Muckrakers were a group of writers in the early 1900’s who exposed social and political evils in the United States. They wrote about such problems as child labor, prostitution, racial discrimination, and corruption in business and government. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt labeled them muckrakers because he felt they were concerned only with turning up filth. But these writers increased public awareness of social problems and forced government and business to work to solve them.
Nearly all the muckrakers were journalists who wrote for inexpensive monthly magazines, including American Magazine, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Everybody’s Magazine, and McClure’s Magazine. Some historians and novelists were also called muckrakers.
Muckraking gained much support from the public after McClure’s published three exposes in 1903. The articles included investigations of corrupt city government by Lincoln Steffens and of the Standard Oil Company by Ida M. Tarbell. Many articles by muckrakers later appeared as books, including The Shame of the Cities (1904) by Steffens and History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) by Tarbell. Other prominent muckrakers were Samuel Hopkins Adams, Ray Stannard Baker, Charles E. Russell, and Upton Sinclair.
The muckrakers helped prepare the way for many reforms in the United States. Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906) exposed unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry and led to the nation’s first pure food laws. Other reforms included the direct election of U.S. senators and greater government regulation of business. Muckraking disappeared by about 1912, partly because the public lost interest.
