Who Were The Journalism Industry's "Muckrakers"?

During the Progressive Era (1890–1920), muckrakers were investigative reporters and writers who wrote about corruption and wrongdoing to make a change in society. Journalists like Upton Sinclair, Jacob Riis, Ida Wells, Ida Tarbell, Florence Kelley, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and John Spargo put their lives and jobs at risk by writing books and articles for magazines like McClure's and Cosmopolitan about the terrible, hidden conditions of the poor and powerless and about the corruption of politicians and wealthy businessmen.

 

•    Between 1890 and 1920, muckrakers were journalists and investigators who wrote about corruption and wrongdoing.

 

•    Theodore Roosevelt came up with the term because he thought they went too far.

 

•    Muckrakers came from all walks of life and put their jobs and lives at risk to do what they did.

 

•    In many cases, what they did make things better.

 

In his 1906 speech "The Man with the Muck Rake," the progressive president Theodore Roosevelt came up with the word "muckraker." It was a reference to a part of John Bunyan's book "The Pilgrim's Progress" about a man who raked muck (soil, dirt, manure, and plant matter) for a living instead of looking up to heaven. Even though Roosevelt was known for helping to pass many Progressive reforms, he thought the most outspoken members of the muckraking press went too far, especially when they wrote about corruption in politics and big business. He wrote:

 

"Now, it's very important that we don't shy away from seeing what's bad and low. There is filth on the floor, and it needs to be scraped up with the muck rake. This is the most important service that can be done at certain times and places. But a person who only uses a muck rake and never thinks, speaks, or writes anything else quickly stops being helpful and starts being one of the most powerful forces for evil."

 

Even though Roosevelt tried to stop them, many of the crusading journalists accepted the name "muckrakers" and forced the country to make changes to fix the problems they wrote about. Between 1890 and the start of World War I, these well-known "muckrakers" helped bring problems and wrongdoing to light in the United States.

 

•    Jacob Riis was born in Denmark in 1849 and died in 1914. From the 1870s to the 1890s, he worked as a police reporter for the New York Tribune, the New York Evening Post, and the New York Sun. For the newspapers and magazines of the time, he wrote a series of articles about the slums on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. These articles led to the creation of the Tenement House Commission, which is a government agency that helps fix slums. In his writing, Riis included photos that showed how people lived in the slums. These photos were very disturbing.

 

•    Tenements were torn down after he wrote "How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York" in 1890, "The Children of the Poor" in 1892, and other books and lantern slide lectures to the public. Riis's efforts to find out the truth led to improvements like the building of sanitary sewers and the start of garbage collection.

 

•    Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. As she grew up, she became a teacher, an investigative journalist, and an activist. She didn't believe the reasons given for why black men were being killed by white mobs. When one of her friends was killed by a white mob, she started to learn more about white mob violence. In 1895, she published "A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching’s in the United States 1892–1893–1894," which showed that lynching’s of Black men in the South were not caused by white women raping them.

 

•    Wells also wrote for the Memphis Free Speech and the Chicago Conservator. In these pieces, she criticized the school system, called for Black women to have the right to vote, and strongly opposed lynching. Even though she never got the Federal government to pass laws against lynching, she helped start the NAACP and other activist groups.

 

•    Florence Kelley (1859–1932) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to wealthy Black activists of the 1800s. She went to Cornell College. In 1891, she started working at Jane Addams' Hull House. Through her work there, she was hired to look into the Chicago labor industry. So, she was chosen to be the State of Illinois's first female Chief Factory Inspector. She tried to sue sweatshop owners to make them fix the conditions, but she never won a case.

 

•    She became a "muckraker" in 1895 when she published "Hull-House Maps and Papers." In 1914, she wrote "Modern Industry in Relation to the Family, Health, Education, and Morality," which was also a "muckraker." These books told about the horrible truth of child labor and sweatshops where children and women worked. Her work led to a 10-hour workday and a minimum wage, but her biggest achievement may have been the "Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act" of 1921, which included money for health care to lower the death rates of mothers and babies.

 

•    Ida Tarbell was born in Hatch Hollow, Pennsylvania, in a log cabin in 1857. She wanted to be a scientist. Because she was a woman, she couldn't do that, so she became a teacher and one of the most powerful "muckraking" journalists instead. In 1883, she became the editor of The Chautauquan and wrote about unfairness and inequality. This was the start of her career as a journalist.

 

•    After working for Scribner's Magazine for four years in Paris, Tarbell went back to the United States and got a job at McClure's. One of her first jobs was to find out about how John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil did business. Her stories about Rockefeller's aggressive and illegal business practices were first published as a series of articles in McClure's. In 1904, "The History of the Standard Oil Company" was published as a book.

 

•    The resulting uproar led to a Supreme Court case, which found that Standard Oil had broken the Sherman Antitrust Act. In 1911, Standard Oil was broken up because of this.

 

•    Ray Stannard Baker was born in Michigan in 1870 and died in 1946. He went to law school before turning to writing and journalism. He started out as a reporter for the Chicago News-Record. During the Panic of 1893, he wrote about strikes and people who were out of work. In 1897, Baker went to work for McClure's Magazine as an investigator.

 

•    "The Right to Work," which was published in McClure's in 1903, was one of his most influential pieces. It was about the plight of coal miners, both strikers and scabs. These workers who weren't on strike were often untrained, but they still had to work in dangerous mines and protect themselves from union workers. His 1907 book "Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy" was one of the first to look at the racial divide in America.

 

•    Baker was also a leading member of the Progressive Party. This gave him the chance to find powerful political allies to help him make changes, like Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton at the time and would later become president of the United States.

 

•    Upton Sinclair was born in New York in 1878. His parents were poor, but his grandparents were wealthy. So, he got a very good education and started writing stories for boys when he was 16. He also wrote several serious novels, but none of them did well. In 1903, he changed his mind and became a Socialist. He then went to Chicago to learn more about the meatpacking business. In his book, "The Jungle," he wrote about the horrible working conditions and dirty, rotting meat that he saw.

 

•    His book was an instant best-seller. It didn't do much to help the workers, but it did lead to the first food safety laws in the country, the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

 

•    Lincoln Steffens was born into a wealthy family in California in 1866. He went to school at Berkeley and then in Germany and France. When he was 26 and went back to New York, he found that his parents had stopped talking to him. They wanted him to learn the "practical side of life."

 

•    He got a job as a reporter for The New York Evening Post. There, he learned about New York's immigrant slums and met Teddy Roosevelt, who would later become president. He became the managing editor for McClure's and, in 1902, wrote a series of articles about political corruption in Minneapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. In 1904, his articles were put together in a book called "The Shame of the Cities."

 

•    Steffens also went after Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. His investigations of Wall Street led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

 

•    John Spargo was from Cornwall and learned how to cut stones. He lived from 1876 to 1966. In the 1880s, he changed his mind and became a socialist. As a member of the new Labor Party, he wrote and spoke about working conditions in England. In 1901, he moved to the United States and joined the Socialist Party. He gave talks and wrote articles, and in 1910, he wrote the first full-length biography of Karl Marx.

 

•    "The Bitter Cry of Children," an investigation by Spargo into the terrible conditions of child labor in the United States, came out in 1906. Even though many people in America fought against child labor, Spargo's book was the most widely read and had the most impact because it talked about how dangerous it was for boys to work in coal mines.