American
journalists, novelists, and critics who in the first decade of the 20th
century were named as the Muckrakers, and they attempted to expose the abuses
of business and the corruption in politics. The term came from the word
“muckrake” used by President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech in 1906, in which
he agreed with many of the charges of the muckrakers but stressed that some of
their methods were irresponsible and dramatic. He compared these journalists to
the “man with the muckrake” (a character in one of John Bunyan’s books) who
“raked up filth.”
Since the 1870s there had been continuing
efforts at reform in government, politics, and business, but it was not until
the beginning of the national mass-circulation magazines such as McClure's,
Everybody's, and Collier's that the muckrakers were provided with funds for
their investigations and with a large enough audience to stimulate nationwide concern.
Muckraking
was launched as new innovations in the publication realm advanced. Essays and
articles that offered political and societal reviews were originally found in
magazines. By the time, magazines were expensive (35 cents per issue), and were
only purchased and read by more educated, wealthier people. Newspapers were
cheaper (due to the “penny press”), and reached a significantly larger
audience, covering stories ranging from crime to politics. However, the Industrial Revolution’s
technologies enabled magazines to compete with newspapers, mainly through the reduced
price of paper and the discovery of halftone photoengraving. As a result, the
price of magazines dropped, and thus attracted a significantly larger
readership. Magazines competed more aggressively with newspapers, and released
successful issues. Even though society was already aware of the hardship the
Industrial Revolution brought, they now had cheaper and easier access to specific
stories that hit home.
Muckrakers gained inspiration for their
articles from personal experiences and wrote about what they saw with their own
eyes. All aspects of American life interested the muckrakers, the most famous
of whom are Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, David Graham Phillips, Ray Stannard
Baker, Samuel Hopkins Adams and Upton Sinclair.
In
the early 1900s magazine articles that attacked trusts, including those of
Charles E. Russell on the beef trust, Thomas Lawson on Amalgamated Copper, and
Burton J. Hendrick on life insurance companies, did much to create public
demand for regulation of the great combines. Ray Stannard Baker reported on the
hardship of life of the unemployed people. Ida Tarbell wrote about oil regions,
including explosions and accidental deaths. Jacob Riis believed pictures would
most effectively drive his messages home, published pieces of photo journalism
(such as How the Other Half Lives) to display to the middle and upper class how
the lower class was forced to struggle in the slums. Upton Sinclair wrote a
fictional novel, The Jungle, in order to shed light on the awful working
conditions found in meat factories and inescapable poverty-stricken life
immigrants faced after entering America during the Industrial Revolution.
With the combination of a large-scope,
booming readership and urgent, hot-button topics on society, muckraking
pictures, articles, essays and magazines were read far and wide across the
country, reaching farmers and city-goers alike. People of diverse social
background read the same literature and saw the same pictures, indicating a new
shape in American culture and politics.
Progressive Era Muckrakers
Progressive Era Muckrakers
