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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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