He framed his work as an attempt "to sound for the civic pride of an apparently shameless citizenship" by making the public face their responsibility in the persistence of municipal corruption.
"[5] After setting out in the spring of 1902, Steffens learned of and arranged a meeting with Joseph W. Folk, the recently elected circuit attorney of St.
[12] In Minneapolis, Steffens discovered a massive protection racket enforced by the police and headed by the mayor, Dr. Albert Alonzo Ames.
[13] He also obtained and publicized "The Big Mitt Ledger," an accounting book that a group of card cheats used to record their winnings and the bribes that they had paid to city officials.
Ida Tarbell helped settle their dispute in Steffens' favor, and he returned to St. Louis to continue writing about Folk's efforts to clean up the city.
[15] Steffens then received a request from the children of the late Jay Gould to investigate Pittsburgh, where, they claimed, they had evidence that the dominant political machines were conspiring to keep them out of the city's railroad business.
Folk found the bribe money in the bank, and began indicting participants in the bribery plot, leading a few of them to flee the state or the country.
Steffens claims that Ames, on being elected mayor in 1900, "set out upon a career of corruption for which deliberateness, invention, and avarice has never been equaled".
Butler was a "boodler", one who sold for personal gain "the rights, privileges, franchises, and real property of the city" to prominent businessmen and corporations.
The scale of their operation was vast, Steffens reported: "In St. Louis the regularly organized thieves who rule have sold $50,000,000 worth of franchises and other valuable municipal assets.
He notes that Folk's investigation is ongoing, but that the people of St. Louis were not roused to action by all of the corruption: few had registered to vote in the previous elections, and there had been no attempt to organize a reform ticket independent of the two main parties.
Steffens discusses the city's late boss Christopher L. Magee, who, he concedes, "did not, technically speaking, rob the town.
Magee, reports Steffens, found a partner in William Flinn: "A happy, profitable combination, it lasted for life.
Together, McGee and Flinn took complete control of the city government, leading Steffens to claim "Tammany in comparison is a plaything".
He discusses the work of the Municipal Voters' League, a group formed by the Civic Federation and led by George C. Cole.
Steffens is optimistic about the city's prospects for good government, and gives credit for this development primarily to Chicago's informed and engaged public.
As a New Yorker himself, Steffens expresses concern that Tammany politicians would undertake superficial reforms to regain power; they would offer the appearance of good government, while remaining corrupt and self-serving.
In the article's postscript, added for the book, he notes that the Tammany mayoral candidate had won in the recent city elections.
Steffens clarifies this claim in the book's introduction; there, he specifically castigates the "big business man" as "the source of corruption", calling him "a self-righteous fraud".
[29] But Steffens also claims that "the good citizen, the typical business man" is partly responsible for city corruption, as he is too absorbed in his own affairs to worry much about politics.
As the Folk investigation continued in St. Louis, Steffens notes, the people were so apathetic that they passively allowed three convicted politicians to return to their seats in the city legislature.
He thought that the public could still be shamed into action against corrupt government: the goal of his book, he writes at its outset, is "to sound the civic pride of an apparently shameless citizenship".
Newspaper editor William Allen White, for example, declared that the book "has done for American cities what De Tocqueville did for the country over a hundred years ago".
The owner of the Chicago Tribune, Medill McCormick, also praised the book, saying, "Nothing has been printed which so well portrays municipal conditions in America.
Alfred Hodder, in the literary journal The Bookman, declared that the book's "facts are of the utmost interest and importance, or should be, to every man in the United States who has at heart any wish to be a decent citizen.
[36] The Outlook gave the book a slightly cooler reception, claiming that it was worth reading, but likely overstated the prevalence of municipal corruption in the country.
[39] Steffens also became highly in demand as a speaker, receiving speaking invitations from across the country, including from his college, the University of California.
[40] He also gained international fame: The Shame of the Cities became very popular in England, and the editor of a London magazine offered Steffens a comfortable job if he felt like moving there.
Of his articles, the most significant to the development of muckraking journalism was "The Shame of Minneapolis," which was published in the January 1903 issue of McClure’s alongside a section from Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company and Ray Stannard Baker's "The Right to Work: The Story of the Non-Striking Miners".
[42] Peter Hartshorn notes the importance of this best-selling issue in muckraking's rise to prominence: "Other magazines, notably Collier’s, Leslie’s, and Everybody’s, quickly grasped what the public was demanding: articles that not only entertained and informed but also exposed.