Muckraking
What is Muckraking?
A muckraker is an American English term for one who investigates and exposes issues of corruption that violate widely held values, such as political corruption, corporate crime, child labor, conditions in slums and prisons, unsanitary conditions in food processing plants (such as meat), fraudulent claims by manufacturers of patent medicines, labor racketeering, and similar topics.
The term muckraker is most usually associated in America with a group of American investigative reporters, novelists and critics in the Progressive Era from the 1890s to the 1920s.
History of the Word
President Theodore Roosevelt is attributed as the source of the term 'muckraker.' During a speech in 1906 he likened the muckrakers to the Man with the Muckrake, a character in John Bunyan'sPilgrim's Progress (1678).
While Roosevelt apparently disliked what he saw as a certain lack of optimism of muckraking's practitioners, his speech strongly advocated in favor of the muckrakers:
"There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful." –Roosevelt
History Of Muckraking
Muckrakers have most often sought, in the past, to serve the public interest by uncovering crime, corruption, waste, fraud and abuse in both the public and private sectors. In the early 1900s, muckrakers shed light on such issues by writing books and articles for popular magazines and newspapers such as Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Collier's Weekly and McClure's. Some of the most famous of the early muckrakers are Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker.
Like with any business, there were muckrakers who were only in it to sell their article and make money. However, the hope of any good muckraker is to create public outcry and/or lead to reform legislation.
Meat Inspection
In 1904 Upton Sinclair, the 26-year-old muckraking journalist, started research on the Chicago stockyards. His novel “The Jungle” was about the Rudkus family, who emigrated from Lithuania to Chicago. Although his main focus of the book was hope to convert his readers to socialism, his description of contaminated meat drew the most attention. He described spoiled hams treated with formaldehyde and sausages made from rotten meat scraps, rats, and other refuse.
Even Teddy Roosevelt said he could no longer enjoy his morning sausages. He ordered a study of meatpacking industry and pushed a bill introduced by Albert Beveridge, the progressive senator from Indiana. In the end, the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was passed.
The four primary requirements of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 were:
- Mandatory inspection of livestock before slaughter (cattle, sheep, goats, equines, swine, chicken);
- Mandatory postmortem inspection of every carcass;
- Sanitary standards established for slaughterhouses and meat processing plants;
- Authorized U.S. Department of Agriculture ongoing monitoring and inspection of slaughter and processing operations.
This bill illustrates how muckrakers, social justice progressive and public outcry can eventually produce reform in legislation.
Pure Foods and Drugs
Americans at the time consumed an enormous quantity of patent medicines, which they purchased through the mail, traveling salesmen, and from local stores. Many packaged and canned foods contained dangerous chemicals and impurities. For example, Hosteter’s Stomach Bitters had 44% alcohol and Coca-Cola had trace amounts of cocaine. Many people, including women and children became alcoholics or drug addicts by trying to ease their pains through these medicines. The same day the Meat Inspection Act was passed, the Pure Food and Drug was also passed. Authors like Samuel Hopkins Adams, helped with given the matter attention. In a series of eleven articles he wrote for Collier's Weekly in 1905, "The Great American Fraud", Adams exposed many of the false claims made about patent medicines, pointing out that in some cases these medicines were damaging the health of the people using them.
The Pure Food and Drug Act is a United States federal law that provided for federal inspection of meat products, and forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated food products or poisonous patent medicines. Though the Pure Food and Drug Act was initially concerned with making sure products were labeled correctly (habit forming cocaine-based drugs were not illegal so long as they were labeled correctly), the labeling requirement gave way to efforts to outlaw certain products that were not safe, followed by efforts to outlaw products which were safe but not efficacious.
The History of the Standard Oil Company
The History of the Standard Oil Company is a book written by journalist Ida Tarbell in 1904. It was an exposé of the Standard Oil Company, ran at that time by John Rockefeller, one of America's richest men. Originally serialized in 19 parts in McClure's magazine, the book was a seminal example of muckraking, and inspired many other journalists to write about trusts, large businesses that (in the absence of strong antitrust law in the 19th century) attempted to gain monopolies in various industries. The History of the Standard Oil Company was credited with hastening the breakup of Standard Oil, which came about in 1911.
Tenements
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) was a pioneering work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future muckraking journalism by exposing the slums to New York City’s upper and middle-class.
He helped push tenement reform to the front of New York's political agenda, and prompted then-Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to close down the police-run poor houses. Roosevelt later called Riis "the most useful citizen of New York".
Ten Days in a Mad-House
Nellie Bly talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World, and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.
While embarrassed physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions at the asylum, inviting Bly to assist. The jury's report recommended the changes she had proposed, and its call for increased funds for care of the insane prompted an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections.
“What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A. M. until 8 P. M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.” – Ten Days in a Mad-House
The Octopus
The Octopus: The Epic Of The Wheat A California Story is a 1901 novel by Frank Norris. It describes the raising of wheat in California, and conflict between the wheat growers and a railway company. Norris was inspired by role of the Southern Pacific Railroad in events surrounding the Mussel Slough Tragedy. (The Mussel Slough Tragedy was a dispute over land titles between settlers and Southern Pacific Railroad that took place on May 11, 1880 in what is now Hanford, California, leaving seven people dead.)
It depicts the tension between the corrupt railroad and the ranchers and the ranchers' League.
Child Labor
The Bitter Cry of Children is a book by socialist writer John Spargo. Published in 1906, it is an expose of the horrific working conditions of child laborers.
In the United States, numerous organizations worked to eliminate child labor, including the National Child Labor Committee, launched in 1904 by social workers. Muckrakers played a definite role in bringing the problem to the public eyes.
“Work in the coal breakers is exceedingly hard and dangerous. Crouched over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and bent-backed like old men. When a boy has been working for some time and begins to get round-shouldered, his fellows say that "He's got his boy to carry around whenever he goes."– Bitter Cry of Children