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chapter 5 Muckraking the Nation’s Conscience: Journalists and the Social Gospel The humor magazine Puck published a satiric cartoon in 1906, depicting American muckraking journalists as Christian crusaders—with S. S. McClure carrying a crossbow in the lead and Lincoln Steffens helmeted and sitting astride a war horse—heading off to do battle with the forces of evil.1 The muckrakers proudly accepted the idea that their reform movement was being carried out in the spirit of Jesus’ call for social and religious renewal.When criticized for his “Jesus complex,” Upton Sinclair responded, “The world needs a Jesus more than it needs anything else.”2 At one point,Steffens planned to write a biography of Jesus,and,in his later writings,he “preached the Golden Rule . . . and declared himself something more dangerous than an anarchist—‘a Christian ,’” wrote Justin Kaplan, Steffens’s biographer.3 Many modern journalists admire the muckrakers and, to this day, talk about the investigative reporters’ mission in terms of the muckraking tradition. However , few of today’s journalists are aware of how directly the muckrakers were influenced by the social ethics of Christianity and how—explicitly and implicitly —they incorporated Judeo-Christian principles into their journalistic crusades . The reform tradition in American journalism—where journalists are allowed to step outside the methodology of objective news reporting and openly advocate cleaning up corruption and doing away with injustice—owes much to the message of community responsibility and social equity found in the Bible. In claiming Jesus as their greatest antecedent,the muckrakers preached a fiery brand of reform politics that was known then as the social gospel.Drawing largely from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) and the radical social elements in Jesus’ teachings,the muckrakers distilled the Christian message into a reform agenda that denounced moral corruption, worldly excess, social inequality, ex05 .76-87/Unde 1/15/02, 9:41 AM 76 Muckraking the Nation’s Conscience 77 ploitation of the poor, and inhumane treatment of any kind. Inspired by the Hebrew prophets, the muckrakers held up the prophetic strain in Christianity as the proper model for dealing with the failings of the social order.4 But the muckrakers’ inflammatory and forceful brand of advocacy seemed anything but patient and loving at times. Both Steffens and Sinclair saw in Jesus a reflection of their own ideals and most passionate beliefs, and they did not hesitate to define Jesus’ message in more socially radical terms than can be gleaned from any explicit reading of the gospels. Sinclair believed that many of the quotations from the apostles and the saints proved that Jesus and his followers were really social revolutionaries; he once rewrote the twenty-third chapter of Matthew as socialist doctrine; and he promoted his vision of social revolution like a new religion.5 When Steffens,frustrated at the pace of social reform, turned to communism late in his career, he found there, too, a model in Jesus, who he said “saw what we see; he understood, as his disciples don’t, the evils, their causes; and he had a cure.”6 In his autobiography, Steffens argued that the economic changes and communal practices Jesus and the apostles taught “showed them [to be] practicing communists!”7 Steffens, who gained widespread fame for his exposure of municipal corruption in McClure’s magazine and his 1904 publication Shame of the Cities, was particularly explicit in articulating the Christian and biblical underpinnings of his reform philosophy. The answer to corruption, Steffens came to believe, was a change of heart among society’s leaders, a philosophy of “applied Christianity ” that would lead to a transformed world.8 In his autobiography, Steffens described how he became curious about the vision that motivated the few “honest fanatics” who devoted themselves to social reform,and “suddenly it occurred to me that Christianity conveyed such a faith, hope, and—vision.” It was then that Steffens experienced what can only be called a journalist’s version of a conversion . “The experience was an adventure so startling that I wanted everybody else to have it,” he wrote. “I still recommend people to re-read the New Testament as I read it, without reverence, with feet up on a desk and a pipe in the mouth, as news. It is news. It made the stuff I was writing in the magazine, old stuff.All my stories of all the cities and States were one story . . . and these were all in that...

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