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The Role Of Muckraking In The Progressive Era

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All throughout history, common people are seen being taken advantage of by people of higher power. For a long time, people had no way to battle these injustices. Either they were to afraid to speak up, or they figured that they could just deal with these injustices, just like they had been doing their whole lives. At the turn of nineteenth century, things began to change. People stopped ignoring the fact that they were being mistreated. They were finally speaking out about things that were common problems, such as poverty, working conditions, and even racism. But who were the people that started speaking up? Who were the people that were not afraid of the public's backlash, and would expose injustice at any cost? These people were the muckrakers. Men and women of the progressives who wrote about or photographed any plight of the lower class. Because of the popularity of these works, the success of muckraking grew. Muckraking in the Progressive Era was the most effective method of exposing injustices. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were …show more content…

According to the scholar Alfred Hornung, “The Muckrakers grew up in this literary environment and started out as dime novelists and/or historical romancers before they turned to political and social issues as themes for their fictions.”8 This is exactly what Upton Sinclair did as a writer. He had written other books that had not been even half the success that “The Jungle” became. “The Jungle” was written with such horror and emotion directed towards the meatpacking industry, Sinclair was able to convince the public that it was finally time for a change, and a drastic one at that. The mix of this “overdrawn fiction”9 with his actual experiences from when he studied the meatpacking industry was just enough to reel people in and get them interested in what was really going on all around

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The muckrakers were investigative writer during the progressive Era, who wrote about different economic and social issues, such as: monopole of standard oil, children labor, work exploitation, and politic corruption. They criticized the corruption and inequality in the system. Trying to rise the public awareness and to mobilize the interest of the public to fight for change, the muckrakers published books, cartoons and articles in newspapers. Among them was, Jacob Riis who write “How The Other Half Lives” and Upton Sinclair, the author of “The

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In this novel it shows the horrors of a meat packing facility in Chicago and all of the pain that the workers had to go through. He described how rats and old sausage were combined together in a grinder to create a new sausage that was sold to the public. The original sausage was denied by the Europeans because it was too disgusting so they sent it

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Muckrakers were people that became upset by politics and wanted to expose the corruption to America. Famous muckrakers included, Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair, who is the author of The Jungle, a book about the unsanitary conditions in meatpacking plants, leading to food regulations and ultimately the establishment of the FDA, which is very

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Max Toubes JR 101 Upton Sinclair A pioneer on the forefront of investigative reporting, Upton Sinclair was one of the most prominent novelists of the early twentieth century and a political activist whose famous foray into the meatpacking industry gained him a spot among the most important journalists of all time. Sinclair’s diverse endeavors ranged from his nearly-one-hundred book bibliography to his radical political career. Perhaps one of his most significant long term contributions to the field of journalism was his work in exploiting social misconduct, gaining him the title “muckraker.”

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