by Mark Bailey
There is no one left; none but all of us. . . . We are all doing our worst and making the public pay. The public is the people. We forget that we are all the people; that while each of us in his group can shove off on the rest of the bill of today, the debt is only postponed; the rest are passing it on back to us. We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end the sum total of the debt will be our liberty.
I can see you shaking your head right now. Maybe you are thinking, What a perfect foil S. S. McClure would have made for Donald Trump. If so, you’re absolutely right. Can you picture it? A self-made man who worked his way off of a farm in the Midwest without so much as a $14 million loan from his dad? A leader who, rather than aspiring to be a petty autocrat, sought to collaborate with talented men and women to produce the best ideas. How McClure would have loved to assign several detailed investigations into a narcissistic billionaire stiffing blue-collar contractors, denigrating female employees, lying about his charitable donations, and not paying his taxes. And he wouldn’t have waited years, or even months, to do it. He would have taken the threat seriously, from day one. After all, a full five years before he was elected president by the Electoral College, Trump announced his racist beliefs by suggesting that the first African American president was not an American but was perhaps a Muslim from Kenya. The media either ignored it or laughed it off, but they never failed to keep him on primetime TV with his weekly show, The Apprentice. There were no editorial calls for his removal. The network loved him, as did tens of millions of Americans. At the height of his powers, McClure would have dispatched his staff to take down this fraud. They would have already sniffed out all the rotten things, the dirty deals we don’t know about even still. Where are you now, Sam McClure? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Maybe most symbolically, McClure would have served up the best rebuke to Trump’s racist and nativist campaign, because he himself was an immigrant, an immigrant whose life became the ultimate success story. It’s not much of a stretch to say that all the vicious rhetoric that Trump and his supporters churned out—toward Mexicans, Middle Easterners, and any brown or black people—during the 2016 campaign wasn’t really very different from what a lot of people used to say about the Irish in America throughout McClure’s entire life and beyond. Like most immigrants, the McClures came to the United States because they wanted a better life. Like most immigrants, they dreamed of finding opportunities that weren’t available to them elsewhere. But what the glib, blustering politicians want you to forget is that America also benefited from this deal. It was true then, and it’s still true today. The truly smart American cities that are moving our culture and our technology and our society forward—not just places like New York or Los Angeles but places all over the United States—are doing so because the more diverse the population, the more the ideas and the art and the science flow. Midsize cities are now fighting to lure more immigrants—because they know that, for instance, Nashville has thrived as a twenty-first-century town in part because so many Kurds are thriving there. Meanwhile, Mexican and Vietnamese communities are putting down successful roots in Houston. Turkish immigrants are wonderfully reshaping small cities like Dayton, and Somalis are revitalizing Main Streets all across Minnesota.
What made Samuel McClure a special figure is that he wasn’t simply content to make a good life for himself as an immigrant; he wanted everyone around him to do well and suffer less. Muckraking was only the start of this process. Once people finally started paying attention to all the corruption in our institutions, McClure moved on to his next mission: finding solutions to improve the government and arguing for them. McClure not only wanted the nation to be more efficient, but he wanted to make it harder for politics to return to a dirty game of profit that only served the rich. With badly needed progressive reforms underway, McClure did another crazy thing: he publicly started pushing Americans to consider ideas that were working well in Europe. As his autobiography shows, McClure was a passionate champion of the idea of America, but he knew that it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do:
As a foreign-born citizen of this country, I would like to do my part to help to bring about the realization of the very noble American Ideal which, when I was a boy, was universally believed in, here and in Europe. I believe that the dishonest administration of public affairs in our cities has come about largely through carelessness, and that the remedy is as simple, as easily understood, and as possible of attainment, as the remedy for typhoid fever. The remedy is no dangerous experiment. It was adopted in Germany in the latter part of the last century. As a matter of self-protection it was adopted by Great Britain in the first third of the last century, and it lifted the nation out of as corrupt conditions of government as had ever existed. It was adopted by Galveston, after the great flood of 1900, to enable that city to continue its existence as a city. This very simple remedy is the establishment, in every municipality, of what, in a railroad, is called a board of directors, in a German city is called the Council, and in an American city is called the city commission form of government.
The commission form of government was a simple idea. No more party elders, no more smoke-filled rooms, less political horse racing or horse trading. A set number of people elected by all the citizens run a city with “efficiency as the watchword.” Simply put, it was governance—get this—without ego. There would be multiple winners and broader minds, instead of fewer hands and narrower ideas. McClure’s Magazine would feature numerous stories about the possibilities of change; McClure himself would travel around the country delivering talks on the topic. In that classic way, his concepts had vision, they gave context, and they were accessible enough for a listener or a reader to understand. Most important, everything was presented in a way that diagnosed the problem and expressed the urgency of it all.
[D]uring the century more new inventions and discoveries were made than in all human history. These inventions, especially that of the railroad, brought new problems of government. . . . The railroads had formed the habit of buying franchises from legislatures and city governments, and a great system of political corruption had grown up. This is the first cause of our political corruption today, the corruption that we have been fighting for the last twenty or thirty years.
This was in a speech McClure gave at Stanford University in 1912, and he spoke in a way that would probably stun anybody who has been subjected to the last several years of American politics. Instead of deploying easy sound bites and quick attacks, he offered actual information and a true accounting of how America stood to gain by thinking about things a little bit differently.
Our government is inefficient because it isn’t properly organized to meet the problems of government. Why are the fire losses in our great cities seven times as great as those of Europe—in structures of absolutely the same material? Why? Because our building inspectors are bribe seekers and takers. In America, 100,000 people suffer violent deaths every year. This exceeds the yearly losses in the Civil War. Eight thousand people are murdered every year here, ten times as many as in other countries of the same population in Europe.
All this is the product of inefficient government. The effect of government, like that of Tammany Hall, is as bad as that of the despot. In the countries of despots, young girls may be burned at the stake in the market place, but in America they are burned to death in the factories through insufficient fire protection.
Can you imagine a modern American politician delivering a speech like this? Connecting special interests and the greed of big business with death and destruction? Just a simple argument for good, humane government. “The true function of the masses,” McClure would write, “is criticism and restraint of officials. But first you have to have efficient officials.”
In addition to his ambitions to contribute to the American project, McClure also maintained a sincere devotion to his birthplace. In 1876, ten years after leaving Ireland for America, he made the long trip back, accompanied by his mother, first
taking an eleven-dollar train from Chicago to Philadelphia, then once again boarding a boat. Of the visit he would write:
I spent a good deal of time with my grandfather McClure. He was then an old man, and he had never got over the loss of his son. The affection he had felt for my father he seemed to transfer to me, and I think he got great pleasure out of my visit. Before I returned to America he begged me to stay in Ireland. I told him that I would come back some day, but he said he would not live to see that day—and, indeed, he did not.
An affection for Ireland and his Irish identity was something McClure carried with him throughout his lifetime. As Irish Americans continued to be harassed and targeted and discriminated against in the United States, McClure continuously commissioned stories about his native country. He wanted an American audience to care about and understand Ireland’s complicated aspirations in the same way they would hopefully care about and understand the aspirations of a Pennsylvania coal miner or an Ohio farmer.
One of these stories was “What Ireland Wants,” by John Redmond, the famous Irish statesman whose life’s work was dedicated to the ultimately impossible job of keeping the peace between Irish unionists and nationalists, as well as the English. In his story, Redmond would lay out the argument for a form of self-rule, explaining, “What Ireland wants is the restoration of responsible government, neither more nor less. The Irish demand is, in plain and popular language, that the government of every purely Irish affair shall be controlled by the public opinion of Ireland, and by that alone.”
Reading a story like this in 1910 in the United States would be something like finding a copy of the Nation after being forced to consume Breitbart all your life. At that point, negative stereotypes of the Irish were alive and widespread. The Irish were a “treasonous lot,” “disloyal,” “backwards,” and worse. The Irish in Ireland were seen as troublesome elements bucking against dear old England, just as the Irish in America were considered “primitive” or “subversive,” even by those at the very top levels of the U.S. government. In his personal diary, Colonel Edward M. House, who was a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, wrote of the president’s own bias against Irish Americans, “In speaking of the Irish, he surprised me by saying that he did not intend to appoint another Irishman to anything; that they were untrustworthy and uncertain.”
As the political situation turned tense and violent in Ireland around the time of World War I, McClure was careful to understand that if the image of Ireland suffered as it fought with the English, the lives of the Irish in America would suffer from the stigma—much like those of modern-day Syrians or Somalis. In a later issue of McClure’s, he would write a story called “The Real Ireland,” which promised “a few words in praise of Ireland.” It appeared among a series of poems and a short story by W. Somerset Maugham. “We find in history many records of human delusions,” the piece began. “Today, probably the largest single delusion is the average man’s opinion of Ireland. I propose in this place to give a few facts about Ireland.”
As when McClure compared America to Europe to make his points stronger for American readers, he now put Ireland and its politics in American terms (perhaps a bit too optimistically at times) to make the defamed country more relatable.
There are few peoples in the world who, for a generation at least, have been as prosperous as the Irish. A larger percentage of the Irish people than of the American people own their own homes. In studying a mass of statistics in many fields dealing with Irish economics, the only statistics in which the figures grew smaller were the statistics of the poorhouses and of those in receipt of outdoor relief and in this matter the Irish made a considerably better showing than the State of New York.
And sure, while he might have promised just a few words, the story goes on like this for several pages, with tables and statistics to back up his arguments. It was more or less the opposite of a dumbed-down news story written in today’s alternative-fact America. And because of the syndication system he had mastered all those decades earlier, the story went far and wide, appearing in far-flung newspapers like South Carolina’s the Watchman and Southron and the Nebraska State Journal.
But the sad truth is that while McClure’s Magazine spawned an entire movement of imitators and laid the groundwork for the rise of progressive politics in the United States, the carcass that once was the American press is a huge part of why we elected an arrogant, ignorant clown to the White House. As we all know, much of the media failed to call Trump on his lies. They didn’t challenge him; they let him insult their reporters and phone into their Sunday news shows. The media allowed Trump to show that he took the press about as seriously as the press took him. They let tweets stand as unchallenged news and heightened meaningless scandals for clicks and ratings. In other words, America has entered a new era of Non-Journalism. It is perhaps, sadly, the final chapter, even though journalism as an institution is barely a couple hundred years old. Maybe anthropologists centuries from now will dig it up and study it as a curiosity. If there is a “centuries from now.” Because without muckrakers, do you honestly think we’re going to stop the polar ice caps from sinking into the oceans, or nuclear weapons from destroying us? The journalist was to be our last buffer against the profiteers who have homes in the Hamptons built on the money that carbon and missiles gave them. We need a hundred thousand S. S. McClures if we are to make it. I’m sorry if this story doesn’t have a happier ending, but I am not hopeful.
And so, given that the institution of journalism has been gutted, let me point out one last thing I think S. S. McClure would want me to say. One of the biggest failures of modern-day journalism has been the journalists themselves. They, like most humans, are sadly too seduced by, too enamored of, celebrity, power, and money. They like the perks. They like to be liked just as much as the rest of us. They crave and need access so they are willing to get close—too close—and then they end up not knowing where or when they blurred the line.
McClure’s journalists, by comparison, were like celibate priests. They were given the time and resources they needed instead of quotas and word counts. They were encouraged to master their subjects and to know a thing or two about the world. They were expected to read books—lots and lots of books. The rise of McClure’s Magazine inspired a civic curiosity that actually became a profitable business model. In the decade or two of true muckraking journalism in the early twentieth century, nearly two thousand examples of muckraking were produced by American magazines—magazines that were following McClure’s lead. During that time, when the U.S. population was just a third of the size that it is now, each of those muckraking magazines on average sold about three million copies a month.
Even before Trump came down the escalator of his gilded fortress in June of 2015, America needed a stronger press. One that would never report that Saddam Hussein helped finance the 9/11 attacks or tried to buy uranium from Niger or sought out some aluminum enrichment tubes. Journalist Judith Miller said, “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself, my job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal”—that’s how we got into Iraq. Remember how we didn’t see the biggest downturn since the Great Depression coming? Or how the water crisis in Flint in 2014 made national news and then nothing happened to fix it? These were disasters for the country, but also disasters for the press—failures to investigate, failures to pay attention, failures to follow up.
But it is in this very dangerous moment that journalists have to try and save us from our self-inflicted doom. To start, the press has to earn back the trust that it has fumbled away. It also has to generate and publish reporting that isn’t a reflection of public opinion but rather something that shapes it. And to do this, the media already has a blueprint: follow the lead of S. S. McClure and his band of muckrakers. These were men and women who were not only fearless but also creative and moral. Journalists who wrote timely stories that got the atte
ntion of disenchanted Americans in forgotten industrial centers. Journalists who reached out to those who had watched the slow-motion decimation of the American working class from the very front row and inspired them to stand up and do something about it.
THE FATHER
Father Edward J. Flanagan (1886–1948)
BY MARK K. SHRIVER
“He ain’t heavy, Father . . . he’s m’ brother.”
I don’t remember the first time I heard that line. And I don’t remember the first time I saw that image of an older boy carrying a younger boy. But the words were always there in my consciousness, and so too was the image.
I was raised in a large, tight-knit Irish Catholic family in the late 1960s and 1970s, and I know that line was mentioned in our house as much as, if not more so than, Notre Dame football, which was a lot. There were four boys and a girl under our roof. We were proud to be of Irish descent, and somehow those words and that image seemed a part of our story. Family mattered—your brothers and sisters, not to mention aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and so on. But the word family was interpreted in a much broader way, broader than just shared DNA or common ancestry.
To my father and my mother, we were all bound together by a shared humanity. Not just as a family, or even as Irish Americans, but as part of a collective whole that included Italians, Greeks, Germans, Swedes, Jews, Christians, Muslims, blacks, whites, Latinos—you get the idea. This meant people with developmental differences too—the men, women, and children that my mother worked with through the Special Olympics movement. And it meant the poor and disempowered living across America and in countries strung across the globe, with whom my father worked through the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty. We were all responsible for each other—and that was perhaps the principal lesson of my childhood. “He ain’t heavy, Father . . . he’s m’ brother”: those words were a call to all of us.