Muckrakers Book Report

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Muckrakers were normal people who made a big difference in American society. During the progressive era of history, investigative journalists and authors called muckrakers brought facts that corporations didn’t want the public to know to light. A few of these were Ida Tarbell, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffans. Ida M. Tarbell was a woman whose early life was impacted by the standard oil monopoly. Ida grew up in the oil rich region of northern Pennsylvania, and as such, her father became an oil refiner. When Standard oil worked with the railroads to monopolize on the production and transport of said oil, her father refused to sell his company, which made life difficult for him and his family. Ida started her journalism …show more content…

In his book How The Other Half Lives Riis opens by saying “Long ago it was said ‘one half of the world does not care how the other half lives.’ This was true then. It did not know because it did not care”. In that same paragraph, he claimed that “the whole world has its hands full answering for its old ignorance. He continues to describe the slums of new York. Riis said that “by far the largest part – eighty percent, at least – of crimes against property and against the person are perpetrated by individuals who have either lost connection with home life, or never had an, or whose homes had ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent and desirable to afford what are regarded as ordinary, wholesome influences of home and family”. “The fifteen thousand tenement houses that were the despair of the sanitarian in the past generation have swelled to thirty-seven thousand, and more than twelve thousand persons call them home.” The tenents complained about mistreatment. “The complaint was universal among tenents that they were uncared for, and that the only answer to their requests to have the place put in order and by repairs and necessary improvements was that they must pay their rent or leave”. “The agent’s advice was simple but emphatic: Collect the rent in advance or, failing, evict the

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