Muckrakers :: essays research papers

Muckrakers were early twentieth-century reformers whose      1mission was to flavour for and uncover political and business turpitude. The term exposer, which referred to the "man with a muckrake" in John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress, was first used in a dislogistic sense by Theodore Roosevelt, whose opinion of the muckrakers was that they were biased and overreacting. The movement began about 1902 and died push down by 1917. Despite its brief duration, however, it had a significant impact on the political, commercial, and even literary climate of the period.                               2Many popular clippings have articles whose purpose was      3to expose corruption. Some of these muckraking periodicals included The Arena, Everybodys, The Independent, and McClures. capital of Nebraska Steffens, managing editor of McClures (and later associate editor of American Magazine and Everybodys), was an fundamental leader of the muckraking movement. Some of his exposs were collected in his 1904 take hold The Shame of the Cities and in two other volumes, and his 1931 autobiography also discusses the corruption he uncovered and the development of the muckraking movement. Ida Tarbell, another noted muckraker, wrote a number of articles for McClures, some of which were gathered in her 1904 book The History of the bar 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 legends about contemporary economic, political, and social problems such as indemnification scandals, state and municipal corruption, shady Wall Street dealings, slum life, and womens emancipation.      perhaps the best-known muckraking novel was Upton Sinclairs       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 advantage of their innocence. more(prenominal) importantly, Sinclair graphically describes the brutal working conditions of those who find work in the stockyards. Sinclairs interpretation of the main characters