ABSTRACT
Walter Lippmann was doing more than complaining; he was angling for a job. He had first met Steffens in the fall of 1908 when the journalist was in Boston at Filene's invitation, alerting the citizens to the corruption around them and admonishing them, with his peculiar brand of Christian Socialism, to open their hearts to goodness. By the time Lippmann joined Steffens, the great days of the muckraking era were over. Though the muckrakers criticisms ran deep, their solutions were shallow. Dedicated to a preindustrial form of capitalism, they celebrated the virtues of the small entrepreneur, free competition, and equal opportunity for all. Only the socialists, with their big-city base, looked beyond the mere symptoms of corruption toward a fundamental change in the social system. Eventually Steffens himself adopted this view, moving left until he ended up in the 1930s among the communists.
