wood-engraving. Only an established publication with a large working capital could afford illustrations made by that process.” Photo engraving was the innovation that fundamentally altered the printing industry. At a fraction of the cost of wood engraving, the new process allowed publishers “to make pictures directly from photographs, which were cheap, instead of from drawings, which were expensive.”

McClure envisioned a new magazine containing four sections: “The Edge of the Future” would feature interviews in which scientists such as Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell discussed their recent inventions; “Human Documents” would showcase portraits of famous people at different ages; “The Real Conversations” would present one distinguished person interviewing another; and the final section would offer short stories initially drawn from the best fiction already published in the syndicate, thereby costing him almost nothing to reprint. McClure hoped to use syndicate profits to support the new magazine until it could stand on its own. One of his trips west to garner support for the magazine included a visit to Davenport, Iowa, where he reconnected with his Knox classmate Albert Brady and persuaded him to come on board as his advertising manager.

For all his plans, McClure could not have anticipated the Panic of 1893, the run on the banks, and the burgeoning unemployment that bankrupted some newspapers and forced others to slash expenses. In this climate, the syndicate became one of the first things struggling newspapers jettisoned. “There was certainly never a more inopportune time to launch a new business,” McClure lamented. He had little personal capital to invest in the venture, having paid syndicate authors handsomely and incurred heavy expenses searching out new world-class writers. He had built up an invaluable asset, however: “the good will of thousands of people”—friends, fellow editors, and writers. Phillips persuaded his father to place a mortgage on his Galesburg home, bringing in $4,500; Conan Doyle invested $5,000; Colonel Pope supplied $6,000; and the geologist Henry Drummond, whose articles would frequently appear in the new journal, invested $2,000 and volunteered an additional loan of $1,000.

The first issue, appearing on the stands in June 1893, received uniformly favorable reviews. “It is not often that a new periodical begins its career with prestige enough to make its success a certainty from the very first number,” noted the Review of Reviews, but “the wisest judges concede it a place among the winners.” The Providence Journal rated the magazine “no little of a triumph,” applauding its freshness and originality: “It is not an imitation of anything existing in this country.” The Philadelphia Public Ledger placed it in the “front rank at once,” while the Atlanta Constitution hailed it as “unusually brilliant.” From Theodore Roosevelt came a letter of congratulations on “the first issue of your excellent magazine.”

McClure immediately understood that his magazine must have “a unity” beyond a mere compilation of freelance articles suiting the individual tastes of miscellaneous authors. He dreamed of creating a full-time staff of writers who would be guaranteed salary and generous expense accounts. The job of staff writer was a new concept; in years to come, McClure would claim he himself “almost invented” it—a justifiable assertion at a time when few magazines subsidized their writers. He wished a writing staff to collaborate with him and with each other, treating mutually agreed-upon topics “in line with the general attitude of the publication.” He wanted “to deal with important social, economic and political questions, to present the new and great inventions and discoveries, to give the best in literature,” and above all, to become “a power in the land . . . a power for good.”

Indeed, the ultimate success of McClure’s—its literary worth, its major contributions to Progressive era reforms, and its significant role in the rise of Theodore Roosevelt—can be directly traced to the prodigiously gifted writing staff McClure assembled. Along with the nucleus consisting of Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White, the McClure’s staff intermittently included Burton Hendrick, Mark Sullivan, George Kibbe Turner, Will Irwin, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris. This talented pool of writers produced hundreds of influential pieces which played a major role in shaping public discourse around the most pressing economic and social issues of the day.

IDA MINERVA TARBELL, THE FIRST to join McClure’s stable of writers, became the “mother hen” of the group. The story of the first meeting between McClure and Tarbell in the summer of 1892 would be told and retold in the years ahead. McClure had briefly stopped in Paris on one of his whirlwind tours in search of material for his new magazine. Thirty-four and unmarried, Tarbell had been living on the Left Bank for twelve months, struggling to support herself with freelance articles for American newspapers. Her free hours were spent in the manuscript room of the Bibliothèque Nationale researching the life of Mme Roland, a celebrated figure in the French Revolution. One of her newspaper articles, “The Paving of the Streets of Paris by Monsieur Alphand,” had landed on McClure’s desk. “This girl can write,” McClure told Phillips. “I want to get her to do some work for the magazine.” The piece, he later said, “possessed exactly the qualities” he desired—a clear narrative style alive with human interest, sound judgment, and trustworthy facts.

Tarbell was then lodging in a boardinghouse on an obscure, crooked street “unknown to half the cochers of Paris.” Yet, somehow, McClure managed to locate the place one Monday evening, “bareheaded, watch in hand, breathless” from racing up the eighty steps to her fourth-floor chamber. “I’ve just ten minutes,” he gasped; “must leave for Switzerland tonight to see [John] Tyndall.” Those minutes stretched to nearly three hours as McClure regaled her with childhood tales in Ireland, his struggles at Knox College and desperate pursuit of Hattie, his creation of the syndicate and friendship with Phillips. Finally, he laid out his plans for the new magazine and her involvement in it. Captivated by his “outrightness, his enthusiasm and confidence,” Tarbell, in turn, confided her own experiences, her hopes and ambitions.

Though less extreme than McClure’s, Ida’s history was shaped by an equally fierce resolution to succeed. The oldest of four children, she was born the same year as McClure and raised in northwestern Pennsylvania, where the discovery of oil had transformed wilderness areas into bustling cities and towns. Her father, Franklin Tarbell, was making “more than he could ever have dreamed” as an independent oil producer. Titusville, where Franklin built a substantial home for his growing family, was flourishing, “confident of its future,” boasting graded roads, handsome homes, college preparatory high schools, and a newly built opera house. “Things were going well in father’s business,” Ida recalled; “there was ease such as we had never known, luxuries we had never heard of.”

For the local oilmen, who drilled the wells and sustained a booming local economy, it seemed there was “nothing they did not hope and dare.” The triumph of optimism in Titusville was destined to end, however: “Suddenly, at the very heyday of this confidence, a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.” That mysterious hand belonged to none other than John D. Rockefeller, as Tarbell would boldly elucidate years later in her chronicle of the history of the Standard Oil Company for McClure’s magazine—the landmark series that would affirm her reputation as the leading investigative journalist of her day.

At the time, all that Ida’s father and his colleagues knew was that the railroads arbitrarily doubled their published rates for carrying petroleum—crude and refined—to the east coast, a huge inflation heralding ruin for the entire region. The local oilmen eventually discovered that Rockefeller had forged an alliance between the railroads and a small group of privileged refiners. His “big scheme” enabled those in the newly formed South Improvement Company to receive secret rebates on every barrel shipped, while outside companies would be charged increased rates to make up for the insiders’ discount. This deal, meant to destroy small competitors, Tarbell later explained, “started the Standard Oil Company off on the road to monopoly.”

The local producers joined together to retaliate. “There were nightly anti-monopoly meetings,” Ida recalled, “violent speeches, processions; trains of oil cars loaded for members of the offending corporation were raided, the oil run on the ground.” The tensions of these confrontations were reflected in the Tarbell household. Franklin Tarbell no longer entertained his family with “the funny things he had seen and heard during the day” or relaxed with an after-dinner cigar to the music he loved. If the machinations behind the conflict were “all pretty hazy” to young Ida, she gleaned enough from her father’s conversation to comprehend that “what had been undertaken was wrong.” From that painful, disruptive period, she wrote, “there was born in me a hatred of privilege”—in this case, the powerful oilmen preying on the independents, but eventually “privilege of any sort.”

As her father fought against monopoly, her mother struggled with a painful “readjustment of her status in the home and in society.” Esther Tarbell, Ida later wrote, “had grown up with the Woman’s Rights movement.” She had taught for a dozen years before her marriage and had planned on “seeking a higher education.” Had she remained single, Ida believed, “she would have sought to ‘vindicate her sex.’ . . . The fight would have delighted her.” But after marriage she “found herself a pioneer in the Oil Region, confronted by the sternest of problems,” which compelled the investment of her energies into the well-being of her family. Witnessing her mother’s frustration, Ida determined early on that she “would never marry.” She was certain that having a husband and children would thwart her freedom and curtail her nascent ambition. At fourteen, she fell to her knees and entreated God to prevent her ever marrying.

Captivated by the natural world, Ida had spent the long afternoons of her childhood wandering around the countryside to gather leaves and plant specimens in her area, “classifying them by shapes, veins, stalks, color.” She began her high school years already intent upon a career as a biologist. Graduating at the top of her class at Titusville High, she enrolled in Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1876, the same year that Roosevelt matriculated at Harvard. At eighteen, Ida had reached her commanding height of five feet ten inches. She was not considered pretty. Her nose and ears were too big, but her “luminous eyes” indicated unusual sensitivity and intelligence.

As the sole woman in the freshman class, and one of four in the entire college, she felt herself “an invader.” But in the college library she found “the companionship there is in the silent presence of books.” Though she may have been “shy and immature,” Ida was a tenacious student, and she had the good fortune of studying under “a great natural teacher,” Jeremiah Tingley, the chair of the science department. Like Professor Hurd, Tingley had studied under Louis Agassiz and absorbed the celebrated scientist’s “faith in observation and classification, as well as his reverence for Nature.” Sensing Ida’s enthusiasm and native intelligence, he took particular interest in her progress. Coupled with her own fierce drive, this support helped her excel once again. “She would arise at four A.M. and get to work studying,” a classmate recalled. “She was never satisfied with anything less than perfection . . . but she was no grind. She was too interested in people.”

After graduation, Ida taught for two years at Poland Union Seminary in Poland, Ohio, hoping to save enough money to “go abroad and study with some great biologist.” But her wages were low, and two years later she had managed to save nothing to further her dream of studying in Europe. She returned to Meadville, where she took a temporary job annotating articles for The Chautauquan, the official publication of the recently founded Chautauqua Institution, a summer camp that provided Bible studies and lectures on science, the arts, and humanities. What began as a temporary assignment became a full-time job as she rose to become managing editor of The Chautauquan, discovering in the process a great fascination with storytelling and the delineation of character. “My early absorption in rocks and plants had veered to as intense an interest in human beings,” she reported. “I was feeling the same passion to understand men and women, the same eagerness to collect and classify information about them . . . I recognized that men and women were as well worth notes as leaves, that there was a science of society as well as of botany.”

She and her colleagues on the liberal monthly magazine were “ardent supporters” of the inclusive labor organization the Knights of Labor and their fight for an eight-hour workday. “We discussed interminably the growing problem of the slums, were particularly strong for cooperative housing, laundries and bakeshops,” she recalled. She came to the conclusion that “a trilogy of wrongs” was responsible for the maldistribution of wealth: “discriminatory transportation rates, tariffs save for revenue only, and private ownership of natural resources.”

“My life was busy, varied, unfolding pleasantly in many ways, but it also after six years was increasingly unsatisfactory,” she later wrote. “I was trapped—comfortably, most pleasantly, most securely, but trapped.” While she stayed up nights working out several ideas for a novel, her days were occupied with the myriad demands of editing the magazine. Furthermore, the design she had brought to the “disorderly fashion” in which the editor-in-chief, Dr. Theodore L. Flood, had formerly managed the magazine was never truly credited. Inevitably, she found herself “secretly, very secretly, meditating a change.” She envisioned herself in Paris, researching and writing a biography of Mme Roland, an alluring character she had included in a series of sketches for The Chautauquan on women of the French Revolution. Though she still had little money saved, Ida aspired to earn a living writing articles on Parisian life for several of the newspaper syndicates in the United States.

Dr. Flood was stunned when Ida revealed that she was leaving for Paris. “How will you support yourself?” he demanded. When she replied that she would make her way by writing, his retort was memorably cruel and condescending. “You’re not a writer,” he announced. “You’ll starve.” Flood struck deep-seated anxieties in Ida about her vocation as a writer, yet she would not be deterred. She persuaded two of her friends from The Chautauquan to join her, and the three set sail for Europe in August 1891. After searching several days for affordable lodgings, they found a boardinghouse in the Latin Quarter run by Mme Bonnet, a cheerful, welcoming landlady. Though their rooms were tiny, they shared a salon with an amiable group of Egyptian students. Before long, they had developed close friendships.

Ida set to work immediately, outlining a series of articles on the daily life of Paris. She astutely guessed that people back home would want to know the very things she herself was curious about: what Parisians did for entertainment; what they ate and drank; how the city preserved the beauty of its parks and sidewalks; whether it was safe for women to walk the streets at night. For an article on the poor, she worked for a time in a soup kitchen. She haunted the shops in the Jewish section for a story on Parisian Jews. “There were a multitude of things I thirsted to know,” Ida wrote. “And if I could get my bread and butter finding out, what luck! What luck!”

“There were few mornings that I was not at my desk at eight o’clock,” she remembered; “there were few nights that I went to bed before midnight, and there was real drudgery in making legible copy after my article was written.” On weekends, she allowed time for expeditions to the cathedrals and the museums, as well as Versailles and Fontainebleau. Before seven weeks had passed, she had sent a dozen articles to various papers at home but had heard nothing in return. It seemed as if Dr. Flood’s prediction would prove correct. Finally, in early November, she received her first check, from the Cincinnati Times-Star, the paper edited by Will Taft’s brother Charles. “It was not much, $6.00,” she reported to her family. “How the doctor would scorn it! But I was glad to get it because it’s a start.”

In the meantime, she and her friends managed to enjoy their “bohemian poverty.” They dined two nights a week with Mme Bonnet, who provided “a good dinner of 6 courses with cider and wine for 40 cents.” These were “happy evenings,” Ida recalled, “for the Egyptians loved games, tricks, charades, play of any sort.” They found a local restaurant that catered to Americans and offered a noonday meal for 23 cents. “Think of us,” she wrote home, “going into a place where there is sawdust on the floor, a bar in one corner, every table with wine and many men smoking cigarettes, but there are lots of ladies, American artists, and then everybody does it.” For their remaining meals, they pledged to spend only 12 cents to offset the expense of the dinners, buying “not a morsel more” than they absolutely required—“a single egg, one roll or croissant, a gill of milk, two cups apiece of café au lait, never having a drop left in the pot.”

Winter came early to Paris that year. “It is the most heartless weather I ever experienced,” she told her family. “It is clear and dry but the wind cuts like a knife.” With only one little heating grate in the room where she wrote, she sat at her desk with one shawl wrapped around her legs, another over her head, and a hand stove to keep her feet warm. At night she wore everything but her sealskin coat to bed. Still, she was convinced that no one in Paris was having more fun. “It isn’t money after all that makes the best of things,” she assured them.

A breakthrough came in December when Scribner’s accepted a piece of short fiction pending her agreement on several changes. “I think after ‘mature deliberation’ for about 1/50 of a second that I’ll allow the changes to be made,” she excitedly told her parents. “That it has been accepted at all is a tremendous encouragement to me. It gives me heart and hope.” Scribner’s paid $100 for the story, nearly the amount she had brought to cover her passage to Europe and her first months in Paris. “What excitement in our little salon when I showed my companions that check!” Her success freed her to attend courses at the Sorbonne on French history and literature, to spend time at the library going through the papers of Mme Roland, relax with friends in the cafés, and buy a new pair of shoes.

In the months that followed, more and more newspapers accepted her articles. “Writing $5 and $10 articles” was admittedly “an awful slow way of making one’s living,” but Ida had proved Dr. Flood wrong and banished her own doubts. She was a working woman, living in a city she adored, surviving on her own as a published writer.

McClure’s invitation to join him as he launched his new magazine intrigued Ida, but she was unwilling to leave for New York before her research on Mme Roland was complete. She happily agreed, however, to contribute freelance articles from Paris once the magazine was under way. His mission that summer evening in 1892 accomplished, McClure suddenly jumped to his feet. “I must go,” he said. “Could you lend me forty dollars? It is too late to get money over town, and I must catch the train for Geneva.” As it happened, Ida had exactly that sum stashed in a drawer, saved for a long-awaited vacation. “It never occurred to me to do anything but give it to him,” she recalled, though the next day she suffered “some bad moments,” fearing he would “simply never think of it again.” The following day, a forty-dollar check was sent from McClure’s office in London.

Work for the new magazine opened up a broad new world of intellectual adventure. She studied microbe theory and interviewed Louis Pasteur in his home, examined the psychology of legerdemain, investigated the new Bertillon system of criminal identification, surveyed public health practices in French cities, and secured contributions from Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Alexandre Dumas. McClure was thrilled with her work. “We all hope you are not planning to get married and cut short your career,” he told her. “All of the articles which you have sent to us recently are most admirably done . . . I have always liked your work, as you know, but of late you have been surpassing yourself.”

The only snag in this propitious arrangement was that McClure had no money to compensate her efforts. Despite rave reviews, the new magazine was struggling to survive in the midst of the severe depression. Indeed, the situation at home was so bleak, Esther Tarbell informed her daughter, that people were “actually starving by hundreds and thousands.” The alarming circumstances had convinced her mother that “monopolies are fearful evils,” a plague to confront by peaceful means or “by force, if it must be.”

Irrepressible Ida, “on the ragged edge of bankruptcy,” nonetheless insisted she was “gay as a cricket.” She continued to believe in McClure. “The little magazine is sure to live,” she assured her family; “they are honest and energetic and young and they’ll pull through.” Her prediction proved on the mark. Month by month, McClure’s circulation continued to increase. In April 1894, McClure returned to Paris, this time securing Ida’s commitment to begin full-time work on the magazine in the fall. But first she would spend the summer with her parents in Titusville, where she hoped to complete her book on Mme Roland.

Tarbell had been home for only six weeks when she received an urgent wire from McClure, begging her to come to New York. An intense fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte had recently swept Europe and McClure believed that America, too, would be captivated anew by the French emperor. McClure had made connection with Gardiner Green Hubbard, father-in-law to Alexander Graham Bell and owner of a valuable collection of Napoleon portraits. McClure secured Hubbard’s permission to reproduce the portraits alongside a short biography of Napoleon by an English author, Robert Sherard. The illustrated series, set to begin in November, had been heavily promoted. When the manuscript arrived, Hubbard found the tone “so contemptuously anti-Napoleon” that he withdrew permission to let his pictures accompany the text. In desperation, McClure turned to Ida.

Though the task of producing the first installment in six weeks seemed impossible, Ida agreed to try. She left at once for Washington, where she was given a suite in Hubbard’s magnificent country estate on Woodley Lane, not far from Roosevelt’s modest Dupont Circle home. In addition to Hubbard’s immense library, she had access to the State Department archives, which held printed copies of all Napoleon’s official correspondence. Granted a desk at the Library of Congress, Tarbell was able to summon books and pamphlets from what turned out to be an exceptional collection covering the Napoleonic era.

Despite her embarrassment at constructing “biography on the gallop,” Ida not only met the deadline but produced a work of quality. When the seven installments were completed, the New York Press hailed the series as “the best short life of Napoleon we have ever seen.” From the reigning Napoleon expert came the welcome, heartening comment: “I have often wished that I had had, as you did, the prod of necessity behind me, the obligation to get it out at a fixed time, to put it through, no time to idle, to weigh, only to set down. You got something that way—a living sketch.” An additional benefit of her accomplishment was Scribner’s agreement to publish her book on Mme Roland.

On the strength of the Napoleon series, the circulation of McClure’s doubled, reaching nearly 100,000 by publication of the final installment. Even before it was finished, McClure conjured another series for Tarbell—a short life of Abraham Lincoln. “His insight told him that people never had had enough of Lincoln,” explained Tarbell later; he was certain that thirty years after Lincoln’s death, hundreds of people remained whose reminiscences were still untapped. Characteristically, once having conceived of the project, McClure “could think of nothing but Lincoln, morning, noon, and night.”

“Out with you,” he ordered Ida. “Look, see, report.” Before her departure, she called on John Nicolay, whose monumental biography had recently been serialized in the Century. Nicolay greeted her coldly. He assured her that he and his co-author John Hay had discovered “all there was worth telling of Lincoln’s life.” She would be well advised “not to touch so hopeless an assignment.” When the Century’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder, was questioned about his opinion of McClure’s magazine, he scoffed: “They got a girl to write a Life of Lincoln.”

Nicolay’s disdain influenced her “plan of campaign.” Rather than start her inquiry “at the end of the story with the great and known,” she would begin “in Kentucky with the humble and unknown.” She would trace Lincoln’s life chronologically, through the little towns and settlements where he had lived and worked. Tarbell’s approach unearthed scores of people who had known him in those early days. She scoured local histories, probed court records and newspaper clippings. Combining the skills of an investigative reporter with those of a detective, artist, and biographer, she coaxed reluctant people and jogged their memories with the hard evidence she had discovered. McClure covered all her expenses and kept her on salary during the three-year period of her research and writing. She completed her project in a charming Washington boardinghouse on I Street between Ninth and Tenth, a lodging shared by Massachusetts senator and Mrs. George Hoar. McClure scrutinized multiple drafts of every installment, assuring that the narrative retained its momentum.

The series proved a popular and critical triumph. “It is not only full of new things,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, “but is so distinct and clear in local color that an interest attaches to it which is not found in other biographies.” When the first installment appeared, McClure’s circulation increased by 40,000 copies to 190,000. A month later, it reached a quarter of a million, exceeding both the Century and Harper’s Monthly.

With the completion of the Lincoln series, McClure brought Tarbell to New York as the desk editor of the magazine. The publication was then housed on the sixth floor of the Lexington Building on 25th Street. Working in the office each day, Tarbell soon understood the critical role that John S. Phillips, whom they called “JSP,” played in the success of the magazine. If McClure was the wind in the sails, with “great power to stir excitement by his suggestions, his endless searching after something new, alive, startling,” the stabilizing ballast was the steady, unflappable Phillips. “Here’s a man,” Tarbell wrote, “who knows the power of patience in dealing with the impatient.” Phillips lived in the city during the week so that he could be available day and night; on weekends, he joined his wife, Jennie, and their small children in Goshen, New York, a small town in the foothills of the Catskills. It was said in the office “that Sam had three hundred ideas a minute, but only JSP knew which one was not crazy.”

“I found the place so warmly and often ridiculously human,” Tarbell remembered. Her genial temperament allowed her to get on “capitally” with the brilliant but volatile art director, August Jaccaci, whose towering fits of anger “came and went like terrible summer thundershowers.” She developed a lifelong friendship with Viola Roseboro, the cigarette-smoking, wisecracking former actress in charge of reading the thousands of unsolicited manuscripts that arrived month after month. Without doubt, Ida was enamored with McClure himself. Years later, she remembered how his blue eyes “glowed and sparkled” when the peripatetic publisher prowled the newsroom spouting a tumult of thoughts and projects, any one of which might harbor “a stroke of genius.”

For Ida Tarbell, the most alluring aspect of McClure’s was “the sense of vitality, of adventure, of excitement,” the feeling of “being admitted on terms of equality and good comradeship” with an extraordinary group of people. They perched on one another’s desks, they lunched together at the Ashland House, they drank together after hours. Each was an integral component of a team that was creating what would soon become the most exciting and influential magazine the country had ever seen.

THE NEXT “PERMANENT ACQUISITION” TO join Ida Tarbell on McClure’s writing staff was Ray Stannard Baker. Baker had spent six years reporting for the Chicago Record, a publication he proudly called “an honest paper” that played “no ‘inside game,’ but wanted to tell the truth, whatever it might be.” His distinguished work at the Record included an extensive and memorable series on the growing tension between labor and capital. Baker had always enjoyed talking with “farmers, tinkers, blacksmiths, newsdealers, bootblacks, and the like,” and firmly believed that “every human being has a story in him—how he has come to be what he is, how he manages, after all, to live, just to live.”

At the age of twenty-seven Baker felt he had exhausted the possibilities of the newspaper format. He craved “a wider field of activity,” a vehicle for in-depth research, a space for longer stories of lasting “import and value.” An avid reader of McClure’s from its inception, he had quickly become “a devoted admirer.” The magazine’s long and thoroughly researched articles, he noted with admiration, “were not merely about people . . . the people seemed to be there in person, alive and talking.” The innovative publication, in his opinion, was simply “something fresh and strong and living in a stodgy literary world.” After reading Tarbell’s series on Lincoln, Baker sent McClure’s a proposal for an article on his uncle, Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, the Secret Service member who had led the party that captured John Wilkes Booth. Tarbell promised to give it serious attention, and within days of its arrival, the piece was accepted for immediate publication. Intuiting that Baker might be a good fit for the magazine, McClure suggested that he come to New York and discuss ideas for further contributions.

“To say that I was awed at having a letter from the founder and editor of such a magazine was to put it mildly,” Baker related a half century later. Soon he received a letter from John S. Phillips with an enclosed “pass” on the New York Central Railroad. “It took my breath away,” he remembered. “So this was the magical way they did things in New York.” Of that first foray into New York, he related that “Mr. McClure had suddenly dashed off to Europe, as was his custom, but I had long and delightful talks with John Phillips and August Jaccaci, the art director, and Ida Tarbell and others of the staff. I went out with them to the jolly table at the old Ashland House where they lunched together, a spot that still glimmers bright in my memory. It all seemed like a marvelous new world, with a quality of enthusiasm and intellectual interest, I had never before encountered. Even with S. S. McClure absent, I suppose I was in the most stimulating, yes intoxicating, editorial atmosphere then existent in America—or anywhere else.”

In the months that followed, Baker submitted a half-dozen additional articles to McClure’s while continuing to work at the Chicago Record. When the coveted invitation to join the McClure’s staff finally arrived, he accepted at once, though he would miss his cohorts at the Record. “It ‘breaks me all up’ to leave after having been so long and so intimately connected with the paper,” he told his father. “I suppose the regret is natural and that it will wear off as I bend to other work. I hope so.” Once in New York, he never looked back. “This is a magnificent old town,” he assured his father. “I never worked so hard in my life as I am doing now.” He got along exceedingly well with the entire McClure’s staff. “I like them and they like me,” he proudly noted.

Baker was “a capital team worker,” Tarbell recalled. “He had curiosity, appreciation, a respect for facts. You could not ruffle or antagonize him. He took the sudden calls to go here when he was going there, with equanimity; he enjoyed the unconventional intimacies of the crowd, the gaiety and excitement of belonging to what was more and more obviously a success. He was the least talkative of us all, observant rather than garrulous, the best listener in the group, save Mr. Phillips. He had a joyous laugh which was more revealing of his healthy inner self than anything else about him.”

Baker’s cheerful, balanced temperament could likely be traced to a devoted father and a peaceful childhood in the frontier village of St. Croix, Wisconsin. The oldest of six sons, he shared his father’s love for “fishing and hunting” amid “the forests and the swift rivers and the lumber camps.” Joseph Stannard Baker, his father, had been educated at Oberlin and the University of Wisconsin. An honored member of the Secret Service during the Civil War, he married Alice Potter, a minister’s daughter from Lansing, and became the “resident agent” of a timber-rich swath of Wisconsin Territory owned by absentee landlords.

“Ours was a house of books,” Ray fondly recalled, noting with pride that his father’s library was the largest in the entire county. Every night, Baker would read aloud to his boys. “How well I remember the little gatherings just before bedtime,” Ray later wrote, “the lamp in the middle of the table, the book, whatever it was, open before him and the small audience, tousle-headed, with grimy legs drawn up under them, sitting with mouths open and eyes fixed upon the reader’s face! Whatever Father did, he did with gusto.” Baker’s animation and expressive voice made him “a prodigious story-teller, the best I ever knew. . . . We teased incessantly for stories and it was not unusual in the earlier days, for my father to have a roomful of people for his audience.”

Ray was still a child when his father gave him a silver dollar for completing Pilgrim’s Progress. No further bribery was ever required to fuel his passion for all manner of tales. By the time he was eleven, the boy loved nothing more than entering “into the lives and sorrows and joys” of others through books. “My reading was always a kind of living,” he explained later, “a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come to know well and sometimes be friends with.”

The eldest child and his father’s favorite, Ray was expected to help shape the behavior of his younger siblings. Both in the classroom and at home he strove to be worthy of that trust. He was the top student in his grammar school class, performed household chores without complaint, and diligently participated in Sunday school classes. When his mother’s ill health briefly forced her into a sanitarium, Ray assumed responsibility for provisioning the household with food and supplies. For a time after her return, her condition seemed to improve, but the year Ray turned thirteen, Alice Baker died. Ray would never forget the shock of witnessing his father’s grief: “It went through me like the thrust of a sharp knife: it was more terrible than anything else that had happened. My father, that strong man, that refuge of safety and fearlessness, my father shaken with weeping.”

After only one year in high school, Ray passed the entrance examinations for college, allowing him to enter Michigan Agricultural College (later Michigan State) as a fifteen-year-old freshman. Like Ida Tarbell, Ray enjoyed the invaluable benefit of an inspired botany professor, William Beal, yet another acolyte (like Professors Hurd and Tingley) of Harvard’s Louis Agassiz. Ray’s first experience in Professor Beal’s laboratory made an indelible impression. Instructed to study a single plant specimen for several days under a compound microscope, he initially deemed the assignment “a great waste of time” when he could simply research the specimen in a botany text and enumerate its characteristics. Baker soon came to understand that Beal wanted his students to learn by investigating for themselves, by compiling “details and facts before principles and conclusions.” Beal, he would come to realize, taught “the one thing I needed most of all to know. This was to look at life before I talked about it: not to look at it second-hand, by way of books, but so far as possible to examine the thing itself.” The friendship he developed with his professor and mentor would last a lifetime; indeed, Baker would eventually marry Beal’s daughter, Jessie. And Beal’s methodology would serve as Baker’s lodestar throughout his long journalistic career.

The personable Baker was well liked in college. He stood five feet ten inches tall, with handsome features: blue eyes behind round spectacles, a straight nose, and a cleft chin. The intent scholarship that kept him at the top of his class did not preclude joining a fraternity, playing rugby, or serving as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. He was a leader in student government and was selected to deliver one of the commencement orations.

That his father hoped he would return to St. Croix after college, learn the land business, and ultimately become his partner was long understood. “When the time comes I shall give you advice,” his father told him, “but I shall never attempt to force or urge you into any position or calling which is at all distasteful to you.” Tears filled young Ray’s eyes as he read those words, and he resolved “never to fail” his beloved father; upon graduation, he dutifully returned home to apprentice in Baker’s office. Sadly, he soon discovered that he “was not adapted to a business life.” He traveled with his father, keeping the books and bank accounts, but “did not live in it, as one must do if he is to be happy and truly successful in any employment.” Despite his efforts, he found his occupation increasingly distasteful: “I felt as though I were being crowded back into a kind of cocoon from which I had long ago worked free, and flown.”

Ray consoled himself by writing poems and stories and by recording thoughts in a journal, a habit he would continue all his life. Decades later, he wrote of the tremendous importance this private chronicle held for him: “Experience soon fades, thought degenerates into musing, even love may presently wither, but the honestly written expression, hot from the penpoint, of the contents of one’s mind, its observations, desires, doubts, faith, ambition, and the like, becomes at length a kind of immortality.” Ray endured two cheerless years in the office until his brother Harry, who found the land business far more congenial, replaced him. Harry’s decision to join their father freed Ray to continue his education.

Having enrolled in the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, Ray soon found himself drawn instead to courses in the English department. A gifted professor, Fred Newton Scott, became his mentor. Unlike traditional surveys of the literary canon, Scott’s seminar focused on a limited number of writers, subjecting their works to in-depth literary criticism. The progressive young professor believed, as did Howells and the realist school, that authors had a social responsibility to address the problems of their era. The test of a writer’s work, he told his students, must be its contribution to the “good working order” of society as a whole.

Baker signed up for a second seminar with Scott called “Rapid Writing,” one of the country’s earliest college programs to teach journalism. The popular class required that students pick one newspaper to follow daily and focus on a particular subject. Baker chose the Chicago Record, concentrating on the struggles between laboring men and employers in that city. Immersed in coverage of the fight to establish workers’ rights in the new industrial order, he began to question the laissez-faire economic principles inherited from his Republican father. Though he already had read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, the book’s remedy—a single tax on land—was “anathema” to his father, whose very livelihood was founded upon the ownership of land. Ray was still trying to reconcile these conflicting ideas when he encountered Professor Scott.

Numerous stories in the Chicago Record that semester reflected the growing tension between labor and capital, as well as an economic stagnation that signaled the impending depression of 1893. Every morning, Ray read and analyzed news articles and editorials, writing his own reports“with the greatest fervor,” eagerly anticipating Scott’s exacting appraisals. “For the first time in my life I was getting honest and direct criticism,” he recalled, “and it was like a draught of clear water to a thirsty spirit.”

By the semester’s close, Baker realized that his desire to study law had evaporated, and he was certain his future lay in journalism. “I did not make this break-away without many hesitations,” he admitted. “I knew how disappointed my father would be.” Unable to confront Joseph, he set out for Chicago, ostensibly seeking summer employment as a reporter, though in actuality he already hoped to make journalism his career. When he presented himself to the editor of the Chicago Record, Baker was told that there were no regular openings, but he could await possible assignments in the city room. After many weeks, his opportunity arrived. The regular labor reporter was out on a story one afternoon when word came that the waiters in a popular restaurant had gone out on strike. Baker received the assignment. When he turned the article in, the assistant night editor delivered words he would never forget. “Great stuff, Baker,” he exclaimed, “great stuff.” With bolstered confidence, Baker canvassed the neighborhoods of Chicago. His explorations resulted in a series of human interest stories, “glimpses, street scenes, common little incidents of the daily life of a great city, which could be treated more or less lightly or humorously.” Pleased with Baker’s work, the Record offered him a regular position that fall.

But in December 1892 he received an urgent summons from his father. Baker’s hearing, damaged in the war many years earlier, was deteriorating into deafness. It was Harry’s turn to enroll in college courses, and he needed his oldest son to come home. Ray tried to convince his father that his aspirations as a writer were neither pretentious nor frivolous, but his father’s needs prevailed and Ray found himself back in St. Croix. For nearly a year, he remained to assist his father until Harry’s winter break allowed a return to Chicago.

The depression was taking a grim toll on the city that winter. Baker was welcomed back to the Record to cover the plight of the unemployed. “There are thousands of homeless and starving men in the streets,” he told his father. “I have seen more misery in this last week than I ever saw in my life before.” This destitute urban population was unlike anything he had encountered. While there were “plenty of people on the frontier who were poor,” he noted, they had means of subsistence. “Land was to be had almost for the asking, logs were at hand for their houses, all the streams were full of fish, and all the hills full of game. . . . There was everywhere plenty of work.” The city offered no such opportunities. “The miserable living conditions, the long hours, the low wages, the universal insecurity, tended to tear down the personality, cheapen the man.”

As Harry prepared for the spring semester, Baker appealed once again to his oldest son. Ray had promised to return home “in the event of absolute necessity” to protect the family business, but leaving the newspaper would force him “to begin all over again at the bottom of the ladder” when he returned to Chicago. Moreover, he insisted, “there is no use in trying to run a business with your heart elsewhere.” While reluctant to return, he reassured his father of his loyalty: “I shall regard it as my first duty, whatever may happen to see that your business is protected and I think every one of the six boys feels in the same way.” Realizing his son’s devotion to his chosen vocation, Baker relented. Ray should remain in Chicago, and he would manage at home.

Supplied with a typewriter for the first time, Ray was sent to Massillon, Ohio, in mid-March 1894 to cover a crusade that would become known as Coxey’s Army. The fiery reformer Jacob Coxey planned a massive march on Washington to demand a government-sponsored public works program to put thousands of unemployed men to work building roads. Baker’s first articles reflected his paper’s editorial stance against the march—venting concern that a horde of vagrants and derelicts would wreak havoc as they marched through the countryside en route to the capital.

Yet as Baker trudged alongside the men, his attitude shifted. “I began to know some of them as Joe and Bill and George,” he related. “I soon had them talking about their homes in Iowa and Colorado and Illinois and Chicago and Pittsburgh—and the real problems they had to meet.” These were not “bums, tramps, and vagabonds” but “genuine farmers and workingmen,” driven in a time of depression by their inability to “earn a living.” Baker’s sympathetic articles brought hundreds of additional recruits to Coxey’s Army and revealed to him the incredible “power of the press.” Skeptics had predicted that the Army, outfitted with supplies for only a few days, would soon disintegrate. But at each scheduled stop “there appeared an impromptu local committee, sometimes including the mayor and other public men, with large supplies of bread, meat, milk, eggs, canned goods, coffee, tea.”

Following Coxey’s improbable army was “a grand adventure” for Baker and his fellow correspondents. Crossing the Allegheny Mountains, they found themselves in snow at least a foot deep. Although some marchers with ragged boots dropped out, the majority persevered, and at last, six weeks after they began, the motley Army reached Washington, D.C. Massive crowds thronged the streets as the procession headed toward the Capitol. Senators and congressmen looked on from the Capitol portico. A large mounted police guard awaited and, as the marchers spilled onto the lawn, Baker reported, “the police seemed to lose their heads completely as they dashed into the crowds on their horses and slashed out with their clubs.” Coxey gained the Capitol steps and was beginning to address the crowd when he was arrested for trespassing and roughly carried away.

“Coxey’s eventful march from Massillon to the marble steps of the national Capitol closed today in riot and bloodshed,” Baker recorded, leaving in its wake public works bills “no nearer passage than they were a month ago.” A remark by a Massachusetts politician reflected the widespread hostility to the reforms among legislators. “The bill,” he claimed, “was immoral, for unemployment was an act of God.” With the arrest of Coxey, the Army “vanished in thin air,” and with it, hope for a political solution to unemployment. It would take the Great Depression of the 1930s to convince the New Deal Congress that Coxey’s approach had merit.

Immediately upon his return to Chicago, Baker was sent to Pullman, Illinois, the model town founded by the railroad industrialist George M. Pullman, developer of both the sleeping car and the dining car and president of the Pullman Palace Car Company. Baker had read rhapsodic descriptions of the experimental community where Pullman’s workers lived in Pullman-owned homes, shopped in Pullman stores, and worshipped in Pullman churches. He had long wanted to meet the “benevolent-looking, bearded man,” but he arrived in Pullman in 1894 to discover a scene of “the wildest confusion.” Three thousand factory workers were striking to protest substantial wage cuts. The company argued that it was losing money in the hard times, but workmen pointed out that regular dividends were still being paid out to stockholders. Indeed, it was later proved that the company’s dividend payouts were in excess of $2 million annually, while profits held steady at $25 million per year.

The Pullman workers appealed for support to the American Railway Union (ARU), headed by Eugene Debs. Initially reluctant to help, Debs was finally convinced by reports of the excessive prices workers were forced to pay for rent, utilities, and food; the predatory hold of the Pullman monopoly must be broken. Baker took an immediate liking to Debs, believing him unselfishly committed to the cause. The ARU gave the company five days to arbitrate a settlement, but Pullman declared that there was “nothing to arbitrate.” He insisted that “workers have nothing to do with the amount of wages they shall receive; that is solely the business of the company.” The powerful union responded with a boycott of all Pullman cars, disrupting railroad traffic across the nation. When railroad managers attempted to replace the strikers with non-union men, riots broke out.

The managers then requested and received a federal injunction against the boycott, ostensibly on grounds of protecting the delivery of mail. Despite the injunction, the boycott continued until President Grover Cleveland, over the objection of Illinois governor Altgeld, sent in federal troops, thereby escalating the violence. Trains were overturned and fires started. The federal troops opened fire. Dozens were killed and wounded. Debs was jailed for ignoring the injunction. By the end of August 1894, more than three months after it had begun, the strike collapsed with nothing gained for the workers.

Baker well understood that mobs could not run amok, “putting the torch to millions of dollars’ worth of property,” yet his feelings of support remained firm for the striking workers whose stories he had come to know. Clearly, Joseph Stannard Baker did not share his son’s empathy for the strikers. “It does seem to me as if the laboring classes were possessed of the devil,” he wrote in early July. “I believe in the free application of rifle balls, grape and canister to mobs.” Ray held his ground. Asked to testify before a federal panel that fall, he asserted that he was “in the midst of the mob” when the violence began and that “at no time” did he witness the involvement of a member of the railway union or a striker. On the contrary, the men who overturned the cars were “toughs and outsiders.” Moreover, when the federal troops arrived, they fired into the crowd with no warning, killing and wounding innocent spectators. While most of the newspapers blamed the strikers and created the impression that the federal troops had saved Chicago from anarchy, Baker carefully recounted what he had observed.

The young journalist believed that his “honeymoon as a newspaper reporter ended with the Pullman strike.” He “had been wonderfully fortunate” to that point, he realized: “I had been able to work on subjects that interested me profoundly ever since my days in the university—the new problems of unemployment and the relationships of labor and capital.” But in the aftermath of the protracted and distressing Pullman strike, even those editors sensitive to labor issues sensed that their readers “were profoundly relieved to have the trouble ended,” no longer wishing to hear about labor’s struggles. Baker found himself covering murders, fires, and robberies. He felt that he was stifling.

The dramatic 1896 campaign between Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republican William McKinley provided a welcome diversion. After witnessing Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the Chicago Wigwam, Baker concluded that the candidate was “the greatest popular orator [he] had ever heard.” Though his father vociferously derided Bryan and his Populist followers, Baker was deeply impressed when he went to see him at the Palmer House. “The essential impression he made,” Baker later recalled, “was one of deep sincerity.” McKinley won a convincing victory, claiming every state outside the West and the South, and Baker found himself once again covering “the commonplace” rather than “the spectacular.”

Two years earlier, Ray had married Jessie Beal, with whom he had corresponded since their college days. He was feeling “somewhat low” as he contemplated how he might support his wife and new child on his newspaper salary and doubted if he “was getting anywhere at all as a writer.” At this stressful juncture, the fortuitous offer from S. S. McClure prompted elation. “Suddenly and joyously” Ray Stannard Baker was transported to a world “full of strange and wonderful new things,” and he was “at the heart of it, especially commissioned to look at it, hear about it, and above all, to write about it.”

TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, EDITOR of a small country newspaper in Emporia, Kansas, ironically came to the attention of S. S. McClure through a scathing anti-Populist editorial that he would later disavow when he became an ardent progressive. “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” written in the heat of the election between McKinley and Bryan, ridiculed his home state for endorsing Bryan’s “wild-eyed” rhetoric that pitted the rich against the poor and was sure to drive out capital and extinguish the possibility of progress. “That’s the stuff!” he jeered. “Give the prosperous man the dickens! Legislate the thriftless man into ease, whack the stuffing out of the creditors. . . . Whoop it up for the ragged trousers; put the lazy, greasy fizzle, who can’t pay his debts, on the altar, and bow down and worship him.”

White’s editorial was republished in dozens of newspapers throughout the country. The sardonic tone caught the fancy of Mark Hanna, McKinley’s campaign manager, who had it reprinted and distributed “more widely than any other circular in the campaign.” Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Tom Reed, without even knowing White’s name, sent a laudatory note to the editor of the little paper. “I haven’t seen as much sense in one column in a dozen years,” he declared. Suddenly, the rotund, florid young man who had labored at his obscure midwestern newspaper became a national figure.

McClure jotted down the name William Allen White; some weeks later, having also read a small volume of short stories White had recently published, he brought the young man to New York. “I had seen cities,” White later recalled, “Kansas City, St. Louis, Denver, Chicago, but even in 1897 the New York sky line as I ferried across to the Twenty-third Street slip, made my country eyes bug out with excitement.”

At first sight, White was totally smitten too by the McClure’s staff. McClure himself seemed “a powerhouse of energy,” a dynamo “full of ideas,” who “talked like a pair of scissors, clipping his sentences, sometimes his words.” White’s mother, Mary Ann Hatton, they discovered, had been Professor Hurd’s student at Knox College. And White connected at once with “fellow midwesterner” John Phillips, who invited him, along with Ida Tarbell, to a “gorgeous dinner” at a cozy restaurant way uptown. “These people knew Rudyard Kipling,” he noted with amazement. “They knew Robert Louis Stevenson. . . . The new English poets were their friends.”

McClure’s original staff members, for their part, were enchanted by the country editor with “the smile of a roguish little boy” and “the eyes of a poet.” Tarbell liked “his affection and loyalty for his state, his appreciation and understanding of everything that she does—wise and foolish.” Baker relished White’s “love of life” and contagious “high spirits.” McClure deluged him with concepts for new magazine pieces, and Phillips helped him distinguish the fool’s gold from the gold. Before leaving New York, White pledged to send the lion’s share of his future stories and articles to McClure’s. They reciprocated his good faith, urging him to “call on them whenever he needed help,” a promise kept when he mentioned he was trying to raise $5,000 to pay for a new home. McClure’s magazine instantly remitted White a check for all construction costs, plus an additional $1,000.

“The McClure group became for ten or fifteen years my New York fortress, spiritual, literary and, because they paid me well, financial,” White later wrote. McClure “was always Sam to me and John Phillips was always John, Miss Tarbell was always Ida M., and Jaccaci was always Jack. And I loved them all. There was no New England repression in our relations. They were cordial to the point of ardent. . . . They talked the Mississippi Valley vernacular. They thought as we thought in Emporia about men and things. They were making a magazine for our kind—the literate middle class. This group had real influence.”

Baker was struck with admiration that White “never yielded to the temptation” of leaving Emporia, “the country and the people he knew best.” He frequently visited New York, “stayed as long as he wanted to stay . . . worked out plans for new articles and stories, and then went back to Kansas.” Yet the rapport and fellowship with the McClure group profoundly influenced his thinking: the provincial editor became cosmopolitan; the young conservative a progressive.

William Allen White’s youthful conservatism was nourished by the comfortable world of his childhood. His family lived in “the best house” in the small central Kansas town of El Dorado, where his father, a successful doctor and shopkeeper, enlarged the family fortunes by operating the town’s grandest hotel and speculating in real estate. “I look back upon my boyhood there in the big house,” White later said, “with a sense of well-being.” The “White House,” as it was called, boasted eleven rooms and a wraparound porch designed “to get a breeze from every angle.” Dr. White was elected to the city council and later served as mayor. He was “somebody,” White later said, fostering William’s “sense of belonging to the ruling class.”

His college-educated mother was thirty-six when she married forty-eight-year-old Doc White. Will, their only surviving child, was, by his own account, terribly spoiled. His “devoted and adoring” parents “bowed down” to accommodate his every desire. “In that Elysian childhood,” he recalled, “I was shielded from pain and sorrow and lived, if ever a human being did live, in a golden age.” In his local school, everyone liked him. “He was so good-natured,” one classmate recalled, “they could not do otherwise.” Summer days were spent diving and going fishing in the nearby river; autumn promised hunting in the surrounding woods; the onset of winter meant setting traps for birds and game, and ice-skating on the frozen river. It was a boy’s paradise, one that later he would work to faithfully re-create in nostalgic fiction.

White’s house, like Baker’s, was filled with books, and every night his mother read to him. “I remember as a child sitting in the chair, looking up to her while she read Dickens and George Eliot, Trollope, Charles Reed, and the Victorian English novels. My father, I remember, used to growl a good deal at the performance, and claimed that if my mother read to me so much I would never get so I would read for myself. But his prediction was sadly wrong. It was to those nights of reading and to the books that my mother had always about the house that I owe whatever I have of a love for good reading.”

Dr. White was a gentle and jovial man, fond of entertaining guests in his spacious house. Will particularly remembered those cheerful evenings when his family hosted friends, neighbors, and frequently “distinguished citizens—the politicians of the time, the governors, congressmen, senators, and judges who came to the town on their political pilgrimages.” The doctor’s geniality and the whirl of his social and professional activity obscured a chronic illness: Dr. White was suffering from severe diabetes, and after a two-week illness in the fall of 1882, he died. Will was fourteen. The entire town attended the funeral, with crowds of mourners converging on the house and congesting the surrounding sidewalks and streets. “I was not without my pride,” White recalled, “looking back as we made the turn half a mile from home and headed for the East Cemetery, to see the long line of carriages and wagons and carts still moving into the procession on Main Street.”

Upon his high school graduation, White enrolled in the College of Emporia, sixty miles away. There he first encountered the new literature of realism through the serialization of William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance, the same novel McClure had devoured at John Phillips’s home.“Here,” White recalled, “was a novel different from the Dickens I adored.” The young freshman “read it and reread it” that spring, feeling that “a new door” had opened. When he returned home that summer, White got a job with the local paper, the El Dorado Democrat. His responsibilities were limited to sweeping floors, doing odd jobs, and helping the typesetters, but he was enchanted by the world of journalism, certain he had found his “life’s calling.”

The following year, White transferred to the University of Kansas, and his mother rented out their El Dorado house so she could “establish a home” for her beloved son in Lawrence. White thoroughly enjoyed his years at the university, where he developed a lifelong friendship with his political science professor, Dr. James H. Canfield. A gifted teacher who taught history, sociology, and economics as well as political science, Canfield encouraged “a babble of clamoring voices” in classes built on discussion rather than lectures. In these classes, White first understood the inequities wrought by the high protective tariff, the standard of the Republican Party. In the years ahead, Canfield encouraged White to read books on socialism and to follow the works of the Progressive economist Richard Ely, father of Reform Darwinism. Ely argued that what businessmen claimed to be the “natural laws” of economics were in fact tools “in the hands of the greedy and the avaricious for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes.” Had White focused more on his schoolwork, he might have absorbed more of Canfield’s philosophy, but he readily acknowledged that his extracurricular passions—his social life and after-hours work for the Lawrence Journal—consumed far more time and attention than his classes. “As I look back at it, classroom pictures blur in my memory of the university,” White wrote. “Fraternity meetings are clear; political excursions are etched deeply; parties, little dances, picnics and what, in the student nomenclature of the time, was called ‘girling,’ I recall vividly. Also, I was downtown much of the time writing my news items for the Lawrence Journal, taking my copy for the Weekly University Courier to the printer, covering local events for the St. Louis and Kansas City papers.” He found himself cutting class after class and realized he had somehow “ceased to be a student and had become a reporter.” Failing to pass a required mathematics exam for the third time, he left the university without a degree.

Despite his mother’s chagrin, she accompanied William back to El Dorado, where he went to work at the El Dorado Republican. Though his father had been a Democrat, White had by this time adopted his mother’s allegiance to the Republican Party, a commitment he would ardently maintain throughout his life. Charged with generating local stories and editorials, the twenty-two-year-old reporter found himself in the midst of the Populist uprising.

The boom times that had accompanied White’s childhood years had vanished for the majority of Kansas farmers, who found themselves caught between usurious interest rates on debts to eastern bankers and the predatory, monopolistic practices of both the grain elevator companies that stored their crops and the railroads that carried them to market. In many sections of the West and Midwest, where only one elevator company or railroad served the area, farmers were forced to pay whatever price these companies demanded. “We have three crops,” a Nebraska newspaper editor lamented, “corn, freight rates, and interest. The farmers farm the land, and the businessmen farm the farmers.”

The grim hardships endured by farming families galvanized the so-called Grangers movement. They successfully pressured state legislatures to regulate exorbitant elevator and railroad rates, but these laws were swiftly challenged in the courts, where corporate influence was pervasive. The Grangers secured a spectacular, albeit temporary, triumph in the 1877 case of Munn v. Illinois. The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the constitutionality of an Illinois state law regulating excessive elevator rates. The Court agreed that Illinois was simply exercising its “police power” to regulate private property “affected with a public interest.” Nine years later, however, in Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Co. v. Illinois, the Supreme Court effectively reversed its decision. The justices denied the state’s regulatory power in a case concerning inflated railroad rates on grounds that only Congress had the right to dictate commerce between states. In the years that followed, the Court would remain an uncompromising barrier to state regulation of business in the public interest.

Responding to the public outcry that followed the Wabash decision, Congress filled the regulatory void in 1887 by passing the Interstate Commerce Act, which created an Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to ensure that railroad rates were “reasonable and just.” The practice of granting rebates to favored big shippers, which essentially destroyed smaller competitors, was outlawed. But the legislation did not authorize the commission to set specific rates, a fatal omission that allowed railroad barons to challenge the ICC rulings in the courts at every turn, thereby rendering the law largely ineffective. In time, railroad executives actually found the law useful. “It satisfies the public clamor for a government supervision of railroads,” one corporate lawyer, Richard Olney, wrote, “at the same time that the supervision is almost entirely nominal.”

Though widespread bitterness against the concentration of economic power led to the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, that law likewise remained a paper tiger while the trusts continued to grow. “Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty,” Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote in Wealth Against Commonwealth, an influential 1902 indictment of the trusts. “The flames of a new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the State . . . and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master, instead of servant.”

In 1890, the Farmers’ Alliance, which had succeeded the Grangers, successfully fielded slates of radical candidates in the West and Midwest. Mary Lease, a formidable proponent of reform, traveled around Kansas on behalf of Alliance candidates. “Wall Street owns the country,” she charged. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.” She angrily dismissed claims that the farmers’ troubles stemmed from a surfeit of produce. “Overproduction!—when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 10,000 shop-girls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them!”

Buoyed by successes in the midterm elections of 1890, the Farmers’ Alliance sent delegates to a national convention in Omaha, Nebraska. There, in 1892, a new party, the People’s or Populist Party, was born. “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin,” the platform began. “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind.” The Populists called for a graduated income tax to shift the heavier burden to the wealthy, a silver standard to facilitate an easier discharge of their debts, and a federally administered system of postal savings banks where people could safely deposit their earnings. To circumvent the collusion of corporate interests and political bosses who, in turn, controlled the state legislatures, they demanded a constitutional amendment to elect U.S. senators by a direct vote of the people, as well as new techniques—the initiative and the referendum—which would enable voters to directly initiate or reject legislation.

Realizing the necessity of a coalition with more urban areas, organizers of the largely agrarian party tried to appeal to industrial workers. The platform endorsed labor’s fight for an eight-hour day and opposed the use of Pinkerton guards as strikebreakers. Finally, arguing that “the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads,” the Populists called for government ownership of the railroads. Though their 1892 presidential candidate, James Weaver, proved unable to unify support beyond the western states, the Populist message remained a rallying point for America’s working poor.

At first, the ruling classes—the bankers, the businessmen, and the lawyers—paid little attention to the members of the Farmers’ Alliance and the new Populist Party. “We prideful ones,” White later admitted, “considered the Alliance candidates as the dregs of Butler County society; farmers who had lost their farms, Courthouse hangers-on . . . political scapegraces.” White wrote stinging editorials to ridicule the uprising, convinced that the grassroots movement was “demagogic rabble-rousing” without any tie to reality. “A child of the governing classes, I was blinded by my birthright,” he later acknowledged. When the local Populists burned him in effigy, he proudly noted that their actions served only to aggrandize his standing with the local leaders of the Republican Party.

Like White, Theodore Roosevelt dismissed the members of the Farmers’ Alliance as “pinheaded, anarchistic crank[s]” and castigated the Populists as grandstanding demagogues. While Tarbell sympathized with the Populists’ outcry against monopoly after experiencing her father’s struggle with Standard Oil, and while Baker came to know personally the members of Coxey’s Army, the Pullman strikers, Governor Altgeld, and William Jennings Bryan, Roosevelt categorically denounced them all as “representatives of those forces which simmer beneath the surface of every civilized community, and which, if they could break out, would destroy not only property and civilization but finally even themselves.”

For genteel reformers like Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, “good government,” not economic reform, was the benchmark. “The ‘best citizens,’ ” White explained, “were supposed to desire honest men in office, men who would not take bribes, men who would appoint high-minded men as their subordinates, men who would look after the public interests, see that public charities were well supported.” The appearance of the Farmers’ Alliance, “the first wave of the shock troops of a revolution that was to gather force as the years went by,” reported White, “all this did not disturb either the Spring Chickens or their parents at the high-five clubs, the formal dances at the opera house given for the firemen, and the town charities.”

White’s jeering editorials against the Populists attracted widespread notice and prompted a job offer from the Kansas City Journal, a conservative Republican paper. During the next three years, from 1892 to 1895, he wrote for the Journal and then for the Kansas City Star. During these tumultuous years, as “the black hand of despair” fell over the countryside, he remained, by his own admission, “a supercilious young Pharisee, blinder than a bat to the great forces that were joining issue in our politics, forces that would be in combat for fifty years.” Although his attacks on the Populists did not abate, he also began to write short stories based on his early life in Kansas that would eventually attract the attention of Sam McClure.

In 1895, having married schoolteacher Sallie Lindsay, White decided to quit big city life and return to the small town of Emporia, with its population of 15,000, a Main Street and college, and simple neighborly life. Intent on becoming his “own master,” White purchased the Emporia Gazette, a local paper with a circulation of less than five hundred. He hoped to streamline the paper’s production and dedicate most of his time to writing poetry and fiction. Most important, he told a skeptical city friend at the time, “I want to live and work some place where I can sit down with the mayor on the edge of the sidewalk and we can let our feet hang off and can discuss local politics and the state of the nation and what we must do to be saved till it’s time to go home to dinner.”

In his very first editorial for the Gazette, White spelled out a manifesto that would define the rest of his life. “The new editor hopes to live here until he is the old editor,” he began. “He hopes always to sign ‘from Emporia’ after his name when he is abroad, and he trusts that he may so endear himself to the people that they will be as proud of the first words of the signature as he is of the last words.” The young idealist would make good on his pledge, living out his years in his beloved country town, even as he became “the best-known and most often quoted country journalist in the United States.”

While White never capitulated to Sam McClure’s repeated invitations to relocate to New York, the warm friendships he developed with McClure, Phillips, Tarbell, and Baker fundamentally altered his social and political attitudes. He began to understand the profound inequities that had produced the Populist uprising: how the growth of colossal corporations had strangled competition in one field after another; how these corporations blatantly wielded their power through venal politicians, widening the gap between the rich and the poor. Belatedly but surely, he came to recognize that Bryan’s platform in 1896 “was the beginning of a long fight for distributive justice, the opening of a campaign to bring to the common man . . . a larger and more equitable share in the commonwealth of our country.”

THE FINAL MEMBER OF THE celebrated quartet at the heart of McClure’s was Lincoln Steffens. As a police reporter for the New York Evening Post, Steffens covered Theodore Roosevelt’s activities as police commissioner. Early on, McClure had identified Roosevelt as a man of unusual potential: he “seems big from here,” McClure confided to Phillips, indicating his resolve to cultivate a connection with a public figure “just our size.” Aware of Steffens’s intimacy with Roosevelt, the editor hoped to secure that conduit to New York’s dynamic commissioner by adding Steffens to his staff.

When first approached by McClure’s, Steffens was reluctant to abandon the newspaper industry and the reputation he had built as “one of the best journalists New York ever had.” A long lunch with Phillips, followed by a visit to the bustling McClure’s office, began to conquer his hesitancy. McClure was out of town, but Steffens met with the rest of the staff and was particularly captivated by the art director, August Jaccaci. “Jaccaci probed me hard, took me to his home, talked with and drew me out,” he recalled. “That was his way. He could not be a friend; he had to be a lover.” Their discussions convinced Steffens that the format of a monthly magazine would allow him to “tell the whole, completed story,” providing time and space for details and implications he could not explore in a daily newspaper. That conversation “clinched” the deal.

Arriving at McClure’s, Steffens later recalled, was “like springing up from a bed and diving into the lake—and life.” S. S. McClure’s sheer, irrepressible drive astounded Steffens. “He was a flower that did not sit and wait for the bees to come and take his honey and leave their seeds,” observed the new staff writer. “He flew forth to find and rob the bees.” Tensions invariably arose when McClure returned from his trips and assembled the staff to allocate new assignments gleaned from his travels. It was Ida Tarbell, Steffens recalled, who helped sort things out. Time and again, she managed to placate the staffers, to avoid battles, and find a path “to compromise and peace.”

Tarbell in turn came to consider the “young, handsome, self-confident” Steffens “the most brilliant addition to the McClure’s staff.” Though “incredibly outspoken” and “never doubtful of himself,” he demonstrated a disconcerting ability to analyze events and detect the underlying patterns, illuminating “the relations of police and politicians, politicians and the law, law and city officials, city officials and business, business and church, education, society, the press.” Tarbell found it “entirely in harmony with the McClure method of staff building that this able, fearless innocent should be marked for absorption.”

More reserved by nature than the cocksure Steffens, Ray Baker acknowledged they would not likely have been friends had they not been “associates in the same enterprise, eagerly engaged in similar tasks, meeting familiarly every day, discussing ideas and projects.” Nevertheless, the more he worked with Steffens, the greater his respect and affection grew. Staff luncheons and dinners, visits to each other’s homes, confidences shared, and letters exchanged combined to “make up the texture of a long friendship.” Baker thought of Steffens “as a kind of Socratic skeptic, asking deceptively simple questions . . . striving first of all to understand.” Indeed, his biographer Robert Stinson observes that throughout Steffens’s long career, “his most consistent pose was that of a student.” Projecting an earnest, unbiased, and questioning nature, he was able to gain the confidence and elicit the secrets of his subjects.

The qualities that made Steffens a first-rate reporter—his immense curiosity and self-assurance, his social ease and storytelling gifts—were perceptible even in his youth. “My story is of a happy life,” he observed in his famous Autobiography, beginning with a childhood surrounded by doting parents and three affectionate younger sisters. His mother, Elizabeth Symes, was a cheerful, quick-witted, warmhearted woman who adored him. His father, Joseph, owned a successful business dealing in “paints, oils and glass.” Later, as vice president of the California National Bank, president of the Board of Trade, and a Republican stalwart, he would become a leading figure in Sacramento, California. The “palatial residence” where Lincoln was raised was subsequently turned into the governor’s mansion.

Both intrepid and inquisitive, eight-year-old Steffens quickly capitalized on his newfound freedom when his parents gave him a pony. He could explore the countryside so long as he returned home in time for dinner. “If I left home promptly after breakfast on a no-school day and right after school on the other days,” Lincoln recalled, “I could see a good deal of the world.” His questing, precocious nature attracted a various and colorful assortment of acquaintances. He befriended a bridge-tender who let him follow along as he walked the tracks to extinguish the burning coals spewed by passing locomotives. In the course of their conversations, the bridge-tender shared his dreams of striking it rich as a gold miner. Watching an artist render a drab, leached-out river channel, he saw the scene transformed by small choices of color and light. Hanging out at the racetrack, the boy struck up a relationship with a jockey who dampened his ardor for horse racing by confiding that the races were frequently fixed—so that those “in on the know” would realize “big killings.” A friendly page at the state capitol took him to the smoke-filled committee rooms and hotel apartments where legislators and lobbyists hammered out compromises on the price to be paid for votes in a particular piece of legislation. “Bribery! I might as well have been shot,” he lamented. “Nothing was what it was supposed to be.”

Organized schooling frustrated young Lincoln’s quest for knowledge and information. Though he read more books than were required, he resisted the standardized curriculum that he perceived as irrelevant to his experience. Graduating at the bottom of his class from grammar school, he was sent to a military boarding school to remedy the problem. When he still failed the entrance examinations for the University of California at Berkeley, he required an additional year at “the best private school in San Francisco” and the aid of a private tutor in order to matriculate.

In his autobiography, Steffens blithely claimed that the enormous liberties he enjoyed as a child had not made him one of those boys “brought up to do their duty,” boys for whom the American educational system was designed. Knowledge at Berkeley, he complained, was “stored in compartments, categorical and independent.” He resented the requirements in higher mathematics, wishing only to pursue his passion for philosophy. “No one,” he insisted, “ever brought out for me the relation of anything I was studying to anything else.” Then, during his junior year, when a history professor demanded research in original documents, he discovered that the past was not a list of dates to be memorized but a series of questions to be continually debated. By the time he graduated from college, Steffens believed himself finally prepared to be a genuine student, an authentic intellectual, and decided to pursue graduate study in Europe.

“My father listened to my plan, and he was disappointed,” Steffens recalled. The older man had harbored hopes that his son would take over the business: “It was for that that he was staying in it. When I said that, whatever I might do, I would never go into business, he said, rather sadly, that he would sell out his interest and retire.” Facing the same irreconcilable demands of familial duty and personal desire that had plagued Baker, Lincoln Steffens was considerably more self-indulgent. He later postulated that having received love “so freely” as a child, he had never learned to reciprocate. Not until his own son was born, as Steffens approached sixty years old, did he feel any intimation of what unconditional love required.

A three-year interlude in Europe allowed Steffens to continue his philosophic study of man and society, first in Germany, then France, and finally in England. Through the works of Marx and Engels, he was exposed to the idea that the state had a responsibility to foster social welfare. He studied music and art, psychology and philosophy, attending lectures if and when he chose. He spent his days reading in cafés, wandering through museums, attending concerts, playing cards, drinking beer, and debating politics and philosophy with fellow students.

European social and sexual mores offered Steffens greater latitude to pursue unconventional relationships as well. In Leipzig, he became involved with Josephine Bontecou, a liberated woman ten years his senior. The daughter of a wealthy New York surgeon, she was studying psychology and anatomy to further her ambitions as both a scientist and a novelist. “She stands next to me as my equal in all respects,” he wrote at the time. “She will have a life and a life’s work of her own.” After a clandestine marriage in London, concealed to ensure his father would continue sending remittances, the two moved together to Paris. They found lodgings in the Latin Quarter where Ida Tarbell struggled to maintain her meager but exciting livelihood during those same months. Steffens savored a carefree intellectual existence for the better part of a year until summoned by his father’s letter: “My dear son: When you finished school you wanted to go to college. I sent you to Berkeley. When you got through there, you did not care to go into my business; so I sold out. You preferred to continue your studies in Berlin. I let you. After Berlin it was Heidelberg; after that Leipzig. And after the German universities you wanted to study at the French universities in Paris. I consented, and after a year with the French, you had to have half a year of the British Museum in London. All right. You had that too. By now you must know about all there is to know of the theory of life, but there’s a practical side as well. It’s worth knowing.”

So at last, determined to heed his father’s edict to find work and support himself, Steffens crossed the ocean, landed in New York, and found employment as a reporter. Armed with a letter of introduction from a friend of his father’s to Joseph B. Bishop, an editor at the New York Evening Post, he was given a chance to prove himself “on space” in an unsalaried position that paid by the word once a piece was accepted for publication. Within weeks, he made good. Assigned to interview the partner of a stockbroker who had suddenly disappeared, he soon gained the man’s confidence: “I told him the story of my life; he told me his,” Steffens later related. Before long, he learned that the missing banker had absconded with all the firm’s funds. More work quickly followed this successful investigation, and soon Steffens was put on salary.

“I came to love New York,” he wrote. “In the course of a few months I had visited all parts of the city, called on all sorts of men (and women), politicians, business men, reformers; described all sorts of events, fires, accidents, fights, strikes, meetings. It was happy work for me.” Suddenly, “science and philosophy, like the theaters and books, seemed tame in comparison with the men and women, the unbelievable doings and the sayings of a live city.” Like Baker and Tarbell, whose early enthusiasm for science gave way to a fascination with human beings, Steffens had found his calling, a focus for his diverse intellectual interests in journalism.

Just as the Panic began during the winter of 1892–93, the city editor assigned Steffens to cover Wall Street. He was directed to develop relationships with leading financiers that would allow the conservative Evening Post to explain insolvent banks and railroads in “cool, dull, matter-of-fact terms,” rather than resort to the fearmongering and sensationalism practiced by competing papers. Recognizing that the Panic of 1893 “was a dismal time of radiating destruction” for millions of people, Steffens nevertheless noted that “it had its bright side, inside; it was good for the bears.” From the sidelines of the Stock Exchange, he dispassionately witnessed “the wild joy” of men who shorted stocks and “rejoiced in the ruin.” In later years, he would come to despise “successful men who seize such opportunities,” but “the practices of big business” were still a mystery, and he “was not thinking in those days; life was too, too interesting, the world as it was too fascinating, to stop to question.”

Steffens gained a reputation as “the gentleman reporter,” one who could be relied upon to present the news with “accuracy and politeness.” In a letter to his father, he proudly described the close relationships he had cultivated with the big bankers. They “confide in me,” he reflected, “saying they know I will report them accurately and without exaggeration.” The equanimity and clarity of his writing was gaining notice. “Above all,” he confessed to his father, “I want that you should be convinced that you were right in giving me the long training of college and that I am worthy of your long, patient help to a son who did not ever seem worth it all.”

In November 1893, a challenging new assignment inspired both elation and unease: “The Evening Post has never given any space to police news: fires, suicides, murders, and other crimes,” Steffens explained to his father. “Now I am to be tried.” He would be head of a new Post police bureau, “with an office on Mulberry Street across the street from Police Headquarters, fitted up with a desk, bookcase, paper racks and telephone, and an assistant and a boy.” From the outset, Steffens understood that he faced “beastly work, police, criminals and low-browed ‘heelers’ in the vilest part of the horrible East Side amid poverty, sin and depravity,” but he regarded the challenge with eager anticipation. “Will it degrade me? Will it make a man of me? Here is my field, my chance.”

Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, a respected minister, was responsible for the Post’s decision to cover the activities of the police department. Head of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, Parkhurst had undertaken an investigation into the relationship between Tammany Hall and the police force. He exposed a system of ubiquitous bribery and coercion that governed all aspects of municipal operation: appointments, promotions, liquor licenses, protection for houses of prostitution, gambling operations, and saloons operating illegally on Sundays. Long opposed to the Tammany regime, the Post editors were delighted to document Parkhurst’s findings in full detail.

Parkhurst’s allegations forced the state legislature in Albany to authorize its own investigating commission, headed by Republican state senator Clarence Lexow. The hearings of the Lexow Committee splashed headlines throughout the state, ultimately revealing a system of corruption even more widespread than Parkhurst had guessed. The shocking revelations produced a surge of support for reform candidates, precipitating the defeat of Tammany in the 1894 elections, the triumph of reform mayor William L. Strong, and the choice of Theodore Roosevelt as the new police commissioner. By the time Roosevelt arrived in New York, Steffens had learned a great deal about the workings of the police department, insights he readily shared in return for access to the new commissioner and his department. A complicated friendship was born that would give Steffens the unique perspective he would bring to McClure’s, where the “Big Four”—Ida Tarbell, Ray Baker, William Allen White, and Lincoln Steffens—would become the heart of the muckraking movement.

UNLIKE MCCLURE, WHO HAD BECOME acquainted with the crueler side of American prosperity through a childhood scarred by poverty and instability, the Big Four were the children of prominent and enterprising businessmen. Each of them had encountered the corrosive effects of the industrial system. Ida Tarbell had witnessed the economic ruin of her father and his fellow independent oil producers at the hands of an all-powerful monopoly. Ray Stannard Baker, in his dedicated pursuit of the human stories behind the Chicago labor conflicts, had developed a sympathetic attitude toward the workingman’s struggles that set him apart from his father’s laissez-faire views. Lincoln Steffens had absorbed radical social ideas during his intense interdisciplinary studies in Europe and would bring an open, inquisitive, analytic mind to his work as police reporter. Even William Allen White, despite a coddled, conservative upbringing, had begun to recognize injustices in the farming and freight industries that had crippled the regional economy and compromised a community he cared for deeply.

All four were extraordinary, independent thinkers. Tarbell defied the conventions of her gender, steadfastly refusing the path of marriage and braving poverty and alienation to pursue her ambitions as a writer. Baker, too, resisted the pressure of social and familial expectation, declining to make his father’s business his own life’s work. Steffens’s difficulty in conforming to a normal course of study allowed him to develop the rigorous and comprehensive understanding of human nature that rendered networks of power transparent. White’s passionate devotion to his state’s progress may have assumed a pugnacious form in the blistering editorials that brought him into prominence, but that same devotion led him to a progressive metamorphosis as he came to see the neglected underside of the new industrial order.

Each of the four journalists was deeply influenced by a teacher. Both Tarbell and Baker had pursued studies in biology, learning investigative principles and procedures they would later apply to human society. Steffens had discovered the joy of working with original documents and the exhilarating freedom when one is allowed to question established authorities. White had found a mentor whose influence would continue to grow in the years ahead. All passionately believed, with S. S. McClure, that “a vigilant and well-informed press, setting forth the truth,” could become “an infinitely greater guard to the people than any government officials.” The new fusion of journalism, literature, exposé, and human interest that emerged in the pages of McClure’s would turn the microscope on humanity, on the avarice and corruption that stunted the very possibility of social justice in America.

This revolutionary cadre of writers would soon play a vital role in Theodore Roosevelt’s political future as well, helping to generate the critical mass of public sentiment to implement progressive policies. Though the McClure’s team had not yet articulated a distinct progressive agenda, their novel, vivid, and fearless explorations of the American condition would sound a summons and quicken the Progressive movement.