11: Muckrakers

Tennessee State Standards

US.16 Citing textual evidence as appropriate, explain the significant roles played by muckrakers and progressive idealists, including Robert La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair. (C, E, P)

Lesson 12. (US.16) Muckrakers

a. What were Muckrakers?

b. Robert La Follette

c. Theodore Roosevelt

d. Ida Tarbell

e. Lincoln Steffens

f. Upton Sinclair

12A. Who or What were Muckrakers?

Muckrakers were journalists, novelists, and critics, who attempted to expose abuses in business and corruption in politics. They were important to the Progressive movement. Their work educated the public about changes needed in laws and society. In 1904, Ida Tarbell published the book, the "History of the Standard Oil Company," which brought their monopoly to light and eventually led to a government antitrust suit against the company. In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, which told of unsafe and unsanitary conditions in meat processing plants. Its readers, including Theodore Roosevelt, called for changes in the laws protecting food, Roosevelt pushed for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It mandated safe and sanitary conditions for food preparation and packaging, and led to the formation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1927. It also put regulations on medicines, doctor's tools, and cosmetics.

12F. Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair (1878 – 1968) was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. In 1906, Sinclair became famous for his classic muckraking novel “The Jungle,” which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry. The book caused a public uproar that contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.

"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle tells the story of a European family that immigrates to America, travels to Chicago, and finds work in the stockyards.

Read the excerpts from the novel below:

Excerpt from The Jungle #1

by Upton Sinclair

"It seemed that (Antanas Rudkus) was working in the room where the men prepared the beef for canning, and the beef had lain in vats full of chemicals, and men with great forks speared it out and dumped it into trucks, to be taken to the cooking room. When they had speared out all they could reach, they emptied the vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the balance and dumped it into the truck. This foor was filthy, yet they set Antanas with his mop slopping the pickle' into a hole that connected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again forever; and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every few days it was the old man's task to clean these out, and shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat!”

Upton Sinclair

Excerpt from The Jungle #2

by Upton Sinclair

"... There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit...”

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