What was muckraking

Honestly, most of the posts and tweets that matter trace their way back to an ink-stained finger on some muckraker somewhere. Muckraker Roberto Saviano summed it up perfectly last week when he spoke at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. Instead, the muckraker only seemed to grow bolder and more dangerous with his every revelation. It was a relief not to be accepted only as Everett the Muckraker , as a professional reformer, as one holier than others.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Steffens, Lincoln. Pharmacy in History The authors discuss the impact of muckrakers, such as Edward Bok whose coverage of patent medicines led to the Food and Drug Act. Not only did the journalism on the subject of ineffective and dangerous medicine lead to new laws in the United States, the muckraking tactics were also used by journalists in the United Kingdom and in Europe.

Wilson, Harold S. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Wilson describes the major stories written by the muckrakers as well as their career trajectories, political beliefs, and their relationships to each other and to the magazines for which they worked. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page.

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I recall vividly meeting Charles Edward Russell and asking him what he had got out of it all. He was the most earnest, emotional, and gifted of the muckrakers. There was something of the martyr in him; he had given up better jobs to go forth, rake in hand, to show things up; and he wanted them to be changed.

His face looked as if he had suffered from the facts he saw and reported. Well, on Monday afternoon the mob began to gather. At first it was an absurd, ineffectual crowd, made up largely of lawless boys of sixteen to twenty - a pronounced feature of every mob - with a wide fringe of more respectable citizens, their hands in their pockets and no convictions in their souls, looking on curiously, helplessly. They gathered hooting around the jail, cowardly, at first, as all mobs are, but growing bolder as darkness came on and no move was made to check them.

The murder of Collis was not a horrible, soul-rending crime like that at Statesboro, Georgia; these men in the mob were not personal friends of the murdered man; it was a mob from the back rooms of the swarming saloons of Springfield; and it included also the sort of idle boys "who hang around cigar stores," as one observer told me.

The newspaper reports are fond of describing lynching mobs as "made up of the foremost citizens of the town. A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes. And no official in direct authority in Springfield that evening, apparently, had so much as an ounce of grit within him. The sheriff came out and made a weak speech in which he said he "didn't want to hurt anybody. The chief of police sent eighteen men to the jail but did not go near himself.

All of these policemen undoubtedly sympathized with the mob in its efforts to get at the slayer of their brother officer; at least, they did nothing effective to prevent the lynching. An appeal was made to the Mayor to order out the engine companies that water might be turned on the mob.

He said he didn't like to; the hose might be cut! The local militia company was called to its barracks, but the officer in charge hesitated, vacillated, doubted his authority, and objected finally because he had no ammunition except Krag-Jorgenson cartridges, which, if fired into a mob, would kill too many people! The soldiers did not stir that night from the safe and comfortable precincts of their armory.

A sort of dry rot, a moral paralysis, seems to strike the administrators of law in a town like Springfield. What can be expected of officers who are not accustomed to enforce the law, or of a people not accustomed to obey it - or who make reservations and exceptions when they do enforce it or obey it?

When the sheriff made his speech to the mob, urging them to let the law take its course they jeered him. The law! When, in the past, had the law taken its proper course in dark County? Someone shouted, referring to Dixon:.