Ben Mandel, Zach Blair and Nurlan Herburger

Why Have An Exhibit On Muckrakers? Combated major issues within the U.S. Corrupt city bosses Overcrowded, unsanitary and unsafe housing and working conditions. Unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry Took serious risks Pioneered investigative journalism

Muckrakers were reform-minded journalists who wrote largely for popular magazines, continued a tradition of investigative journalism reporting, and emerged in the United States after 1900 and continued to be influential until World War I

They used a combination of advertising boycotts, dirty tricks and patriotism, the movement, associated with the Progressive Era in the United States.

Definition: a writer who investigates and publishes truthful reports to perform an auditing or watchdog function. In contemporary use, the term describes either a journalist who writes in the adversarial or alternative tradition or a non-journalist whose purpose in publication is to advocate reform and change

More About Muckrakers Muckrakers took their name from a term first used by President Theodore Roosevelt. Muckrakers exposed business and government corruption by publishing articles and books describing, often in horrifying detail, the ways in which corruption affected the lives of those both directly and indirectly involved.

Important Muckrakers Upton Sinclair Ida Tarbell Jacob Riis

Upton Sinclair

“There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white – it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and … made over again for home consumption.”

After President Theodore Roosevelt read The Jungle he ordered an investigation of the meat-packing industry. He also met Sinclair and told him that while he disapproved of the way the book preached socialism Roosevelt agreed that "radical action must be taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist."

Jacob August Riis May 3, 1849 – May 26, 1914

Jacob Riis Riis was a Danish American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist and social documentary photographer. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography As one of the most famous proponents of the newly practicable casual photography, he is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his very early adoption of flash in photography

Ida Tarbell Took out John D. Rockefeller business operation Exposed unfair practices of the Standard Oil Company U.S Supreme Court broke up the monopoly Discoveries of Standard Oil Company published in the McClure Magazine Later published in The History of the Standard Oil Company

“There is no mistaking it: we are in Jewtown “There is no mistaking it: we are in Jewtown. It is said that nowhere in the world are so many people crowded together on a square mile as here….yet the sign “To Let" is the rarest of all….Here is one (building) seven stories high. The sanitary policeman whose beat this is will tell you that it contains thirty-six families, but the term has a widely different meaning here….In this house, where a case of small-pox was reported, there were fifty-eight babies and thirty-eight children that were over five years of age. In Essex Street two small rooms in a six-story tenement were made to hold a "family" of father and mother, twelve children, and six boarders …. These are samples of the packing of the population that has run up the record here to the rate of three hundred and thirty thousand per square mile.” – Jacob Riis 300,030 people/sq mile as opposed to 27,532 people/sq mile today in NYC

“Mr. Rockefeller has not squandered his income “Mr. Rockefeller has not squandered his income. He has applied it for thirty-five years to accumulating not only oil property but real estate - railroad stock, iron mines, copper mines, anything and everything which could be bought cheap by temporary depressing and made to yield rich by his able management. For thirty-five years he has worked for special privileges giving him advantages over competitors, for thirty-five years he has patiently laid net-works around property he wanted, until he had it surely corralled and could seize it; for thirty-five years he has depreciated values when necessary to get his prey. And to-day he still is busy. In almost every great financial manoeuvre in the country is felt his supple, smooth hand with its grip of steel, and while he directs that which is big, nothing is too small for him to grasp.” -Ida Tarbell