- published: 01 Oct 2012
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The term muckraker is closely associated with reform-oriented journalists who wrote largely for popular magazines, continued a tradition of investigative journalism reporting, and emerged in the United States after 1900 and continued to be influential until World War I, when through a combination of advertising boycotts, dirty tricks and patriotism, the movement, associated with the Progressive Era in the United States, came to an end.
Before World War I, the term "muckraker" was used to refer in a general sense to a writer who investigates and publishes truthful reports to perform an auditing or watchdog function. In contemporary use, the term describes either a journalist who writes in the adversarial or alternative tradition or a non-journalist whose purpose in publication is to advocate reform and change.[citation needed] Investigative journalists view the muckrakers as early influences and a continuation of watchdog journalism.[citation needed]
The term is a reference to a character in John Bunyan's classic Pilgrim's Progress, "the Man with the Muck-rake" that rejected salvation to focus on filth. It became popular after President Theodore Roosevelt referred to the character in a 1906 speech.
Ida Minerva Tarbell (November 5, 1857 – January 6, 1944) was an American teacher, author and journalist. She was known as one of the leading "muckrakers" of the progressive era, work known in modern times as "investigative journalism". She wrote many notable magazine series and biographies. She is best known for her 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company, which was listed as No. 5 in a 1999 list by New York University of the top 100 works of 20th-century American journalism. She became the first woman to take on Standard Oil. Her direct forerunner was Henry Demarest Lloyd. She began her work on The Standard after her editors at McClure's Magazine called for a story on one of the trusts.
Tarbell was born in the village of Hatch Hollow in Amity Township, Erie County, Pennsylvania on November 5, 1857. She was born in a log cabin that was the home of her maternal grandfather, Walter Raleigh McCullough, a Scots-Irish pioneer. She grew up in the western region of the state, where new oil fields were developed in the 1860s. She was the daughter of Esther Ann (née McCullough) and Franklin Summer Tarbell, a teacher and a joiner by trade, who used his trade to build wooden oil storage tanks.
Jacob August Riis (May 3, 1849 – May 26, 1914) was a Danish American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist and social documentary photographer. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most famous proponents of the newly practicable casual photography, he is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his discovery of the use of flash in photography. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the bad living conditions of poor people by exposing their traditionalism to middle class ridicule.
Jacob Riis was the third of the 13 children (one of whom, an orphaned niece, was fostered) of Niels Edward Riis, a schoolteacher and occasional writer for the local Ribe newspaper, and Carolina Riis (née Bendsine Lundholme), a homemaker. Among the 13, only Jacob, one sister and the foster sister survived into the twentieth century. Riis was influenced by his father, whose school Riis delighted in disrupting, and who persuaded him to read (and improve his English via) Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper.