--: The Muckrakers and American Reform

The Muckrakers and American Reform

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One of the end-of-year projects that has so frustratingly kept me away from this blog was a history paper. Having been given the freedom to do so, I sifted through years of civil rights cases and political trivia to find a topic that I was truly interested in: the Muckrakers. During the Second Industrial Revolution, corporations rose to prominence, exploiting an under-equipped legal system through unethical business practices and humans rights while the American government struggled to keep up with their rapidly industrializing country. The Muckrakers were reform journalists who latched on to these injustices and exposed the corporations through the fourth estate: the press.

If any of what you have just read interests you, I encourage you to read on.

Muckraking: New American Reform During the Second Industrial Revolution

The Second Industrial Revolution was an era of exceeding wealth and prosperity for the United States. The advent of mass production and mass consumerism marks a watershed in nearly every aspect of American life, from its culture to its politics and its economy. It was a period that saw America leap to the reins of the global economy, surpassing Britain’s manufacturing production, and cementing itself as a world power for years to come. On the surface, America had entered a golden age. However, the widespread affluence and good fortune was only skin deep. Corporations took advantage of a rapidly growing workforce and an infantile industrial law system to operate some of the most dangerous workplaces in United States history, and monopolies accrued power in the absence of anti-trust laws, stifling competition and entrepreneurship. In the face of such oppressions, american progressivism and reform needed to adapt to the change, or else risk falling behind. Thus rose the muckrakers: journalists who revealed the truth to the public and the authorities, and showed the world the horrors that lay underneath America’s gilded surface. The muckrakers came from all walks of life, and their works spoke to the growing lower classes, rallying the public to their causes. The notion that books ands articles could catalyze any significant change under these circumstances would have been ridiculous in any other era, but the Second Industrial Revolution provided the perfect ingredients for the movement’s success. A vast target audience, and the immense number of injustices on which to report, allowed the media to play a massive role in progressivism. Essentially, muckraking was a tailor-made reform movement that achieved its goals by capitalizing on the expending diversity in social rights infringements and rapid growth in lower and middle class populations.

Thrust into a new world following emancipation and the Civil War, industrialization quickly spread across the United States, and with it came a host of new public grievances. It was an era of blurry and undefined lines between legality and morality that had served their purposes in antebellum America, but were inadequate for the looming changes in the economy. Sensing a wealth of possibilities, insightful and cunning market opportunists pounced. The ‘Gilded Age’ (1870 - 1900) saw industry grow in leaps and bounds, with farming’s share in the American GDP declining from 38% in 1870 to just 24% in the 1890s. Overall wealth also experienced a share of this fortune, with total national wealth rising to $88 billion in 1900, over five times what it had been in 1860, and national wealth per capita doubling from $500 to $1100 during the same period. The second industrial revolution also saw the rise of such entrepreneurs as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and Vanderbilt, who embraced the social darwinist theories of Herbert Spencer and laissez-faire government to fight their way to the top, creating a new class of business magnates at the pinnacle of American society. In 1900, the number of trusts had grown to 183 from 24 just a decade ago, and were capitalized at $3 billion. The titans of industry had arrived, and a new power dynamic had emerged in America.

The new elite class was accompanied by an expansion of the lower and middle classes, due to sudden urbanization and a leap in immigration. In 1870, the US Census Bureau reported 5.5 million foreign-born citizens living in the United States, a number which jumped to over 13.5 million by 1910. Over the same period, the urban population of the United States increased from 25.7% of the total population to 45.6% as people migrated from rural areas to the industrial centers of the country. These statistics complement the vast increase in population the United States experienced in this era, a number which climbed from 38.5 million people in 1870 to over 100 million in 1920. For the progressives, this was a goldmine of opportunity. Never before had such a large percentage of the population been under the control of such a small class of elites.

William Henry Vanderbilt adequately summed up the attitude of the late 19th century during an interview with John Sherman, when he astutely declared ‘the public be damned’. Similar attitudes were prevalent throughout the class of tycoons and businessmen, and the infractions made by their corporations and trusts were so individual and diverse that any singular, focused movement would have been divided and disorganized. Indeed, the American Federation of Labor became increasingly inefficient and the International Workers of the World experienced multiple splits in the early 20th century. Instead, muckraking, a movement as diverse as the oppressions it challenged, was born. It was a new strategy, not planned or predetermined, but rather experimentally spawned from the discontentment of the growing public. Little did anyone know, muckraking would become the medium through which reformists of the Progressive Era would operate for the next thirty years.

Jacob A. Riis is credited as being the first to use journalism in hope of reformation during the Progressive Era. A poor Danish immigrant, Riis arrived in the US in 1870 with a childhood dream of becoming not a journalist, but a carpenter. After fruitless job hunting and sleeping on the streets, Riis landed several disheartening manual labor jobs as he came to terms with the degrading reality of immigrant life in the US. Frustrated, Riis invested all his money into a telegraphers course, in the hopes of becoming a reporter, writing that ‘it seemed to me that a reporter was the highest and noblest of all the callings.’ Years later, he landed a steady, well paying job as a police reporter that finally allowed him some freedom to pursue a newfound passion: the war on poverty. John Haynes Holmes, a Unitarian minister, noted: ‘what moved Riis the most was the spectacle of helpless human beings robbed of their sheer joy of living.’ Armed with a camera that he barely knew how to use, Riis took to the streets, photographing candidly and realistically the lives of those in poverty, in an effort to communicate the miserable conditions that many were unaware of. To Riis, ‘the power of fact [was] the mightiest lever of this or of any day. In 1890 he published his book How the Other Half Lives, which was filled with stories and pictures of the poor and their homes, utilizing a factual and investigative approach to evoke an emotional response in the restless public. The working class responded overwhelmingly to the documentation of their plight. How the Other Half Lives was acclaimed by critics, and publications such as Darkness and Daylight; or Shadows of New York Life attempted to replicate the success of this new genre of journalism. The seeds of muckraking had been sown, and would grow to be the backbone of Progressive Era progressivism.

8 years after How the Other Half Lives, McClure’s Magazine became the headquarters of professional muckraking when it introduced Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker to its staff in 1898. In 1902, McClure’s published a series of articles by Tarbell describing the anti-trust violations of the Standard Oil Company, which at the time was one of the largest multinational corporations in the world, and had integrated so thoroughly that competitors had next to no hope of matching their undercut prices. Tarbell had her own reasons for entering the world of reform journalism. In 1860, when she was 3 years old, her father entered the oil business as an independent, having perfected a wooden tank that could hold hundreds of barrels of oil. By the turn of the century, Standard Oil had become a petroleum powerhouse, and independents like Franklin Tarbell were finding it difficult to compete, especially in the aftermath of the Panic of 1893. Around this time, McClure’s searched for more ‘trust-busting’ features, in response to public demand for pieces that reflected the dramatically changing landscape of the American economy. After contemplating which trusts best exemplified the ‘passing from ownership by the many to control by the few’, Tarbell’s twenty-five thousand word exposé on the Standard Oil Company were authorized by Sam McClure. Initially, Tarbell wasn’t sure whether Rockefeller had done anything illegal at all with Standard Oil. Her motivation came purely from the struggles Standard Oil had put her family through with its monopolistic practices, and her project was enabled by a public that hungered for more publicity for the injustices of the industrializing economy in the aftermath of How the Other Half Lives. Two tedious years of investigation and interviews later, the first installment of Ida’s Standard Oil series was published in McClure’s, and the nation had an example of the effects the magnates had on their lives. Said Tarbell of her work: ‘it is in no sense a piece of economic work, nor is it intended to be controversial, but a straightforward narrative, as picturesque and dramatic as I can make it, of the great monopoly.’

In 1906, two years after Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company was published, the case against Standard Oil began when Charles Bonaparte (whose grand-uncle Tarbell had interviewed for The History of the Standard Oil Company) filed a claim under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against Standard Oil and its seventy affiliated corporations for ‘combining and conspiring to restrain and monopolize interstate commerce in petroleum.’ Standard Oil appealed, but the Supreme Court upheld the decision five years later, ‘on the ground that [Standard Oil] is a combination in unreasonable restraint of inter-state commerce’. Standard Oil, once one of the largest corporations the world had ever seen, was dissolved into thirty-eight subsidiaries, signaling one of the great muckraking triumphs of the Progressive Era.

In 1904, Upton Sinclair arrived in Chicago with a smile on his face and a goal: ‘Hello!’ he apocryphally introduced himself to Ernest Poole. ‘I’m Upton Sinclair! And I’ve come here to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the labour movement!’ Though The Jungle did eventually reached the same prominence that Uncle Tom’s Cabin did, Sinclair would have a much more difficult job than Harriet Beecher Stowe. Unlike slavery, the labour movement was an intangible and invisible injustice. Sinclair could not describe the chains, whips and cotton fields of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for there were no such symbols in the wage slavery of the Industrial Revolution. However, Sinclair was determined to express his work through fiction, as he thought that a fictional account would be much more appealing to the masses than other drab muckraking exposés. As historian Anthony Arthur notes: ‘Only through fiction could writers concerned about social problems and ideas hope to reach the widest audience. Not only was Sinclair’s methodology distinct, his motivations were not consistent with his predecessors’ either. Unlike Riis and Tarbell, who found inspiration in their personal experiences, Sinclair was an aspiring writer looking to capitalize on a literary trend. As said by Arthur: ‘There was little in his early life pointing towards the slaughterhouses of Chicago, much less his many later accomplishments.’ Before The Jungle, his only notable work was an autobiographical novel titled The Journal of Arthur Stirling, whose title character commits suicide. In 1904, Sinclair began his research, spending 6 months collecting data and observations under the guise of a laborer. Then, on Christmas morning of that same year, he began writing.

Two years later, in January of 1906, the first twenty-thousand copies of The Jungle were rolling off the press and into the hands of an eager public. Said the New York Evening World of Sinclair’s overnight success: ‘not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.’ Describing in gory detail the life of Jurgis, a European immigrant struggling for work in Chicago’s meat-packing industry, The Jungle brought the horrific sanitary and safety conditions in the factories to everyone, including the Supreme Court. The same year The Jungle was published, Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act, two landmark pieces of legislature that led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1930. As for Sinclair, he had accomplished his goal, and more than he could ever have imagined. With the help of the public, his book soared to the top of bestsellers lists around the world, and he spent the rest of his career capitalizing on the success of The Jungle, writing such social critiques as The Brass Check and The Lanney Budd Series. Upton Sinclair, the man who stumbled fortunately into the world of reform journalism, remains to this day one of the greatest and most renowned examples of muckraking in American history.

According to historians, the Progressive Era ended in 1920 with the ratification of the 18th amendment, which enforced prohibition in the United States. Until then, progressivism flourished as the prevailing ideal of the early 20th century. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt became the most successful third-party candidate in American history when he won 27.4% of the popular vote with his newly-formed Progressive Party in perhaps the highest point of the entire movement. In 1917, The United States entered World War I, unifying the country and undoing the stark contrast in social classes that had enabled the muckrakers’ success, signaling the end of an era. The US would never again have a man as rich as Rockefeller, nor would it have such a rapidly expanding working class, or a industrial revolution so explosive. The stories of Riis, Tarbell and Sinclair show us the social structure and offenses that facilitated the rise of reform journalism. As their habitat of inequitable power faded, muckraking disappeared as the support of the masses it once experienced was nowhere to be found. The rest of the 20th century would be written through the lenses of the Great Depression, the women’s and African American’s rights movements, and numerous global wars. As for the muckrakers, they had done their job. They had found a way to fight for their rights on the most unbalanced of playing fields, and their legacies, their articles, novels and journals, will never be forgotten.

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Stanley Ng

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