If something is wrong

then it is felt to be wrong


lose the labels and let the ingredients expose what is rotten within


~30~

The Jungle

Maybe when food stamps are being used by 12 % of the population and unemployment is stuck over 9% a little progressive and socialistic thinking is needed. Govcorp isn't doing anything for the declining middle class now. Some social services could be used to actually  help the common man and the common good. helping to maintain the freedom necessary to create a society with more equality for all and make changes for the betterment of humanity.




Poverty, Visualized
Underlying the public outcry over "bad meat" was the problem of urban poverty. Pioneering photojournalist Jacob Riis strove to show Americans How the Other Half Lives in his 1890 book of that title, which explored the filthy and overcrowded tenements of New York and quickly became a bestseller. Influenced by the growing temperance movement, Riis described how saloons vastly outnumbered churches in the slums below Manhattan's Fourteenth Street. For the poor, Riis argued, the saloon offered "refuge, relief," since it was "the one bright and cheery and humanly decent spot to be found" in "many a tenement-house block."56 Riis was fairly conservative and believed solutions to poverty were more likely to be found in private Christian charity and benevolent businessmen than in government reforms, but he did advocate legislation for stricter building codes. In 1904, settlement house worker Robert Hunter expounded upon poverty in Poverty, a work based on his experiences among the slums of Chicago and New York. Hunter sought to describe not only the conditions and problems that bedeviled the working class, but to explain how such problems would feed on themselves and continue to grow unless the public could adequately address the issue. He made the striking claim that for all the growth and prosperity of the Gilded Age, some 10 million Americans were still "underfed, underclothed, and poorly housed"—some 13% of the U.S. population.57 There was no way to actually prove or disprove this estimate, since—as Hunter himself pointed out—the United States spent more money than any other nation on statistical investigations, "and yet we know less about the poverty of our people than almost any other great nation of the Western world."58

But perhaps the most striking medium of all for exposing the true conditions of American poverty was not the written word, but the captured image. Lewis Wickes Hine was one of the first and most successful documentary photographers to showcase the potential of his medium for capturing social ills and inequalities. His images revealed child laborers in deplorable conditions, all across the country. Boys around the age of ten were captured through Hines's lens, covered in the soot of the Pennsylvania coal mines. Illiterate children who labored in Georgia's textile mills told Hine that they wanted to learn how to read, but their jobs kept them too busy. Some boys and girls working at these textile mills were so small that they had to climb up on the spinning frame to fix broken threads and replace empty bobbins. One of the girls Hine interviewed and photographed in a North Carolina mill stood just 4'3" tall, and made 48¢ a day. In St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Connecticut, Hine documented the lives of newsboys—or "newsies"—who were as young as five years old, many of them forced to work late into the night to help support their families. Hine's work provided moving and irrefutable evidence of the poverty and rampant child labor that plagued turn-of-the-century America. His range of locations documented the extent to which these issues affected people all across the nation.

And Hine knew exactly what he was doing; he had been a teacher before embarking upon a career in photography in order to further the cause of child labor reform. Hine worked in conjunction with the National Child Labor Committee, which reformers organized in 1904 and Congress chartered in 1907. Hine's haunting pictures proved effective for the NCLC's cause, and his work was emblematic of the Progressive faith in the ability of education and science to solve the major social problems of the age. Hine's images resonated with Progressives, who were horrified to confront such vivid portrayals of wasted youth and rigid class structure, where these haggard and filthy children seemed to have no hope of ascending beyond their miserable circumstances. The specter of these poor working children was antithetical to everything Progressives knew or believed about America; the photographs seemed more appropriate for a class-bound European country, not the fabled land of opportunity.

  Link

Society in Muckrakers & Reformers of the Progressive Era
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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~30~