Muckrakers

Investigations

• Businesses such as Standard Oil and other monopolies had strangled competition.
• Immigrants packed into substandard housing.
• Corruption seemed widespread in city governments.
• The meatpacking industry broke the backs of its workers and delivered unsanitary meat.

McClure's Magazine

• In January 1903, the New York magazine McClure’s trumpeted a trio of writers: Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Ray Stannard Baker.

McClure's

• Editorial: The lead article, “The Shame of Minneapolis,”might have been called “The American Contempt of Law." That title could well have served for the current chapter of Miss Tarbell’s “History of Standard Oil." And it would have fitted perfectly Mr. Baker’s “The Right to Work." Altogether, these articles come pretty near showing how universal is this dangerous trait of ours.

Jacob Riis

• Reporter for the New York Sun Wrote a series of articles, took photographs for the newspaper, and later authored a book called How the Other Half Lives.
• In 1890, in one block in the city nearly 3,000 lived in the tenements without a single bathtub Buildings lacked light and proper ventilation, disease was rampant, and fire hazards existed.

Upton Sinclair

• Upton Sinclair wrote 90 novels, including Dragon’s Teeth, a book about Germany under Nazi rule and the 1943 Pulitzer Prize honoree.
• The Jungle was an investigation, written as fiction, of the meat packing industry in Chicago.
• The experience left him “white-faced, and thin, partly from undernourishment, partly from horror.”

Sinclair

• Wrote about the substandard wages, dangerous conditions, and the lack of sanity conditions in the meatpacking industry .
• Meat sales dropped by nearly half within six months.
• Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Beef Inspection Act of 1907.

David Phillips

• The Treason of the Senate written in 1906 for Cosmopolitan
• Attacked 21 U.S. senators for their support of the cotton, oil, rail, and other monopolies of that era
• The articles contained many inaccuracies.

Teddy Roosevelt

• President Theodore Roosevelt, coined the term “muckrakers.”
• In a 1906 speech, Roosevelt invoked the image of the man with the muckrake in Paul Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
• The muckraker was “the man who could look no way but downward… (and) continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.”