Who was Charles Edward Russell?
By Robert Miraldi Palgrave MacMillan, 321 pp., $35 Charles Edward Russell (1860-1941) may be the most famous largely forgotten newspaperman in this country’s history — a muckraker as well known in his day as Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens. But he was more: a Socialist Party candidate for national and state offices; a co-founder of the NAACP; an author of more than two dozen books; and a poet. Why, then, largely forgotten? Robert Miraldi in his prologue to The Pen Is Mightier wonders the same thing and sees it this way: “While all of the major muckrakers have had biographies … little has been written about Russell. This is odd given that he muckraked on more topics and wrote more exposé articles for a longer period of time than any of the others. Nonetheless, he had no one ‘smoking gun’ issue that won him fame. … In addition, Russell’s turn to Socialism in 1908 and his foray into elective office isolated him from the more conventional and popular reformers of his
