ONCE muckraking was fairly started, it covered prac-
tically every aspect of American life. Inasmuch,
however, as "Tweed Days in St. Louis" (by Claude H. Wetmore
and Lincoln Steffens in McClure's, October,
1902), has already been referred to as marking the opening
of a new epoch, and inasmuch as Lincoln Steffens may be
regarded as in some respects the real founder of the muck-
raking movement, it will not seem amiss to consider as a
separate topic the exposure of municipal corruption.

Lincoln Steffens, who was born in San Francisco and edu-
cated in the schools of that city, at the University of Cali-
fornia, and at the universities of Berlin, Heidelburg, Leip-
zig, and the Sorbonne, began his journalistic career as a
reporter for the New York Evening Post. Allan Nevins, in
his history of that newspaper, states that Steffens was one
of the best journalists New York ever had, and he rose rapidly
in the profession. He was a police reporter when Roosevelt
was a police commissioner, and the friendship between the
two began at that time. Later he was city editor of the
Commercial Advertiser.

Steffens, then, had had an unusual academic training and
a notable career in journalism when, at the invitation of
John S. Phillips, he became managing editor of McClure's,
in 1901. S. S. McClure, however, on his return from Europe,
informed Steffens that he did not know how to edit a mag-

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