Citizen Reporters
S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine That That Rewrote America
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST FOR THE SPERBER PRIZE FOR JOURNALISM – BIOGRAPHY
A fascinating history of the rise and fall of influential Gilded Age magazine McClure’s and the two unlikely outsiders at its helm—as well as a timely, full-throated defense of investigative journalism in America
The president of the United States made headlines around the world when he publicly attacked the press, denouncing reporters who threatened his reputation as “muckrakers” and “forces for evil.” The year was 1906, the president was Theodore Roosevelt—and the publication that provoked his fury was McClure’s magazine.
One of the most influential magazines in American history, McClure’s drew over 400,000 readers and published the groundbreaking stories that defined the Gilded Age, including the investigation of Standard Oil that toppled the Rockefeller monopoly. Driving this revolutionary publication were two improbable newcomers united by single-minded ambition. S. S. McClure was an Irish immigrant, who, despite bouts of mania, overthrew his impoverished upbringing and bent the New York media world to his will. His steadying hand and star reporter was Ida Tarbell, a woman who defied gender expectations and became a notoriously fearless journalist. Through McClure’s, they cemented investigative journalism’s crucial role in democracy and introduced Americans to the voices of Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and many others.
Tracing McClure’s from its meteoric rise to its spectacularly swift and dramatic combustion, Citizen Reporters is a thrillingly told, deeply researched biography of a powerhouse magazine that forever changed American life. It’s also a timely case study that demonstrates the crucial importance of journalists who are unafraid to speak truth to power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Socially conscious journalism and colorful personalities stimulate each other in this meandering portrait of a Progressive Era magazine. Journalist Gorton recounts the heyday of McClure's (roughly 1893 to 1906), which gained a then-massive circulation exceeding 400,000 for its fiction by legends including Willa Cather and Robert Louis Stevenson and its investigative reporting on strikes, business monopolies, racial lynchings, municipal corruption, and other controversies. President Theodore Roosevelt celebrated the magazine's reformist zeal, then denounced its "muckraking" after the magazine's reporting made trouble for him. Gorton's narrative revolves around biographies of Ida Tarbell, a pioneering female journalist whose sensational expos of Standard Oil sparked antitrust action, and founder Samuel Sidney McClure, a brilliant manic-depressive with a gift for spotting great writers and sowing chaos with grandiose schemes. (McClure's was crippled when a plan to start a second publication and perhaps an insurance company, bank, mail-order university, and company town to boot provoked mass resignations.) Gorton wants to capture an evanescent group alchemy of journalism at McClure's, with McClure inspiring and supporting Tarbell's investigations and Tarbell stabilizing the erratic McClure, but her case for a unique McClure's culture that wouldn't flourish under steadier management is unconvincing. The result is a miscellany of profiles and anecdotes, some more revealing than others, without a unifying theme.
