Charles Edward Russell

Charles Edward Russell (September 25, 1860 – April 23, 1941) was an American journalist, opinion columnist, newspaper editor, and political activist. In 1928, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas.

Russell was born in Davenport, Iowa, a transportation center on the Mississippi River on the far eastern border of the state. His father, Edward Russell, was editor of the Davenport Gazette and a noted abolitionist. The Russell family were staunchly religious Christian Evangelicals, with Charles' grandfather a Baptist minister and his father a Sunday school superintendent and a leader of the Iowa YMCA.

Russell attended St. Johnsbury Academy (Class of 1881), in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, for his high school education and also worked under his father at the newspaper.

Russell wrote for the Minneapolis Journal, the Detroit Tribune, the New York World, William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan, and the New York Herald. He was employed as a newspaper writer and editor in New York and Chicago from 1894 to 1902, working successively for the New York World, the New York American, and the Chicago American. In 1912 he appeared as one of the editors of The Coming Nation, a socialist newspaper published by J. A. Wayland and Fred D. Warren in Girard, Kansas.

In his memoirs, Bare Hands and Stone Walls, Russell stated that "transforming the world... to a place where one can know some peace... some joy of living, some sense of the inexhaustible beauties of the universe in which he has been placed" was the purpose that inspired his work and his life. Russell felt strongly about the hardships of the working class, particularly unfair working and living conditions. Factories often had poor workplace conditions with long hours and low wages, in addition to inadequate safety measures which lead to high rates of serious injury. Workers and their families lived in slums with little to no sanitation, making the outbreak of infectious disease a common occurance. These issues also disproportionally affected newly arrived immigrants, and served as key inspiration for Russel and his writing.

Russell was a high-profile muckraker, a progressive era movement in journalism, claiming to focus on exposing corruption and wrongdoing in established institutions. Muckrakers most commonly targeted the corporate monopolies or political machines of the era, claiming they perpetrated and profited off of unsafe working conditions, urban poverty, and child labor. The muckraker movement helped to jumpstart numerous reforms that included prison conditions, railroads and church-building conditions.

In Soldier for the Common Good, an unpublished dissertation on Russell's life, author Donald Bragaw wrote, "Historian Louis Filler has called Russell the leader of the muckrakers for contributing 'important studies in almost every field in which they ventured.'" Shortly after his hiatus from writing because of the death of his first wife, Russell wrote "The Greatest Trust in the World," exposing the unsafe and exploitative practices of the meatpacking industry.

Russell's reports on the corrupt practices and inhuman conditions at Chicago stock yards were the inspiration for Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, which caused a national uproar that led to inspection reforms. Russell's most controversial exposé was fixated on the Trinity Church. It accused the church of being one of the leading slum landlords in New York City and was detrimental to the church's reputation.