The Muckrakers

warmup

Section 1 00:00:00 Hi. I'm [INAUDIBLE]. Welcome to our discussion on the muckrakers. Well, take a look at the image in front of you. It's of a very busy newsroom at the turn of the 20th century. And newsrooms then, just as they are today, were very busy places. 00:00:14 Journalists scrambled to write stories and deliver them before a deadline. And for many people, the newspapers and magazines were the chief source of their information. This lesson's going to focus on a specific type of journalist that emerged during the Progressive Era-- so from the 1890s to the 1920s-- the muckraker. 00:00:33 Muckrakers were investigative journalists. They searched out facts about problems in business, government, and society. Their stories shed light on the dark corners of American life and some of the problems. So why were they called muckrakers? Well, let's take a look at where that term came from. Section 2 00:00:00 Who were these muckrakers? Well, a muckraker was an investigative journalist who exposed crime, corruption and scandal. And it was actually President Theodore Roosevelt who coined the term in 1906 when he said "There's a filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muckrake. And there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. 00:00:21 The men with the muckrakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society." Well, so what was he talking about? He said these muckrakes. Now what he's saying is the muck is the dirt and the grime on the ground, on the floor. Now if you're applying that to society, what he's saying is all of the bad things, the ills of society that are going 00:00:42 on, the American people need to know about these things. And it's the job of the journalist to kind of rake it up, and stir it up, and expose it. But he also warned two journalists that their reports had to be founded in fact. That their attacks only had value if they stuck to the facts, that the liar is no better than the thief. But that it was necessary to bring these things to the 00:01:06 attention of the American people. So muckrakers were concerned with exposing problems in society, including things like unfair business practices, poor living conditions in cities, unsafe working conditions, and corruption in government. And you can see someone here in this image purchasing a newspaper from the newsboy. So people were reading these newspapers and magazines as 00:01:29 the source for information. Now, investigative journalists today are committed to exposing corruption in government and in business. And really, the muckrakers of the Progressive Era changed the history of journalism. And they set new standards for reporting true facts and uncovering scandals that are going on. Now in recent years, journalists have uncovered 00:01:52 wrongdoing in sports. Including corruption in college athletic programs and the use of illegal drugs such as steroids. Section 4 00:00:00 Knowing that a muckraker is a journalist is going to help you fulfill the first objective, which is to define muckraker and explain the contributions of individual muckrakers to the progressive movement. Then in our second objective, we're going to describe Upton Sinclair's goals when writing The Jungle, and evaluate the novel's effect on the era of progressive reform.

lecture

Section 1 00:00:00 In this lesson, we're going to answer the question who are the muckrakers? And how did their activities shape the Progressive Era? Now you know what a muckraker is, it's a serious investigative journalist. We're going to be talking about the important role muckrakers played in the social and political reform that characterized the Progressive Era. 00:00:20 And then later on we're going to talk in detail about the work of muckrakers before examining the most famous muckraking work of all time. So let's get started in focusing on how the muckrakers influenced the public. Section 3 00:00:00 Well, how did muckraking lead to reform? Well a muckraker, or investigative journalist, conducted an investigation and then wrote an article. And remember, these were typically about society, the living conditions of people in the poorer neighborhoods, working conditions of people in factories, and many of the manual labor and unskilled labor jobs, and also corruption in government. 00:00:25 People would read the articles and they were shocked by these facts. Now, a large reading base for some of these magazines and newspapers was middle-class America who had no idea that some of these things were going on just blocks away from them. And then people begin to take action, they organized. And this is where you see the progressive movement coming 00:00:44 into play as numerous people got together and started fighting for similar goals to make changes for some of these issues in society, government, and in business. Now, Lincoln Steffens was one of the first muckrakers and he was quite famous. He wrote about corruption in government. And he's also known as being the managing editor for McClure's Magazine, which was a well-known muckraking 00:01:08 magazine at the time. He said his purpose was "to see if the shameful acts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride." So he didn't want corruption and these shameful acts to really take over, defining Americans and America. Jacob Riis studied and photographed New York's slum neighborhoods, or poorer neighborhoods. 00:01:37 And he put together a book titled How the Other Half Lives, which is a collection of these images with details in it that really opened the eyes of many New Yorkers to the dreadful living conditions that existed only blocks away from their own comfortable homes. And these images really shocked many people. Middle-class Americans really saw for the first time what it was like for the poorer people living in their city. Section 5 00:00:00 You know that a muckraker's a serious investigative journalist. And you know that muckrakers like Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens wrote about and photographed some of the problems that they saw in society. And that many people were shocked to find out that some of these things were going on within their city or within their neighborhood. 00:00:20 In this segment we're going to continue to look at how muckrakers influenced the public by looking at the contributions of three key muckrakers. And that would include Ida Tarbell, Frank Norris and Ida B. Wells, and how their activities helped make reform happen. Section 6 00:00:00 Ida Tarbell was the daughter of a successful Pennsylvania oil man. When she was 15, the entire Pennsylvania oil region fell victim to an illegal scheme between Standard Oil and the railroads. Standard Oil was a great monopoly of the era. In 1880, Tarbell became the first woman to graduate from Allegheny College. 00:00:21 And she went on to teach high school science, but quickly abandoned that career and turned her attention to writing, where she became known as being one of the first great female newspaper reporters. Some of her most successful work was published in the McClure's Magazine, which was one of the most well-known magazines at the time and she became one of the most well-known writers for that magazine. 00:00:44 She started her career there in 1894 when Samuel Sidney McClure hired her as a writer and editor for his new magazine. Now Tarbell became really well-known in an expose that she did of Standard Oil. She conducted a two-year investigation into Standard Oil's business practices. She examined court records, testimony, statements to the 00:01:11 press, newspaper coverages, and anything else that had been made public. She originally planned a three-part series, but she had so much information and there were so many people willing to talk to her about the way that Standard Oil had treated them and taken over some of their smaller businesses and trampled over them, that she actually-- it developed into a 19-piece articles which she wrote 00:01:37 between 1902 and 1904. She would later author a two-art article focusing on Rockefeller's character. Now she also wrote and expressed some personal admiration for his patients in business sense. But she did say that-- she did condemn him for some of his open disregard of decent ethical business practices. 00:01:59 Her work ultimately resulted in the breakup of the Standard Oil company. Section 8 00:00:00 Another well known muckraker of the time was Frank Norris, who was born in Chicago but attended the University of California at Berkeley. He was a San Francisco based novelist and journalist. Originally he wanted to write fiction, but because it takes a long to write a book he needed to make income in the meantime. He wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle McClure's Magazine, 00:00:20 and focused on the struggles of ordinary Americans. He wrote a series of articles on the people of Polk Street, which is a San Francisco working class district. He also became well known for his exposure of the railroad businesses and their practices. Now at this time, at the turn of the century, railroads had expanded westward. They expanded from east to the western part of the country, 00:00:44 and they had owned quite a bit of land. Now, they sold some land the farmers and ranchers for $2.50 an acre. This was actually profitable to both sides. The railroads were able to get fees for transporting livestock and goods, and the farmers had cheap land, and they also were at a convenient hauling distance from railroad stations so it was easier for them to ship things. 00:01:11 But the railroads retained the legal title to the land that they had sold, which meant that they were actually the real owners of the land. And so several years later, once this land had been improved upon by these farmers and ranchers and was actually worth more, the railroads said that they were now selling this land and it was going to be 10 times the original price, but these farmers and ranchers could still buy it if 00:01:33 they wanted. Now, of course these people were outraged. Frank Norris exposed this scandal, and he wrote his novel The Octopus, and he based it on these issues from the late 1880s and 1890s. Section 10 00:00:00 Now let's talk about Ida B. Wells. She was well known as a crusader for African American rights. She was actually born to slave parents in Mississippi during the Civil War, and then went on to become a school teacher after the war to help support her seven siblings after her parents had passed away. She was a writer and a part owner of a Memphis newspaper. 00:00:19 And she wrote about discrimination against African Americans. In 1892, this is really going to hit home for her, as one of her friends and two other men were murdered when they tried to defend her friend's store against a white mob. And this is when she began her crusade against lynching. And lynching is an execution that's carried out without legal authority. 00:00:43 And it's done so by a mob. This was often used to punish African Americans for doing things like trying to vote or to protest segregation laws. In her crusade against lynching, Wells published editorials. She suffered property damage, and even received personal threats on her life. She wrote The Red Record, a book containing case studies 00:01:09 and statistics, and campaigned against lynching until her death in 1931. Section 12 00:00:00 Now we're that much closer to answering our lesson question. Who were the muckrakers, and how did their activities shape the Progressive Era? We know what a muckraker is and how they influenced the public. Now we're going to take a look at one of the most important examples of muckraking journalism, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Section 13 00:00:00 Upton Sinclair was a journalist from New York City who sympathized with the common man and common worker, and as such, he became a member of the Socialist Party. He went undercover to research the Chicago meatpacking industry where he worked as a regular employee for seven weeks, taking notes and detailing everything that he saw. He wrote The Jungle, which was one the most influential books 00:00:23 of the progressive era. It was intended to bring attention to the plight of workers, but it ended up doing something else. Section 15 00:00:00 The Jungle led immediately to government reform. The public read The Jungle and reacted with outrage. Why? Because they had no idea what they were eating. They were shocked when they read his graphic descriptions, and they were sickened and outraged. They demanded reform immediately. Sinclair was quoted as saying "I aimed at the public's 00:00:20 heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach" basically because people responded with outrage over the food that they were eating, not over the conditions of the workers. The government at first doubted the accuracy of The Jungle. And President Roosevelt even sent his own inspectors over because he didn't believe. He thought that Sinclair was exaggerating 00:00:42 things for his book. So he sent those inspectors to investigate and then read their report, and based on that called for reform legislation. Now in 1906, Congress passed two new laws, the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. The Meat Inspection Act addressed the problems that were described in The Jungle, and said that only healthy 00:01:04 livestock could be used for food. And it created standards of cleanliness in how to handle the food, how to handle the animals beforehand. And the Pure Food and Drug Act banned food and drugs that contained harmful ingredients. And it made it illegal to sell spoiled food or poisonous drugs. It also required that there be accurate labels, and making 00:01:27 sure that people knew exactly what was going into their medications. It called for government inspections to make sure that these regulations and that these new pieces of legislation were actually being followed.

summary

Section 1 00:00:00 PROFESSOR: Now, you should be able to answer our lesson question. Who were the muckrakers, and how did their activities shape the Progressive Era? We've defined who the muckrakers were, and met some influential muckrakers along the way. So let's take a look and quickly review at some of the things we discussed in this lesson. Section 2 00:00:00 So in this lesson we talked about the role of muckrakers. We know that they're investigative journalists who wrote influential books and articles that exposed the public to the problems in society. The outraged public demanded reform, and this resulted in new legislation and business regulation. We also met some important muckrakers and talked about their issues, including Ida Tarbell who brought down 00:00:22 Standard Oil, Frank Norris, who focused on railroad corruption, and Ida B. Wells, who led a national crusade against lynching. We also saw how Upton Sinclair's description of meatpacking plants in The Jungle led to the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. So thanks so much for joining me here today. I hope that you learned something, and I hope you have 00:00:43 a great day. Bye for now.