From the Basement: Filene and Steffens

 The Filene’s Bros., R.H. Stearns or the Jordan Marsh of Boston were in their times barons of sorts – of no more interest now than Charlemagne and his barons. In their days, they were lords of the city, forming a merchandising class with distinct social oblige.

Unique among all was Edward A. Filene. His family came to this country as part of the Prussian-German exodus of 1848. And, like a lot of those folk, he inherited some innovative ideas about man and society. He was eager, as the Filenes store succeeded, to improve the lot of Filene’s workers, and of the city of Boston. This reached a culmination of sorts when, at Filene’s request, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens came to Boston in 1909.

Filene and Steffens formed an inspired partnership, with civic duty as the bond. Filene influenced the Merchant’s Association to hire Steffens, at a salary of princely $10,000 per year, to uncover corruption in Boston.

He hired Steffens to write the “Boston 1915 Plan.” Within six years it would be a better town. Steffens would uncover corruption of police and politic as he had elsewhere, most notably in NY during Teddy Roosevelt’s term as police commissioner.

By the time he came to Boston, Steffens had refined his investigative methods, which required the reporter to find the individuals that most influenced the life of a city, to ascribe their motives, and to examine the areas where one group’s interests conflicted with another’s.

Filenes and Steffens were not out to revive abstract ideals. Instead they were -- in the thrall of some trends of the day -- interested in finding a new model for society that worked within the reality of the times. Boston was corrupt. This wasn’t a surprise to too many; to Steffens the muckraker, it was very familiar, and, ultimately, he tired of the Boston assignment. But, for a time he lived on Beacon Hill, and summered, with Filene, in Marblehead, and went about copiously inspecting the city and its phalanxes, all the time on salary.

Read the rest of the story at https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2006/07/filene-and-steffens.html