The Pen Is Mightier
The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Charles Edward Russell was a muckraking journalist who exposed the dark underside of America's class system at the turn of the 20th century. The scandals he revealed through investigative reporting led to some of the most important and largest reform efforts of the period, in areas such as housing, prisons, and race reform. A Pulitzer Prize winner, author of 27 books, and a founder of the NAACP, Russell has nonetheless faded from public view. In this book, Robert Miraldi restores him to his rightful place in history. Miraldi's biography of Russell sheds light on the Hearst and Pulitzer newspaper empires, the growth of yellow journalism, and numerous scandals of the period (including Lizzie Borden's murder of her parents and the gruesome details of the Chicago meatpacking industry). It also provides a fascinating look at the growth of the American Socialist Party, of which Russell was an active member until he resigned when his pro-World War I stance brought him into conflict with other members of the Party.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Russell, Miraldi has found a rare subject: a man of large historical importance about whom very little has been written. Russell's accomplishments as a muckraking journalist and social activist in many ways surpass those of his better-known colleagues, but this is the first biography of him. Russell (1860 1941) followed in the footsteps of his father, a newspaper editor in Davenport, Iowa. Over the course of his life, he attacked Iowa's railroad monopolies, took on Chicago's meat-packing industry and helped force Hugh McLaughlin, Brooklyn's version of Boss Tweed, from power. Miraldi, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, admirably focuses on Russell's professional and political development, but excludes most personal details. When Russell was 42, his wife died and he suffered a nervous breakdown, leaving his job as editor of the Chicago American. Miraldi provides few details about these events, using them merely as transition to explain why Russell began writing for magazines. Russell joined the Socialist Party, ran for governor of New York, helped launch the NAACP and, breaking with the Socialist Party, took the lead in warning the nation of German aggression before WWI. As a newspaperman, Russell became a prot g first of Joseph Pulitzer and then of William Randolph Hearst and learned to gauge and shape public opinion. This influence required some compromises, including serving as a distributor of the Hearst brand of yellow journalism, but Russell offered no apologies. "Russell simply felt that Hearst was doing what was logical and necessary...: making money in order to give his newspaper influence."
