McClure, though, also inspired confusion: Tarbell found “his editorial direction could be frustratingly vague, as when he shot her a request for ‘something startling.’” But Steffens understood investigative reporting. When one corporate executive declined an interview by saying, “I don’t care for write-ups,” Steffens replied, “I don’t propose to write you up … I want to write you down.” Most people, though, wanted to be known, as a writer nicknamed “the Cynic” understood a century before selfies became fashionable: “Click! Click! Click! / … Everybody posing, smirking, attitudinizing! / Trying to look their best while being photographed, / Trying to look intellectual unconscious, beautiful!”

Nancy Cott’s Fighting Words (Basic, 2020) tells of journalism’s next generation through portraits of four leading foreign correspondents in the 1920s and 1930s: Dorothy Thompson, John Gunther, Vincent Sheean, and Rayna Raphaelson. It was a great time to be a magazine freelancer, since with radio an infant, television unborn, and the internet hardly imagined, 2,500 newspapers and dozens of national magazines were hungry for stories. Cott fluently describes career-making scoops and propagandistic swoops, but also marriage-breaking stoops into adultery and homosexuality.

Finally, here are quick mentions of four history books that will be shortlisted on our Books of the Year (Dec. 5) issue. I’ll review Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties and include a full Q&A with Daniel Chirot, author of You Say You Want a Revolution? Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences. Our Aug. 1 issue included a Q&A about War Fever, a book on the 1918 pandemic. I’ll also have a full review of Tracy Campbell’s The Year of Peril: America in 1942 (Yale, 2020): Hitler did not think Americans could pull together as we did. If we think 2020 a hard year, it’s good to remember that Franklin Roo­sevelt’s first name for World War II was the “Survival War,” since the U.S. was fighting for “the survival of our civilization, the survival of democracy, the … survival of what we have all lived for.”