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A muckraker 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 with a group of American investigative reporters, novelists and critics in the Progressive Era from the 1890s to the 1920s. It also applies to post 1960 journalists who follow in the tradition of those from that period. See History of American newspapers for Muckrakers in the daily press.
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, and McClure's. Some of the most famous of the early muckrakers are Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker.
An example of a contemporary muckraker work is Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) which led to reforms in automotive manufacturing in the United States. Nader's publication led to a stop in the production of the Chevrolet Corvair, one of the first rear-engine American cars. The discontinuation of the Corvair was controversial because many believed the innovative style could have been altered for safety and could have spurred the American automobile industry.
The rise of muckraking in the late 19th and early 20th centuries corresponded with the advent of Progressivism yet, while temporally correlated, the two are not intrinsically linked.
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History of term muckraker
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's Pilgrim's Progress (1678).
While Roosevelt apparently disliked what he saw as a certain lack of optimism of muckraking's practitioners:
...the Man with the Muck-rake, the man 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.
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."
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Early muckrakers
Helen Hunt Jackson (1831-1885) - A Century of Dishonor, U.S. policy regarding American Indians
Jacob August Riis (1849-1914) - early pioneer in investigative journalism, exposed slum conditions
Charles Edward Russell (1860-1941)- investigated Beef Trust, Georgia's prison system, big-business control of press,
Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936) - articles in McClure's, the American, and Everybody's magazines on city bosses
George Seldes (1890-1995) - Freedom of the Press (1935) and Lords of the Press (1938), blacklisted during the 1950s period of McCarthyism.
John Spargo, (1876–1966) - American reformer and author, Bitter Cry of Children (child labor)
Jessica Mitford (1917–1996) - author of The American Way of Death (US Funeral Industry) and Making of a Muckraker (collection on various topics including writing schools and prisons)
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Contemporary muckrakers
Richard Behar, investigative journalist, two-time winner of the 'Jack Anderson Award'. Anderson himself once praised Behar as "one of the most dogged of our watchdogs."
John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) white journalist who disguised himself as a black man to write about racial injustice in the south.
Ralph Nader consumer rights advocate; Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), exposed unsafe automobile manufacturing
Geraldo Rivera - exposed abuse of mentally retarded patients, led to reforms
Studs Terkel - Legendary Chicago writer, journalist, DJ, and historian
Gary Weiss, exposed the Mob on Wall Street, described by Barron's Magazine as "an old-time gumshoe, with a soupçon of little-guy champion Jimmy Breslin and a dash of 1950s bad-boy comic Lenny Bruce."
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Roosevelt Speech Reference Note
Theodore Roosevelt Describes the Muckrakers, 1906
"In Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man 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.
In "Pilgrim's Progress" the Man with the Muckrake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil.
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.
Source: The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, Condensed from the Original Edition, Supplemented by Letters, Speeches, and Other Writings, Wayne Andrews editor (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913, rep. 1958) pages 246-247...
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Bibliography
Campbell, W. Joseph. Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (2003), focus on 1898
Filler, Louis. Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939)
Kaplan, Richard L. Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865-1920 (2002)
Nasaw, David. The Chief The Life of William Randolph Hearst (2000)
Stanley K. Schultz. "The Morality of Politics: The Muckrakers' Vision of Democracy," The Journal of American History, Vol. 52, No. 3. (Dec., 1965), pp. 527-547. in JSTOR
Weinberg, Arthur, and Lila Weinberg. The Muckrakers (1961).
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See also
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