Muckrakers and Magazine

American journalists, novelists, and critics who in the first decade of the 20^th 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