ACHIEVING REFORM BY MUCKRAKING
DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, THE American economy experienced an unprecedented orgy of expansion. Propelled by new inventions that made American offices and factories the most efficient operations in the history of the world, business and industry raced into the future at breakneck speed. Production figures doubled and redoubled, foreign exports soared, and the number of factories boggled the mind. America, fueled by unbridled genius and energy, established itself as the nation of the future.
In politics, the Republican Party charged mightily onward to use the country’s abundant resources, human as well as material, to transform the United States into an industrial giant, while protecting American business from foreign interference. Prosperity lay in adopting laissez-faire policies—which often meant adopting no policies whatsoever—while building more railroads, digging more mines, and increasing factory production by finding a new man who worked faster than the previous one.
At the same time, however, the country had evolved into one that the Founding Fathers wouldn’t have claimed. For the world’s democratic stronghold had been “let go,” turned into a nation of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation. Though industrialists and investors made enormous profits, the economic boom largely bypassed the common man. In particular, the throngs of new immigrants, drawn by the radiance of America’s promise, were crowded into dark factories and foul slums. The nation founded on the bedrock concept of equality had deteriorated into a society dominated by a few gluttonously rich robber barons who feasted on life’s pleasures while the teeming masses struggled to stave off starvation. The pungent odor of corruption had spread into politics as well; in government at all levels, the wholesale flouting of laws and the sprawling spoils systems rivaled those of the infamous Boss Tweed in New York some thirty years earlier.
But then, at the moment of greatest need, the Fourth Estate stepped into the fray. Armed with literary talent and investigative skill, reform-minded journalists boldly accused the nation of auctioning off its birthright for private gain. These progressive warriors exposed a stunning variety of crimes against democracy. They reported the rampant misdeeds of greedy industrialists and grafting politicians—from the local level all the way to the US Senate—to show how the scofflaws had climbed to success by being ruthless and lawless. Other reporters revealed the vast differences between the fraudulent claims of patent medicines and the actual contents of the products, and still others exposed the unsanitary techniques used in preparing foods.
To the delight of their readers, the reporters provoked political, industrial, and social change by describing the sordid details to create a new style of magazine writing that was gripping—office clerks and shop girls never knew business and politics could be so interesting. Fortunately for those relatively low-paid workers, technological advances in printing and paper production allowed magazines to lower their prices to an affordable level. Also contributing to the rise of the magazine as America’s first truly national medium were the country’s rapid growth—the population doubled between 1880 and 1900—and the advent of advertising as an institution standing on the shoulders of the plethora of new products and new competition. Responding to these forces, popular magazines vied for attention with vivid and compelling exposés. In the early years of the new century, a dozen national publications boasted a combined monthly circulation of 3 million.1
The term that ultimately came to define this journalistic phenomenon was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt, who led the larger reform movement that the journalists helped to spark. During the Progressive Era, government attempted to reassert its control of business through myriad new agencies and regulations. The youthful and buoyant Roosevelt supported journalistic reform, but, in one volatile moment, he lashed out at the crusaders for finding nothing good about society but looking constantly at the negative elements—as if raking muck. The epithet took hold, and the golden age of reform journalism became known as muckraking.2
The contributions that progressive journalists made to this country in the early twentieth century established a high-water mark that remains unsurpassed—in both breadth and intensity—in the epic drama of how the news media have shaped American history.
Attacking Municipal Corruption
Lincoln Steffens, an intellectual who wore spectacles and a string tie, is widely acknowledged as the first muckraker. After studying at the finest universities in the United States and Europe, Steffens joined the New York Evening Post, covering Wall Street and city police. Ten years later, in 1902, he switched to McClure’s, the greatest of the muckraking journals.
Steffens then undertook the project that would make him a journalistic icon—investigating the state of municipal government in the United States. For three years, he visited the country’s largest cities to conduct detailed studies, first digging through public documents and then interviewing city officials.
He designed his first article, “Tweed Days in St. Louis,” as a wake-up call to alert the American public to the immorality driving city officials throughout the country. Steffens’s exposé of St. Louis politics and government reported that city aldermen had crafted a system of governance based on bribery and corruption. In the October 1902 article, Steffens said of St. Louis, “Taking but slight and always selfish interest in the public councils, the big men misused politics.” He went on to describe how the wrongdoing spread, writing, “The riff-raff, catching the smell of corruption, rushed into the Municipal Assembly, drove out the remaining respectable men, and sold the city—its streets, its wharves, its markets, and all that it had—to the now greedy business men and bribers.” Steffens ended with a bitter tone, “When the leading men began to devour their own city, the herd rushed into the trough and fed also.”3
Steffens did more than expose. As a result of his blockbuster article, St. Louis District Attorney Joseph Folk gained the public support he needed to prosecute dozens of city officials for a variety of offenses, from stuffing the ballot box to padding contracts. Folk was so successful, in fact, that in 1904 he was elected governor of Missouri. And all the time he continued to credit Steffens for building the popular support that allowed him to reform the city and then the state government.4
After publishing the St. Louis article, Steffens moved on to other cities, creating blockbuster articles that exposed wrongdoing in Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. Steffens then moved on to state governments, reporting the illegal practices among government officials in Missouri, Illinois, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.5
Contemporary newspapers lauded Steffens’s series. The St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota praised the reporter’s “keen deductions,” and the Emporia Gazette in Kansas wrote, “Mr. Steffens has made an important step in the scientific study of government in America. This work should be in every social and economic library, for it is a work of real scientific importance.”6
The most tangible legacy of Steffens’s journalistic work, published as a book titled The Shame of the Cities, was that it helped usher in the city-manager form of government. After Steffens revealed the corruption that inevitably occurred when elected politicians ran local government, cities such as Toledo, Cleveland, and Detroit opted to hire professional administrators who had training and experience in operating large organizations. And these men, in turn, reduced the political spoils system by requiring that job applicants possess formal credentials and pass standardized tests.7
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Busting the Trusts
S. S. McClure, the Irish immigrant who founded the leading muckraking magazine, decided to tackle the enormous power of corporations by focusing on a single trust and tracing its history, leaders, and inner workings. For his example, McClure chose Standard Oil, which was supplying an astounding 90 percent of the oil to light American homes and power American factories. For the reporter, he selected a serious-minded woman who looked like a schoolmistress.
Born in the oil region of northwestern Pennsylvania, Ida Tarbell grew up surrounded by derricks, tanks, and pipelines, and her father and brother earned their livelihoods in refining. After receiving her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Tarbell wrote for Chautauquan magazine on such progressive subjects as education and public health. She later specialized in biographies, writing a book about a female leader of the French Revolution and articles on Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln.
In the first installment of her monumental series “History of the Standard Oil Company,” which began in the November 1902 issue of McClure’s, Tarbell described how the trust had achieved its position through John D. Rockefeller’s shrewd and ruthless approach to competition. She revealed that he’d created a system of secret—and illegal—agreements with selected railroads to give him preferential rates. Under the contracts, Rockefeller transported his oil exclusively via those railroads in exchange for rates equal to half what his competitors paid. The discount made it impossible for other companies to compete with Standard Oil, driving the smaller operations out of business.8
Though the articles were packed with financial information, Tarbell’s abundant anecdotes made compelling reading. She told, for example, of a Cleveland refinery owner whose bereaved widow went to Rockefeller and begged him for financial advice so she could feed her three children. Rockefeller said he’d help her and then paid her $79,000 for a refinery worth $200,000. In another article, Tarbell described how Standard Oil officials paid the chief mechanic at a competing refinery to stoke the fire in a tank to such a high temperature that the safety valve blew off and thousands of barrels of oil were lost. She also told how Rockefeller’s henchmen had paid the most valued employee of a competing East Coast refinery to move to California, forcing the company out of business.9
Publications throughout the country lauded Tarbell’s work. The Chicago Inter Ocean called her series “absorbing,” and the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote, “This series of impartial narration has attracted wide attention, not only for the subject-matter, but for the vividness with which the light is thrown upon one of the most corroding ulcers of modern times.”10
Enthusiasm among readers was so great that the series, initially scheduled for three articles, was expanded to eighteen. By the time the stories ended in October 1904, Tarbell was being hailed as one of the most courageous women in American history—“a modern-day Joan of Arc,” the Terror of the Trusts, and the Queen of the Muckrakers.
Tarbell’s series, which was credited with boosting McClure’s circulation from 350,000 to 500,000, had profound impact on public policy. The first tangible result came in 1906 when Congress passed the Hepburn Act, making the penalties for preferential arrangements by railroads so severe that the practice quickly ceased. Then, after federal grand juries indicted Standard Oil on fraud charges, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that Standard Oil was violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The High Court then forced the mammoth monopoly to dissolve to form thirty-eight smaller companies.11
Although Rockefeller avoided going to jail, the series damaged his image so severely that he hired the country’s first publicity man, Ivy Lee, to improve his tarnished reputation. When the most renowned of the robber barons began making huge contributions to charities, the public again credited Tarbell, thanking her for opening the Rockefeller purse to the common good.
Most important, the series fulfilled McClure’s goal of showing the public not only that many big businesses were corrupt but also that the Fourth Estate could force them to abide by the law. Tarbell’s journalistic triumph encouraged other muckrakers to investigate other monopolies. McClure’s and The Arena exposed the railroads, and Cosmopolitan tackled the telephone and telegraph companies. Hampton’s focused on the mining and sugar trusts, Collier’s on liquor interests, Everybody’s on the beef trust.12
Awakening the Public to Dangerous Foods and Drugs
Another issue that attracted the attention of muckraking journalists was the poor quality of the food and medicine America was consuming. Because refrigerated railroad cars were now speeding perishable products hundreds of miles, the public was consuming, for the first time, food preservatives with such strange names as “borax” and “benzoate.” Drugs were of concern as well. The health field was overrun with quacks who were selling patent medicines to the American public to the tune of $100 million a year. Some products promised to cure cancer, others to curb addiction to tobacco, and still others to enlarge female breasts. Most users had no idea that many soothing syrups contained alcohol or were laced with morphine. In reality, the widely used products were destroying the nation’s health while transforming unsuspecting men, women, and children into drug addicts.
The most spectacular assault on the food industry began after the newspaper Appeal to Reason made a tantalizing offer to an idealistic young writer named Upton Sinclair. The paper would pay him $500 to live among Chicago stockyard workers while writing a series of articles describing the conditions he found there. Sinclair accepted the Socialist weekly’s offer and spent seven weeks talking with meatpacking workers and their families, while also interviewing plant managers, doctors, lawyers, and social workers.
After the first installment appeared in February 1905, it was clear that the food industry would never be the same. For Sinclair wrote his series, “The Jungle,” with the fire of a man who’d witnessed human suffering at its most base level. In one shocking revelation, Sinclair reported that exhausted workers sometimes fell into the huge vats where meat was being canned—which meant that consumers were unknowingly eating human flesh. Sinclair wrote, “For the men who worked in tankrooms full of steam, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting. Sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world.”13
Some critics argued that Sinclair’s series wasn’t muckraking because it was written as fiction, but the author defended his work as journalism because it was based on intensive reporting. Sinclair said, “‘The Jungle’ will stand the severest test—it is as authoritative as if it were a statistical compilation.” Readers agreed with Sinclair rather than his critics, as have the generations of students who’ve read the series in book form. In one history of the muckrakers, Louis Filler wrote, “‘The Jungle,’ from the moment it began to appear in the Appeal, was recognizably the literary sensation of the time.”14
One reader was President Roosevelt. After completing the series, he sent his own agents to Chicago to confirm what Sinclair had written. And confirm they did. The agents’ words weren’t as graceful as Sinclair’s, but they told a strikingly similar story.15
The leader of the muckraking campaign against drugs was Ladies’ Home Journal. Editor Edward Bok fired the first salvo in 1904 by urging readers to boycott patent medicines. “A mother who would hold up her hands in holy horror at the thought of her child drinking a glass of beer, which contains from two to five per cent alcohol, gives to that child with her own hands a patent medicine that contains from seventeen to forty-four per cent alcohol—to say nothing of opium and cocaine!”16
Among the other magazines joining the crusade was Collier’s, which boldly announced it would no longer accept ads from patent medicine companies. This was a daring step for any magazine to take, as publications of the era bulged with page after page of ads promoting these products and providing them with a major source of revenue. Nevertheless, the list of magazines that ultimately were willing to make the sacrifice included not only Collier’s and Ladies’ Home Journal but also McClure’s, Good Housekeeping, the Saturday Evening Post, and Everybody’s. The decision had serious financial consequences. A year after Collier’s purged patent medicine ads from its pages, the magazine announced, “We spoke out about patent medicines, and dropped $80,000 in a year.”17
Like Harper’s Weekly during its campaign against Boss Tweed, Collier’s recognized the power of images. The magazine printed a full-page cartoon titled “Death’s Laboratory” that became a symbol of the hollow promises and deadly results of drug fraud. Dominating the drawing was a skull branded with the words “The Patent Medicine Trust—Palatable Poison for the Poor.” The skull’s teeth were bottles of patent medicine, and its cheeks were bags of money. Papers strewn in front of the skull read “Slow Poison for Little Children” and “Baby’s Soothing Syrup—Opium and Laudanum.”18
By 1906, Ladies’ Home Journal believed the muckrakers had raised public awareness to the point that it could take proactive measures. Bok printed “An Act to Regulate the Manufacture and Sale of ‘Patent’ Medicines,” urging readers to clip out the simulated bill and send it to their congressmen in Washington. The editor who’d initiated the crusade two years earlier now insisted, “This and other magazines have done their parts: the remedy of the fearful evil they have laid bare is in the hands of the people: in your hands. The question is: Will you, now, do your part?”19
Readers flooded Washington with thousands of copies of the sample bill along with letters demanding that the government protect consumers from unsafe drugs. In his annual message to Congress, President Roosevelt advocated a law regulating food as well as drugs. Senators then introduced such legislation, along with a bill requiring inspection of meat. Propelled by public indignation, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, requiring medicines to be analyzed and approved by the Department of Agriculture, and the Meat Inspection Act, requiring meat to be examined before it was sold. Respected publications such as the New York Times joined prominent historians in calling the laws direct products of muckraking.20
Exposing “Treason” in the US Senate
In the early years of the twentieth century, the upper house of Congress was widely known as the most reactionary body in America. Elected by state legislatures rather than directly by the people, senators were political puppets who were bought and paid for by Standard Oil and other corporations driving the national economy.
As muckraking rose to its zenith, the conservative nature of the Senate—widely known as the “millionaire’s club”—stood in stark contrast to the reform movement sweeping the country. The senators opposed each and every initiative the muckrakers championed. Only when public sentiment grew to leviathan proportions—as when the muckrakers agitated for regulation of patent medicines—did progressive measures break through the sturdy walls of the Senate.21
The man who ultimately challenged this institution was no minion himself. William Randolph Hearst, the bad boy of American journalism, bought Cosmopolitan magazine in 1906 and poured money into it. To conduct his most important exposé, Hearst chose a writer named David Graham Phillips.
The series debuted in March 1906, beginning, “The treason of the Senate! Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous.”22
That first article focused on New York’s senators. Chauncey M. Depew was described as the “archetype of the sleek, self-satisfied American opportunist in politics” and accused of receiving $50,000 a year from dozens of corporations in return for political favors. Of Thomas Collier Platt, the story said he had a “long and unbroken record of treachery to the people in legislation of privilege and plunder.”23
The charges reverberated throughout the country, and the series was a runaway success. “Glory Hallelujah!” cried one letter praising Cosmopolitan’s courage and service to the public. The writer continued, “You have found a David who is able and willing to attack this Goliath of a Senate.”24
In later installments, Phillips documented how senator after senator—Arthur Pue Gorman of Maryland, Joseph Weldon Bailey of Texas, Stephen Benton Elkins of West Virginia—played leading roles in an enormous conspiracy to circumvent the needs of the people. Phillips eventually documented that corporations controlled seventy-five of the ninety senators.25
The series provoked vehement protests and denunciations from the accused. Hearst and Phillips both received hundreds of threatening letters and were repeatedly castigated on the Senate floor. But “The Treason of the Senate” continued, as did public interest. In June, Cosmopolitan boasted that its circulation had more than doubled since the series had begun three months earlier, jumping from 200,000 to 450,000.26
Phillips wasn’t satisfied, though, simply to create a sensation or ensure the defeat of individual men, as he argued that the larger problem was senators being selected by their state legislatures. And then, in the last of his nine articles, he proposed a solution: the voters of each state should elect senators directly.27
“The Treason of the Senate” demolished the walls that previously had seemed impossible to penetrate. A dozen senators were defeated in 1906, more in 1908 and 1910. By 1912, all seventy-five of the senators Phillips had exposed were gone. The final triumph in the crusade came in 1913 when a constitutional amendment transferred the election of senators from state legislatures to the American people. Political observers cited Phillips’s stunning series as the catalyst for that extraordinary reform.28
Muckraking: An Unparalleled Legacy
In synthesizing the era of reform concentrated in the first dozen years of the twentieth century, historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “Aggressive and sensational measures were required to awaken the nation from its lethargy and to rejuvenate the old spirit of American democracy. To this mission a new generation of Americans dedicated themselves. The protest first found expression through the popular magazines.”29
Schlesinger is one of many scholars of the Progressive Era to praise the muckrakers for their leading role in helping the nation recover from a dark period in its history. As these scholars have pointed out, the journalists spearheaded the campaign of investigation and agitation that ultimately set the nation on a more admirable course as it marched boldly into the twentieth century. Some historians have focused on documenting the governmental reforms rightly credited to the crusading journalists; Arthur and Lila Weinberg wrote, “Muckraking was directly responsible for such initiatives as the Pure Food and Drug Act, direct election of senators, and city and state reform.” Others have lauded the seminal impact that Ida Tarbell and her fellow trustbusters had on American business; C. C. Regier wrote, “The whole tone of business in the United States was raised because of the persistent exposures of corruption and injustice.” Still others have made more sweeping observations about the muckraking phenomenon; Vernon Parrington described the muckraking era as “a time of brisk housecleaning that searched out old cobwebs and disturbed the dust that lay thick on the antiquated furniture.”30
The muckrakers’ reform impulse ultimately triggered a list of specific activities that was both long and broad. In city after city, corrupt municipal officials were replaced with men and women with professional training and experience. John D. Rockefeller’s vice grip on the oil industry was broken, and then other trusts dominating the railroad, mining, liquor, sugar, and beef industries were busted. The public was made aware of the fraudulent claims and harmful ingredients of food and patent medicines, prompting federal legislation to protect consumers. Likewise, the unscrupulous profiteering in the US Senate was revealed, and a constitutional amendment was enacted to reform that body.
Despite this formidable list of achievements, a truly comprehensive roll call of reform-oriented journalism would be longer still. It would include Everybody’s exposés of the inner workings of the stock market and fraud among life insurance companies, Collier’s assault on the autocratic leaders of the House of Representatives, and American Magazine’s denunciation of society’s shameful treatment of African Americans.31
For a final appraisal of this splendid chapter in the evolution of the news media’s relationship to American history, it may be best to return to Schlesinger’s concluding comments about muckraking. The historian said the journalistic phenomenon played a profoundly important role in saving democracy from the clutches of the robber barons and returning it to the common people who rightly governed America. “The most beneficial effect of the literature of protest was the moral awakening of the masses,” Schlesinger said. “In growing numbers they gave their support to a new group of political leaders who fought to restore government to the people.”32
