20th Century Blog

Muckrakers often wrote about the wretchedness of urban life. The muckrakers wrote about poverty and they showed society as big business. They played a significant role in the social justice movements for reform and the campaigns to clean up cities. They reported and publicized the dark corners of American society in a sensational way.

The period from 1700-1802 saw an increase in the kind of reporting that would come to be called “muckraking”. The term “muckraker” was first used in a speech on April 14, 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt: “In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; Who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor”.

Upton Sinclair, Jr wrote over 90 books in many styles. Sinclair was defeated by Frank F. Merriam in 1934 when he ran for governor of California and after this defeat, he largely abandoned politics to return to writing. However this race in 1934 became known as the first race to use modern campaign techniques like motion pictures. He became very popular in the first half of the 20th century, gaining particular fame for his 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. The book dealt with conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that partly contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and Packing Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906.

Ida Minera Tarbell was an America teacher, author and journalist. She was known as one of the leading “muckrakers’ of her day which helped to create the idea of “investigative journalism”.