What Are The Problems That Muckrakers Faced During The Progressive Era

The Progressive Era was from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. It was filled with muckrakers trying to eliminate the flaws in the US. This included problems such as the exploitation of workers, tenement housing, and impure food and drugs. These problems were hurting U.S. citizens and needed to be fixed. Without muckrakers and people who saw what was happening and wanted change, these problems could still be here today. Even some of these problems are still around today like race inequality, drug abuse, and alcoholism. These problems were never fully solved but many others were, thanks to them. There are also people today who we could consider muckrakers. One big person is Greta Thunburg. She stands up for what she believes in and we need more

This occurred when they were put in dangerous and unhealthy conditions and being forced to work excessive hours. This also included sweatshops and child labor. Workers could also have their work taken advantage of by underpaying them. This wasn’t fair to the workers and it let companies make way more profits than they should have because they barely paid their workers. Muckrakers named Lewis Hine and John Spargo saw this problem and wanted to do something about it. Lewis Hine took pictures of child labor and that helped people see what was going on behind the scenes of big companies. John Spargo was a writer and his books informed people of child labor and how bad it really was. One of his most famous books was called “The Bitter Cry of Children”. After people started to realize that this needed to change laws started to get put in place. There were four acts/laws passed: the Children's Bureau, the Adamson Act, the Keating Owens Child Labor Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The Children’s Bureau helped improve the lives of children and families by eliminating abuse and neglect, the Adamson Act put an eight-hour workday in place with overtime pay;, the Keating Owens Child Labor Act made it illegal for any factory or shop to sell their products if they employed children under 14, and finally; and, the Fair Labor Standard Act of 1938 put in place minimum wage, overtime pay, record keeping, and

This means there were a bunch of extra items added to the meat without people knowing. This could be anything from fingernails to a finger. Workers could sometimes get their fingers chopped off in the machines so they would end up in people's food. But, this wasn’t all the bad that people were normally consuming. There were fake medicines that had cocaine and/or heroin in the ingredients. People had no idea how bad this was and even children were drinking these medicines thinking they were “curing” them. Muckrakers named Upton Sinclair and Samuel Hopkin Adams found out about these problems and wanted to expose them. Upton Sinclair wrote a book called “The Jungle” which exposed meatpacking to the public. Samuel Adams exposed fake medicine sellers and what was actually in them. When the publicpeople found out about all this they decided to establish laws, acts, and a whole organization to fix the problems. The Pure Food and Drug Act made it illegal to sell mislabeled or contaminated food. The Meat Inspection Act made it illegal to sell altered or misbranded meat and that it was processed in clean/safe conditions. The last fix put in place was the FDA. The FDA is still up and running today. It stands for “Food and Drug Administration” and they search and test all the food we eat. They also have the authority to search restaurants to make sure they are preparing safe