by Mark Bailey
BY MICHAEL MOORE
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: America, swept up in an era of innovative technology, exploding economic inequality, and deep political turmoil, falls prey to wretched corporate greed and men with maniacal, narcissistic egos. Labor unions are battered, and wages are far too low. Small businesses, factory workers, and farmers get screwed over and squeezed out by robber-baron schemes and massive industrial monopolies. Prejudiced cops roam the streets and enforce their bigotry with unchecked violence. Judges selectively dispense justice, and immigrants are vilified by angry white men as foreign radicals or parasites sucking on the national economy.
If this sounds depressingly familiar to you, it’s because the America of today looks a lot like the America of the early 1900s. To be sure, there are plenty of differences between the two eras, but there’s one important thing that the United States right at this moment does not have—a crusading journalist by the name of Samuel S. McClure.
S. S. McClure may be just a footnote in history textbooks at this point, but he’s someone we need now more than ever. As the founder, editor, and publisher of McClure’s Magazine, McClure invented a new form of investigative journalism in the United States. He is the godfather of the muckrakers, a type of journalist you will be hard-pressed to find these days. Seymour Hersh is one of them. So is James Risen. Woodward and Bernstein used to be. And in the far-flung reaches of the Internet there are those few unknowns who try to do that work with the minimal resources available to them. But the muckrakers of McClure’s era have become a near-extinct breed. And we, as citizens on the verge of a fading democracy, are all the worse off for it.
Throughout his lifetime, McClure took the pulse of the nation and felt there a real hunger for the truth, for the full story—a wish to examine the corrupt institutions that were dominating people’s lives. And for a little while at least, he got the press to stop stumbling and fawning over powerful people. He discovered writers, gave them the time and space to work, and pushed them to produce articles using real facts and deep reporting. For several years, McClure published stories that forced Americans to pay attention—to look at themselves and say, Holy shit, our government is corrupt and our politicians are for sale! Our food is lethal to eat! Working conditions for men, women, and children are horrible! Also, why the hell are children working in the first place? McClure’s efforts jump-started an entire generation of progressive politics that turned out quaint things like antitrust laws, the eight-hour workday, and protections for children and the elderly.
In a lot of ways, the story of S. S. McClure is an unusual and unlikely one. He was born in 1857 into deep poverty in County Antrim, Ireland, in a tiny two-bedroom house with a dirt floor and a straw roof. He and his three younger brothers shared a room, with the kitchen doubling as the living room. His mother, Elizabeth, worked on the family’s small farm. His father, Thomas, worked as a farmer too and also a master carpenter. It was what you’d call a Spartan upbringing, governed by the stern rules imposed by his strict Protestant parents. While McClure would later describe it as a contented, if not mirthful, childhood, that was most likely because he found some measure of escape.
Young Sam relished education. The little Irish schoolhouse was his oasis, and he would get there as early and leave as late as he could. An intensely curious boy, he read constantly from a young age, staying up to study until his parents forced him to go to bed. This drive for knowledge was always there, and friends from his early days could see a clear through line from Sam’s dogged work ethic, rapacious curiosity, and omnivorous tastes to his eventual success as a bold and visionary magazine editor.
But that was much later. In 1886, life was still very harsh. Unable to pay the bills, Sam’s dad was forced to leave the family for work in the Glasgow shipyards. One day a coworker left open a hatch door on a ship Sam’s dad was working on, and he tumbled all the way to the bottom of the hold. That was that—he died in an instant. Sam was only nine.
For the McClure family everything quickly went from bad to worse. Now their poverty was acute. Elizabeth and her four boys were passed between relatives, staying at a house as long as they could before moving on. Naturally, she craved stability, and so, like many of the desperate families around her, she found herself ready to take a big roll of the dice. Elizabeth had relatives in America, specifically in rural Indiana. This, she decided, was where the McClure family would find a new start. And so in 1866, Sam, his three brothers, and his mother boarded a ship and took off for America.
If the United States was a place of promise, it was not without its challenges. The McClures were fresh-off-the-boat Irish, and little Sam had to be scrappy. It took hustle, and not just because the McClures were poor. It took hustle because they had arrived in a country that wasn’t terribly hospitable to the Irish. The family settled on another small farm, now in rural Indiana. With his hunger for learning undiminished, Sam’s grades were so impressive that he left home to attend nearby Knox College at age fourteen. The college was a serious, no-nonsense place. There he would meet the core group of fellow writers and curiosity hounds who would go on to help run his news syndicate and later his magazine. He was so young that he had to study at Knox for three years before even reaching freshman standing. But McClure made the most of his time. He edited the student newspaper and started a news service, worked every summer to pay the next year’s tuition, and debated competitively.
During one debate, McClure delivered a powerful and telling speech that praised the efforts of American abolitionists. He said, “It was when they believed in what seemed impossible that the abolitionists did the most good, that they created the sentiment that finally did accomplish the impossible.” He was celebrating the power of the public to topple institutional corruption and laying out his own vision for taking on long odds.
As a young student, McClure was brash and energetic—the kind of kid who is, and was, frequently compared to a whirlwind. He once told a college friend, “I feel like a chained tiger. I fret against my chains.” On the romantic front, McClure didn’t make life any easier for himself. He fell in love with the whip-smart and beautiful Harriet Hurd, whose father, Albert, was a leading professor at Knox and detested the cocky and impulsive McClure. Professor Hurd fought hard to keep Sam away from Harriet, for whom he envisioned a much more stable partner. (To his beloved daughter, the professor once wrote about McClure: “His personal appearance, his bearing & his address are not pleasing to me. I think him conceited, impertinent, meddlesome.” Ouch.) But McClure, unsurprisingly, never backed off and, after a marathon seven-year courtship, eventually persuaded Harriet to be his bride. Professor Hurd, on the other hand, would remain unconvinced and didn’t let his son-in-law into his house until years after they had married.
The young couple moved to Boston, and after a successful stint there editing a bicycling magazine called the Wheelman, McClure was lured down to New York to take a job at a printing house. He discovered that he was fascinated by the printing process but hated doing the work himself. He also realized he was a terrible employee and dreamed of building a career where he was his own boss.
In so many ways, S. S. McClure lived that special kind of mythical story that Americans know well and love obsessively—that of a self-made man who creates his own luck through masochistic determination and hard work. McClure first attained real financial success by creating a system that syndicated the work of fiction writers to hundreds of newspapers across the country. Later, he would fancifully boast that he had invented the very concept of a syndicate, but that wasn’t true. What he did was create a formula for tenaciously wooing writers who showed unheralded skill. He read magazines and newspapers voraciously and fought for writers whose work he coveted. Though many warned him that journalism and fiction were a poor fit, he would impulsively hop on trains or buses to chase far-off writers, and would even board ships to cross the Atlantic to hunt down his prey. A result of this, his syndicate is credited with introducing Americans
readers to the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling.
But what separates McClure’s Horatio Alger story from everyone else’s Horatio Alger story is that McClure learned a better lesson from his climb up the social ladder: success had to be moral. And though he was an immigrant, he learned that to question power is inherently American. Accordingly, McClure didn’t use his newfound influence to lobby Congress for tax breaks; instead, he embarked on an endeavor that would actually change the course of history by holding the powerful accountable and by asking readers to think for themselves.
By 1893, with the syndicate in sound financial shape, McClure’s restlessness began to push him beyond the business. He was sending so many articles from his desk over to the desks of newspapers and magazines that he began to feel he was already effectively an editor—a magazine editor. And from there, the dream grew bigger. “I would rather edit a magazine than be President of the United States a hundred times over,” he told his wife. In June of that year, he launched McClure’s Magazine.
McClure’s was created at the worst possible time—in the dead middle of the Panic of 1893—but it survived and flourished anyway because the work was good. And the work was good because, by basically all accounts, McClure was a genius—an obsessive, idealistic, imperfect one, but a genius nonetheless. Lincoln Steffens, who was empowered by McClure to write an entire book’s worth of blockbuster stories on the unchecked corruption in city government, once described the job of the McClure’s staff as putting “four-wheel brakes upon the madness of McClure’s genius.” In his autobiography, Steffens praised McClure as “the receiver of the ideas of his day,” adding that “he was a flower that did not sit and wait for the bees to come and take his honey and leave their seeds. He flew forth to find and rob the bees.”
At the time McClure was building his career, yellow journalism was all the rage. Yellow journalism exaggerated, trumped up, and sensationalized stories to raise circulations and to serve its masters instead of serving the public. It was clickbait in an era long before the Internet. Back then, newspapers were not only affiliated with political parties but also cozy with big business and corporate interests. And you did not bite the hand that fed you. If a story was bad news for your boss, you didn’t dare report it.
The principles behind the muckraking movement, which seem so obvious now, were at the core of who McClure was. Just as sincerity, modesty, and perhaps the occasional affair with whiskey are practically Irish birthrights, so too is the love of language and storytelling. Long before McClure’s Magazine had a truly investigative bent, the magazine scored a reputation as a respectable and popular place to read good fiction and incisive biographies. Early issues of McClure’s featured some bylines you might be familiar with: Willa Cather, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Émile Zola, and Jack London, to name just a few. By 1899, the circulation had surged to four hundred thousand, making it one of the most popular magazines in the country. One year later, McClure’s had secured more advertising per issue than any other magazine in the world.
But McClure’s coworkers and contemporaries didn’t call him a genius just because he was creative or fearless or more than a little bit crazy. Part of what made McClure brilliant was that he understood what he could and couldn’t do. Sure, he could write well enough and could edit brilliantly, but as he explained in his autobiography, he also knew his “real capital was my wide acquaintance with writers and with what they could produce.” McClure has been described by some as “a Columbus among editors,” the idea being that he discovered so many major talents. But in truth, it wasn’t so much about discovery; rather it was that he had been paying attention all along. Throughout his life, McClure identified smart people, collected them, and then put them to their best use for as long as they could stand him. With his writers, he was known to be gruff, blunt, and erratic at times, but he was also attentive, persuasive, and a superlative listener. His whole career was marked by his adeptness in cajoling, but also nurturing, talent.
Certainly, part of the success of the magazine was due to the fact that McClure’s writers not only wrote with obsessive accuracy but also displayed an uncanny radar for examining deep social problems their readers often had yet to perceive themselves. The Civil War had ended a few years before McClure and his family arrived in Indiana, and the aftermath of that bloody war had given way to the Second Industrial Revolution. In America, the national issue of the day was no longer slavery but the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few—and uncertainty for everybody else. Sound familiar? In the wake of what was then the country’s worst-ever economic depression, millions of people were suddenly jobless, banks and railroads were closing or failing, and farmers burned their crops in the fields rather than sell them at a loss. As we all know too well, income inequality is a complicated problem and difficult to see clearly. Americans in the middle class were losing their sense of economic destiny and didn’t know why. Meanwhile the wealthy elites (believe it or not) were mostly clueless and largely responsible for the problems of the country.
According to McClure himself, it had never been the plan for his publication “to attack existing institutions.” Instead, he called what he and his writers accomplished “the result of merely taking up in the magazine some of the problems that were beginning to interest the people a little bit before the newspapers and other magazines took them up.” But once McClure’s got started, the powerful in America were finally put on notice.
Part of what made McClure’s special for its time is that it was specifically designed for a working-class readership. Most of the highbrow literary publications of the day cost thirty-five cents an issue, a price that connoted luxury, and their coverage didn’t reflect the urgency of the moment. Using new technology to keep costs down, McClure and his staff priced his magazine at fifteen cents so that it would be accessible to the masses. He also set the mission dials of the magazine “to deal with important social, economic and political questions, to present the new and great inventions and discoveries, to give the best in literature.”
Most important, he wanted it to be a force for good in the universe. Gradually, more and more hard-hitting investigative stories began to appear in the magazine, pointing out corruption and exploring issues that the entire country was dealing with in one way or another. These stories illustrated the national anxiety and clarified how raw the deal was for most people. And wouldn’t you know it, before long, the real shitshow began.
The coming-out party for the journalists later known as the muckrakers happened with the publication of the legendary, earth-shattering, orgy-of-corruption January 1903 issue of McClure’s. It featured a number of classic exposés that are still part of the journalism canon today. One was “The Shame of Minneapolis,” a study of municipal corruption. In it, Lincoln Steffens uncovered graft schemes that implicated a connected cast of shady characters including the city’s mayor, some local politicians, and the police force, all of whom conspired to take bribes from illegal brothels, saloons, and gamblers. Steffens also throws some of the blame on the citizens, who either looked the other way or didn’t bother paying attention to what was going on around them.
The story was a triumph of reporting, and Steffens went on to cover similar corruption scourges in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in future installments of McClure’s. But perhaps the most gobsmacking aspect of “The Shame of Minneapolis” is how chilling it sounds in the context of America today. Here’s one part of Steffens’s indictment of the greed and destruction wrought by the mixing of business and politics in America:
The business man has failed in politics as he has in citizenship. Why? Because politics is business. That’s what’s the matter with it. That’s what’s the matter with everything—art, literature, religion, journalism, law, medicine—they’re all businesses. Make politics a sport, as they do in England, or a profession, as they do in Germany, and we’ll have—well, something else than we have now—if we want it, which is a
nother question. But don’t try to reform politics with . . . business men.
The January 1903 issue also featured one the most famous investigative stories of all time: the third installment of Ida Tarbell’s groundbreaking series dissecting in detail the extent of Standard Oil Company’s vicious industrial monopoly. Here we were, nearly two decades before women could even cast a ballot in the United States, and Ida Tarbell was taking on John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the country and head of a company that controlled 90 percent of America’s oil supply.
“The History of Standard Oil” was a thorough, fact-based nineteen-part takedown of Gilded Age capitalism at its very worst. Tarbell’s series was as much about greed and injustice as it was a reflection of McClure’s personal ideology about success and power in America. “They had never played fair and that ruined their greatness for me,” Tarbell wrote of Standard Oil: “Everybody did not do it. In the nature of the offense, everybody could not do it. The strong wrested from the railroads the privilege of preying upon the weak, and the railroads never dared to give the privilege save under the promise of secrecy.”
The public’s enraged response to the Standard Oil series forced the political levers. Lawsuits were filed, and the Supreme Court eventually ruled that Standard Oil had to be broken up. Meanwhile, Tarbell, who had grown up in Pennsylvania oil country, was widely celebrated for her feat and even dubbed “the most popular woman in America” by one magazine.
McClure sensed that a wake-up moment in America was underway, and so, just before the January 1903 issue was released, he did an unusual thing and penned a call to arms. Homing in on the anticorruption themes of the stories, the editorial was titled “Concerning the Articles in This [Issue] of McClure’s, and a Coincidence That May Set Us Thinking.” It was, in essence, the muckrakers’ manifesto:
Capitalists, workers, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it? . . .