The Muckraker Era
The muckrakers did not have free reign throughout their era, as big businesses and the trusts had weapons at their disposal through which to silence them. Magazines provided the platform from which muckrakers reported their findings, and magazines needed advertising revenues to survive. Advertising boycotts by businesses affected by the articles and their adverse publicity led the businesses to apply leverage to the publications. Lawsuits were another weapon, as few magazines could match the financial assets of the trusts they reported on. The Progressive Era itself lost momentum after Theodore Roosevelt left office, another factor which affected the muckrakers.
McLure’s Magazine was one of the earliest of the muckrakers, and when several of its most noted writers in the genre defected to form The American Magazine its impact was severely blunted. McLure’s Magazine faded rapidly in the face of competition from Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, The American Magazine, and several others and by 1911 the magazine was forced to sell to its creditors. It resumed publication as a women’s magazine, and never again produced the hard hitting types of articles which it pioneered in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1929 McLure’s Magazine ceased publication. Other magazines continued to present muckraking articles, though with less frequency.
The muckrakers are often connected with yellow journalism, an era which for the most part preceded them. Yellow journalism evolved in the late nineteenth century and involved the sensationalizing of stories for the purpose of expanding sales. Yellow journalism was unconcerned with supporting facts when presenting stories, and both exaggerated events and made them up out of whole cloth. The muckrakers were meticulous in the presentation of supporting facts in their reports, in part because of the frequent attacks upon them by the interests they targeted and the politicians the interests controlled. This led to even Sinclair’s sensationalized novel The Jungle being deemed by investigators to be supported by facts in its description of the meatpacking industry.
The muckrakers enjoyed considerable success in raising public awareness of issues, to the point that reforms were enacted in diverse industries and in local and national political activity. Meatpacking, drug manufacturing and distribution, the dairy industry, mental health care, banking, the stock market, the railroads, the US Navy, child labor, prisons, police forces, and many more interests were subjected to reforms as awareness of the abuses they practiced was raised in the public mind. Many of these reforms were staunchly opposed by conservatives, who castigated them as socialism, but public pressure gradually eroded their power.
The muckrakers were the forerunners for the investigative journalists which followed. McLure’s Magazine imposed standards on its writers which they took with them to other magazines and publications. These standards included an emphasis on accuracy and research into facts, rather than speculation. Although changes in the style of writing makes the work of most of the muckrakers seem flowery to the modern eye, very little of their work was disproved. The people of the United States were alarmed by the corruption which was exposed and the dangers it posed to them. That alarm was sounded by Roosevelt’s “man with the muck rake”.
Where do we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
“The Woman Who Took on the Tycoon”, by Gilbert King, Smithsonian Magazine, July 5, 2012
“Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle”, by Harold Bloom (ed), 2002
“The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens”, by Lincoln Steffens, 1931
“Jacob Riis: Reporter and Reformer”, by Janet B. Pascal, 2005
“Literature and Insurgency”, by J.C. Underwood, 1914
“Theodore Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet: American Sea Power Comes of Age”, by K. Wimmel, 1998
“Adams, Samuel Hopkins”, entry by Samuel V. Kennedy, American National Biography Online, 2000
“John Spargo and American Socialism”, by Markku Ruotsila, 2006
“The Pen is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell”, by Robert Miraldi, 2003
“Years of Conscience: The Muckrakers”, by Harvey Swados, 1962
