The most brilliant addition to the _McClure’s_ staff in my time was Lincoln Steffens. He had made himself felt in the journalistic and political life of New York City by a fresh form of reportorial attack. Young, handsome, self-confident, with a good academic background and two years of foreign life and observation, Steffens began his professional career unencumbered by journalistic shibboleths and with an immense curiosity as to what was going on about him. He was soon puzzled and fascinated by 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. Apparently groups from each of these categories worked together, supporting one another, an organization close, compact, loyal from fear or self-interest or both. It was because of this organization, Steffens concluded, that graft and vice and crime were established industries of the city. Attacks from outraged virtue had slowed up the system at intervals ever since the Civil War, but never permanently deranged it. A few rascals might be exterminated, but they were soon replaced. The system had bred new rascals, grown stronger and more cunning with time. He set out to trace its pattern. Incredibly outspoken, taking rascality for granted, apparently never shocked or angry or violent, never doubtful of himself, only coolly determined to demonstrate to men and women of good will and honest purpose what they were up against and warn them that the only way they could hope to grapple with a close corporation devoted to what there was in it was by an equally solid corporation devoted to decent and honest government, business, law, education, religion. First as a reporter and later as the city editor of the _Globe_, Steffens stirred the town.
It was entirely in harmony with the McClure method of staff building that this able, fearless innocent should be marked for absorption. He was persuaded to take the editing of the magazine, now in its tenth year and steadily growing in popularity and influence. He was to be the great executive—the editorial head that would shift some of the burden from the shoulders of Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips. But the machine was running smoothly even if with little outward excitement. Steffens made a brave effort to adjust himself to the established order, to learn the situation. Naturally he took Mr. McClure’s meteoric goings and comings, his passionate and often despairing efforts to make his staff “see” what he did, his cries that the magazine was stale, dying, more seriously than those of us who had been longer together. He seems to have been bewildered by what went on in the excited staff meetings held whenever Mr. McClure came in from a foraging expedition. I had come to look on Mr. McClure’s returns as the most genuinely creative moments of our magazine life. He was an extraordinary reporter; his sense of the meaning, the meat of a man or event, his vivid imagination, his necessity of discharging on the group at once, before they were cold, his observations, intuitions, ideas, experiences, made the gatherings on his return amazingly stimulating to me. Sifting, examining, verifying, following up, were all necessary. Mr. McClure understood that and trusted John Phillips to see that it was done, but he properly fought for his findings. In his “Autobiography” Steffens credits me with a tact in our editorial scrimmages which I do not deserve. It is true, as he says, that I was the friend of each and all, but what I was chiefly interested in was seeing the magazine grow in delight and in usefulness. I knew our excited discussions were really fertile. They also were highly entertaining.