Charles Edward Russell (1860–1941) was born to a career
in journalism and social activism. He was the son of Davenport, Iowa, newspaper editor Edward Russell and his wife,
Lydia Rutledge. His fraternal grandfather, William Russell, quit a distillery job to become a temperance activist.
His maternal grandfather, William Rutledge, was a clergyman leader in Iowa’s Underground Railroad. Charles began
work at his father’s Davenport Gazette when he was twelve,
wrapping newspapers in the mailroom. He advanced to
typesetter as a teenager and became managing editor at
twenty-one, embracing his father’s admonition to “terrify
evil doers” by “arousing the conscience” of his readers
(Russell 1933, 4).
Russell’s antipathy toward corporate interests was
heightened when financial troubles forced his father to sell
the Gazette to a railroad company. For twenty years Russell
championed progressive causes, first as night editor of the
Minneapolis Tribune in 1883, then as managing editor of
the Minneapolis Journal in 1884, and the Detroit Tribune
in 1886. He vaulted to national attention as Chicago correspondent for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World with his
sympathetic reporting on strike leaders who were hanged
on November 11, 1887, for the Haymarket Square bombing. He became a crime reporter for the New York Herald
in 1889 and was promoted to assistant managing editor in
1892. It was reporting the “misery, want, and destitution” of
the immigrant community on New York’s Lower East Side
that pushed Russell into socialism (Russell 1914, 69–70).
Russell’s newspaper career reached a peak during
his three years as city editor of the New York World, the
nation’s widest circulating newspaper. With the help of
Sunday editor Arthur Brisbane, Russell pushed the World’s
Sunday circulation to six hundred thousand. William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, attempted
to break Pulitzer’s position with New York readers by making Russell his managing editor in 1897. Three years later
Hearst promoted him to publisher of the Chicago American. The death of Russell’s wife in 1902 and his subsequent
physical collapse cut short his populist appeals.
Russell re-emerged in 1904 with a series of articles on
the beef trust for Everybody’s magazine. Over the next
decade his investigate reports on railroad fraud, election graft, slum landlords, and race relations appeared in
Everybody’s, Cosmpolitan, Pearson’s and Hampton’s. Russell believed the work of the muckraker was the gathering
of information, “the discovery of innumerable and indispensable details” that proved one’s case and mobilized the
public to action (Russell 1908, 285–287). His advised other
muckrakers “never give credence to any claim without
complete investigation” (Russell 1907, 346–347). Russell’s
pitiless description of the Georgia prison system in Everybody’s magazine in June, 1908, led to a special session of
the state legislature. His attacks on Trinity Church that
same year helped to force America’s wealthiest church to
clean up its tenements. Concern for racial justice led him to
become a founding member of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People.
Russell joined the Socialist Party in 1908 and ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York in 1910 and 1912, for
mayor of New York City in 1913 and for United States senator in 1914. He declined the Socialist nomination for president in 1916 and would later be expelled from the party for
his support of United States entry in World War I.
Russell received the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1927
for The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas. His
autobiographical Bare Hands and Stone Walls, published
in 1933, completed a career of public service that trusted
readers to do the right thing when journalistic detective
work revealed the hidden situation and gave them news they
needed to know.
Further Reading
“Charles Edward Russell.” Contemporary Authors, vol.. Detroit:
Gale Group, 2002.
Miraldi, Robert. “Charles Edward Russell: ‘Chief of the Muckrakers’.” Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs.
Columbia, SC: Association for Education in Journalism and
Mass Communication, 1995.
Miraldi, Robert. The Pen Is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of
Charles Edward Russell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003.
New York Times, April 24, 1941.
Papers of Charles Edward Russell, Manuscript Reading Room,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Russell, Charles Edward. Bare Hands and Stone Walls: Some
Recollections of a Side-line Reformer. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1933.
——. Doing Us Good and Plenty. Chicago: C.H. Kerr, 1914.
——. The Greatest Trust in the World. New York: RidgwayThayer, 1905.
——. Lawless Wealth: The Origin of Some Great American Fortunes. New York: B.W. Dodge, 1908.
——. A Pioneer Editor in Early Iowa: A Sketch of the Life of
Edward Russell. Washington, D.C.: Ransdell, 1941.
——. These Shifting Scenes. New York: Hodder & Stoughton,
1914.
——. The Uprising of the Many. New York: Doubleday, Page,
1907.
——. Why I Am a Socialist. New York: Hodder & Stoughton,
1910.
Bruce J. Evensen