# Muckraking **Muckraking** was the aggressive, evidence-based investigative journalism that flourished in American mass-circulation magazines during the [[Progressive Era]], roughly 1902–1912, exposing monopoly, municipal corruption, adulterated food and bought legislators. It matters to the KB as the origin case for accountability journalism — proof that sustained reporting could break the information advantage of concentrated wealth and push law onto the books — and as the first time a president tried to recast the press's watchdog function as something sordid. ## McClure's, January 1903 The movement is usually dated to the January 1903 issue of *[[McClure's Magazine]]*, which ran three investigations side by side: an installment of [[Ida Tarbell]]'s *[[The History of the Standard Oil Company]]*, [[Lincoln Steffens]]'s "The Shame of Minneapolis," and Ray Stannard Baker's labor piece "The Right to Work." Publisher S. S. McClure's editorial tied them together as one story of lawlessness running through business, city government and labor alike. ## The name [[Theodore Roosevelt]] supplied the label in a speech on April 14, 1906, at the dedication of the new House office building. He borrowed the Man with the Muck-rake from Bunyan's *Pilgrim's Progress* — a figure so intent on raking filth that he never looked up. Roosevelt endorsed "relentless exposure" of wrongdoing provided it was "absolutely truthful," but warned against writers who saw only the muck. The speech was widely read as a rebuke to David Graham Phillips's "The Treason of the Senate," which began in *Cosmopolitan* in 1906. Journalists took the insult as a badge. ## What it produced | Work | Years | Result | |---|---|---| | Tarbell, Standard Oil series | 1902–04 | Evidence base for the case that ended in the [[Standard Oil Breakup]] (1911) | | Steffens, *The Shame of the Cities* | 1902–04 | Template for municipal-corruption reporting | | Samuel Hopkins Adams, "The Great American Fraud" | 1905 | Exposed patent-medicine fraud | | [[Upton Sinclair]], *The Jungle* | 1905–06 | Meatpacking revulsion; [[Pure Food and Drug Act]] and Meat Inspection Act signed June 30, 1906 | | Phillips, "The Treason of the Senate" | 1906 | Fed the drive for direct election of senators ([[Seventeenth Amendment]]) | Sinclair had written *The Jungle* to win readers to socialism; his own verdict was that he "aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." [[Ida B. Wells]]'s earlier anti-lynching reporting is often grouped with the movement as its most dangerous precursor. ## Decline and descendants The magazine wave faded within a decade. The McClure's staff split in 1906, when Tarbell, Steffens and Baker left to run *The American Magazine*; influence waned under Taft; and advertiser pressure bankrupted some titles by the 1910s. [[Walter Lippmann]] began his career researching for Steffens before turning skeptical of the mass public the muckrakers wrote for. The method outlived the magazines. Its line runs through the [[Pentagon Papers]] and Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate reporting in *[[All the President's Men]]* to nonprofit and consortium investigations such as [[ProPublica]] and the [[ICIJ]]'s [[Panama Papers]] — the accountability-journalism tradition catalogued in the [[Writers]] ecosystem, and the function that "[[Enemy of the People]]" rhetoric is built to delegitimize. ## See Also - [[Ida Tarbell]] · [[Lincoln Steffens]] · [[Upton Sinclair]] · [[Ida B. Wells]] · [[McClure's Magazine]] · [[Standard Oil]] · [[Progressive Era]] · [[Antitrust]] · [[Writers]]