1
The first amendment will prove to show its true power in the tumbling of big business’s
“bad” practice. I believe the group known as the muckrackers were the most influential entity of
the early years of the Progressive Era, along with government assistance changing social and
economic reform. A key writer of the era, such as Lincoln Steffens along with several others.
They created a snowball that would eventually engulf These particular writers detailed the
horrors of poverty, urban slums, dangerous factory conditions, and child labor, along with other
sub-standard treatment. Along with the legalization of union strikes, and the right to assemble.
The journalistic movement emerged in the United States after 1900 and continued to be
influential until World War I. Louis Filler from Pennsylvania State University writes, “When the
movement came to an end through a combination of advertising boycotts, dirty tricks and
“patriotism”.”1 The muckrakers and their patriotism played a significant historical role,
primarily because late nineteenth-century America was a nation of readers. The television did not
yet exist and radios did not enter widespread use until the 1920s and ’30s. Technological
improvements in the publishing industry—from the linotype machine to the telegraph, telephone,
and use of a chemical wood pulp process for making more durable newspapers—spread across
the country after the Civil War. They enabled a vast expansion in the number of papers printed,
and circulation rose quickly. Some 24 million daily newspapers were sold in the United States in
1899, nearly ten times as many as had been sold just three decades earlier.
In a speech on April 14, 1906 on the occasion of dedicating the House of Representatives
office building, Theodore Roosevelt drew on a character from John Bunyan’s 1678 classic,
Pilgrim’s Progress, while cautioning about possible pitfalls of keeping the public’s attention
1 Filler, Louis (1976). The Muckrakers: New and Enlarged Edi on of Crusaders for American Liberalism. University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 361, 367–68, 372.
2
always trained downward, “on the muck,” Roosevelt emphasized the social benefit of
investigative muckraking reporting saying;
“There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is
urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of
and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice,
whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or
speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with
merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that
the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.”2
The muckrakers were journalists that saw different abuses going on in American society.
They used their ability to write as a way to bring attention to these issues. Social and economic
