Muckraking Summary

     The Gilded Age of American history saw a huge increase in industrialization and the economy was booming. Corporations were creating factories and new jobs at an alarming rate and the country was flexing it's dominance as a world power.
     New inventions were being made, advances in technology and medicine were on the rise, and big businesses were at the top of the food chain. Unfortunately, with money and power comes abuse of such power, in the hopes of obtaining even more money.
     Corruption was running rampant, and not just corruption, but unsafe practices within factories and unsafe, untested medicines were being given to the public without them knowing the harmful effects they may cause. The American people were obviously unaware of what was happening around them, and who could blame them? They had no way of knowing. Fortunately for the country, big business wasn't the only thing booming; journalism was too. Thanks to the muckrakers of the early 1900s, this country went under serious reform.
     In 1902, a man by the name of Lincoln Steffens, who would go on to be credited as the first muckraker, got a job with McClure's, a popular journal during that time period. His investigative reporting and stories about municipal corruption alarmed the public and helped bring a wave of political change. The District Attorney of St. Louis at that time, Joseph W. Folk, credited his public support and eventual election into the governor's seat to Steffens and his eye opening journalism. Steffens did not stay in Missouri but rather went from big city to big city, hoping to raise awareness and bring the public together to fight the corporate machine.
McClure's didn't stop at political corruption. You don't get the title of the greatest muckraking magazine by exposing one subject. Ida Tarbell, a daughter and sister to oil refinery workers, shared her experiences with The Standard Oil Company and exposed John D. Rockefeller's quest to be a one man powerhouse. In her series "History of The Standard Oil Company", she explains how Rockefeller pays off railroad companies in exchange for cheaper shipping costs, roughly half the cost his competitors paid, which ultimately means other small, developing businesses never had a chance to grow, or compete with his growing monopoly. Her articles, packed with facts, numbers, and witty language didn't just get people talking; they got people acting. In 1906 Congress passed the Hepburn Act, which penalized railroads caught making preferential deals with select businesses. Then in 1911, after being found guilty of several accounts of fraud charges, and violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, Standard Oil was forced to break up its monopoly into thirty eight different companies.
As noted before, political and corporate corruption weren't the only things on the minds of muckrakers. Public health was also a major concern. More importantly, the safety and quality of the food and drugs Americans were consuming. Upton Sinclair, another muckraker that would be up there with some of the best, was hired by the newspaper Appeal to Reason to do some investigative work. Sinclair exposed the disgusting practices found within meatpacking plants and in his series "The Jungle", he goes into shocking and disgusting detail of what really goes on in these plants. Although it was written as fiction, there was nothing phony about this. He got his information from real sources, questionig real people and investigating real plants.
Another muckraking icon was Ladies Home Journal editor Edward Bok. His attacks were aimed at the drug companies, claiming their products were unsafe and sometimes deadly. Other publications joined in his crusade including McClure's, and Collier's, which printed a cartoon with a skull representing the Patent Medicine Trust, showing once again as Thomas Nast did that imagery is just as effective as words, if not more so. In 1906, Ladies Home Journal published a simulated bill demanding its readers send it into their congressmen and reform the drug companies. They did just that, and President Theodore Roosevelt would go on to advocate a law regulating food and drugs, and congress would pass the Pure Food and Drug Act, which required all food and drugs to be analyzed, inspected, and approved.
     Not everybody appreciated the work of muckrakers. Some politicians opposed them, obviously because they saw the influence and power these journalists had, and knew sooner or later, their day would soon be coming. The muckrakers delivered. David Graham Phillips, writing for Cosmopolitan magazine, aimed his attacks at politicians and accused many of them of corruption and treason. His words were strong enough to bring voters to the polls and one by one, every politician he accused was voted out of office in the elections that followed. Changes were also made within the political arena in 1913 when a constitutional amendment made it so that senators were elected by the people, not state legislatures.