Lincoln Steffens's "Tweed Days in St. Louis," published in McClure's
magazine in October 1902, is considered the first work of muckraking
journalism, exposing corruption between businessmen, politicians, police
officers and other municipal actor, as well as how apathetic citizens
allow machine politics to proceed unfettered.
The article also highlights residents who do fight back, including civil
rights lawyer Joseph W. Folk and the workers involved in the St. Louis
Streetcar Strike of 1900. "Tweed Days" was so successful that Steffens
traveled on to Minneapolis to report "The Shame of Minneapolis," which
appeared in the same 1903 issue of McClure's as another muckraking
classic, Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company.
Steffens would go on to expose machine politics in Pittsburgh, Chicago,
Philadelphia, and New York City. In 1904, McClure's published the
series as a book, The Shame of the Cities, which remains stubbornly
timely and prescient more than a century later.