Essay On Muckrakers

Andrew Truty 5 paragraph essay rough draft period 5 The muckrakers of the Progressive Era helped instill a new social awareness in the people of their time period. They did this by writing about the problems in big businesses, the government, etc. People like John Spargo and Upton Sinclaire wrote books that would depict these problems and would send the people into a kind of rush to fix all of the things that had come out of the Industrial Age. The problems that they helped bring attention to that ultimately got fixed include such things as corruption (both political and in the big business), the adulteration of food, and the exploitation of labor, among many others. Muckrakers like Sinclair also helped expose some of the health issues

The corruption in politics was very evident in places like New York and Philadelphia. New York had Tammany Hall and Philadelphia had a very corrupt voting system. In his collected articles in the form a book entitled The Shame of the Cities, California-born journalist Lincoln Steffens writes, “The machine controls the whole process of voting, and practices fraud at every stage.” He is writing about Philadelphia and the corruption in the voting process. Steffens goes on to describe how the voting system is corrupt, like, “The assessor pads the list with the names of dead dogs, children, and non-existent persons.” He later mentions one Rudolph Blankenburg, who sent out letters to everyone on the list before hand and 63% of them were returned as ‘not at,’ ‘removed’, ‘deceased’, etc. The muckrakers also helped expose the corruption in big businesses. Upton Sinclaire, a famous socialist muckraker who wrote the book The Jungle, wrote about how unsanitary the meat packing process was and mentioned how when the superintendents were questioned about the conditions, they merely stated and I quote from The Jungle, “…the meat would after wards be cooked and that this sterilization would prevent any danger from its use.” Sinclair goes on to say that statement was not wholly true as some of the meat would be used as smoked products, such as sausage, and

John Spargo wrote about child laborers in the coal mines in his book The Bitter Cry of the Children. At one point, Spargo says, “I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve-year-old noy was doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day…I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few minutes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed. I could not do this workand live, but…boys of ten and twelve years…doing it for fifty to sixty cents a day.” Spargo, a full grown man, could not do the work of a ten or twelve-year-old boy. Unfortunately, because of the work that the children did, they often developed health problems and deformities. And it was perfectly legal for the big businesses like the coal industry to do this. There were no laws prohibiting it and that is the way the businesses liked it. After Spargo’s book, there was an outrage among the people. The people wanted to change the laws to make that sort of thing illegal and so they turned to the government. Now, in 1898, a case had gone before the Supreme Court about a state law prohibiting miners in Utah working for more than eight hours a day and the Supreme Court upheld the state law.