Muckrakers :: essays research papers

Muckrakers were early twentieth-century reformers whose      1 perpetration was to look for and uncover political and business corruption. The term muckraker, which referred to the "man with a muckrake" in John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress, was first used in a pejorative sense by Theodore Roosevelt, whose opinion of the muckrakers was that they were biased and overreacting. The movement began well-nigh 1902 and died down by 1917. Despite its brief duration, however, it had a significant have-to doe with on the political, commercial, and even literary climate of the period.                               2Many commonplace magazines featured articles whose purpose was      3to expose corruption. Some of these break periodicals include The Arena, Everybodys, The Independent, and McClures. Lincoln Steffens, managing editor of McClures (and later associate editor of American snip and Everybodys), was an important leader of the muckraking movement. Some of his exposs were collected in his 1904 book The Shame of the Cities and in two other volumes, and his 1931 autobiography in any case discusses the corruption he uncovered and the development of the muckraking movement. Ida Tarbell, another famous muckraker, wrote a number of articles for McClures, some of which were gathered in her 1904 book The recital of the Standard Oil Company.Muckraking appeared in fiction as well. David graham Phillips,     4who began his career as a newspaperman, went on to write muckraking magazine articles and eventually novels about contemporary economic, political, and social problems such as insurance scandals, state and municipal corruption, shady Wall Street dealings, spend life, and womens emancipation.     Perhaps the best-known muckraking novel was Upton Sinclairs  &nb sp   5The Jungle, the 1906 expos of the Chicago meatpacking industry. The novel focuses on an immigrant family and sympathetically and realistically describes their struggles with loan sharks and others who take good of their innocence. More importantly, Sinclair graphically describes the brutal working conditions of those who find work in the stockyards. Sinclairs description of the main characters