Articles written by muckrakers led to many reforms for industrial workers during the gilded age. A main example of this was The Meatpacking Jungle written by Upton Sinclair. As an avowed socialist, Sinclair hoped to illustrate the horrible effects of capitalism on workers in the Chicago meatpacking industry. His bone-chilling account, the jungle, detailed workers sacrificing their fingers and nails by working with acid, losing limbs, catching diseases, and toiling long hours in cold, cramped conditions. Even though he hoped that his accounts would cause a public outcry that would give workers more rights, the population was focused on something entirely different. In his book, he also talked about how terribly the food was handled in these factories. Spoiled meat was covered with chemicals to hide the smell. Skin, hair, stomach, ears, and nose were ground up and packaged as head cheese. Rats climbed over warehouse meat, leaving piles of excrement behind. The anger at these unsanitary acts of the food industry forced Roosevelt to act, getting congress to sign the pure food and drug act and the meat inspection act into law to curb the sickening abuses that were happening in the industry.Even though we don’t hear the term muckraker anymore, it is still at large in our daily lives under the term “investigative reporting”. The tradition of this continued strong all the way up to World War II where it was then suppressed by the government via censorship laws. As of today, we are constantly deluged with stories of scandal and corruption making the headlines and getting the most attention. However, unlike in the past, the corrupt systems that are critiqued do not collapse. The “public” sees, but does not act, except for that sturdy minority of good folks who continue the muckraking tradition. Large numbers of people seem to accept corruption as inevitable. “They are all crooks,” is the common ideology , and political apathy is widespread. If any lesson is to be drawn from the history of the muckrakers, it is that the reforms they achieved have always rested on fragile ground. Today many reforms are in danger of being reversed by the very person elected to do the housecleaning. Raking the muck is clearly insufficient. It must be linked to a movement for fundamental change.
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I learned a lot when i was reading this post. I felt an interesting thing to add would be the actual solutions to the problems proposed by muckrakers. I also found it very interesting that these muckrakers were able to influence popular opinion so much as to force the President's hand, and I think more examples of elaboration on this subject would be cool. In general, I thought this article was very well written. Well Done!
ReplyDeleteI thought it was very interesting how the term muckraking came from President Roosevelt himself. Your post gave me a better insight to the affects that muckrakers had on the public back in the 19th century compared to how they affects of muckrakers today. It was interesting how books like "The Jungle" had a prominent effect on peoples views of the meat industry while when we see corruption in the newspaper today, we tend to accept it. Your post made me interested in searching more about muckrakers in the 21st century. I found that muckraking today is actually in demise as muckrakers could not keep up with the pace of the readers. That is, muckrakers based there findings in monthly magazines; however, now, most readers are not willing to wait a month in order to get breaking news.
ReplyDeletehttps://niemanreports.org/articles/where-are-muckraking-journalists-today/