Muckrakers

10 Key excerpts on "Muckrakers"

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  British Politics, Society and Empire, 1852-1945

  Essays in Honour of Trevor O. Lloyd

  • David W. Gutzke(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9

  Originating in the late nineteenth century, muckraking has a much shorter history than investigative journalism. President Theodore Roosevelt coined the term muckraking in 1906 in a speech in which he derided writers who lacked a balanced perspective:

  In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake… who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.

  Defending Muckrakers, Lincoln Steffens, one of their leading practitioners, wrote to Roosevelt the following year: “You seem to me always to have been looking down for the muck, I am looking upward to an American Democracy. You ask men in office to be honest, I ask them to serve the public.”10

  Despite Roosevelt’s strictures, US Muckrakers had emerged as a powerful force in exposing societal ills, giving the broader Progressive movement compelling evidence for seeking diverse governmental reforms – introduction of the individual income tax, political initiatives, greater corporate responsibility through tighter government oversight, better sanitary conditions, and radical changes in drinking habits through Prohibition. Less heralded but still energetic, British Muckrakers also attacked many of the same evils.

  Three traits characterised muckraking: personal investigative exploration; sympathy with the working class; and an abiding interest in understanding the social, economic and political forces shaping society. As Olive Malvery observed, “it is impossible to know people unless you live… and work with them.”11 Going down and out was hardly new; decades earlier, Henry Mayhew, James Greenwood and others had delineated a view of the poor, drawn from their own experiences. Now, however, from depictions of the poor, a new concept of the impoverished as the underclass emerged that threatened propertied society. Earlier British investigators had described and lamented what they encountered, whereas late Victorian and Edwardian Muckrakers unearthed corruption, social injustices and unhygienic practices as well as dangerous working conditions in order to compel the Government to apply administrative or legislative remedies.12

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  A Narrative History of the American Press

  • Gregory Borchard, Gregory A. Borchard(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 , contributed to a unique era of change. (While muckraking can be understood as a reporting technique, yellow journalism, which essentially placed style over substance, can be seen as a publishing technique to increase sales.)

  And while the definition of muckraking would evolve into a somewhat fluid description of investigative reporting in general, a few representative writers and reporters who fit the description established by Roosevelt can illustrate, for the purposes of this chapter, what muckraking did. While the journalists featured in this chapter do not encompass the entire muckraking movement, they do supply a sample that supplies a snapshot of their work.

  The Making of a Movement

  To remedy society’s ills, the Muckrakers advocated in their writings the redistribution of wealth. Muckraking had its golden years in the first decade of the twentieth century, but writers practiced this style of reporting well before then. For example, Ida B. Wells, in at least a few respects, had practiced muckraking, although she did so on different terms than the most prominent writers associated with the movement—while Wells focused on racial justice, more commonly the Muckrakers focused on economic issues.

  Another defining element of the movement included its reliance on popular magazines (not newspapers alone) to advance the agenda of social reform. These magazines set the trend for prominent issues by featuring extensive reports accompanied by elaborate color graphics and entertaining articles on a wide range of topics, with McClure’s, as a leading muckraker magazine, leading the way, and Cosmopolitan—

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  White-Collar and Corporate Crime

  A Documentary and Reference Guide

  • Gilbert Geis(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  . . stood by compliant and not alarmed. Capitalists, working men, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it? The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in the country are hired, not to go to court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of pun- ishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some “error” or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelm- ingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a . . . health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand. There is no one left; none but all of us . . . The public is the people. We forget that we are all the people; that while each of us in his group can shove off on the rest the bill of today, the debt is only postponed. The rest of us are passing it back to us. We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end the sum total of our debt will be our liberty. Source: S. S. McClure, “Editorial,” McClure’s Magazine 20 (January 1903): 336. ANALYSIS The Muckrakers, predecessors to investigative reporters and academics who study white-collar and corporate crime, were a group of men and women whose expose ´s were featured in books and the mass-circulation magazines of the time, most notably McClure’s. As one writer noted: “The Muckrakers mounted a concentrated attack against the citadel they believed dominated the landscape.” The period of muckrak- ing lasted from about 1903 to 1912 and captured the American imagination because of its daring, shock value, and consonance with public understanding of the way it was being injured and ripped off by those in positions of political and corporate power. Muckraking writers are credited with having published some 90 books and more than 2,000 articles.

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  The Progressives

  Activism and Reform in American Society, 1893 - 1917

  • (Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  For a historical moment, investigative journalists and photographers, otherwise known as Muckrakers, seemed to personify Progressivism in its early stage. Hoping that their exposés would effect social change, in addition to probing greed and corruption in businesses and government, the Muckrakers investigated many issues related to life in urban areas, including child labor, inhumane prison conditions, systems of justice, prostitution, women's inequality, the drug trade, the tax system, the insurance industry, exploitation of natural resources, and beef, oil, and tobacco trusts. Muckrakers' shocking photographs and scathing accounts in books, as well as in newspapers and magazines informed middle- and upper-class readers who otherwise had little knowledge of the problems associated with industriali­zation. Ultimately, these journalists and photographers, men as well as women, wielded an enormous amount of influence on policy makers and legislators.

  It was none other than Theodore Roosevelt who inadvertently coined the term muckraker during a 1906 speech at the dedication of a new congressional office building when he likened this new breed of journalists to the pilgrim in Puritan writer John Bunyan's seventeenth-century classic Pilgrim's Progress. Roosevelt observed that there were some journalists who raked the muck from earth always looking down, therefore rejecting a celestial crown. Roosevelt agreed that Muckrakers helped to advance Progressive causes, but he also believed that they sometimes went too far with their caustic assessments on and pessimistic views of American society.

  Advances in typing and printing technology at this time enabled mass distribution of inexpensive newspapers and magazines, the very vehicles in which Muckrakers presented their findings. The communications empires created by newspapermen including Horace Greeley of the New York Herald Tribune, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World, and magnate William Randolph Hearst changed the worldviews of literate Americans. The communications leaders oversaw and financed investigations that probed the injustices of life in the new urban society. In New York, Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Tribune competed for articles detailing the Spanish American War in 1898. The sen­sationalism contained in these papers and their imitators led to the nickname the “Yellow Press” after the popular Yellow Kid color comic strip. This sentiment easily transferred to the domestic arena.

  In Boston in 1892, Irish immigrant Samuel S. McClure founded one of the first magazines especially intended to provide a forum for the Muckrakers' exposés. By October 1902, the sales of his McClure's magazine soared following the publication of Lincoln Steffen's account of political bossism in “Tweed Days in St. Louis,” a reference to Democrat William Tweed's control of local politics in New York City. Many considered the article the first muckraking piece in the nation. Other periodicals, including Munsey's, Cosmopolitan, Everybody's, Pearson's

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  Protest And Popular Culture

  Women In The American Labor Movement

  • Mary Triece(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Muckraking went hand in glove with a Progressive Era “reform spirit,” which was motivated by a certain optimism toward American society , according to which despite the ill effects of runaway capitalism, the system was basically good (Gould 1974; Mowry 1963; Regier 1957). Progressive Era reformism was distinctly moral in tone (Caine 1974; Filler 1939; McCraw 1974; Mowry 1963), and was marked more by “group hope” than “group fear” (Mowry 1963, 55). Its underlying premises were that disparities in wealth were caused by “crooks,” and class disputes were the result of both “greedy labor” and “selfish businessmen.” Good men with good character were the cure for cleaning up politics. The progressive mentality, according to Mowry, “was imbued with a burning ethical strain which at times approached a missionary desire to create a heaven on earth. It had in it intense feelings of moral superiority over both elements of society above and below it economically” (1963, 54, 55).

  This emphasis on morality mystified the economic relations behind the corruption and obscured the distinctly middle-class values that underpinned progressive reformism. The writings of various household and factory inspectors during the early 1900s provide a good example of the inability of progressive reformers to overcome their own class biases. Though they attempted to correct old notions of poverty that blamed the individual for his or her poverty, their findings still operated within a frame that emphasized “bourgeois values of hard work, respectability, and self-restraint” (Horowitz 1985, 50). Progressives emphasized legislative and other changes that altered but did not disrupt capitalism. Corporate corruption was exposed and trusts were busted, but the system went on as usual, with only a few changes. In fact, some scholars have demonstrated the extent to which the Progressive Era was not “progressive” at all, but rather quite soundly conservative (Kolko 1963; Sklar 1988).

  Muckraking journalism can also be understood as part of the “broader Progressive drive to found political reform on ‘facts’” (Schudson 1978, 71). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, federal and state bureaus were springing up to investigate factory and tenement ills, and muckraking reporters saw their role as presenting a “realistic” view of society. Yet conveying the “facts” was only part of the job: Muckrakers were also eager to stir indignation and celebrate reform. McClure’s primary Muckrakers, Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker, made their stories “dramatic and damning” (Wood 1971, 135). McClure’s

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  Essays in American Historiography. Papers Presented in Honor of Allan Nevins

  • Donald Sheehan, Harold C. Syrett, Donald Sheehan, Harold C. Syrett(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  4 This study finds a line of distinction between Muckrakers and progressives such as the naked eye cannot perceive, though there were Muckrakers who preferred Wilson or Debs to Theodore Roosevelt, in 1912. It distinguishes between Muckrakers and the social justice movement, though there were Muckrakers active in every one of its folds. Brand Whitlock, for example, was cru-sader, mayor, and, not incidentally, novelist, and anything but alone in his many-sidedness. The juxtaposition of muckraking and yellow journalism is patently inadequate, and the date of 1908 patently inaccurate. In 1908, the Ballinger affair had not yet taken place. Hampton's, Everybody's, Collier's, Success, the American, and a dozen other muckraking magazines were still be-ing distributed to mass audiences. But the purpose of these ob-servations is not to argue a point; it is merely to indicate that the Muckrakers have not been well remembered. The greater number of them have been thoroughly forgotten, the few others who are generally cited serving no particular end. They are mere names—Charles Edward Russell, Norman Hap-good, Samuel Hopkins Adams—or mere titles— The Story of Life Insurance, The Women Who Toil, People of the Abyss, The 254 FILLER: T H E Muckrakers Color Line. They fill out the paragraphs in textbooks, or add décor to analyses of twentieth-century trends. C. P. Connolly, Josiah Flynt, Herbert N. Casson, Frederic U. Adams, John K. Turner, Benjamin B. Hampton are several of many personages who were significant to, or central in, muckraking operations, and whose names never appear in commentary respecting the era. But this is not the bottom fact of forgetfulness. The muck-rakers' works have not survived their heyday. It is not only that they have not been reprinted; they are unread. This is as true of Lincoln Steffens as of Charles Edward Russell. Many of the Muckrakers thought of themselves as literary figures as well as stu-dents of society and commentators.

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  Cases in Public Policy and Administration

  From Ancient Times to the Present

  • Jay M. Shafritz, Christopher P. Borick(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER TWO

  Muckrakers and Reformers to the Rescue

  HOW THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT CREATED MODERN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION FROM THE MUCK OF CORRUPTION, INDIFFERENCE, AND IGNORANCE    

  PREVIEW

  Muck is what animals leave behind from their behinds. As it accumulates, it becomes increasingly unpleasant, especially when it is in a confined space such as a stable. Muck happens! Therefore, it must be shoveled or raked out periodically.

  Most people are familiar with muck because they have stepped in it or have had to put up with a lot of it, but few have been able to rise above it to see its strong historical relationship to public administration. To be specific, contemporary U.S. public administration, as both an academic discipline and a professional practice, has its origins in the early twentieth-century investigative journalism of a group of reporters known to history as the Muckrakers.

  This story starts in 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt figuratively put a muck rake into the hands of those investigative journalists who were gaining ever-increasing fame for exposing government corruption. For inspiration, Roosevelt called on John Bunyan (1628–1688), an English preacher and notorious nonconformist (meaning he did not conform to the teachings of the Church of England), who, while serving time in jail for his nonconformity, wrote Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), a religious allegory that for centuries was one of the most widely read books in the English-speaking Protestant world.

  THE TREASON OF THE SENATE

  In a speech on April 16, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt used Bunyan to attack journalists who were stirring up so much muck that he was concerned that some of it might land on him. He was specifically upset with a series of nine articles that began in the February 17, 1906, issue of Cosmopolitan

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  Drift and Mastery

  An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest

  • Walter Lippmann(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Wisconsin Press

    (Publisher)

  The Muckrakers spoke to a public willing to recognize as corrupt an incredibly varied assortment of conventional acts. That is why there is nothing mysterious or romantic about the business of exposure,-no putting on of false hair, breaking into letter-files at mid!light, hypnotizing financiers, or listening at keyholes. The stories of graft, written and unwritten, are literally innumerable. Often muckraking consists merely in dressing up a public document with rhetoric and pictures, translating a court record into journalese, or writing the complaints of a minority stockholder, a dislodged politician, or a boss gone "soft." No journalist need suffer from a want of material. Now in writing this chapter I started out to visualize this material in systematic and scholarly fashion by making a list of the graft revelations in the last ten years. I wished for some quantitative sense of the number and kinds of act that are called corrupt. But I found myself trying to classify the industrial, financial, political, foreign and social relations of the United States, with hundreds of sub-heads, and a thousand gradations of credibility and exaggeration. It was an impossible task. The popular press of America is enormous, and for years it has been filled with "probes" and "amazing revelations." And how is a person to classify, say, the impeachment of a Tammany governor by a Tammany legis- lature? 2 A mere list of investigations would fill this book, and I abandoned the attempt with the mental reservation that it anyone really desired that kind of proof, a few German scholars, young and in perfect health, should be imported to furnish it. They could draw up a picture to stagger even a jaded American. • William Sulzer, who took office as Governor of New York in January 1913, was impeached and removed from office on October 18, 1913. 25 THE THEMES OF MUCKRAKING Suppose they began their encyclopedia with the adulteration of foods.

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  Democracy’s Detectives

  The Economics of Investigative Journalism

  • James T. Hamilton(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  5 When scholars tell the story of investi-gative reporting in the United States, they often start with the muckraking magazines because of their impact, prominence, and easy accessibility (relative to newspapers, whose content was less likely to survive to be archived). This focus on the early 1900s as the start of investigative journalism misses investigative stories written in U.S. newspapers during prior decades. 6 The dispersal of this reporting across a wide geography and the ephemeral nature of the daily press make it diffi cult to trace out patterns of coverage in the late Detectives, Muckrakers, and Watchdogs 37 1800s. The recent digitization of daily papers from this era, however, offers a new way to explore the evolution of accountability coverage. To explore trends in newspaper investigations, I focused on a prime institutional problem often uncovered by this type of work—the breakdown of delegated decision- making power in principal-agent relationships. I characterized the potential for agents to seek goals in conflict with their principals as involving five areas: effort, money, advantage, power, and information. I further broke down these problems into a list of twenty-one principal-agent problems: wasted/wasteful; mismanagement; neglect; bribery; embezzlement; steal; cor-ruption/corrupt; nepotism; patronage; conflict of interest; rent seeking; influ-ence peddling; favoritism; abuse; harassment; misconduct; discrimination; misuse; fraud; deception; and mislead. Searching for these terms in newspaper articles in the database newspaperarchive.com allowed me to chart patterns in investigative work. Newspaperarchive.com contains copies of hundreds of newspapers in the United States per decade. The database includes many years of issues of some newspapers, and only copies from a few years of others.

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  From Puritanism to Postmodernism

  A History of American Literature

  • Richard Ruland, Malcolm Bradbury(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  American industrial achievement and output were now outstripping those of Great Britain and Germany combined, making America the world’s leading technological power. But the social unrest that ravaged Europe in the 1880s reached America too; strikes and riots revealed the conflict of mass and class, poor and rich, new money and old. Some of this sense of conflict had already made its way into what was now beginning to be called “muckraking literature,” the new reporting and fiction that had been emerging since 1879—the year Henry Adams published his bitter novel Democracy about the corrupt new political order, and Henry George printed his powerful social tract Progress and Poverty which saw the two elements of the title proceeding hand in hand. Thereafter in the work of authors like Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Edward Bellamy, Ignatius Donnelly and many more, we can see a rising note of progressive critical indignation growing out of the age of capitalism, industrialism and political conflict and displayed alike in fiction, journalism and polemic. Thorstein Veblen’s ironic Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) would introduce the phrase “conspicuous consumption” to the language, and Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904) would make investigative journalism an American tradition. By the 1900s “muckraking” would become a critical flood urged along by many of the leading writers. From the end of the 1870s on it was starting to become clear that what Newton Arvin has called “the apparently placid interval” between the upheavals of the frontier and the ravages of new industrialism was over. The 1890s was a cultural fulcrum, when the religious, social and moral faiths of an older America began to shift toward a twentieth-century vision. II Like similar exhibitions in Buffalo and St

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