Muckrakers

Origin of the Term

The word muckraker was first coined by President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech on March 17, 1906. Roosevelt was angered by a recent political exposé published by his enemy William Randolph Hearst in Cosmopolitan magazine. In an address to the Washington Gridiron Club, Roosevelt complained about a dangerous new breed of journalist whose inflammatory writings were sweeping America. “The man with the Muck-rake,” Roosevelt said derisively, “the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands” only wanted “to rake to himself the filth on the floor” and “consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing.” Such a journalist, the President said, “speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces of evil” (Weinberg and Weinberg 2001, 58–59).

Although Roosevelt's use of the word muckraker was negative, the muckrakers themselves embraced the insult as a badge of honor. The term stuck and would thereafter be used to refer not only to the crusading journalists of Roosevelt's time but to later investigative reporters as well. In fact, Roosevelt's denunciation was surprising in some ways because he was personally sympathetic to the muckrakers' reform agenda and because his political career had been helped tremendously by positive publicity from muckrakers, some of whom he befriended. But the muckrakers' targets also included some of Roosevelt's fellow Republican politicians whom the President tried to appease with his attack on these journalists.

Rise of Muckraking Journalism

Prior to 1900, investigative reporting in America was rare and mostly local in nature. By the beginning [Page 920]of the twentieth century, however, muckraking became national in scope and seemed to flower everywhere in the United States almost at once. The decade between 1902 and 1912 is generally regarded as the heyday of muckraking, the “golden age of public service journalism” (Protess 1998, 35). In general, the muckrakers targeted corporate wrongdoing, government misbehavior, and social injustice; they viewed all three as interconnected to each other and to systemic problems spawned by the U.S. industrial revolution of their time.

The muckrakers were a uniquely homegrown American phenomenon, championing optimism, personal responsibility, individualism, and the inherent goodness of man. For the most part, the muckrakers were white, middle class, and Protestant, and their writings bore an unmistakable religious influence. Earnest and righteous, they viewed their work as a moral crusade. They believed in equality of opportunity, certain that truth would prevail if given a fair chance in the marketplace of ideas. They focused on domestic, usually urban, issues, tinged with a hint of American nationalism. Their solution for the many abuses they uncovered was a simple one: the Golden Rule. “Their criticisms of American society were, in their utmost reaches, very searching and radical,” Historian Richard Hofstadter noted, “but they were themselves moderate men who intended to propose no radical remedies. From the beginning, then, they were limited by the disparity between the boldness of their means and the tameness of their ends” (Hofstadter 1955, 196).

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