Excerpt: The Shame of the Cities

From The Shame of the CitiesLincoln Steffens

Perhaps the most influential of the muckrakers was Lincoln Steffens. Steffens’ articles were published in McClure’s magazine in 1902 and 1903 and then collected in The Shame of the Cities, published in 1904.

Questions for understanding:

1. What is Steffens’ opinion regarding businessmen?

2. What is Steffens’ opinion regarding politics in America?

3. What influence did Steffens think business had on politics?

4. Were Steffens’ criticisms accurate in 1904? Are they accurate now?

Now, the typical American citizen is the business man. The typical business man is a bad citizen; he is busy. If he is a “big business man” and very busy, he does not neglect, he is busy with politics, oh, very busy and very businesslike. I found him buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government with corruption funds in New York. He is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if he would neglect politics. But he is not the business man that neglects politics; that worthy is the good citizen, the typical business man. He too is busy, he is the one that has no use and therefore no time for politics. When his neglect has permitted bad government to go so far that he can be stirred to action, he is unhappy, and he looks around for a cure that shall be quick, so that he may hurry back to the shop.

Naturally, too, when he talks politics, he talks shop. His patent remedy is quack; it is business. “Give us a business man,” he says (“like me,” he means). “Let him introduce business methods into politics and government; then I shall be left alone to attend to my business.” There is hardly an office from United States Senator down to Alderman in any part of the country to which the business man has not been elected; yet politics remains corrupt, government pretty bad, and the selfish citizen has to hold himself in readiness like the old volunteer firemen to rush forth at any hour, in any weather, to prevent the fire; and he goes out sometimes and he puts out the fire (after the damage is done) and he goes back to the shop sighing for the business man in politics. 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 business, and all—as you see them. 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 another question. But don’t try to reform politics with the banker, the lawyer, and the dry-goods merchant, for these are business men and there are two great hindrances to their achievement of reform: one is that they are different from, but no better than, the politicians; the other is that politics is not “their line”. …

The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade and dickering, not principle. “My business is sacred,” says the business man in his heart. “Whatever prospers my business, is good; it must be. Whatever hinders it, is wrong; it must be. A bribe is bad, that is, it is a bad thing to take; but it is not so bad to give one, not if it is necessary to my business.””Business is business” is not a political sentiment, but our politician has caught it. He takes essentially the same view of the bribe, only he saves his self-respect by piling all his contempt upon the bribe-giver and he has the great advantage of candor. “It is wrong, maybe,” he says, ‘but if a rich merchant can afford to do business with me for the sake of a convenience or to increase his already great wealth, I can afford, for the sake of living, to meet him half way. I make no pretensions to virtue, not even on Sunday.”

And as for giving bad government or good, how about the merchant who gives bad goods or good goods, according to the demand? But there is hope, not alone despair, in the commer-cialism of our politics. If our political leaders are to be always a lot of political merchants, they will supply any demand we may create. All we have to do is to establish a steady demand for good government. The boss has us split up into parties. To him parties are nothing but means to his corrupt ends. He ‘bolts” his parry, but we must not; the bribe-giver changes his party, from one election to another, from one county to another, from one city to another, but the honest voter must not.

Why? Because if the honest voter cared no more for his party than the politician and the grafter, then the honest vote would govern, and that would be bad—for graft. It is idiotic, this devotion to a machine that is used to take our sovereignty from us.

If we would leave parties to the politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for the city, and the State, and the nation, we should rule parties, and cities, and States, and nation. If we would vote in mass on the more promising ticket, or, if the two are equally bad, would throw out the party that is in, and wait till the next election and then throw out the other parry that is in—then, I say, the commercial politician would feel a demand for good government and he would supply it. That process would take a generation or more to complete, for the politicians now really do not know what good government is. But it has taken as long to develop bad government, and the politicians know what that is. If it would not “go,” they would offer something else, and, if the demand were steady, they, being so commercial, would “deliver the goods.”

Florence Kelley Speaks Out on Child Labor

Florence Kelley Speaks Out on Child Labor and Woman Suffrage,
Philadelphia, PA, July 22, 1905.

Questions for understanding:
1. What are Kelley’s criticisms regarding child labor?
2. What connection does she make about labor laws and the right of women’s suffrage?
3. Think: Why would “no labor organization in this country ever [fail] to respond to an appeal for help in the freeing of children [from labor]?

We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread.  They vary in age from six and seven years (in the cotton mills of Georgia) and eight, nine and ten years (in the coal-breakers of Pennsylvania), to fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years in more enlightened states.
No other portion of the wage earning class increased so rapidly from decade to decade as the young girls from fourteen to twenty years.  Men increase, women increase, youth increase, boys increase in the ranks of the breadwinners; but no contingent so doubles from census period to census period (both by percent and by count of heads), as does the contingent of girls between twelve and twenty years of age.  They are in commerce, in offices, in manufacturing.
Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.
In Alabama the law provides that a child under sixteen years of age shall not work in a cotton mill at night longer than eight hours, and Alabama does better in this respect than any other southern state.  North and South Carolina and Georgia place no restriction upon the work of children at night; and while we sleep little white girls will be working tonight in the mills in those states, working eleven hours at night.
In Georgia there is no restriction whatever! A girl of six or seven years, just tall enough to reach the bobbins, may work eleven hours by day or by night.  And they will do so tonight, while we sleep.
Nor is it only in the South that these things occur.  Alabama does better than New Jersey.  For Alabama limits the children’s work at night to eight hours, while New Jersey permits it all night long.  Last year New Jersey took a long backward step.  A good law was repealed which had required women and [children] to stop work at six in the evening and at noon on Friday.  Now, therefore, in New Jersey, boys and girls, after their 14th birthday, enjoy the pitiful privilege of working all night long.
In Pennsylvania, until last May it was lawful for children, 13 years of age, to work twelve hours at night.  A little girl, on her thirteenth birthday, could start away from her home at half past five in the afternoon, carrying her pail of midnight luncheon as happier people carry their midday luncheon, and could work in the mill from six at night until six in the morning, without violating any law of the Commonwealth.
If the mothers and the teachers in Georgia could vote, would the Georgia Legislature have refused at every session for the last three years to stop the work in the mills of children under twelve years of age?
Would the New Jersey Legislature have passed that shameful repeal bill enabling girls of fourteen years to work all night, if the mothers in New Jersey were enfranchised? Until the mothers in the great industrial states are enfranchised, we shall none of us be able to free our consciences from participation in this great evil.  No one in this room tonight can feel free from such participation.  The children make our shoes in the shoe factories; they knit our stockings, our knitted underwear in the knitting factories.  They spin and weave our cotton underwear in the cotton mills.  Children braid straw for our hats, they spin and weave the silk and velvet wherewith we trim our hats.  They stamp buckles and metal ornaments of all kinds, as well as pins and hat-pins.  Under the sweating system, tiny children make artificial flowers and neckwear for us to buy.  They carry bundles of garments from the factories to the tenements, little beasts of burden, robbed of school life that they may work for us.
We do not wish this.  We prefer to have our work done by men and women.  But we are almost powerless.  Not wholly powerless, however, are citizens who enjoy the right of petition.  For myself, I shall use this power in every possible way until the right to the ballot is granted, and then I shall continue to use both.
What can we do to free our consciences? There is one line of action by which we can do much.  We can enlist the workingmen on behalf of our enfranchisement just in proportion as we strive with them to free the children.  No labor organization in this country ever fails to respond to an appeal for help in the freeing of the children.
For the sake of the children, for the Republic in which these children will vote after we are dead, and for the sake of our cause, we should enlist the workingmen voters, with us, in this task of freeing the children from toil!