Looking at the Past Through the Lens of Society
The Muckrakers
Theodore Roosevelt derisively named them for "the Man with the Muck Rake, " a figure who would "rake to himself the filth of the floor" in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.49 The muckrakers were reporters, authors, and critics who sought to expose the evils and injustices of Gilded Age society, hoping to expose such social ills before they strangled democracy. Publishing their works in popular periodicals like McClure's, Hampton's, Cosmopolitan, and even the more conservative Ladies' Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post, these reporters spearheaded a movement in investigative journalism that remains an important part of American society today. Yet they did not always succeed in provoking substantive reforms, and sometimes their motives differed starkly from the actual effects of their work.50
The muckrakers played a significant historical role, largely because late nineteenth-century America was a nation of readers. The television did not yet exist and radios did not enter widespread use until the 1920s and '30s. Technological improvements in the publishing industry—from the linotype machine to the telegraph, telephone, and use of a chemical wood pulp process for making more durable newspapers—spread across the country after the Civil War. They enabled a vast expansion in the number of papers printed, and circulation rose quickly. Some 24 million daily newspapers were sold in the United States in 1899, nearly ten times as many as had been sold just three decades earlier. Joseph Pulitzer's The World doubled in circulation to 40,000 just after Pulitzer took over the paper in 1883; by the next year, the paper was selling 100,000 copies a day, then 250,000 by 1886.51 By the early twentieth century, heavily illustrated magazines could be purchased for a dime.
Continuing a trend that began in the antebellum period and continues to the present, editors favored salacious stories about crime and scandal because those stories yielded greater sales. At the same time, Progressive-era editors gained more freedom to publish their journalists' more controversial pieces, since newspapers were becoming less and less dependent upon affiliations with political parties, which traditionally had subsidized their operations. Instead, the modern newspapers of the Progressive Era came to rely more on subscriptions, sales, and—especially—advertising revenue. Politicians could no longer wield the same sort of influence over editors in this new climate, though advertising sponsors gained a newfound power over newspapers and magazines. Nonetheless, advertisers had a vested interest in getting their ads seen by the largest possible number of readers, and muckraking exposés proved widely popular with the public. At the height of the muckraking era, McClure's readership more than doubled in a span of just three years to reach 750,000 people; Hampton's experienced an even more dramatic boost, from 13,000 to 440,000 subscribers between 1903 and 1906.
Readers avidly bought these magazines to read of appalling malpractices in the food industry, the drug industry, the government, the police, the corporations, and the banks. These stories often abounded with salacious details—like George Kibbe Turner's 1907 revelation that there were "at least 350 good-sized houses of prostitution" in Chicago, home to more than 4,000 women who made about $50 "a head"—but they also directly affected readers' lives with their revelations about all aspects of American society, from the economy to the democratic process.52 Notably, muckrakers seldom offered concrete solutions to the problems they described in such explicit detail; the writers were usually optimists who believed that their society needed reform, but not sweeping institutional change, and that merely exposing wrongdoing to the public would lead to improvement. In perhaps the most memorable and dramatic example, an author who never actually defined himself as a muckraker created a public outcry with his grotesquely detailed novel on the meatpacking industry and the immigrant laborers who worked in it.
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