Steffens defined the journalist as thinker; he was a public moralist whose zeal for reform led him to personalize urban, national, and international problems.
Joseph Lincoln Steffens was born 6 April 1866 in San Francisco, California, the youngest child and only son of Elizabeth Louisa (née Symes) and Canadian-born Joseph Steffens, a banker and businessman who crossed the plains on horseback with his family from Illinois. Born a few days before the first anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's death and named after the late president, Steffens grew up in middle-class comfort in Sacramento, where his family moved in 1870. Like his father, Steffens as a boy developed a habit of traveling widely on horseback and learning the independence that stayed with him all his life. Educated in the public schools, he failed his final year in grammar school and spent a year in a private military school in San Mateo in the fall of 1881. From 1885 to 1889 he attended the University of California in Berkeley, and at age twenty-three he received his bachelor of philosophy degree, though he graduated at the bottom of his class.
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