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

in how the food was being prepared. In his book, The Jungle, Sinclair describes in detail how the meat was handled. As one might expect, the people reacted with disgust and a sense of urgency to fix this problem, eventually leading to President Roosevelt to mount an investigation into the meat packing industry. The investigation confirmed that the essential truth in what Sinclair wrote about. One of the investigators wrote, “…Meat scraps were also being found being shoveled into receptacles from dirty floors where they were left to lie until again shoveled into barrels or into machines for chopping. These floors, it must be noted, were in most cases damp and soggy, in dark, ill-ventilated rooms, and the employees, in utter ignorance of cleanliness or danger to health expectorated at will upon them. In a word, we saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts, in all of which processes it was in the way of gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth, and the expectoration of tuberculous and other diseased workers.” After this, Roosevelt helped pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Through The Jungle, Sinclair helped point out another sad fact about big business; they were willing to do anything to make a profit, even if it meant gaining a perverse sense of integrity. In other words, they became corrupt.
When it comes to corruption, the muckrakers exposed two different aspects of it; corruption in politics and corruption in big business.

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

therefore would not be sterilized. And in revealing this corruption, it was revealed that there was an abuse of labor in order to make a profit.
The abuse of labor and, therefore the laborers, was a common practice at the time.

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.

But in 1905, just seven years later, the Supreme Court ruled exactly the opposite in a similar case, one judge going so far as to say that the state law itself was, and I quote, “We do not believe in the soundness of the views which uphold this law. On the contrary, we think that such a law as this,…is an illegal interference with the rights of individuals, both employers and employees…” The Supreme Court decided that the law in New York prohibiting bakers from working more than ten hours except in a case of emergency, had nothing to do with the safety of bakers because being a baker was not considered to be a very dangerous job. The inconsistencies in the government’s rulings at this time proved to people that in order to bring about this change in labor that they wanted; they would have to change the government. Eventually, though, the people got what they wanted; change. And because of that change, we now have things like worker’s compensation and other helpful programs to promote safety in our working environments.
While the muckrakers were very useful in exposing the faults in society at the time, they did not really do anything else. Theodore Roosevelt said, “Now it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake: and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes save his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil.” More often than not, the muckrakers only wrote about the problems in society; they never did anything about it. However, one cannot deny the usefulness of the muckrakers in regards to their feats in helping move along the Progressive Era.