The Great Muckralcer

In the Manhattan editorial office of McClure's Magazine, one day in 1902, Samuel Sidney McClure gave his goateed managing editor a jolt straight from the shoulder. McClure told Lincoln Steffens: "You don't know how to edit a magazine." Snapped Steffens: "How can I learn?" Said McClure: "You can't learn here . . . Buy a railroad ticket, get on a train, and there, where it lands you, there you will learn." Steffens, then 36, and already a crack reporter (New York Evening-Post), bought a ticket to Chicago. Before his U.S. travels were over, he had written The Shame of the Cities, a sizzling series of articles on nationwide municipal corruption. The series made Steffens famous and helped make McClure's the most influential publication of its day.

At first, President Theodore Roosevelt sneered at McClure's for "muckraking," but Editor McClure assigned his staffers to rake more muck.* Ida M. Tarbell went after the Standard Oil Co.; Ray Stannard Baker, incensed at the land-grabbing railroads, wrote The Railroads on Trial; Burton J. Hendrick spilled his Story of Life Insurance. When aroused state legislatures passed laws checking the excesses of big business, and reform candidates were elected to public office, "T.R." saw the light and grinned. He called S. S. McClure's crusading muckrakers to the White House to discuss trustbusting and business regulation. By 1905, McClure's, which claimed much of the credit for selling the public on T.R.'s spectacular cleanup, had climbed to a formidable circulation of 750,000.

Great Ideas. Insatiably curious, S. S. McClure was always on the go in the U.S. and Europe, had an invariable explanation for his restlessness: "I never get ideas sitting still." Returning to the office, he always berated the editors for stagnating in his absence, then dumped a suitcaseful of "great ideas" on their desks. McClure published the first magazine articles on X ray, radium, Marconi's wireless, the Wrights' flying machine and twilight sleep; he discovered Willa Gather, helped popularize William Dean Howells and Joel Chandler Harris, introduced Stevenson, Kipling and A. Conan Doyle to their first big U.S. audiences.

Once S. S. explained the secret of his success: "There never was anyone whom I was afraid to ask to write for me." One popular writer, Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, stood fast for a while: he said he would be neither "lured nor McClured." Eventually McClure got him.

Long Hours. Irish-born S. S. McClure worked his way through Illinois' small Knox College as farmhand and peddler. Soon after graduation, he landed a job as editor of a new Boston cycling magazine, the Wheelman, then moved to the staff of the Century Magazine. McClure tried to convince his Century bosses that they should branch out, left when they vetoed his idea and launched the first successful U.S. newspaper syndicate himself. In 1893, on $2,800 in profits from the syndicate and a borrowed stake, McClure started his magazine. At its peak in 1906, Steffens, Tarbell, and Baker walked out after an argument with the "mad genius," and took over the rival American Magazine.

By then, most of McClure's muckraking fervor was spent, and his health was failing. In 1914, he suspended McClure's. Later he revived it briefly and unsuccessfully, sold out and virtually retired. While McClure's degenerated into a snappy-stories magazine--and folded for good in 1933--McClure lived on at Manhattan's elegant, decaying Murray Hill Hotel (TIME, May 5, 1947). He spent long hours at the Union League Club writing a history of freedom and other forgotten books, and was almost forgotten himself. Last week, at 92, S. S. McClure died.

* In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the man with the Muckrake is too busy raking the "dust of the floor" to look up when offered a celestial crown.

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