Late 1800’s - Early 1900’s

• Progressives • Sought to solve problems created by industrial and urban growth

• Many were part of a growing middle class (had time and money)

• Journalists who wrote about or photographed problems in society

• Wanted to “stir the muck” so people noticed it

• Used newspaper and magazine articles, books, music, poetry and photography to get people to pay attention

Muckrakers

Muckrakers• Jacob Riis • Took pictures of tenements -

broken down apartment buildings

• How the Other Half Lives -Focused on poor families living conditions

Jacob Riis’ Photographs

Muckrakers• Lewis Hine • Took photographs of

child labor workers working conditions immigrants

Muckrakers• Upton Sinclair • Wrote a novel called The

Jungle• Exposed what conditions were

like in meat packing industry• Tried to get people mad at

terrible working conditions but people more disgusted at lack of food regulations

• Sinclair is quoted as saying, “I aimed at their brains and hit them in the stomach.”

[T]he meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one. There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste

barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat,

and sent out to the public breakfast.

Chapter 14

"All day long the blazing midsummer sun beat down upon that square mile of abominations: upon tens of thousands

of cattle crowded into pens whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion; upon bare, blistering, cinder-strewn railroad tracks and huge blocks of dingy meat factories,

whose labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate them; and there are not merely rivers of hot

blood and carloads of moist flesh, and rendering-vats and soup cauldrons, glue-factories and fertilizer tanks, that

smelt like the craters of hell-there are also tons of garbage festering in the sun, and the greasy laundry of the workers hung out to dry and dining rooms littered with food black

with flies, and toilet rooms that are open sewers."

Chapter 26, pg. 328

Muckrakers

• Ida Tarbell • Wrote articles and History of Standard Oil attacking Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company

• Changed forever the role of investigative reporter by digging for facts in hundreds of documents

• Complained of ruthless business tactics• History of Standard Oil was listed as

#5 on list of top 100 works of American journalism in the 20th Century.

“Very often people who admit facts, who are willing to see that Mr. Rockefeller has employed force and fraud to secure his ends, justify him by declaring, ‘it’s business’. That is, ‘it’s business’ has come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, and special privileges.”

- Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company