Joseph Freeman’s memoirs of his life in the Left are easily among the best written by any U.S. activist. Here, he looks at 1912 and the role of muckraking in creating that ‘Lyric Year.’ Fantastic.

‘The Muckraking Era’ by Joseph Freeman from Pacific Weekly. Vol. 5 No. 9. August 31, 1936.

LOUD was the middle-class protest in those days. You could hear it plainly in the commercial magazines of S.S. McClure, Frank Munsey and William Randolph Hearst, building careers and fortunes by catering to popular discontent with the growth of monopoly-capitalism. Their publications, which Louis Smith constantly read aloud to Robert and myself, flourished in soil prepared by Populist and socialist propaganda. Here writers of exposure and protest showed up the political and economic abuses of American capitalism, which they called Big Business. They brought out into broad daylight the sore spots–the boodling, blackmail, embezzlement, stock speculation, child slavery, adulteration of food; the fraud, graft and corruption which pervaded local and national government departments, the press, the stock exchange, indeed the whole of American economic, social and political life. The basis of the Republic was not questioned. It was pointed out, however, that there was widespread political corruption and that its cause was Big Business. The railroads, the banks, the public-service corporations on a large scale, and the saloons, the whorehouses, the gambling joints on a smaller scale, controlled politics in order to increase and protect their profits. In order to expand, they needed what the elder La Follette called “special privilege”–franchises, special legislation, protective tariffs, and interpretations of the law in their favor. They needed to, and did, control the boards of aldermen, the state assemblies, the Congress in Washington, the police, the newspapers, the courts low and high.

Privilege, according to Lincoln Steffens, was the root of all evil. Throwing “bad” men out of office and putting “good” men in their places was useless; the “good” men who came into office, just like the “bad” men whom they ousted, were under the pressure of their political party, which, in turn, was the tool of Big Business. American society as a whole set up an ideal of success whose goal was riches and power. These could be secured only through corruption; yet society, in judging the race for power and riches, punished the losers and rewarded the winners. It, trampled on, the “good” men and poured the material wealth of life into the laps of the “bad”; it set a premium on corruption.

The discontent expressed by Steffens, Tarbell and Baker in the magazines was echoed in the novels of Booth Tarkington, Frank Norris, David Graham Phillips, Winston Churchill and Upton Sinclair. Those of us who began to read and think at this time became accustomed to the idea, first, that American capitalism was corrupt from top to bottom; second, that art and politics were closely related. Both ideas came from purely American sources. The scene involved was the United States alone; the muckrakers were native-born Americans.

Louis Smith and my other socialist friends, however, assured me that mere exposure, mere protest, mere muckraking was futile. A vice commission might be appointed and its report might be very illuminating; a pure food and drugs act might be passed; but the rot would grow deeper. There was no cure for capitalism; it had to be exterminated if humanity was to progress. The muckraking movement was dying of its own impotence. It could not even survive its name, plastered on it sarcastically by T.R. himself. In 1914 Charles Edward Russell explained the pernicious political anemia which killed muckraking. Magazines of exposure had been strangled to death by the withdrawal of advertising. The few which had survived had become purveyors of cheap fiction and open apologists for the system. But more powerful even than the advertiser, with his censorship of reading matter, was the growing indifference of the middle classes to exposure of the crimes of Big Business.

My socialist friends spoke for an American movement which had grown up alongside the muckrakers. The more alert workers had discovered the death of the Gilded Age earlier than the intellectuals did. State and federal troops and private thugs had taught them in the Coeur d’Alene, Buffalo, Pullman and Tennessee strikes that the prevailing economic system was not merely corrupt, but that it was the property of the bankers and industrialists who had no desire to “share” its blessings with the “common man,” and would stop at nothing to maintain their privileges.

The first decade of the century saw the growth of two revolutionary movements rooted in America: the Socialist party and the Industrial Workers of the World. Both groups were primarily interested in the industrial worker; they advocated, supported and organized strikes; they fought for higher wages and shorter hours. But the Socialist party, as distinguished from the I.W.W., had a special appeal for the more discontented sections of the middle class. True, American socialism spoke of the powerful class of capitalists who dominated the economic and political destinies of the country, and of the large army of industrial wage earners in a precarious condition of existence; and it spoke of the clear-cut conflict between the capitalists and the wage earners. It was this gospel of the class struggle that attracted workers like Louis Smith to the party. What attracted middle-class elements was the party’s attacks on big capital, attacks which seemed sharper and more consistent than those of the liberal reformers.

The Socialist party tried to avoid the rigidity of dogma and organizational discipline which marked Daniel de Leon’s Socialist Labor party, the dominant radical group of the nineties. This led to a looseness of organization, theory and policy which opened the movement to various social classes, groups and individuals who for one reason or another were dissatisfied with contemporary society. The socialist movement, contained orthodox Marxists, revisionists and Fabians, and middle-class liberals for whom the word “socialism” concealed, from themselves chiefly, the ideals of the muckrakers. It contained people who despised political action to the point of syndicalism, and people who cared more for election campaigns than for strikes. There were in it advocates of sabotage and violence, and disciples of nonresistance; ministers of the gospel and militant atheists. On the fringes of the party, as around all movements opposed to the foundations of the status quo, were faddists and cranks of all kinds with their own private schemes for rational eating, free love and the quickest way to achieve socialism.

When Eugene Debs, presidential candidate of the Socialist party in the 1904 elections, polled over 400,000 votes, radicals and reactionaries alike began to look upon the socialists as America’s future Opposition party. Both sides of the barricade took the “rising tide of socialism” seriously. Around this “tide” there developed a voluminous literature, for and against. At school and in the library, my friends and I read on the street and heard about the “menace” of socialism; corners and in the meeting halls we heard about its “promise.” The publications of the socialist publishing house of Charles H. Kerr Company–the red-covered pamphlets of Karl Marx and the popular brochures of American socialists–circulated by the millions. In the Middle West The Appeal to Reason reached an enormous mass of farmers, factory workers and railwaymen; in our own city the Call became familiar in every working-class neighborhood.

In Gene Debs, Mother Jones and Bill Haywood, the socialists and wobblies found remarkable leaders of native American stock and working-class origin. But just as the Russian revolutionary movement drew into its ranks at one time or another members of the middle classes and even of the nobility, so the American Socialist party stirred young men and women of the upper and middle classes to join its organizations and preach its ideas. Names like J. G. Phelps Stokes, Robert Rives La Monte and William English Walling alarmed the chief beneficiaries of the System. Such converts to socialism made it appear that the ruling caste was breaking from within, especially since the radicals from the Social Register called loudly and immediately for a thoroughgoing revolution.

Prewar American radicalism probably reached its peak in 1912, when Debs polled nearly a million votes, and the most dramatic of the capitalist candidates ran on platforms of social righteousness and New Freedom. It was the year when the names of Joe Ettor and Arthuro Giovannitti, leaders of the Lawrence textile strike, became household words, and when Emma Goldman could pack meeting halls in any city with lecturers on anarchism, free love and Shakespeare.

The flavor of 1912 was caught by Floyd Dell when he called it the Lyric Year. A new spirit had come to America, and not in politics alone. Poetry was entering upon its American renaissance with the foundation of Harriet Monroe’s magazine in Chicago; the Irish Players and Maurice Brown were instigating the New American theater; Marcel Duchamps’ “Nude Descending a Staircase” aroused the rebel sons and daughters of the Babbittry to the meaning of “modern” art; the emancipated sexual theories of Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis and Auguste Forel had emigrated to our shores and followed close on the heels of the army of men and women fighting for woman suffrage; and gay clothing, colored neckties, bobbed-haired and smoking women flaunted the victory of the younger generation of that day over the prostrate body of puritanism. For the next five years, this “new spirit” was to dominate American intellectual life.

Pacific Weekly, based in Carmel, California was edited by William K. Bassett, Lincoln Steffans, and Ella Winter from late 1934. A Popular Front-era ‘fellow-traveler,’ magazine that became more of a Party press over its life. With a strong literary and arts focus, something of a West Coast ‘New Masses’, the weekly did not survive long after Steffans death in June, 1936. Though its run was short, Pacific Weekly is a rich record of left-wing 1930s writing with many leading authors publishing work in its pages.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/pacific-weekly/1936/v05n09-aug-31-1936-pw.pdf