Lincoln Steffens Publishes "The Shame of the Cities" Exposing Municipal Corruption

Lincoln Steffens published “The Shame of the Cities” in 1904, a groundbreaking collection of articles originally written for McClure’s Magazine that exposed systematic corruption in major American cities including St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. Beginning with “Tweed Days in St. Louis” in October 1902—considered by many as the first true muckraking article—Steffens documented how political machines operated through bribery, fraud, and the collaboration of business elites. His central thesis challenged conventional wisdom: “In all cities, the better classes—the business men—are the sources of corruption; but they are so rarely pursued and caught that we do not fully realize whence the trouble comes.”

Steffens framed his work not merely as an exposé of corrupt politicians but as an indictment of public complicity and the business community’s systematic corruption of democratic institutions for private gain. He aimed “to sound for the civic pride of an apparently shameless citizenship,” arguing that big business men corrupted city government for their own ends while blame fell disproportionately on politicians and the poor. The work established Steffens as “the first muckraker” and represented an early effort to reveal the structural relationship between corporate power and political corruption—a pattern that would intensify throughout the twentieth century. While Steffens hoped an informed public would become righteously indignant and work to make government more democratic, the corporate-political fusion he documented would only deepen as business interests refined their capture techniques.