Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein

Media History Monographs 21:1

(2019-2020) ISSN 1940-8862

‘Single out the rascals for distinction from their fellows’: Realist, Prosecutorial, Yellow, and Radical Muckraking in the Progressive Era

Tim V. Klein

Instead of a single muckraking movement, four shades of muckraking existed during the Progressive Era. While all muckrakers were involved in exposure of wrongdoing, they differed, sometimes drastically, in how they exposed. Realist muckrakers, such as Ray Stannard Baker and Ida Tarbell, presented multiple sides of an issue, avoided inflammatory language, and tended to abstain from editorializing. Yellow muckrakers, including Thomas Lawson and David Graham Phillips, used sensational language, ridiculed and demonized their opponents, and treated their own opinions as if they were certainties. Prosecutorial muckrakers, such as Mark Sullivan and Norman Hapgood, wrote like prosecutors—telling restrained but one-sided stories that were based on a strategic and partial selection of facts. Radical muckrakers, including Upton Sinclair and Charles Edward Russell, infused their journalism with their ideology, giving voice to investigative journalism that preached revolutionary socialism. Drawing on the ideas of John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, I argue that those journalistic distinctions are important because journalists not only share information with the public, but they also share their epistemology and model public discourse. This monograph clarifies an influential moment in journalism history and helps us recognize how different types of journalism can advance or hinder a democratic culture.

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While investigative that progress required the journalism existed for decades “unsparing exposure of the before the Progressive Era,1 the politician who betrays his trust” term “muckraking” came from a and “of the big businessman who speech by Theodore Roosevelt in makes or spends his fortune in 1906. Moments after construction illegitimate or corrupt ways.” workers lowered the cornerstone Roosevelt argued: “The men who of the new House of with stern sobriety and truth assail Representatives onto its the many evils of our time, foundation and covered it in corn, whether in the public press, or in wine, and oil in accordance with magazines, or in books, are the some ancient and now abandoned leaders and allies of all engaged in tradition, the president stood the work for social and political before a crowd of spectators and betterment,” but those who both praised and criticized employ “hysterical sensationalism” investigative journalists.2 utilize “the very poorest weapon Roosevelt argued that some types wherewith to fight for lasting of journalism created social righteousness” and “may do more division and planted seeds of damage to the public mind than chaos and radicalism, while other the crime itself.” Then Roosevelt forms of journalism educated the made the enduring association public, created greater between investigative journalism understanding of social problems, and the muckraker, maintaining: and provided a foundation for the men with the muckrake positive social change.3 are often indispensable to Roosevelt’s muckraker the well-being of society, but speech is typically remembered as only if they know when to an attack—a president calling stop raking the muck …. If journalists’ names—but the text of the whole picture is painted his speech reveals something more black there remains no hue nuanced and significant. He began whereby to single out the by honoring “every writer” who rascals for distinction from exposed “evil” in business and their fellows.4 politics, so long as it was done with “honesty, sanity and self- This monograph can be seen as a restraint.” He told his audience refinement of Roosevelt’s

3 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein muckraking speech—an attempt The daily press, spurred on to re-capture the distinctions by powerful opponents of between different types of investigative journalism, largely investigatory journalism in the ignored Roosevelt’s distinction Progressive Era, and to consider and instead latched onto the the possible implications that “muckraker” label as a derogatory these divergent types of term for all investigative journalism can have on public journalists who exposed the opinion and democracy. unsavory sides of society.7 Many Roosevelt’s muckraker historians also ignored the more speech was almost certainly precise meaning in Roosevelt’s politically motivated. His speech and instead wrote that the unnamed target was David President gave investigative Graham Phillips, and possibly journalists a “collective title,”8 Phillips’ publisher William “labeled all of the crusading Randolph Hearst who was trying journalists of the day to break into presidential politics.5 muckrakers,”9 and “chastised the While Roosevelt is largely Tarbells, Bakers, and Steffenses— remembered as a Progressive, he along with such coworkers as was also the head of the David Graham Phillips and Upton Republican party which Sinclair, Charles E. Russell and dominated the Senate. Phillips’s Samuel Hopkins Adams.”10 The series “Treason of the Senate,” original distinction between published in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan, different types of journalism and was a direct journalistic attack on their varied impact on public the Republican-controlled Senate. opinion and political debate has Throughout the nine-part series, been all but lost.11 Phillips ridiculed and mocked The way we remember twenty-one Senators, eighteen of Roosevelt’s muckraker speech is which were Republicans, including significant because of its relation New York Senator and Roosevelt to our larger interpretation of the alley Chauncey Depew, who muckrakers. While the term Phillips’ called a “buffoon” and “a “muckraker” has remained in the spineless sycophant” who had a public lexicon—shifting from “greasy tongue and a greasy being an insult to being embraced backbone.”6 as synonymous with investigatory

4 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein journalism12—historians’ also share their epistemological interpretations have been hindered outlook; they give the public a by too loose a recognition of the method for making sense of the varying styles, impulses, world and a model for discussing epistemologies, and methods of public events. Based on this the muckrakers. Both journalists theoretical perspective, in the third who were beholden to “stern part I layout an alternative sobriety and truth” as well as interpretive framework that “wild preachers of unrest” who classifies the muckrakers based on were “sensational, lurid, and four different approaches to untruthful” have all been classed investigative journalism. In the as muckrakers.13 This paper conclusion I consider how attempts to bring more precise different types of muckraking terminology to the way we think influence the formation of a about the muckrakers, and argues democratic culture. that we need to confront and modify confusing and stilted Historiography of the terms. muckrakers—pluralism or a The paper is organized into central essence? four parts. The first is a In 1906, in the midst of the historiography of the muckrakers, muckraking movement, the which argues that many historical literary editor of The Independent, interpretations of the muckrakers Edwin E. Slosson recognized the have placed disproportionate varying hues of muckraking. emphasis on their commonalities “When the historian of American and shared essence, at the expense literature write of the opening of of recognizing their journalistic this century, he will give one of his differences. The second part most interesting chapters to the builds on the ideas of John Dewey literature of exposure,” wrote and Walter Lippmann to consider Slosson. “It blossomed forth in why differences in journalistic every hue of rhetorical red, from tone, method, and epistemology the aniline cerise of Miss Tarbell’s are crucial for the health of tale of Standard Oil to the Tyrian democratic debate. I argue that crimson of Mr. Lawson’s story of journalists not only pass on Amalgamated Copper.”14 What information to their readers, but those different shades of

5 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein rhetorical red would actually look attention to evils,” but instead like were still in flux during “threw … bricks” and “thundered Slosson’s time, as if the paint was their denunciations in bold-face, yet to dry on the historical canvas. italics, and large sized caps.” This In the opening chapter of interpretation fit a muckraker like Drift and Mastery (1914) Walter Charles Edward Russell—whose Lippmann tried to classify journalism displayed passion and different types of muckraking, but resentment, and who, by his own he gave up after looking at “a admission, wrote that “wherever thousand gradations of credibility an exploiter showed his head” he and exaggeration.” Lippmann was “ready with a brick to heave at does not spend much time it.”17 But interpreting the exploring the variations within the muckrakers as outraged militants muckraking movement, beyond contradicted Regier’s own writing that there was a difference description of other muckrakers, between later muckraking which such as Ida Tarbell, who “did not was more exaggerated and … let personal bias affect the conspiratorial, and “the earlier diligence of her research” and kind of muckraking” which was whose articles on Standard Oil more moderate and willing to tell were a “careful historical readers of both the honest and the analysis.”18 corrupt sides of business and Louis Filler (1939) continued politics.15 As time has gone on, the search for a central muckraker historians have been less likely to essence. He described a emphasize the various hues or generalized muckraking gradations of muckraking, and movement that was the opposite have instead searched for a central of Regier’s radical, disgusted, and essence.16 attacking movement. Filler’s An early example of the muckraking movement was central essence interpretation is in moderate, good natured, and C. C. Regier’s The Era of the detached. He emphasized a Muckrakers (1932). Regier “straightforward style, concerning described the muckrakers as a itself with facts and figures.” This “fighting” force who were fit Tarbell, but contradicted not “nauseated,” “shamed and only Russell’s style of muckraking sickened” and “did not mildly call but other muckrakers such as

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David Graham Phillips, who journalism centered around self- swung wildly and demonized his promotion, an embrace of poplar opponents, and was generally light prejudices, and commercialism—is on evidence to support his bold at odds with the democratic ideals charges.19 In Phillips’s popular of the press, where journalists series “Treason of the Senate” supply the public with as reliable (1906), the upper chamber of information as possible so citizens congress was more dangerous can form intelligent judgments.22 than “an invading army” and a Altschull pointed out the “monster” with “many heads.”20 contradiction in using a single Even Phillips’ publisher, William term to describe a diverse Randolph Hearst, who was known approach to journalism, but he did as one of the “yellowest” of all not propose a new mode of publishers, was said to have classification that attempted to stopped the presses of Cosmopolitan resolve some of the after reading Phillips’ article and contradictions.23 said: “I had intended an exposé. Robert Miraldi did use the We have merely an attack. Voice is term “muckraking” to not force. Windy vituperation is distinguished between different not convincing…. The facts, the types of journalism, but his proof, the documentary evidence definition explicitly excluded some are the important thing, and the of the most prominent article is deficient in them.”21 muckrakers of the Progressive There have occasionally Era. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle been historians who recognized was excluded because it was the contradictions that arise when fiction, and Miraldi excluded most all the muckrakers are grouped of the writing of Mark Sullivan under a singular label. J. Herbert and Norman Hapgood because Altschull (1990) wrote that “to they were opinion writers.24 This some, muckraker is a dirty word, left non-fiction, non-editorial, the embodiment of all the investigative journalists, which still excesses of the yellow press” and did not distinguish between other “to others, it epitomizes the crucial differences in method, virtues of a democratic press.” tone, and epistemology. Miralidi’s The tradition of the yellow definition of muckraking is also press—a crass form of tabloid too restrictive because it severs the

7 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein connective tissue between the such as Sinclair and Russell who muckrakers that did exist. Sinclair, tended to express their Phillips, and Sullivan, practiced investigative findings in a bellow investigative journalism that of despair and ideological zeal. exposed wrongdoing, as did There were others like Henry D. Tarbell, Baker, and Lawson. To try Lloyd who at times favored to remove Sinclair, the most worker-owned collectives and at widely remember muckraker, from other times supported elitist the muckraking tradition is an Fabian socialism, and whose unnecessarily sharp break in journalism was full of historical interpretation. Instead of philosophical moralizing and claiming that Sinclair and others footnotes of evidence. And there were not muckrakers, I believe it is were muckrakers, such as Tarbell, more useful to develop terms to who wrote an entire series of distinguish between different types articles on “The Golden Rule in of muckraking, recognizing their Business,” which featured commonalities and their favorable articles about differences.25 industrialists like Thomas Lynch Compared to journalism and Henry Ford, written in a historians, historians of the wider restrained and moderate tone.27 Progressive Era tended to be even Even historians who placed less precise in their generalizations the muckrakers at the center of about the muckrakers. For the Progressive movement, such instance, in the handful of pages as Richard Hofstadter, still that dealt with the muckrakers, focused on how to group the Arthur Link and Richard muckrakers together into a unified McCormick (1983) wrote that the whole.28 Hofstadter wrote that muckrakers expressed the “To an extraordinary degree the “progressive attitude toward work of the Progressive industrialism.”26 This overlooks movement rested upon its the fact that there was neither a journalism.” Hofstadter boiled single muckraker attitude towards down the muckrakers to a single industrialism, nor a single mode of characteristic: “literary realism.” expression—only a pluralism of His term was fitting for a perspectives. There were muckraker like Tarbell, as well as prominent socialist muckrakers, her fellow McClure’s muckraker,

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Ray Stannard Baker, who wrote muckrakers. For decades, with care, and even conservatism, historians looked for a central about labor violence, railroad essence and a cohesive propaganda, and segregation. “movement” out of the various Baker kept his opinions out of his pieces of the Progressive text, and instead quoted sources movement. Hofstadter saw the directly in an attempt to “tell their Progressive movement as a stories, exactly as [he] heard them . moralistic “status revolution” that . . hot out of life.”29 But united middle-class urban Hofstadter’s literary realism professionals with established doesn’t come close to describing political elites.33 Robert Wiebe saw the muckraking of Phillips or the the Progressives as bureaucratic millionaire-muckraker Thomas modernizers who developed Lawson, whose series “Frenzied professional standards and looked Finance” offered an exaggerated to the scientific method to tame and sensational look at the world the complexity of modern of big business. While Hofstadter industrialism and create order.34 described the muckrakers as Martin Sklar and James Weinstein “moderate men [and women] who saw progressivism as “corporate intended to propose no radical liberalism”—a disingenuous remedies,”30 Lawson explicitly reform movement that was called for “quick, radical, action.”31 controlled by big business.35 It was not just the yellow Despite the differences in muckraking of Lawson— interpretation, they all looked for a Hofstadter’s “literary realism” central essence that connected the failed to capture the radicalism of disparate reformers. Sinclair, Russell, John Kenneth In the midst of this search Turner, and Gustavus Myers—all for the animating heart of the of whom used muckraking to Progressive movement, Peter promote their ideology.32 Filene wrote "An Obituary for In the 1970s there was a 'The Progressive Movement’,"36 well-documented shift in the way which challenged the idea that historians interpreted the there was anything that could Progressive Era that offers a coherently be called meaningful parallel to the current “progressivism” or even a state of the historiography of the “movement.” Filene, along with

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John Buenker,37 John Kirby,38 approaches to reform, the David Kennedy,39 and Daniel historiography of the muckrakers Rodgers,40 argued that the path still largely embraces an forward lay in recognizing the interpretation of a monolithic differences within the Progressive muckraking movement. Focusing movement, and trying to on the common thread of understand the shifting coalitions, investigative journalism has as opposed to treating the allowed us to gloss over the Progressives as a unified force. To numerous journalistic differences speak of a unified movement was within muckraking, just as early “to wrap the entire period within historians of the Progressive an undifferentiated ideological movement generalized about embrace without saying anything reform as opposed to recognizing about the diversity within the the vast diversity between period.”41 Instead of a single different types of reform. Writing Progressive movement, there were about muckraking as if it multiple movements taking place contained a single approach to at the same time. After this investigative journalism is the historiographic shift, new norm. The recognition of a interpretations emerged that plurality of approaches to emphasized pluralistic sources of muckraking has yet to take place. power within the Progressive In many of the most influential movement. “There are books in journalism studies, the imperialists. There are immigrant muckrakers are treated as a unified political bosses and politically force. In Deciding What’s News, powerful farmers’ lobbies in Herbert Gans wrote that modern addition to the corporate journalism’s values emerged from managers, social scientists, status- the muckrakers of the Progressive anxious members of the middle Era. “The values [of the class, and bohemian cultural muckrakers] signify and maintain a radicals,” wrote Rodgers.42 proud chapter in American Unlike the historiography of journalism, for during the the wider Progressive Era, which Progressive period, journalists shifted from a search for a central achieved a level of power and essence to a recognition of a influence in American life” they plurality of interests and have rarely held since.43 Many

10 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein journalism historians would agree historiography of the muckrakers; that the muckrakers deeply few if any historians depicted the influenced American journalism muckrakers as a completely and played an important role in undifferentiated mass, and every many Progressive Era reforms, yet movement is made up of an array to speak about the muckrakers as of groups and perspectives. a singular force, sharing common Instead, my argument is that the journalistic values, and having a generalized “muckraker” label has singular influence, is misleading. overwhelmed the significant While all muckrakers were differences that existed between involved in exposure and the muckrakers. My point is not to investigation, they differed, reject the muckraker label, but sometimes drastically, in how they instead it is to recognize that the exposed. Beyond investigating dominant interpretations of the wrongdoing—which is an muckrakers have focused on their important commonality—they journalistic similarities, while only didn’t share similar journalistic recognizing their journalistic means or similar political ends. To differences in passing. This is better understand both the understandable; to put the Progressive Era and investigatory multitude of historical facts into journalism, we should see some discernable order it is muckraking as a tradition that is necessary for historians to composed of diverse and often generalize and label. Thomas times clashing journalistic Hobbes’ maxim, that “Nothing in approaches, as opposed to a the world is universal but names, singular monolithic muckraking for the things named are every one tradition. Just like the disparate of them individual and singular,”44 strands of the Progressive is worth keeping in mind, while movement, the journalists who still recognizing that labels and have been labeled as muckrakers generalizations are necessary for did not share a common historians to usefully discuss the understanding of who they were past. Yet, after more than a or what they wanted out of century of describing the journalism. muckrakers as “crusading” (or I want to be careful not to “moderate”) journalists who wrote overstate my critique of the “pure sensationalism” (or “literary

11 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein realism”), we need to move language of partisan battle that beyond a single generalized term they refuse to consider anyone and a search for a central essence else’s perspective. The reason it is of the muckraking movement, and important to distinguish between see muckraking as a pluralistic different types of muckraking is tradition that was (and is) because using a single muckraker composed of diverse and often label ignores these differences in times clashing journalistic communication and their approaches. influence on public discourse. As both Walter Lippmann46 How (not) to create a and John Dewey47 have argued— deliberative and cooperative in different ways—the character public opinion and quality of journalism is crucial Journalists do not simply for the politics and public opinion uncover and transmit facts and of any age. In “A Test of the other information to the public— News,” Liberty and the News, Public their work is part of the process Opinion, and The Phantom Public, that gives facts meaning.45 Lippmann was primarily Journalists pass on an concerned with the publics’ and epistemology or a way of deciding journalists’ inabilities to form what to believe about the world— accurate pictures of the world, but a method for separating truth and he was also concerned with the falsehood—and a model for method in which those pictures discussing and debating public were formed. When journalists affairs. As anyone who has been in romanticize complex issues into an argument knows, there is a vast simplified stories of good versus difference between someone who evil, or attempt to satisfy readers’ shares their ideas with humility, (or their own) whims and understanding, reference to prejudices, Lippmann feared the supporting evidence, and an public would incorporate a similar acceptance that there are multiple approach to their own thinking. ways of looking at an issue, versus Whether the character of public someone who is full of outrage opinion was rigorous, Socratic, and certainty, or someone whose and self-examining, or whether it ideas are so insulated by was undisciplined, self- ideological dogma and the aggrandizing, and full of

12 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein exaggeration and gross the “Democratic method is … simplification, would depend, in public discussions carried on … in part, on the method and tone of legislative halls … in the press, the press.48 private conversations and public While Dewey was also assemblies.”50 He argued that the concerned about the veracity of more citizens participated in the the information journalists shared, democratic methods of he was more concerned with the “consultation, persuasion, problem of how to develop a negotiation, communication, [and] sense of community, and how to cooperative intelligence” then the integrate an individual’s identity greater their skill and capacity and self-interest into the broader would be in these areas.51 society. This was especially “Majority rule” on its own, “is as challenging in a diverse nation that foolish as its critics charge,” wrote stretched thousands of miles and Dewey. It is through “discussion, was inhabited by hundreds of consultation and persuasion” that millions of citizens. In The Public it can become intelligent and and Its Problems, Dewey argued that compassionate, or at least less journalists should not only supply foolish and cruel.52 For a society the public with accurate, verifiable to become democratic, citizens information, but should also help need to learn how to see the world citizens from “different groups from perspectives which are interact flexibly and fully in different from their own, and to connection with other groups” develop the habits of deliberative and learn to see how their and cooperative public discourse. seemingly isolated interests were This is where the method of actually intertwined with broader journalism becomes crucial. If social interests.49 To overcome journalists model a public debate regionalism, tribalism, and based on name calling and outrage absolutism in public opinion, that is quick to place blame, and journalists had the lofty task of purposefully distorts the views of facilitating a national dialogue that their opponents, then deliberative helped build understanding, and cooperative public discussion tolerance, and cooperation becomes nearly impossible. between different groups. In Similarly, if journalists only share Freedom and Culture, Dewey wrote, evidence that supports one

13 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein particular interpretation, even if it opinion. During the Progressive is done with civility, the public will Era, what the public was reading still lack the knowledge to see an influenced how they viewed the issue from another’s perspective. trust question, the labor question, When we group together, under the race question,53 and a host of the generalized term “muckraker,” other issues ranging from journalists whose approach, tone, urbanization and the epistemological outlook, and use commoditization of goods, to of evidence was so drastically food and drug safety and the use different, we fail to recognize the of natural resources. varied ways journalists can impact If the first premise has to do public opinion. Our limited with the relationship between the terminology hinders our ability to type of journalism and the discuss the type of journalism we character of public opinion, the had in the past or that we have second has to do with the today. relationship between the language This paper is built around of history and public opinion. By two main premises. The first, this I mean that our understanding already stated, is that the type of of journalism today is intertwined journalism influences public with our understanding of opinion. Some forms of journalism history, and with the journalism breed tribalism and language that we have developed resentment, while others help us throughout history to talk about understand complex issues, or give the role of journalism in society. us better insights into those who Part of my argument is that see the world differently. historians have often failed to Journalists often give us the words distinguish between radical we use to discuss political issues, ideologically driven muckraking, and their tone and framing— one-sided partisan muckraking, whether angry and volatile, or sensationalized self-promotional moderate and respectful—are muckraking, and balanced crucial for the solidarity and muckraking that promotes a wellbeing of a society. Of course, deeper and multifaceted it is not a one-to-one relationship, understanding of an issue. All are but the character of journalism housed under the muckraker label. influences the character of public If we agree with the first premise,

14 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein that the type of journalism impacts Four Shades of Muckraking: the type of public debate a society Realist, Prosecutorial, Yellow, will have, then classifying different and Radical types of investigative journalism During the Progressive Era, under the broad muckraker label muckraking that appeared in hides essential journalistic nationally distributed magazines differences that influence the addressed a need that had quality of public debate and the previously been fulfilled by local strength of social cohesion. journalists and even citizens Instead of seeing themselves. In the eighteenth and muckraking as a distinct type of early nineteenth century, society journalism that is separate from was far more centered around the other journalistic traditions—such local community. While there were as, respectively, the partisan press national and international issues, that emerged in the Colonial Era many of the problems citizens had and the early republic, the more to solve were local in origin. The politically neutral press that began economy was made up of small to take root with the rise of the local businesses and a “penny press” in the 1830s, the community’s politicians were radical abolitionist press reasonably accessible. If a surrounding the Civil War, the politician absconded with the yellow press in the late nineteenth money for a new bridge, or if a century, and the more “objective” butcher shop sold spoiled meat, it minded professional press that was relatively easy for citizens to developed later in the twentieth figure out what went wrong. century—I view remnants of these During the Civil War and in the journalistic traditions as existing decades after the war, the within the muckraking of the provincial nature of American Progressive Era. There was yellow society went through a rapid and muckraking just as there was more aggressive transformation. A restrained and neutral muckraking, largely unregulated nation-wide which I have called realist economy developed after the muckraking, along with radical Supreme Court prevented states ideological muckraking, and from regulating interstate partisan prosecutorial muckraking. commerce.54 Cities swelled as millions of people moved from

15 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein rural areas.55 Within a matter of environment could the average decades, the relative transparency citizen understand and make wise that existed in small-town America decisions regarding the issues that had vanished. In its place were affected society? Muckraking massive trust companies, attempted to function as the commodity markets, sprawling peoples’ eyes and ears in this new cities, massive industrial factories, industrial age—allowing readers to and a politics that was national imagine the massive oil refineries instead of local. “The age could of Standard Oil, the meat packing only be comprehended in bulk,” plants of Chicago, the mines of wrote Robert Wiebe.56 Giant Amalgamated copper, the hidden monopolies—located in big cities corporate structure and the or even overseas—dictated terms backroom deals of trust to the public on everything from companies, “the octopus” of the cost of jute bagging and rope, railroads stretching all over the to railroad rates and the price of country, and a host of other sugar and oil. Society was no distant and hidden forces.59 longer apparent to its itself— The challenges of hidden from its citizens.57 The vast globalization, urbanization, and impersonal forces that touched the industrialization were not merely lives of nearly every American theoretical test for democracy, and were largely hidden from sight. muckraking was not born out of “The facts have changed,” wrote readers’ mild curiosities about the John Dewey in 1916. “We are part changes their country was going of the same world as that in which through. Many farmers, laborers, Europe exists and into which Asia and small businesspeople were is coming. Industry and commerce hurting and opportunity seemed have interwoven our destines. To to be shrinking. At the same time, maintain our older state of mind is a select few amassed astounding to cultivate a dangerous illusion.”58 fortunes, greater than the world A critical question for had ever known. It is no Progressives, including the coincidence that muckraking and muckrakers, was whether the Progressive Era followed the democratic ideals could be outrage of the failed Populist transformed to fit an industrialized movement and the economic nation. That is, in this new downturn in the mid-1890s.

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Muckraking gave readers a Pearson’s, Hampton’s, Success, The backstory for how and why these American Magazine, Leslie’s, Appeal social and economic changes were to Reason, Ladies’ Home Journal, taking place. As Walter Lippmann World’s Work, Review of Reviews, and wrote, muckraking “arose because The Arena, started putting the world has been altered resources towards the “literature radically, not because Americans of exposure.” From 1903 to 1912 fell in love with honesty” and there were approximately 2,000 exposure.60 investigative journalism articles The start of the muckraking published.64 movement is typically traced back In Public Opinion, Lippmann to the January 1903 issue of famously wrote that we "live in McClure’s Magazine when Ida the same world, but we think and Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and feel in different ones."65 One of Lincoln Steffens wrote articles on the many reasons we perceive the corruption in business, labor, and world differently is because we get government, respectively.61 In an our news from different editorial, editor S. S. McClure journalists, each of whose method identified the common element in of storytelling is unique, and this the three articles, writing that all influences the way we construct could have fallen under the title reality. In a society where citizens’ “The American Contempt of experience public affairs firsthand, Law.”62 The three articles had there will be differences between much in common. Not only did perspective and interpretation, but they all expose corruption, but our senses—namely our eyes and each of them identified ears typically work in similar ways documentary evidence, avoided to each other’s. But, as citizens’ the melodramatic “red-hot understanding of their society invective” that was common to became more mediated through that era,63 took a detached tone, journalism and other forms of and told multi-sided stories that mass communication, the represented diverse points of view. consequences of different types of As sales of McClure’s swelled, journalism became more more than a dozen other national significant. It is not only a magazines, including Cosmopolitan, different picture of reality that is Collier’s, Everybody’s, The Independent, passed on to readers, but a

17 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein different set of news values and a journalistic method, though the different type of epistemology— realist muckrakers were more or method of making sense of the dramatic storytellers, placing them world—that is passed on. News closer to the tradition of literary values and epistemology are rarely realism.68 explicit features of a news story, Prosecutorial muckrakers, many but are instead indirectly passed of whom were trained as lawyers, on to the public through the way a included journalists Mark Sullivan news story is told.66 “By selecting, and Samuel Hopkins Adams. highlighting, framing, shading, and Unlike the realists, the prosecutors shaping in reportage” journalists did not claim neutrality or “create an impression that real disinterestedness, and instead people—readers and viewers— openly sought to convince the then take to be real and to which reader to adopt a particular they respond in their lives,” wrote perspective. They made personal historian Michael Schudson.67 attacks and were largely one sided Some muckrakers, who I in their presentation of evidence. classify as realist muckrakers, While the prosecutorial followed the moderate and muckrakers were often partisan, evidence-based style of Tarbell, they were far more independent Baker, and others at McClure’s. and honest than many of the They presented multiple journalists of the party press era of perspectives, avoided editorializing the late eighteenth and early and explicitly inserting their nineteenth century. Nonetheless, personal values and opinions into the prosecutorial muckrakers their reporting, and shunned could be understood as more attack journalism, name calling, educated and financially sensationalism, or the direct independent descendants of the advocacy of a specific policy, partisan journalists of the early party, or ideology. They placed republic. understanding an issue ahead of Yellow muckrakers such as advocating for change. The realist David Graham Phillips and muckrakers could be seen as the Thomas Lawson wrote with a forebears of the more professional hyperbolic sensationalism and journalists of the mid-20th century knack for publicity that came out who tried to follow an “objective” of the “yellow journalism” of the

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Pulitzer and Hearst era of the The purpose of identifying 1890s. They ridiculed their four types of muckraking instead opponents, filling pages with name of one is not to replace a calling. Sometimes their charges historiographic framing based on were backed up with verifiable one central essence with a evidence, and at other times the historiography of four central charges were simply asserted essences. Instead, I will follow the without evidence. For the yellow advice of philosopher Karl muckrakers, greed was a Popper, who argued that “cannibalistic money-hunger,” historians should avoid altogether governmental corruption was a search for a central essence and sinful “treason,”69 and poverty was instead look for external patterns the “strangled, mangled, that can be measured empirically.73 sandbagged wrecks of human Each type of muckraking is the hopes.”70 The yellow muckrakers result of looking at observable mixed emotionally charged features in a piece of journalism. A language with popular prejudices journalist’s epistemology and and a touch of self-promotion.71 values “are rarely explicit and must Radical muckrakers such as be found between the lines—in Charles Edward Russell and what actors and activities are Upton Sinclair advocated like reported or ignored and in how ideological activists or preachers. they are described.”74 Like the yellow muckrakers, they The following section often used overblown language attempts to uncover the and stretched their conclusions epistemological values that are beyond the reach of their implicitly passed on to readers by evidence, but the radicals were some of the most influential guided by a firmly-held ideology.72 muckrakers from the Progressive They used their ideology to makes Era. The four types of muckraking sense of the information they were developed by looking at the uncovered, and they wrote with a most prominent muckraking moral certainty and zeal that had articles and books, and analyzing similarities to the abolitionist the differences between the journalism in the decades before method, language, use of evidence, the Civil War. and style of each, and then inductively categorizing the

19 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein muckrakers into four types. The without pointing to verifiable archetypes were selected because evidence? How does the journalist they best exemplified the differing evaluate the relative sturdiness of epistemologies and methods of documentary evidence (when it each type of muckraking. In these exists)? Does the journalist cite four categories, I am not looking more neutral expert opinions, or for what is purely unique about the opinions of self-interested each journalist, but in the words political elites? Are of Edward Hallett Carr, “what is unsubstantiated rumors given general in the unique”75 or what central prominence? Whose distinguishes one category of perspective is shared and how is it muckraker from the next. shared? Are alternative While focusing on the perspectives given a fair hearing? differences between each type of What sort of language is used— muckraking, I don’t want to sand passionate and angry diatribes or off inconvenient imperfections to more disinterested and moderate give the illusion that each language? Does the journalist journalist fits perfectly into my share her or his own opinions or typology. This is why I have do they stay more detached and included examples of muckraking neutral? When the journalist that didn’t fit a given shares her or his opinion, is it classification—for instance, I done explicitly or is it disguised as highlight the select articles where fact? Are opinions boldly stated Tarbell and Baker let their with certainty or are they opinions come to the forefront presented as one possible and muckraked more like interpretation among many? Does prosecutorial muckrakers as the journalist provide a solution to opposed to realists. the problem she or he has My analysis of each presented, or is it left up to the muckraker and their work is audience to decide what should be guided by questions related to a done? Does a journalist explicitly journalist’s method, tone, and probe or question their own epistemological outlook. Does the conclusions? Is a conclusion about journalist share evidence that what a story means stated before justifies their conclusions, or does the evidence is given, or does the he or she simply tell a story evidence precede the conclusion?

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And, does the journalist help the way a reader imagines an event, reader understand an event or an but also individual, or does she or he try to reveals the type of journalism that persuade the audience to adopt is being practiced. Below is an the journalist’s beliefs? The way outline of the main characteristics questions like these are in my analysis of the muckrakers. maneuvered, not only shapes the

Language Justification Perspective Confidence Solutions Apparent Purpose Passionate, Opinion One-sided, Closed- Journalist Persuade extreme, without simplistic minded provides audience name calling pointing to (good vs. certainty, solutions to verifiable evil) conclusions the problems evidence are expressed they have as if they described. were the only legitimate interpretation Dispassionat Verifiable Multi-sided, Open- It is left up to Understan e, moderate, evidence, complex, minded, the audience d an issue respectful probing nuanced acknowledges to decide strength of limits, shares what should evidence opinions with be done humility about the problem.

REALIST MUCKRAKERS directly affected her life, such as Throughout her life Ida Tarbell whether women should have the couldn’t help but question her right to vote. With a hint of agony beliefs. After learning about the over her position on woman’s scientific method as a student, she suffrage, she asked: “Why must I began to doubt her faith in persist in the slow, tiresome Christian creationism. She would practice of knowing more about not jump to a conclusion even things before I had an opinion?”76 when considering an issue that Biographer Kathleen Brady

21 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein described Tarbell’s journalism as lawyer she had hired to evaluate following a “scholarly method” the legal cases against Standard. that resembled “the historian’s The lawyer found that in one pedantry, the journalist’s instinct, instance related to the accusation and the friendly guile of one of Vacuum Oil Works, the judge seeking help.”77 Everett E. Dennis who indicted Standard Oil had wrote that Tarbell was “a more been wrong.80 rigorous and systematic journalist Tarbell routinely cited than almost anyone before or specific technical and financial since,” and she “brought the rigor information, drawing on of scientific inquiry and a thousands of pages of federal and penchant for facts and accuracy.”78 state investigations, legal filings, This questioning mindset sent and court transcripts, and quoted Tarbell on a five-year investigation from authoritative sources, such as of Standard Oil for McClure’s the Hepburn Committee. She Magazine that yielded nineteen even worked with Standard Oil articles, totaling over 700 pages. executive Henry Rogers, who While other muckrakers, like provided her with information in Henry D. Lloyd had written about order to represent Standard’s Standard Oil in a one-sided and perspective.81 “The more we moralizing fashion,79 Tarbell talked, the more at home I felt attempted to understand with him and the more I liked him Rockefeller and his oil monopoly, [Rogers]” wrote Tarbell. “Finally and only reluctantly—and we made our compact. I was to humbly—passed judgment. take up with him each case in their Tarbell’s refusal to openly take history .... He was to give me sides led to criticism from some documents, figures, explanations, reformers. Lloyd, who had written and justifications—anything and a scathing history of Standard Oil everything which would enlarge a decade earlier, began telling my understanding.”82 people that she had been duped by In “The Rise of the Standard Standard’s corporate publicity. In Oil Company,” Tarbell chronicled another instant, Mark Twain joked Rockefeller’s upward mobility that she had been bought off by from a fruit-seller on Cleveland’s Rockefeller after Tarbell published docks to the head of the largest oil the findings of an independent monopoly in the world. Writing

22 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein with thoughtfulness and even that the railroad was a public signs of respect, Tarbell portrayed carrier, and that its charter forbade Rockefeller as a talented and discrimination”—they were disciplined businessman who, with required to charge all freight the a “steadfastness of purpose,” same rate—but “he knew that the relished achieving the highest railroads did not pretend to obey efficiency in all aspects of his the laws governing them, [and] business.83 Where other that they regularly granted special muckrakers, such as Sinclair, rates and rebates to those who had Phillips, Lawson, and Will Irwin large amounts of freight.”85 While waxed poetically about the Lloyd (1894)86 and Russell (1905)87 unquenched greed of a politician filled pages with vitriol and or a businessman, Tarbell condemnation of the railroad dispassionately explained how rebates as an evil conspiracy, Rockefeller “pointed out in detail Tarbell made clear that “in all and with gentleness, how branches of business the heaviest beneficent the scheme really was” buyer got the best rate” and to the independent oil refiners he Rockefeller simply bargained with was incorporating into his trust. the railroads “as you could with a Within three months of man carrying on a strictly private consolidating Cleveland’s oil business depending in no way on a industry, Rockefeller had taken public franchise.”88 over twenty-one of twenty-six Tarbell was ultimately critical refiners and controlled one-fifth of Rockefeller’s use of the rebates, of the oil refining in the United and of his failure to apply his States.84 Christian morality to his business Throughout her journalistic practices. But she did not narrative Tarbell was able to bring demonize him. She instead offered out the intensity and the anger a justification for his cutthroat that independent oil refiners felt business practices: “Mr. toward Rockefeller, but not at the Rockefeller knew that if he did not expense of demonizing the oil get rebates, somebody else would” trust or the railroads. In Tarbell’s as they “were for the wariest, the January 1903 article, “The Oil War shrewdest, the most persistent. If of 1872,” she carefully explained somebody was to get rebates, why to readers that Rockefeller “knew not he? This point of view was no

23 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein uncommon one. Many men held Rockefeller and Standard Oil it.”89 highlighted specific wrongdoings, Tarbell also tried to namely the rebate, which gave understand the railroad’s Standard Oil its advantage over perspective, passing on their claim every other oil refiner. She was that the railroads only agreed to also willing to attempt to share the rebates because they were told perspectives different from her that all oil refiners would be own in a way that clarified the allowed to join Rockefeller’s trust. disagreement.91 Tarbell’s inclination was to bring Very often people … who out complexity and share multiple are willing to see that Mr. perspectives, as opposed to Rockefeller has employed preaching a clear-cut story of good force and fraud to secure his versus evil. ends, justify him by Tarbell’s July 1903 article declaring, ‘It’s business.’ “The Real Greatness of the That is, ‘it’s business’ has Standard” was not a sarcastic title. come to be a legitimate The article described Standard Oil excuse for hard dealing, sly as employing men of “intelligence tricks, special privileges. It is and superiority” who competed to a common enough thing to improve the efficiency and hear men arguing that the effectiveness of their department. ordinary laws of morality do She shares glowing accounts of not apply in business.92 Rockefeller’s greatness, citing W. H. Vanderbilt, who told the In the concluding article of Hepburn Commission that he the series, published in the “never came in contact with a October 1904 issue of McClure’s, class of men as able as they [the Tarbell did write as a cautious Standard Oil men] are in their advocate for change. She business.”90 Nearly the entire questioned those who viewed article is devoted to Rockefeller’s business as being outside the business greatness. realm of morality, and worried While it is clear that Tarbell what this view would do to the believes in business conducted on broader ethics of the nation: “The the basis of fair, ethical, and lawful freight clerk who reports the competition, her criticism of independent oil shipments for a

24 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein fee of five or ten dollars a month his intelligence, thrift, and work is probably a young man, learning ethic, there was an uncharacteristic his first lessons in corporate meanness to the profile. morality,” wrote Tarbell. She was Particularly in the second article, appalled that “so large a body of she ridiculed Rockefeller’s age: young men in the country are “the oldest man in the world—a consciously or unconsciously living mummy.” She scrutinized growing up with the idea that his physical appearance: “the big business is war and that morals cheeks are puffy, bulging have nothing to do with its unpleasantly under the eyes.” And practice.” In the concluding she speculated about what his paragraphs of the nineteen-part physical appearance said about his series, Tarbell engaged in careful character: “the lips are quite lost, and understated advocacy. “What as if by eternal grinding together are we doing to do about it? … of the teeth—set on something he We the people of the United would have… Mr. Rockefeller States … must cure whatever is may have made himself the richest wrong in the industrial situation, man in the world, but he has typified by this narrative of the paid.” 95 growth of the Standard Oil Shortly after the articles Company.”93 came out, Tarbell expressed some Long after her series had regret. The whole character sketch been compiled into a best-selling was “repugnant … to me book, Tarbell recalled in her personally,” she wrote. But she memoir that “Everybody in the was convinced that Rockefeller’s office… began to say, ‘After the personal power and influence over [Standard Oil] book is done you public affairs warranted a deeper must do a character sketch of Mr. scrutiny of his character. “It was Rockefeller.’ I was not keen for just one of those things that had it.”94 Despite her hesitation, she to be done; there seemed to be no did it anyway. In her July and way for me to get around it,” she August, 1905 two-part character wrote. “A man who possesses this study of Rockefeller, Tarbell kind of influence cannot be deviated from her restrained, allowed to live in the dark. The humble, and good-natured public not only has the right to muckraking. While she did praise know what sort of man he really

25 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein is; it is the duty of the public to before—for it always has been know.”96 tried before, even if we in our self- In the character sketch and confidence do not know it.”97 To in the October 1904 conclusion to the extent that Tarbell used her the Standard Oil series, Tarbell journalism to promote reform, she crossed the boundaries that did so cautiously, without feigning objective journalism sets between certainty that she had all the facts and values. While she made answers. some attempt in these articles to Her balanced approach is balance her disapproval of evident from the journalism she Rockefeller with praise for his took up after her series on more admirable qualities, she Standard Oil was complete. She momentarily and hesitantly veered set out to share with readers some out of the realist muckraking and of the positive aspects of into the style of the prosecutorial American industrialism. Writing in muckrakers. The American Magazine, Tarbell Nonetheless, when taken as detailed the success of a whole, the vast majority of industrialists like Thomas Lynch Tarbell’s journalism was full of of the Frick Coke Company and moderation, humility, and wrote with deep respect for Henry understanding. The expressed Ford’s business practices. While purpose of journalism for Tarbell these articles did not have nearly was “making the matter in hand a the impact of Standard Oil articles, little clearer, a little sounder for they show that she wanted readers those who come after” and not to have a balanced view of for projecting her solutions on to industrialism.98 the public. Instead of boldly Later in life, Tarbell wrote seeking to remake the world based that many Progressives “wanted on what she had learned, Tarbell attacks” and “had little interest in questioned the universal wisdom balanced findings.” Echoing of her own understanding: “In our Roosevelt’s muckraking speech, eagerness to prove that we have she wrote that, “in the long run, found the true solution,” Tarbell the public … would weary of wrote in her memoir, “we fail to vituperation” and if reformers inquire why this same solution “were to secure permanent results failed to work when tried the [public] mind must be

26 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein convinced.”99 When Roosevelt attacking, melodramatic, complained that “lurid” journalism ideological, muckrakers. would “damage … the public If the essence of the realist mind” and that “hysterical muckrakers was to place sensationalism” was the “poorest understanding a phenomenon ahead weapon … to fight for lasting of persuading the reader to adopt a righteousness,” he and Tarbell particular belief, then Ray were in full agreement.100 Stannard Baker was the ideal There is near consensus realist muckraker. His approach among historians that Tarbell’s was typified in an exchange with journalism was rigorous, fair, the radical Jack London, who moderate in tone, and of the wanted to convince Baker to highest quality. John Tebbel and become a socialist. Baker replied Mary Ellen Zucherman wrote that that he could not accept any Tarbell’s “research was thorough, ideology since he had “only begun her writing sober, and the end to look at the world” and wanted result was an inexorable march of “to see it all more clearly and facts that showed how Standard understand it” before he came to Oil conducted its business. But any conclusions. “The difference she was also fair.”101 Peter Lyon, between us,” wrote Baker, “lay the biographer of McClure’s editor, probably in the fact that he S. S. McClure, wrote that Tarbell’s wanted to reform me, and I did journalism was “the best- not want to reform him.” Instead grounded, most careful, most of persuading, Baker saw his job substantial” of all the muckrakers. as helping people understand each Another biographer, Robert C. other so “they can live together Kochersberger Jr. described peaceably, even in a crowded Tarbell as a “sociologist,” world.” sometimes her work was What seemed to me then the “drowning in facts” but it supreme problem displayed an “‘objectivity and confronting mankind was professional detachment.’”102 the art of living in a crowded Nonetheless, Tarbell has been world. The part I could best classed under the same play in it as a writer … was muckraking label as one-sided, to become a “maker of understandings.” I was to

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help people understand After months of covering more clearly and completely Coxey’s Army, Baker began the extraordinary world they writing articles about British were living in—all of it, journalist and reformer William T. without reservations or Stead and Stead’s popular book, If personal prejudices—and in Christ Came to Chicago. With moral the process to make them outrage, Stead criticized the understand one another, wealthiest men in Chicago, which I considered the comparing them to the fundamental basis for the moneychangers of the New democratic way of life.103 Testament. Stead wrote with sweeping certainty. “I always jump Baker was not entirely to conclusions: I never ponder,” immune from sensationalism and he told Baker.105 Baker reflected incivility. His early journalism for on their difference in styles: the Chicago Record covering Coxey’s I was not at all satisfied with Army—the 1894 march of Stead’s answers to the unemployed workers—ridiculed problems he saw so clearly, Jacob Coxey’s and Carl Brown’s nor yet Coxey’s. It did not protest as “the laughing stock of seem to me that either of the nation.” But, over many weeks them understood what the of covering the march, Baker fundamental conditions slowly learned to see the protest as really were, or the difficulty a more serious and legitimate of meeting them. I did not expression of “dissatisfaction [understand them] myself.106 among the laboring classes” and a “movement [that] must be looked In series of articles for on as something more than a huge World’s Work,107 Baker met with joke.” It appears that Baker labor organizers, Samuel learned to see the oddball Gompers, Eugene Debs, and John protestors with sensitivity and Mitchell, and he visited labor care; in his private notebooks meetings and picket lines. He also around this time, Baker wrote, met with financiers J.P. Morgan “The more a nation is civilized, and Charles Schwab and “worked the more generously it listens to hard and long to try to the voice of the minority.”104 understand, thoroughly and

28 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein honestly, what they were trying to possible impact of their story, and do and why, and what things then cherrypicked their evidence looked like to them.”108 and exaggerated their The conflict between capital interpretation in order to influence and labor created a conflict in public opinion. He thought they understanding within Baker: put their own conceptions of As a reporter I could and did “national interest” ahead of set down, as facts, what I trusting the public with a wide and saw: but I could not, in the varied description of events. This least degree, make up my appears to be true for other types mind what ought to be done of muckraking, but the nuanced, … At times I found my multi-sided journalism of realist sympathies going out muckrakers defied this pattern of strongly to the starving discourse by trusting the public strikers in Pullman, … What with as full a picture of the facts as other remedy had they to they could obtain. Baker, Tarbell meet injustice and and other realists believed there oppression except to strike? were no absolutes in … And yet, when I saw interpretation, and to imagine that huge mobs running wild, one’s interpretation was irrefutably defying the officers of the perfect, leaving no space for no law, attacking non-union other explanations, was either workers, putting the torch to shortsighted or self-interested. millions of dollars worth of property—I was still more PROSECUTORIAL perplexed.109 MUCKRAKERS The prosecutorial muckrakers, In Liberty and the News (1920) unlike the realist muckrakers, Lippmann argued that journalists didn’t seek neutrality and they had taken over the role of were not interested in “thinking” for the public and accommodating a wide variety of sacrificed truth and fairness in perspectives. Instead, they openly order to persuade the public. took sides and strongly advocated Instead of being disinterested for their positions. Mark Sullivan, carriers of information, journalists Norman Hapgood, C. P. made political calculations on the Connolly, Samuel Hopkins

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Adams, Louis Brandeis (in his Another prosecutorial articles for Harper’s Weekly on J.P. muckraker was C. P. Connolly, Morgan’s “money trust”),110 who wrote about the activities of William Hard, and to an extent, Secretary of the Interior Richard Henry D. Lloyd111 followed the Ballinger, in what became known prosecutorial method of as “the Ballinger Affair.” muckraking, building a case on a Connolly’s likeness to a one-sided arrangement of prosecutor was evident in the evidence. Sullivan, Adams, illustration on the cover of Collier’s Hapgood, Brandeis, and Lloyd Weekly which showed an also had training as lawyers and indictment bill issued by the their muckraking reflected the “Court of Public Morals” in the fact-based, but strategically case of “The American People selected stories a prosecutor against Richard A. Ballinger.”113 In would tell a jury. the article, titled the “Ballinger- Lloyd’s Wealth Against Shyster,” Connolly accused Commonwealth (1893) was a fierce Ballinger of trying to push through moral indictment of Standard Oil, ownership claims on behalf of J. built on well-documented P. Morgan for some of the most evidence. Where Tarbell held her valuable mineral deposits in the judgments lightly and presented a world for a paltry $10 an acre. wide variety of perspectives, Lloyd Connolly presented evidence to was one-sided and vilified show the guilt of the accused but Rockefeller, stating that he and his offered little defense. associates were “sincere as Mark Sullivan’s campaign in rattlesnakes” and lacked “the Collier’s against the “Czar” of the imagination to concern the pain House, Speaker Joseph Cannon, they inflict.” Their profits were was, in Sullivan’s own words “the winnings of speculators in “blatantly partisan.” Sullivan also bread during famine—worse, for led an attack to change the rules to make money [they] make the that governed the House. During famine.”112 Over 536 pages laced the debate over the rule change, a with painstaking argument, Lloyd Cannon ally said on the House made the case that Standard Oil floor, “This movement [to change was guilty of crimes against the the House rules] does not public. originate in the House of

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Representatives… [but instead at] people’s money” in companies the behest of a gang of literary Morgan owned and controlled, highwaymen who are entirely while at the same time telling these willing to assassinate a reputation investors he represented their in order to sell a magazine.” interests. To make this argument, Sullivan reflected in his memoir, Brandeis drew heavily on expert with a bit of discomfort, that testimony, frequently quoting the “whatever Cannon and the Pujo Committee.115 Brandeis’s standpatters did was evil,” and writing offered little or no defense “whatever the insurgents did was on the side of Morgan and good.”114 Like other prosecutors, associates. Sullivan did not provide readers If McClure’s was the main with a multi-sided understanding forum for realist muckrakers like of the politicians or businessmen Tarbell and Baker, then Collier’s he exposed and instead presented was the publication for one-sided evidence that supported prosecutorial muckrakers.116 his conclusions. Collier’s editor Norman Hapgood Even though the reflected in his memoir that “the prosecutorial muckrakers took opportunity to get into a fight has sides, they still placed evidence always been one of the ahead of emotion, sensationalism, temptations most difficult … to and ideology. They followed a resist”117—a sentiment that would restrained structure that be at odds with a realist resembled, to a degree, the muckraking editor like S. S. confines of a courtroom. The McClure who cared more about future Supreme Court Justice telling an interesting story. The Louis Brandeis’ series of articles prosecutors could also be labeled on the “Money Trust” for Harpers as editorial muckrakers, for many Weekly strongly fit the of them, like Hapgood and prosecutorial mold. He arranged Sullivan, often worked on the his evidence to fit his indictment opinion side of their magazines, as against J. P. Morgan and his opposed to the news side. Their bankers. Brandeis charged that goal was not to share their broad Morgan had purposefully understanding with readers; they restricted competition in a host of didn’t take their evidence to industries by investing “other independent authorities and they

31 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein didn’t attempt to separate their and exaggerated language, opinions from the facts they dramatic conspiracy, salesmanship, presented. Instead they sought to and personal attacks on his convince readers to adopt their enemies, with only a pinch of perspective and support their verifiable evidence. Where a realist proposed reforms. muckraker like Tarbell wrote about a well-documented YELLOW MUCKRAKERS conspiracy like the railroad rebate In Drift and Mastery (1914), in terms that demystified it, Lippmann commented, in a Lawson blurred the line between chapter titled “The Themes of evidence, myth, drama, and Muckraking,” that “The sense of opinion. conspiracy and secret scheming After a bitter falling out with which transpire is almost uncanny. Standard Oil over their joint ‘Big Business,’ and its ruthless venture in Amalgamated Copper, tentacles, have become the Lawson turned on his former material for the feverish fantasy of associates. First, he spread rumors illiterate thousands thrown out of by placing ads in newspapers kilter by the rack and strain of warning “every holder of modern life.” Lippmann saw Amalgamated stock to sell his some, but not all, forms of holdings at once before another muckraking as playing to popular crash comes.” In the midst of his prejudice against big business. campaign against Standard Oil, the “Even though the most intelligent editor of Everybody’s approached muckrakers have always insisted Lawson to write a “true the picture [of mass conspiracy] confession,” exposing the inside was absurd,” wrote Lippmann, it world of big business. Lawson still gained popularity and became agreed to write the story if a staple of muckraking.118 One of Everybody’s agreed to spend the most prominent prompters of $50,000 advertising the series. Like conspiratorial thinking was the yellow journalists who wrote Thomas Lawson. for Pulitzer and Hearst in the Lawson was the 1890s, Lawson was well aware of quintessential yellow muckraker of the influence of promotion and the time. His articles were a propaganda, writing “My one mixture of emotionally charged instrument is publicity … It is the

32 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein most powerful weapon in the words describing Henry Rogers as world.”119 “the big brain, the big body, the In “Frenzied Finance,” Master of ‘Standard Oil.’” The Lawson described a series of rules description of Rogers is oddly that Standard Oil lived by; these poetic and glorifying, with Rogers included to “keep your mouth appearing “as tall, as straight, as shut” and make all profitable deals well-proportioned, and as supple in the name of Standard Oil and as one of the beautiful American all questionable deals in the name Elms.” Lawson’s lavish of a dummy corporation; never description appeared to veer into butt heads with the government dubious and unusual territory, for, “Our government is by the spending almost an entire page people and for the people, and we describing Rogers eyes (e.g., the are the people and those people “fiery red and that glinting yellow who are not us can be hired by which one sees only when at night us,” and “Always do right. Right the doors of a great, roaring makes might, might makes dollars, furnace are opened,” or the “pure dollars make right, and we have blue of a cloudless late summer the dollars.”120 Lawson did not say afternoon sky when the bees hum how he came up with these rules, and the locusts’ drone blend with and they appear to be more a the smell of the new-mown hay”). concoction of Lawson’s Lawson framed this odd dramatization than some sort of description by saying that when secret rules. Even if true, the Rogers came in contact with “the source of the rules is kept intoxicating spell of dollar making uncertain, hiding the evidential … he passes under the baleful basis of Lawson’s charges. influence of ‘The Machine,’” and Lawson’s article emphasized with a “cannibalistic money- the personal characteristics of hunger” becomes a “ravenous Standard Oil’s executives, but creature, pitiless as a shark, surprisingly John D. Rockefeller knowing of no law of God or was given only a few lines as the man.”121 The lack of evidence and “ideal money-maker” and being this sort of exaggerated imagery “machine-like” in character. In would be almost unthinkable for one article Lawson spent the both realist and prosecutorial better part of fifteen-hundred muckrakers.

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In the final pages of current “literature of exposure.” Lawson’s article, he did turn to The article appeared as Lawson’s more prosecutorial style when he “Frenzied Finance” was shocking described five symbolic readers far and wide, and investment “floors” of Everybody’s published Russell’s Amalgamated Copper. The series, “The Greatest Trust in the ground floor is where stock was World” about the “Beef Trust,” created by the company at a value and Appeal to Reason was serializing of $39,000,000; only Henry Rogers The Jungle, and Tarbell’s and William Rockefeller (no uncharacteristically mean-spirited mention of John D. Rockefeller) character study of Rockefeller was were allowed to buy at this level. published in McClure’s. The high- A floor a few million dollars brow and elitist Alger had higher was available to the next previously written on the harmful class of Standard Oil partners, and social aspects of “yellow so on up until the public investors, journalism”— its “arrogant who were allowed to buy based on boastfulness, mawkish a valuation of $75,000,000, sentimentality,” its “use of believing they getting in “at the intimidation rather than … ground floor.” This was the crime: persuasion,” its “persistent and “The public was compelled to pay systematic distortion of value” and $36,000,000 profit to a few its “vulgarizing influences on its men.”122 readers.”125 Alger saw many of the One newspaper wrote that similar techniques being applied to Lawson’s charges had a “curious the literature of exposure. In a mixture of truth, exaggeration and comment that almost surely was misrepresentation.”123 Regier directed at Lawson, he wrote that wrote that Lawson “undoubtedly “Titus Oats and his plot live again wished to pay off an old score” in the amazing historian of and may have even used “the modern finance”—a reference to sensation [of] his articles … to an English priest who concocted a advance his personal interests in fake a story of a Catholic the stock market.”124 conspiracy to assassinate King In the August 1903 issue of Charles II.126 Alger went on to The Atlantic Monthly, George W. write: Alger wrote a critique of the

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These writers do not belong This statement was fittingly to that class of social critics applied to Lawson and other whose purposeful and yellow muckrakers. It also applied devoted studies of economic to some prosecutorial muckrakers conditions, of the history of who attacked individual politicians business systems, have given and corporations without saying us so many suggestions of much about the broader political ways and means for and economic system. It also fit progress.… For [they] Tarbell’s uncharacteristically mean expose, not the July, 1905 character sketch of opportunities which create Rockefeller. But Alger’s critique temptations, but the did not capture Tarbell’s nineteen individuals who succumb.127 articles on Standard Oil. Tarbell focused on specific instances of Alger feared what this yellow wrongdoing, but as opposed to exposure would do to public simply bashing Rockefeller, she opinion: repeatedly pointed to the broader As every teamster knows, economic conditions and the there is a limit to the amount “opportunities which create of extra effort which can be temptations.”129 got out of a horse with a Alger’s unease with the more whip…. It is as important to outlandish forms of the literature the community as it is to the of exposure was similar to individual that its capacity Tarbell’s belief that “vituperation” for being shocked with itself and sensationalism would get in should remain unimpaired. the way of lasting progress.130 Nothing worse can happen Alger worried that “As our to it than to have its moral appetite grows jaded and surfeited, cuticle hardened by much the stories become more drubbing. The inherent sensational so as to retain our defect with much of the attention.”131 This would produce literature of exposure is that both a moral decline and a it exists merely for the shock dumbing down of the culture. it gives, and is of no further Similarly, later in life, Tarbell profit to the community.128 would write:

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We were classed as When Roosevelt gave his muckrakers, and the school muckraker speech, he told had been so commercialized journalist Lincoln Steffens that his that the public was criticism had not been aimed at beginning to suspect it. The Steffens, or his colleagues at public was not as stupid as it McClure’s, but had instead been sometimes seems. The truth directed at David Graham Phillips of the matter was that the and his hugely controversial series muckraking school was “The Treason of the Senate.”134 In stupid. It had lost the an attacking and exaggerated style passion for facts in a passion Phillips assailed more than a for subscriptions.132 dozen Senators in his popular series running in Cosmopolitan. The Lawson’s yellow muckraking majority of Phillips’ attacks did saw public opinion as something not go far beyond boldly stated to be excited and manipulated as generalizations about “the opposed to educated. In a private System” or “the Interests.” letter to one of the editors at Phillips attempted to justify his Everybody’s, Lawson shared, lack of specific evidence by perhaps with some sarcasm, his blaming the public’s attention opinion of the public: “What do I span. In what is nearly the owe to the gelatine-spined opposite of Tarbell’s painstaking shrimps? What have the saffron- and careful approach to blooded apes done for me?” muckraking, Lawson wrote that Adding, “Forgive me … but the “To relate the treason in detail people, particularly the American would mean taking up bill after people are a joke.”133 This quote bill and going through it, line by may give some indication of why line, word by word” and “few he chose sensational publicity over among the masses have the even-handed storytelling. After patience to listen to these dull reading Lawson’s articles, it’s not matters,” wrote Phillips. The clear whether Lawson is pulling popularity of Tarbell’s nineteen- back the curtain or giving a part series indicated that Phillips purposeful distortion of what is was mistaken about his low behind the curtain. expectations for the masses.135

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In his article on Senator submitting to this plundering.” He Aldrich, Phillips filled pages with closed the article with a personal emotional and far-sweeping attack, attempting to prod the platitudes, but he did eventually reader’s anger: hone in on a specific issue—the Has Aldrich intellect? tariff. He claimed Aldrich changed Perhaps. But he does not the language of the 1890 tariff bill show it …. No, intellect is to enrich the sugar trust by over not the characteristic of three million dollars a year. Aldrich—or any of these Phillips’ strongest use of evidence traitors…. A scurvy lot they came in the final pages when he are, are they not, with their shared the testimony of, smirking and cringing and somewhat ironically, a Senator voluble palaver about God who called for an investigation and patriotism … He must into why U.S.-made goods were laugh at us, grown-up fools, one-quarter to 100 percent more permitting a handful to bind expensive in the U.S. than abroad: the might of our eighty “‘our’ borax, a Rockefeller millions and to set us all to product, costs seven and a half work for them.137 cents a pound here and only two and a half cents abroad” and While there is every “‘our’ nails, a Rockefeller-Morgan indication that the corruption that product, sell here for four dollars Phillips was writing about was and fifty cents a keg and abroad real, Phillips’ highly emotional and for three dollars and ten cents.”136 frenzied tone brought much In these few pages, Phillips scorn, including from his fellow muckraked like a prosecutor— muckrakers. The prosecutorial presenting specific and muckrakers at Collier’s saw Phillips’ authoritative evidence—but this articles as “one shriek of was a fraction of his article. accusations based on the Unlike the realist distortion of such facts as were muckrakers attempts to printed, and on the suppression of understand their antagonist’s facts which were essential.” He perspective, Phillips wrote that made “reform odious.” His Aldrich “must laugh as he watches muckraking was: the American people meekly

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sensational and money- of their evidence, but the radicals’ making preying on the muckraking was guided by their vogue of the ‘literature of ideology and they wrote to bring exposure,’ which had been about a revolution. Many built up by the truthful and historians have interpreted the conscientious work of muckrakers as being moderate writers like Miss Tarbell, middle-class professionals,140 yet Lincoln Steffens and Ray one of the most famous and Stannard Baker.138 influential muckrakers was Upton Sinclair, an emotional and Ida Tarbell also looked at Phillips eccentric socialist. journalism as intrinsically different Sinclair stood out from from her own, writing “Mr. other muckrakers not only Phillips always put into his because his most famous discussion an emotion and an muckraking text was a novel,141 imagination which we did not but also because of his bohemian indulge ourselves much at lifestyle and his personal extremes. McClure’s.”139 The difference He lived more like an eccentric between a yellow muckraker like artist than an investigatory Phillips and a realist like Tarbell is journalist, writing in isolation for the difference between an angry fourteen hours a day in a frenzied and sweeping editorialist and a manner. Sinclair wrote with the careful and neutral investigator. If belief that literature could save the we agree that this journalistic world, and for that he was willing distinction matters then using the to sacrifice himself and others same “muckraker” label for both around him. He lived with his wife fails to tell us what we need to and young son in an isolated cabin know about the journalism of the in New Jersey, and one winter Progressive Era. night Sinclair awoke to find his wife sobbing with a revolver in her THE RADICAL hand: “she had been trying for MUCKRAKERS hours to get up the courage to put Radical muckrakers, like the a bullet into her head,” wrote yellow muckrakers, often used Sinclair. He would later write of overblown language and stretched the ordeal, “all such scenes were their conclusions beyond the reach

38 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein practice for the future writing of personality and values—specific The Jungle.” facts were somewhat of an For three months I worked afterthought to his emotionalism incessantly. I wrote with and passionate advocacy of tears and anguish, pouring socialism. This was clearly evident into the pages all that pain in Jurgis’ political awakening. which life had meant to me. Broken and homeless, Jurgis Externally, the story had to wandered into a socialist meeting do with a family of in search of a place to sleep. He stockyards workers, but was awakened from his slumber, internally it was the story of both literally and metaphorically, my own family.142 by the power and sincerity of the socialist message. The Jungle chronicled the life ‘Workingmen—comrades! of the Jurgis, a Lithuanian Open your eyes and look immigrant who arrived in America about you! You have lived strong, smart, and ambitious, but so long in the toil … that was ground to a pulp working at your senses are dulled, your the Chicago stockyards. Jurgis souls are numbed, but eventually discovered socialism realize once in your lives this and recognized the reason for his world in which you dwell— failures—a corrupt and exploitive tear off the rags of its capitalist a system. customs and conventions— Far from keeping facts and behold it as it is, in all its values separate, as the realist hideous nakedness! Realize attempted to do, or keeping it, realize it!’143 emotion constrained behind documentary evidence like the The socialist speaker told of prosecutors, Sinclair’s values and millions of “wage slaves” around emotions were his central the world “living in misery and inspiration—the force which gave squalor” while the “masters of facts and his writing meaning and these slaves … riot in luxury and purpose. His muckraking was extravagance.” The capitalists did unapologetically subjective. He this, not through superior wrote from a place that was productivity but by corrupting the unique to him and driven by his government, which maintained the

39 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein privileges of the wealthy through goal was to tell the story of “wage the exploitation of workers.144 slavery,” he also described, Sinclair and other radical somewhat incidentally, the muckrakers were not interested in revolting conditions of Chicago’s exposing a few bad characters, or industrial slaughterhouses. In advocating for a few moderate graphic detail, Sinclair wrote about reforms that could improve the diseased cattle being turned into existing economic system. They canned beef, with boils covering wanted to bring the system down. their bodies that would “burst and In The Brass Check, Sinclair turned splash foul-smelling stuff into his investigative eye on American your face.” Diseased hogs were journalism, not to show that some turned into sausage and sold to journalists had been bought off by consumers, including meat riddled the rich, but to castigate the entire with “tuberculosis” and capitalistic news industry. He “ptomaines—deadly poisons— would have agreed that “The mass which cooking would not kill.” media have never given powerless Sinclair found that knowledge of Americans the necessary selling condemned meat was “an information to link the ubiquitous everyday, matter-of-fact thing rotten apples to the structure of among the men,” but no one the barrel.”145 would testify because of fear they As a muckraker, Sinclair can would be “blacklisted” and “never be understood dualistically; when hired in Packingtown again.”146 the subject of his pen was Between Sinclair’s two capitalism or socialism, he was different muckraking styles, the emotionally charged, highly passionate provocateur- ideological, and at times imprecise, investigator who presented simplistic and sweeping. But he specific information about the also could be seen, perhaps nation’s meat appears far more secondarily, as a first-rate effective than the radical investigator who uncovered revolutionary, who prescribed specific facts about the meat wide-sweeping solutions with the industry. While researching The goal of cutting down capitalism. It Jungle, Sinclair spent seven weeks was not Sinclair’s socialist vision living among the stockyard that stirred the nation; it was his workers of Chicago. While his factual statements about the

40 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein nation’s meat that produced the journalistic style at Collier’s. tangible change. Hapgood argued (with a bit of The Jungle was a shocking exaggeration of his own) that success. President Roosevelt Collier’s had: received 100 letters a day. Sinclair a method that is sensation, set up an “amateur publicity but it is our own special kind office” and “gave interviews and of sensation. It is the wrote statements for the press” sensationalism of telling the until he was “dizzy.” Sinclair exact truth about important wrote: “It seemed to me that the things—as exact as science walls for the mighty fortress of itself. Sinclair’s greed were on the point of sensationalism is of a more cracking; it needed only one push, familiar type, the and then another, and another.” sensationalism of About six months later “The Pure exaggeration, … of saying, if Food and Drug Act” was there is blood on the floor passed.147 That a radical socialist of a slaughterhouse, that it is writer could be responsible, in an inch thick, when it isn’t. part, for the creation of a I’m afraid if we start down moderate and bureaucratic reform, that path we shall lose the offers clues into the complicated distinct outlines of the relationship between journalism character we have built up.150 and public opinion. Though Sinclair was unhappy with the Roosevelt may have had Phillips in moderate reform,148 many mind when he gave his historians have considered “the muckraking speech, but no law a direct product of his muckraker fits the description of a muckraking.”149 “wild preacher of unrest” more Before The Jungle was than Sinclair. serialized in the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason, it was offered to Conclusion: Democratic culture Collier’s. Both Robert Collier and and the language of journalism Norman Hapgood thought there Why is it important to was big commercial potential, but recognize the different varieties of they rejected it because Sinclair’s muckraking that existed in the radical muckraking didn’t fit with Progressive Era? There are both

41 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein historiographic and contemporary benefit from paying closer political reasons. Historically, attention to the ways that interpreting the muckrakers as journalism can increase containing different types of polarization, extremism, outrage, journalism not only adapts itself and group-think. And conversely, better to the wide array of facts how other types of journalism can about the muckrakers’ journalism, promote understanding, but it also opens up new lines of moderation, and acceptance of inquiry.151 For instance, perhaps pluralism. A closer recognition of the end of the muckraking era the epistemologies, methods, and might be partially explained tones within journalism can help because of changes in the us understand the ebb and flow character and quality of throughout history of tribalism muckraking itself. Perhaps and dogmatic absolutism in public Roosevelt and Tarbell were opinion. As journalism becomes correct when they said that “to more adversarial—that is more secure permeant results the mind radical and yellow, and to a lesser must be convinced” for effect, prosecutorial—it naturally sensational journalism would becomes more partisan and eventually make the public “weary divisive, which pushes the broader of vituperation” (Tarbell) and culture in a similar direction. As “violent emotionalism” would lead much as we may value hard-hitting to a “spasm of reform” and then oppositional investigative “exhaustion” (Roosevelt).152 By journalism, the more adversarial paying closer attention to the journalism becomes the more it values, methods, and epistemology can resemble partisan debate, and within journalism, we may be able the easier it can be dismissed by to better understand the successes unthinking political tribalism. and failures of reform We’ve seen this recently as movements.153 politicians neutralize inconvenient The contemporary reason is scientific research and well- related to the recent multi-decade documented investigative increase in partisanship and journalism, not through reason incivility. To understand this and evidence of their own, but by recent degradation of democratic appealing to partisan loyalties and culture in the U.S., we would attacking the messenger.154 The

42 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein need for investigative journalism is trap of “presentism” and judge the as critical as ever, but if we want past based on today’s social values. to avoid investigative journalism Historians have acknowledged from being seen as another form that, in some respects, all history is of partisanship, we would benefit contemporary, for no historical from a closer attention to the facts speak for themselves until tone, language, method, and they are selected by the historian underlying epistemology that and placed into a context that journalists use in their stories. gives the facts meaning. As Robert In turn, the language and D. Johnston wrote, “When labels scholars have often used to historians fight about discuss journalism and journalism Progressivism … they are history has too often been struggling over the basic meanings ineffective at distinguishing of American democracy” which, if between “hysterical we directly accept the influence of sensationalism” and “stern present events on historical sobriety and truth.”155 We interpretation, “we would not only understand by contrast. We advance the study of the past but cannot easily recognize the … we might improve the practice moderation and understanding in of our current politics as well.”157 the journalism of a realist like If the quality of a debate is Baker, without recognizing the directly related to the clarity of the radicalism of a Sinclair, or the terms that are used, then some of sensationalism of a Phillips. We the terms we have developed need precise terms to help us regarding the role of journalism in make that distinction. While a society have not positioned us well shift in language and framing to have a clear and fruitful probably will not bring about an discussion. This problem stretches immediate change in culture or in beyond the use of the term politics, as George Orwell stated, muckraker. Before continuing to “one can probably bring about make a case for why we should some improvement by starting at avoid the generalized muckraker the verbal end.”156 label, and instead add the To acknowledge the role of qualifying designation: realist, the present in historical prosecutorial, yellow, and radical, interpretation is not to fall into the I’d like to briefly consider two

43 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein other terms we have used to be lacking. While verifiable facts evaluate journalism in order to about the world do exist, any news make a broader case for why we story requires a journalist’s value need to adopt more precise terms. judgement to select which facts to Over the last century, the include in a story and how to dominant journalistic ideal has arrange those facts. Facts require been “objectivity,” which historian interpretation and interpretation Michael Schudson described as the requires value judgments. Just as strict separation between facts and historians are intrinsically part of values, facts being defined as history—they write about events verifiable statements about the that shaped the world in which world and values defined as an they live—journalists are part of individual’s subjective “conscious the society they write about. A or unconscious preferences for complete separation between the what the world should be.” The investigator and the thing being belief in objectivity is not based on investigated is an illusion. Of the belief that journalists as course, scholars recognize that individuals are objective. Quite the objectivity is a methodological opposite, it is based on the belief ideal, and we can try to measure that individuals are not objective, how close a piece of journalism which necessitates a method of gets to that ideal, but that nuance objective reporting to help has not made its way into public journalists overcome their own discourse. This leaves us relying subjectivity.158 The belief in on a term that expresses a objectivity wrote Schudson, “is a standard that is unachievable. faith in ‘facts,’ a distrust of Without a set of precise ‘values,’ and a commitment to intermediary benchmark terms their segregation”159 As an abstract that journalists can actually live up concept, this is clear enough, but to, even the highest quality as a practical measure for investigative journalism can be, evaluating journalism, strictly speaking, accurately “objectivity" has failed to be a criticized as failing to live up to useful term for public debate. It the ideal of objectivity. This leaves has failed because every piece of us with false equivalences and a journalism, when measured against frustrating public discourse that the ideal of objectivity, is found to

44 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein fails to help the public understand communicate meaningful the ideals of journalism. solutions. Just as “objectivity” is not an Just as opponents of reform effective term for distinguishing used the muckraker label to brand between different types of all investigative journalists as journalism, many scholars have hysterical, lurid and unreasonable, argued that the term “fake news” much of the distortion around the is an ineffective term, because it term “fake news” is the result of conflates numerous issues.160 deliberate acts by political Sometimes “fake news” refers to operatives. As Orwell warned, Russian propaganda. Sometimes it “political chaos is connected with refers to domestic political the decay of language” and “the disinformation. “Fake news” can great enemy of clear language is refer to the “internet shell insincerity.”162 The debasement of game”—a strategic mix of true language can have a profound and stories intertwined with false lasting impact on a society, for stories for the purpose of when we continue to use terms confusing the public.161 At other that do not have precise meanings times “fake news” refers to or do not make the distinctions we completely outlandish rumors or need them to make, we run the conspiracy theories. President risk of turning a serious debate Donald Trump has used the term into confusion and nonsense. The to undercut news coverage that he terms “fake news” and thinks is unfair or harmful to his “muckraker” are both generalized own interests, or that uses labels that fail to distinguish anonymous sources. Fake news between different types of can also refer to exaggeration or journalism. When we can sensationalism, or to simple distinguish between different types misinformation—reporting errors of muckraking by using different that are later corrected by qualifying terms—such as realist, newsrooms. Using a single term to prosecutorial, yellow, and describe multiple and distinct radical—and when we can discuss journalistic issues clouds our the failures in journalism without understanding of problems and using the blanket term “fake harms our ability to find and news,” and instead use more precise terms, such as: “implicit

45 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein and explicit bias,” “foreign seen the future and it works”165—a propaganda,” “sensationalism,” statement that is more in line with “spin,” and “reporting errors”— the radicals. then we enhance our ability to Proving the effect of diagnose problems and come up different types of journalism on with useful solutions. The clarity public opinion is beyond the of our language and the clarity of scope of this article, but a major our thought are intertwined, and premise of this article is that clear thinking is a necessary part journalists not only pass on of political renewal. information, but also pass on an The point of this paper is epistemology—a method or not to create rigid categories, but orientation for understanding to illuminate the differences in the what’s true in the world. In A type of journalism the muckrakers Preface to Politics, Walter Lippmann created. There are some argued that the way the public was muckrakers who do not fit neatly educated on public affairs was far into any of the four categories. more important than the success Lincoln Steffens’ earlier or failure of any specific reform. muckraking on municipal “What matters the method” the corruption fits roughly with the reformer will cry, “provided the realists—offering a detailed, reform be good? Well, the method detached, and somewhat aloof, matters more than any particular narrative about crime in reform,” wrote Lippmann.166 Minneapolis, St. Louis, and With a clear eye, Lippmann elsewhere.163 But after Steffens saw that representative democracy was criticized for failing to offer and self-government were not solutions to the corruption he guaranteed to be moral, just, and exposed, he muckraked more like wise. Majority’ rule can be just as a prosecutor, promoting cruel, corrupt, and arbitrary as a successful anti-corruption king’s rule. Just as Alexis de reformers in a series of articles Tocqueville feared that the and in the book The Upbuilders tyranny of majority opinion would (1909).164 Later in his career he be the downfall of America,167 became more revolutionary. After Lippmann wrote that “pure” his 1919 trip to the Soviet Union democracy—based on the Steffens famously stated “I’ve unrestrained will of the majority—

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“is really brute, inchoate democratic culture better than the democracy” that creates the yellow and radical muckrakers. “foundation of absolutism.” If When Tarbell tried to explain questions of public importance Rockefeller’s perspective, or when were decided via a popularity a prosecutorial muckraker like contest carried out through the Mark Sullivan, restrained his mass media, the loudest and the critique to the evidence he could most charismatic demagogues and verify, they were practicing a form propagandists would likely to of moderation. The same could dominate.168 Intelligent and fair not be said of the ideologically self-government required the driven muckraking of Sinclair, or people to “rule in a particular the brash outrage of Phillips. way.” No “system of checks and In addition to moderation, balances would in itself insure Lippmann believed that to begin freedom and good government” to see even a small part of the and “nothing could save the modern world clearly, we had to nation” from the ills of rely on independent scientifically democracy, or any other form of guided specialists to decipher the government, “except the restraint complexities of society. Those imposed by the virtue of its findings had to be shared in sober citizens.”169 The “supreme social and precise language. For, under principle is moderation in all the clearest of circumstances, our principles,” wrote Lippmann. In interpretations of social events order to bring about this “change were far from certain. “The least of the public philosophy” he hampered minds, the most called on journalists and political imaginative and experienced men, leaders to adopt “the ancient can only stumble through to wisdom of the humanists—that partial explanations,” wrote excess is the essential Lippmann.171 characteristic of vice and that in all This attitude of humility, truth, beauty, and goodness there which Lippmann saw as essential is proportion, moderation, and for a wise and just democracy, was restraint.”170 not manifest by many, or even Based on this principle of most, muckrakers. The yellow moderation, the realists and the muckrakers employed prosecutorial muckrakers served a exaggeration, drama, and certainty.

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The radical muckrakers also biography of Woodrow Wilson, expressed great certainty about not to mention his writing under their political ideology. Neither the pen name David Grayson, were moderate. The prosecutorial which covered a wide range of muckrakers—sobered by a musings about nature, society, and commitment to evidence and companionship. Tarbell wrote restraint in language, were about business corruption as well moderate, but they still expressed as industrial innovation, the tariff, certainty as they sought to and wrote biographies of persuade their readers of the guilt Napoleon and Lincoln. Their of their antagonists and the methods were less rigorous than a correctness of their solutions. social scientist following the They wrote with the air of scientific method, but their sureness, and withheld the facts neutrality, impartial language, and interpretations that undercut examination of an issue from their conclusion. The realist multiple perspectives, openness to muckrakers, like Tarbell and alternative interpretations, and Baker, came closest to Lippmann’s vigilant adherence to evidence, ideals of a moderate, humble, and resembled the values of science meticulously professional press. more closely than the yellow, Ultimately, Lippmann prosecutorial, or radical wanted the investigative fact- muckrakers. finding work to be done by While no journalist can independent specialists who entirely live up to the ideals of followed the exact rigors of the scientific objectivity, this does not scientific method, and were mean the journalist who attempts removed from both politics, to be fair and independent and the business, and other constraints of journalist who strategically crafts a journalism. On this account, all story to manipulate readers are the muckrakers, including the realists, same. While Tarbell’s and Baker’s fell short. Tarbell and Baker were realist muckraking was not generalists, not specialists; Baker divorced from their personal wrote books and articles about values, their writing attempted to labor strikes, railroad propaganda, represent multiple values and race relations, environmental stretch beyond any single policy, and a comprehensive

48 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein perspective by giving a fair hearing as a strength—to “make the to all the stakeholders. accident of our internal John Dewey is often framed composition into an idea.” This as standing in opposition to would require a commitment to Lippmann’s ideas about “promoting the efficacy of human journalism, but he agreed that how intercourse irrespective of class, the public came to its conclusions, racial, geographical and national and the rigidity in which a limits” and a dedication to the conclusion was held, was of “processes of cooperation in the critical importance to democracy. great experiment of living In a society composed of together.” Dewey went on to astounding diversity, encountering write, “We have to recognize that someone who interprets the world furtherance of the depth and differently was, and is, a fact of width of human intercourse is the modern life. Whether those measure of civilization.”172 encounters would be combative To create this ideal, Dewey and divisive or cooperative and believed journalists—along with build understanding depended, in educators and public part, on the type of public intellectuals—should facilitate discourse that was modeled by public inquiry, discussion, and journalists. debate, and help the public accept Seeing what was happening the reality of cultural pluralism— in Germany before and during that different groups were World War I, Dewey feared that inevitably affected in different the American public could get ways, and would naturally form caught up in a similar ridged and different explanations and uncompromising absolutist interpretations.173 Journalism, ideology, which he thought had along with other venues for infected the Germans. democratic debate, should help us “Philosophical absolutism may be expand our individual conception practically as dangerous as matter of self-interest into a recognition of fact political absolutism,” wrote of our common interests, and Dewey. To strengthen our social promote tolerance and bonds, he believed we had to turn understanding. our national diversity into Ray Stannard Baker’s something the public recognized conception of the role of

49 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein journalists as being “makers of democratic ideals—including the understanding,” fits well within rationality and morality of the Dewey’s political philosophy. people, the average citizens’ role Both saw the role of journalism as in self-governance, and the free helping the public understand competition of ideas—to this new what life was like for their fellow reality. Journalists who made their citizens. Much of Tarbell’s writing case by forcefully stating a also fit with this ideal. With deep conclusion without sharing the respect for the democratic process evidence behind their conclusion and an appreciation for diverse were, in essence, asking readers to public opinion, Tarbell wrote that accept an epistemology based on our individual ideas: faith, not evidence. An must sink or swim in a epistemology based on faith, stream where a multitude of authority, or willful manipulation, human experiences, undermine the Enlightenment prejudices, ambitions, ideals values that grounds democratic meet and clash, throw one theory. The yellow muckrakers another back, mingle, make like Lawson and Phillips often that all-powerful current failed to share the evidence behind which is public opinion— their conclusions, and instead the trend which swallows, implicitly relied on the audiences digests, or rejects what we pre-existing skepticism of business give it. It is our indifference tycoons and political elites. If to or ignorance of the evidence is minimized and a multiplicity of human citizen’s preexisting beliefs and elements in the society we prejudices become their primary seek to benefit that is epistemological justification, then responsible for the sinking personal and group biases are outright of many of our fine elevated above a shared set of plans.174 facts and a common rationality. When this happens, it is not As the distance between surprising that journalism cause and effect expanded and becomes more partisan, social problems became more ideological, and divisive. complex, Dewey and Lippmann Like Dewey, Lippmann both grappled with how to adapt believed that an effective

50 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein democracy required certain journalism should be one vehicle cultural and structural conditions. where citizens learn how to For Lippmann democracy was at understand and respectfully its best when different individuals interact with those whose views and groups were effectively were different from their own. represented over a span of time Arguably, the realist muckrakers and space; “time” meaning that helped develop a culture based on democracy wasn’t based on the respectful debate, while the “hypnosis of the moment,” but prosecutorial, yellow, and radical reflected public opinion as it muckrakers moved society closer adapted to the past, present, and to a politics of partisanship, the future; and “space,” intimating tribalism, and ideological rigidity. that representation shouldn’t be While the specific divisions based on the entire, aggregated threatening democracy have nation, but on a variety of groups changed since the Progressive Era, of different sizes and locations (i.e. when a society becomes so both neighborhood, city, county, divided that citizens refuse to district, state, and national recognize their common representation). Both Dewey and humanity, or no longer believe Lippmann believed that they have common interests with democracy required the their fellow countrymen and development of a culture that took women, then the stability that the long view and that helped democracy requires is threatened. people see beyond their immediate We need to recognize different time and space. To navigate types of muckraking because of differences in opinion both the divergent influences each have believed that we had to temper on public opinion. Weighing our opinions “with scientific multiple sides of an issue and humility”175 and recognize that considering one’s own values and dogmatic beliefs were harmful to a then forming a belief is diverse nation. In a democratic fundamentally different than society, it makes a great difference refusing to reflect on alternative whether opposing groups perspectives and pre-judging the respectfully disagree or whether morality or intelligence of those they hate and demonize each you disagree with. There is an other. Dewey believed that essential insight in Roosevelt’s fear

51 Media History Monographs 21:1 Klein that a “gross and reckless” form depends, at least to a degree, on of journalism would “create a the type of journalism that is morbid and vicious public prevalent, and the type of public sentiment.”176 Whether society is opinion that develops. held together or pulled apart

Notes

1 James L. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007). 2 “Roosevelt on the Muck Rake Brigade,” Times-Picayune, Apr. 15, 1906. 3 Theodore Roosevelt, “The Man with the Muckrake,” New York Times, Apr. 15, 1906. 4 Roosevelt, “Man with the Muckrake.” 5 Mark Neuzil, “Hearst, Roosevelt, and the Muckrake Speech of 1906: A New Perspective,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 73 (Spring 1996). 6 David Graham Phillips, “Treason of the Senate,” Cosmopolitan, March, 1906. 7 For instance, New York Time’s headline read, "President On Muckrakers: Condemns Indiscriminate Assaults On Public Men,” and had a prescient sub-heading: “Easy to Twist President’s Words.” New York Times, Apr. 15, 1906. 8 David Chalmers, The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), 14. 9 Fred J. Cook, The Muckrakers: Crusading Journalists Who Changed America (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1972), 9-10. 10 Irving Dilliard, “Foreword: Six Decades Later,” in Muckraking: Past, Present, and Future, ed. John M. Harrison and Harry. H. Stein (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973), 1. 11 There are numerous other examples of historians describing Roosevelt’s muckraker speech as if it was a one-sided attack on all investigative journalists. Robert Miraldi wrote that Roosevelt made a speech “attacking … muckraking writers.” Jackson Learns wrote that Roosevelt “criticized investigative journalists as ‘muckrakers.’” Cecelia Tichi described Roosevelt as applying the “muckraker” label to Tarbell, Baker, and Steffens, and the whole “cohort of literary social critics.” Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 307. Robert Miraldi, Muckraking and Objectivity: Journalism’s colliding traditions (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990), 7. Cecelia Tichi, “Exposé and Excess,” American Literary History 15, no. 4 (2003): 822. 12 David A. Copeland, The Media’s Role in Defining the Nation: The Active Voice (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 129-130. 13 Roosevelt, “The Man with the Muckrake.” 14 Edwin E. Slosson, “The Literature of Exposure,” The Independent, Mar. 22, 1906. 15 On classifying the muckrakers, Lippmann also stated: “Muckraking is full of the voices of the beaten, of the bewildered, and then again it is shot through with some fine anticipation. It has pointed to a revolution in business motives; it has hinted at the emerging power of

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labor and the consumer.” Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 25-27. 16 David Hackett Fischer called this historical tendency the “fallacy of essences.” He writes that it is common in historiography because the idea of a central essence “supplies a sense of completeness and it encourages a sense of certainty,” which, even if it is false, is psychologically satisfying. David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 68-69. 17 Charles Edward Russell, Bare Hands and Stone Walls (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), 140. 18 Cornelius C. Regier, The Era of the Muckrakers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932), 10-11, 123-127. 19 Louis Filler, The Muckrakers: Crusaders for American Liberalism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967), 4-5. Many others have viewed the muckrakers as Filler has, contrasting the “stodgy” journalism of the 19th century to the “solid factualism of muckraking” of the Progressive Era, including Robert E. Spiller, et al., Literary History of the United States (New York: Macmillian, 1963), 965. 20 Phillips, “Treason of the Senate.” 21 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines: 1885-1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 492. John Tebbel, The Life and Good Times of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Dutton, 1952), 150-51. 22 J. Herbert Altschull, From Milton to McLuhan: The Ideas Behind American Journalism (New York: Longman, 1990), 271-274. 23 Other historians have noticed the broad differences in types of muckraking. Matthew Schneirov saw important differences between two muckraking magazines, McClure’s and Cosmopolitan. Doris Kearns Goodwin did not specifically define muckraking as containing different types of journalism, but in a brief section she cited Filler when she wrote “The president’s attack on the muckrakers reflected … his exasperation with the proliferation of increasingly sensational and shoddily investigated exposure journalism [that] had been slowly building. Although the ‘masters’ at McClure’s typically invested months and even years of careful research in the studies, a host of less meticulous and principled ‘imitators’ had followed in their wake.” Matthew Schneirov, “Popular Magazines, New Liberal Discourse and American Democracy, 1890s-1914,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 16 (2017): 121-142. Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 482. 24 Robert Miraldi, Muckraking and Objectivity, Journalism’s Colliding Traditions (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990), 17-19. 25 There have been other attempts to “redefine” muckraking. Kathleen L. Endres wrote an essay in American Journalism that argued historians have placed too much emphasis on white male muckrakers and should recognize the muckraking contributions in women’s magazines, such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, Delineator, and Good Housekeeping. Endres also advocated for distinguishing between muckraking that provided solutions, versus muckraking that was merely descriptive of a social problem. Kathleen L. Endres, “Muckraking: A Term Worth Redefining,” American Journalism, 14, no. 3-4 (Summer-Fall 1997): 333-335.

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26 Arthur S. Link, and Richard McCormick, Progressivism (Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 1983), 24. 27 Ida M. Tarbell, "The Golden Rule in Business," The American Magazine, Oct. 1914 to Sep. 1915. 28 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 185-186. 29 Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle: The Autobiography of Ray Stannard Baker [David Grayson], (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), 41-42. 30 Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 185-186. 31 Arthur Weinberg and Lila Weinberg, The Muckrakers, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 288. 32 John Kenneth Turner’s revolutionary zeal also included arms smuggling for Mexican rebels. Linda Lumsden, “Socialist Muckraker John Kenneth Turner: The Twenty-First Century Relevance of a Journalist/Activist’s Career,” American Journalism, 32 (Sept. 2015): 282-306. 33 Hofstadter, Age of Reform. 34 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877-1920, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). 35 Martin J. Sklar, "Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism," Studies on the Left 1 (1960). James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in The Liberal State, 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). 36 Peter Filene, “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,” American Quarterly 22 (1970): 20-34. 37 John D. Buenker, "The Progressive Era: A Search for a Synthesis," Mid-America 51 (1969): 175-93. 38 Jack T. Kirby, Darkness at the Dawning: Race and Reform in the Progressive South (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1972), 3. 39 David M. Kennedy, "Overview: The Progressive Era," Historian 37 (1975): 453. 40 Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (1982): 113-132. 41 Filene, “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,” 33. 42 Daniel T. Rodgers, “Capitalism and Politics in the Progressive Era and in Ours,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13 (July 2014): 380. 43 Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1980), 204. 44 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, I (originally published in 1651, republished by New York: Penguin Classics, 2017), iv. 45 “To edit is to interpret, to speak is to define, to communicate is to structure reality.” David Paletz and Robert Entman, Media Power Politics (New York: Free Press, 1981), 22. 46 Walter Lippmann, and Charles Merz, “A Test of the News: An Examination of the News Reports in the New York Times on aspects of the Russian Revolution of special importance to Americans, March 1917-March 1920,” The New Republic, Aug. 4, 1920. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914); Liberty and the News (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920); Public Opinion (New York, Macmillian, 1922); and, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1927).

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47 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1927, reprinted 1988). 48 Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, 68. 49 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 147. 50 John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939), 128. 51 Dewey, Freedom and Culture, 175. 52 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 207. In the words of the modern Dewian Michael Sandel, democracy requires “a way of life that fosters communication and deliberation among citizens,” that culminates in “intelligent collective action.” Michael J. Sandel, “Dewey Rides Again,” New York Review of Books, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/05/09/dewey-rides-again/ 53 As Maurine H. Beasley has argued, racism, lynching, and the treatment of African Americans were rarely the focus of muckrakers’ investigations. Collier’s even featured the occasional article that tried to justify the lynching of blacks. There were some notable exceptions, such as Ray Stannard Baker’s writing for McClure’s and his series “Following the Color Line” for American Magazine, but he dealt with segregation and lynching in a way that largely avoided the ethical dimensions and instead focused on the economic and social nature of racism. Baker doesn’t attack segregationists as racist, or un-Christian, and his article is noticeably absent of strong statements about immorality of lynching. Baker’s reporting on race was described by historians Arthur and Lila Weinberg as “cold, scientific, reportorial logic.” Weinberg & Weinberg, The Muckrakers, 214. Maureen Beasley, "The Muckrakers and Lynching: A Case Study in Racism," Journalism History 9, no. 3/4 (Autumn-Winter 1982): 86-91. 54 Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7. 55 When the Constitution was written, the U.S. was a nation of around 4 million—700,000 of which were slaves—and 95% lived on farms or in small towns. By 1850s the percentage of Americans who were farmers had declined to around 64% of the workforce—by 1900 it was at 37%. Philip Abbott, Political Thought in America: Conversations and Debates (Itasca: F. E. Peacock Publishers, 1991), 106-107, 184. 56 Robert Wiebe, The Search For Order: 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 40. 57 Michel Foucault makes this point in Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 58 John Dewey, “The Schools and Social Preparedness,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, Vol. 10: 1916-1917 Period, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 193. 59 Hofstadter wrote that the muckrakers “were able, as very few of the practitioners of exposure had been able before, not merely to name the malpractices in American business and politics, but to name the malpractitioners and their specific misdeeds, and to proclaim the facts to the entire country.” They told a story about how “America worked” at a time when the public was trying to get a sense of the nation beyond their city or state or region. The “muckrakers pictured state settings that everybody recognized but that nobody had written about – oil refineries, slums, the redlight districts, the hotel rooms where political deals were made.” He argued that the muckrakers realism, grounded by a description of specific people in specific places, fostered the pragmatic thinking of the Progressive era.

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“Reality was . . . rough and sordid. It was hidden, neglected, and off-stage…. Reality was the bribe, the rebate, the bought franchise, the sale of adulterated food.” Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 186, 199, 201. 60 Lippmann expanded on this point: “Muckraking flared up at about the time when land was no longer freely available and large-scale industry had begun to throw vast questions across the horizon. It came when success had ceased to be easily possible for everyone.” Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, 25. 61 Filler, The Muckrakers, 83. 62 S. S. McClure, “Editorial: Concerning Three Articles in This Number of McClure’s, and a Coincidence That May Set Us Thinking.” McClure’s Magazine, Jan., 1903. 63 Baker, American Chronicle, 185. 64 Filler, The Muckrakers, 23. 65 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 14. 66 Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003). This was echoed sociologist Gaye Tuchman—the journalistic “act of making news is the act of constructing reality itself rather than a picture of reality.” Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1980), 12. 67 Schudson, Sociology of News, 2. 68 Literary realism, made famous by William Dean Howells, was an approach to both fiction and non-fiction that attempted to depict reality without embellishing or romanticizing, and typically featured characters who were nuanced and complex as opposed to pure good or evil. Richard Hofstadter (1955) was the most prominent scholar to draw the connection between muckraking and realism. Since then, scholars have continued to explore the link. In Raymond Seidelman’s chapter titled “Science as Muckraking: The Cult of Realism,” he described progressive political science as a “critical unmasking” and framed the work of Arthur F. Bentley and Charles Beard, respectively, as being part of a scientific muckraking tradition. Maxwell Bloomfield saw realism in muckraking as influencing realism in American theater. J. S. Maloy described the methods of muckraking realism as “a road not traveled” in academic political science, and as a way to connect social science research to a broader political culture. He conceived of political scientists and muckrakers (he focused solely on Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens) as having similar goals and following compatible methods of empirical fact finding and critical analysis, while rejecting partisan propagandizing and echo chambers. Hofstadter, Age of Reform. Raymond Seidelman, Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015). Maxwell Bloomfield, "Muckraking and the American Stage: The Emergence of Realism, 1905-1917," South Atlantic Quarterly 66 (Spring 1967). J. S. Maloy, “Political Realism as Anti-scholastic Practice: Methodological Lessons from Muckraking Journalism,” Political Research Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2020): 28, 30-31. 69 David Graham Phillips, “Treason of the Senate: Aldrich, Head of it All,” Cosmopolitan, Mar., 1906. 70 Thomas Lawson, “Frenzied Finance: The Story of Amalgamated,” Everybody’s Magazine, Aug., 1904. 71 Other historians have written about the connection between yellow journalism and muckraking. Kristen MacLeod, for instance, wrote of the “sensationalist discourse of ‘yellow

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journalism’ and its reform-minded offshoot, the muckraking movement.” John Durham Peters wrote: “The histories of muckraking and sensationalism are intertwined. The raw truth could be as sensational as the wildest story…. Muckraking sought to ‘expose’ the hidden, in both the photographic and pornographic senses of that word.” Kristen MacLeod, American Little Magazines of the Fine de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 252. John Durham Peters, “Satan and Savior: Mass Communication in Progressive Thought,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989): 259. 72 Radical muckraking could also be called ideological muckraking. To recognize the method and epistemology of a journalist, the specifics of an ideology (socialism, laissez-fair capitalism, etc.) are less important than the role ideology plays in shaping a journalist’s writing. While the radical muckrakers of the Progressive Era were all socialists, the important thing to recognize is that ideology guided or framed nearly everything they wrote. They made sense of their reporting through their faith in an explicitly held ideology. 73 Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston: Routledge, 1957), 23-30. 74 Gans, Deciding What’s News, 39-40. 75 Edward Hallet Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 80. 76 Ida M. Tarbell, All in a Day’s Work (New York: Macmillian, 1939), 30, 85. 77 Kathleen Brady, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (New York: Putnam, 1984), 123, 99. 78 Everett E. Dennis, foreword to More Than A Muckraker: Ida Tarbell’s Lifetime in Journalism, ed. Robert C. Kochersberg Jr. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), xii. 79 See Henry D. Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (New York: Harper Brothers, 1894). 80 Brady, Ida Tarbell, 123, 129. 81 S. S. McClure, The Autobiography of S. S. McClure (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 239. 82 Tarbell, All in a Day’s Work, 215. 83 Ida M. Tarbell, “The Rise of the Standard Oil Company,” McClure’s Magazine, Dec., 1902. 84 Ibid. 85 Tarbell, “The Oil War of 1872,” McClure’s Magazine, Jan., 1903. 86 Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth. 87 Charles Edward Russell, “The Greatest Trust in the World,” Everybody’s Magazine, Feb., 1905. 88 Tarbell, “Rise of the Standard Oil.” 89 Ibid. 90 Ida M. Tarbell, “The Real Greatness of the Standard,” McClure’s Magazine, July, 1903. 91 Tarbell, “Real Greatness of Standard Oil.” 92 Ida M. Tarbell, “The History of the Standard Oil Company: Conclusion,” McClure’s Magazine, Oct., 1904. 93 Ibid. 94 Tarbell, All in a Day’s Work, 234. 95 Ida M. Tarbell, “John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study, Part 2,” McClure’s Magazine, Aug., 1905. 96 Ida M. Tarbell, “John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study,” McClure’s Magazine, July, 1905. 97 Tarbell, All in a Day’s Work, 399-400, 206. I’ve cautiously used memoirs in this paper to see how different muckrakers defined their own journalism, and to look for other clues

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about their broader epistemological outlooks. Like all historical texts, memoirs should be interpreted with a critical eye, for even the most honest and revealing memoir is still no more than the expression of one individual who is anything but a neutral spectator. 98 Tarbell, "The Golden Rule in Business." 99 Tarbell, All in a Day’s Work, 242. 100 Roosevelt, “The Man with the Muckrake.” 101 John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zucherman, The Magazine in America: 1741-1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 108. 102 Robert C. Kochersberger Jr., introduction to More Than A Muckraker, xxiv. 103 Baker, American Chronicle, 139 104 Michael S. Sweeney, “The Desire for the Sensational: Coxey’s Army and the Argus-eyed Demons of Hell,” Journalism History 23 (1997): 119-120. 105 Baker, American Chronicle, 32. 106 Ibid. 107 Ray Stannard Baker, “How Labor Is Organized,” World’s Work, Aug. 1902. 108 Baker, American Chronicle, 165. 109 Ibid., 38-39. 110 Brandeis is far better known as a Supreme Court Justice, but he wrote a series of articles on J.P. Morgan’s “money trust” for Harper’s Weekly that fit well within the prosecutorial muckraking approach. Brandeis’ articles were later assembled into the book: Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money: And How the Bankers Use It, (New York: The McClure Publications, 1913). 111 Henry D. Lloyd could also be understood as a radical muckraker, instead of a prosecutorial muckraker, as he advocated for a cooperative socialist commonwealth, but his writing was full of hundreds of footnotes citing verifiable evidence, and he was more ideologically flexible than die-hard socialists like Sinclair and Russell (i.e. Lloyd was also an advocate of free trade). Lloyd’s use of evidence was also more in line with the prosecutorial muckrakers, but his exaggerated language and his quasi-socialist ends were consistent with the radical muckrakers. 112 Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth, 500, 508. 113 Filler, The Muckrakers, 336. 114 Mark Sullivan, The Education of an American (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1938), 254-255, 261. 115 Brandeis, Other People’s Money. 116 McClure’s Magazine also published prosecutorial muckraking, including some of Connolly’s articles, but in general McClure’s was less attacking and partisan. 117 Norman Hapgood, The Changing Years: Reminiscences of Norman Hapgood (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930), 106. 118 Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, 24. 119 Weinberg & Weinberg, The Muckrakers, 261-262. 120 Lawson, “The Story of Amalgamated,” 15. 121 Ibid., 17-19 122 Ibid., 20-22.

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123 “Mr. Lawson and Others,” The Independent, Dec. 29, 1904, in The Independent, Volume 57, July—December, 1904, (New York: Independent Publications (1904), 1,514. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=BKUeAQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA762. 124 Reiger, The Era of the Muckrakers, 130 125 George W. Alger, “Sensational Journalism and the Law,” The Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1903. 126 George W. Alger, “The Literature of Exposure, The Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1905. 127 Ibid., 211. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid., 242. 131 Ibid., 211. 132 Tarbell, All In A Day’s Work, 298. 133 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Volume V: Sketches of 21 Magazines 1905-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 79-80. 134 Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 581. 135 Phillips, “Treason of the Senate: Aldrich.” 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid. 138 Collier’s Weekly, Nov. 17, 1906. 139 Ida M. Tarbell letter to Louis Filler, published in Louis Filler, Voice of Democracy: A Critical Biography of David Graham Phillips (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press: 1978), 75. 140 Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 196. 141 Other muckrakers wrote fiction, like Frank Norris, The Pit (New York: Doubleday, 1903). 142 Upton Sinclair, American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932), 61, 123-237, 158. 143 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Bantam Dell, 2003), 324. 144 Ibid., 326. 145 Paletz and Entman, Media Power Politics, 167. 146 Sinclair, The Jungle, 207-209. 147 Sinclair, American Outpost, 166-173. 148 Sinclair’s disparaging remarks about the Pure Food and Drug Act have been backed up by meat processing experts and historians, such as Alan Toulin, who saw publicity and advertising undermine the law’s regulations on the meat processing industry. Alana Toulin, “‘Old Methods Not Up to New Ways’: The Strategic Use of Advertising in the Fight for Pure Food After 1906,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 18 (2019): 461–479. 149 Weinberg & Weinberg, The Muckrakers, 206. 150 Hapgood, The Changing Years, 171. 151 I don’t in any way mean to disparage the two dominant explanations for the end of the muckraking movement—that banks and advertisers pulled funding from muckraking magazines and that journalists lost legitimacy when they joined the government propaganda department at the Committee for Public Information during WWI. These are well documented interpretations for the end of muckraking, but it is also possible that realist

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muckraking was overwhelmed by yellow and radical muckraking, as Tarbell and Roosevelt feared would happen. 152 Tarbell, All In A Day’s Work, 242. Roosevelt, “The Man with the Muckrake.” 153 The relationship between investigative journalism and the success of a reform was explored using an anthropological approach by David L. Protess, Fay Lomax Cook, Jack C. Doppelt, James S. Ettema, Margaret T. Gordon, Donna R. Leeff, and Peter Miller, The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991). 154 This point was made by Michael S. Sweeney in the 2006 Presidential Address of the American Journalism Historians Association, when he criticized unthinking opinion journalism for oversimplifying complex problems and “substituting punditry and pugnacity for constructive public discourse” that pushed readers to stop thinking for themselves and “merely parrot expressions.” Michael S. Sweeney, “Everyman His Own Historian—Not! A Defense of Our Profession—And a Plea for its Future: AJHA Presidential Address, Oct. 6, 2005, San Antonio Texas,” American Journalism 23 (2006). 155 Some scholars have emphasised the contemporary relationship between tone of journalism and its impact on public opinion. See Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 156 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angos, vol. 4 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1968), 139. 157 Robert D. Johnston, “Re-democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1 (Jan. 2002): 68- 92. 158 Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2014), 10. 159 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 5. 160 Numerous scholars and journalists have rejected the imprecise term “fake news,” including: Claire Wardle, “Fake News. It’s Complicated,” First Draft, Feb. 16, 2017, https://firstdraftnews.org/latest/fake-news-complicated/. Daniel Funke, “Reporters: Stop Calling Everything ‘Fake News,’” Poynter, Aug. 29, 2018, https://www.poynter.org/fact- checking/2018/reporters-stop-calling-everything-fake-news/. George Lakoff on All Things Considered, National Public Radio, Feb. 17, 2017. The point was made by multiple participants at the 2018 John Breaux Symposium on “fake news” (May 3, 2018, Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, Washington D.C.) and in the subsequent report An Anatomy of Fake News: History, Populism, Partisanship, Technology, and Solutions, ed. Tim V. Klein, (Baton Rouge: Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs, 2018). Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2018). 161 Michael Lynch, “Fake News and the Internet Shell Game,” The New York Times, Nov. 28, 2016. 162 Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 139.

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163 Even in the early articles, as James J. Connolly has pointed out, Steffens favored action over reflection, and promoted individual reformers like Joseph Folk. Steffens’ initial lack of emphasis on specific solutions was partly due to his simplistic formulation of the public interest as a monolith that had grown apathetic, and just had to be awakened. Lincoln Steffens, Shame of the Cities (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904), 8. James J. Connolly, “The Public Good and the Problem of Pluralism in Lincoln Steffens’s Civic Imagination,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4 (Apr. 2005): 125-147. 164 Lincoln Steffens, The Upbuilders (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909). 165 Dimitri S. von Mohrenschildt, “Lincoln Steffens and the Russian Bolshevik Revolution,” The Russian Review, 5:1 (1945): 31. The quote is sometimes recorded as “I’ve been to the future and it works.” 166 Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, 68. 167 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1899). 168 Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1938), 255. 169 Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow: The American Idea,” Herald Tribune, Feb. 22, 1954. 170 Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow: The Departure of the Lindberghs,” Herald Tribune, Dec. 28, 1935. 171 Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, 156. 172 John Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics [1915], in John Dewey: The Middle Works, Vol. 8: 1899-1924: Essays and Miscellany in the 1915 Period and German Philosophy and Politics and Schools of Tomorrow. ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 203-205. 173 John Dewey, “Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality” [1903], in John Dewey: The Middle Works, Vol. 3: 1903-1906., ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 3-4. Tim V. Klein and Elizabeth Fondren, “The Lippmann- Dewey ‘Debate’: Roles and Responsibilities of Journalists in a Democratic Society” in Journalism’s Ethical Progression: A Twentieth-Century Journey, ed. Gwyneth Mellinger and John P. Ferré (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020), 45-72. 174 Tarbell, All in a Day’s Work, 400. 175 Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, 106. 176 Roosevelt, “The Man with the Muckrake.”

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