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Lincoln Steffens Research Paper

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Lincoln Steffens was born in 1866 in San Francisco, CA. Joseph Steffens and Elizabeth Louisa Symes were his parents. Joseph Steffens is a wealthy businessman, and he grew up very privileged. His parents went on to have three girls after his birth and he grew up in Sacramento. Lincoln Steffens attended an expensive military academy, and later attended and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1889. His father then gave him $100 and said that his days of study were over and now he should fend for himself. He married Josephine Bontecou. He was an American journalist, lecturer, muckraker and a political philosopher. For many journalists, muckraking became a way to express your opinion about corruption to benefit society. He specialized in investigating government and political corruption, specifically, …show more content…

That means he wrote and taught about those areas to expose information to the public so they could have a better understanding, he was a teacher and was passionate about it. Lincoln Steffens was a christian, rich, white male, he well represented the average person. Throughout his life, he wrote many books including, The struggle for self-government, The shame of the cites, and The autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. One famous quote he has is, “One business man’s bribery was nothing but a crime, but a succession of business briberies over the years was a corruption of government to make it represent business.” A huge success for Steffens was being a journalist at the New York Evening Post. Jacob Riis was his mentor. Riis was an a Danish-American social reformer, journalist and social documentary photographer. He had a major impact on the public and the way that they viewed their representatives because he was a biased writer. Lincoln also eventually became the paper's first police

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