Nowhere did this investigative reporting shine brighter than in McClure’s Magazine.
Owner and editor S. S. McClure, whose enthusiasm and energy captivated his reporters, did not
shy away from stories with a strong point of view. In contrast to most other publishers, McClure
hired full-time writers who were experts in their fields, paid them well, and gave them ample
time to complete their work. The result was thorough, accurate, and better-written stories.
McClure sent Lincoln Steffens, known for his keen interviewing skills, to investigate
municipal corruption around the country. Typical of Steffens’s work was “The Shame of
Minneapolis,” which revealed that the city’s mayor and police were behind its rampant and
lucrative vice. Steffens saved his most severe indictment for the typical big businessman, whom
he described this way in his 1904 collection, The Shame of the Cities: “I found him buying
boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburg [sic],
sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government
with corruption funds in New York.”39 Once he was finished with corrupt cities, Steffens turned
his attention to state government and uncovered graft in Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio,
Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.
The January 1903 issue of McClure’s showcased the power of investigative reporting. It
featured Steffens’s “The Shame of Minneapolis,” Ray Stannard Baker’s report of union bosses
abusing laborers in the nation’s coal mines, and the third chapter of Ida Tarbell’s The History of
the Standard Oil Company, which detailed John D. Rockefeller’s ruthless rise to wealth and
power. Tarbell, a tall, independent-minded woman with tremendous research skills and an
unquenchable desire to find the truth, was the first reporter to systematically use documents to
investigate wrongdoing. Her series became the magazine’s most famous and influential exposé.
During her reporting, Tarbell read through hundreds of thousands of pages of secret company
documents, government reports, legislative testimony, newspaper files, and court records from
around the country. She also interviewed Standard Oil executives, government regulators,
academic experts, and businessmen who had fought the company. Her methodology—analysis of
public documents, direct observations of people and places, interviews of people with personal
knowledge of the topic, character-driven narratives, disclosure of information sources to
readers—set the standard for future investigative reporters.40
Originally planned as a series of three articles, The History of the Standard Oil Company
proved so popular that it was stretched to twelve installments and turned into a best-selling book.
The stories took readers to the country’s oil fields to describe the bitter struggles between
Rockefeller and the independent producers. Tarbell revealed Standard Oil’s use of espionage,
threats, illegal rebates, and other bare-knuckled tactics to crush competition and create a
monopoly that led to higher prices, lower wages, and the destruction of competitors in a crucial
industry. Spurred by Tarbell’s reporting, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit
against Rockefeller and Standard Oil. The Supreme Court found the company guilty of illegally
restraining trade and forced it to dissolve in 1911.41
McClure’s popularity and investigative zeal continued with Baker’s 1905 series,
“Railroads on Trial.” Using the companies’ accounting statements, he revealed how the railroad
companies connived to build monopolies through secret rebates and discriminatory rates. After
reading Baker’s stories, Roosevelt pushed Congress to pass the Hepburn Act, which gave the
Interstate Commerce Commission enhanced power to regulate railroads. The new law, however,
did not completely stop railroad abuses. Over the next five years, Steffens and other journalists
continued to document their predatory practices.42
McClure’s success with investigative reporting was contagious. Eight other magazines
regularly ran exposés, and at least seven more periodically joined the fray.43 Everybody’s and
Hampton’s magazines published Charles Edward Russell’s “The Tenements of Trinity Church,”
which revealed how the nation’s wealthiest house of worship became Manhattan’s biggest
slumlord. Russell and two assistants combed through tax records and Trinity’s annual reports,
visited hundreds of its properties, and interviewed tenants as well as Trinity officials. Russell
described in heartbreaking detail the conditions faced by tenants and their “chalk-faced”
children. His stories pressured Trinity to replace its slums with model housing and open its
financial books to the public. The church responded with a public relations strategy later
employed by other institutions challenged by investigative reporters: it emphasized the good
work the church did, criticized Russell for overstepping his journalistic limits, and confused the
issue by emphasizing that it did not own many of the terrible tenements even though it owned the
land on which they were built.44
In 1905 and 1906, Collier’s Weekly published one of the most astonishing investigations
of the era, Samuel Hopkins Adams’s “The Great American Fraud.” As part of his research into
the $75 million a year patent medicine industry, Adams used a new reporting technique:
laboratory testing. To check the actual content of these “medicines,” he arranged for their
chemical analysis. The ten-part series disclosed that gullible Americans were swallowing “huge
quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied
drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and,
far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.”45
In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s best-selling book The Jungle exposed the dangerous, miserable,
and unsanitary conditions of Chicago’s unregulated meatpacking industry. Although The Jungle
was a novel, its pages reflected Sinclair’s investigative reporting. For seven weeks he had
immersed himself in the lives of the meatpackers by dressing like one of them and entering the
factories during shift changes. Sinclair described workers dying in plants where rats roamed the
floors and corrupt inspectors allowed moldy and tubercular beef to be processed.46
That same year William Randolph Hearst, who had recently bought Cosmopolitan,
decided to boost readership and his own White House ambitions by publishing David Graham
Phillips’s “The Treason of the Senate.” The nine-part series was a sensation, boosting
Cosmopolitan’s circulation by 50 percent. Phillips, a well-known writer with the handsome looks
of a movie star, documented the corruption of nineteen senators who did the bidding of rich
industrialists. For example, he wrote, seventy companies paid directors fees to New York
Senator Chauncey Depew. Phillips used melodramatic language and included sweeping, forceful
conclusions:
The treason of the Senate! Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too
weak, to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful,
indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading
army could be, and vastly more dangerous; interests that manipulate the
prosperity produced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few; interests whose
growth and power can only mean the degradation of the people, of the educated
into sycophants, or the masses toward serfdom.47
Phillips peppered his stories with insults; he called Depew a “buffoon,” “spineless sycophant,”
and “traitor to the people.” The political establishment reacted with rage to Phillips’s stories,
accusing him of offering thin evidence for some of his far-reaching conclusions. His work,
however, helped reformers pass the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, which allowed
voters to elect senators directly.48
At first, Theodore Roosevelt appreciated journalists whose reporting supported his
reformist agenda. He met and exchanged letters with Sinclair, Steffens, Baker, and other writers.
But soon the president resented the journalists who were claiming credit for progressive reforms
and criticizing him as a timid compromiser. Complaining that Hearst was trying to whip up
hysteria and build his own political power by running “The Treason of the Senate,” Roosevelt
gave a speech in 1906 criticizing the negativity of Phillips and other writers. He compared them
to the muckraking character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress who only looks downward:
“There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times
and places where this service is the most needed of all services that can be performed,”
Roosevelt said. “But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes
save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement
to good, but one of the most potent forces of evil.”49 Roosevelt meant it as an insult, but some of
the investigative journalists of the era started to wear the “muckraker” label proudly.
Despite his frustration with the muckrakers, Roosevelt pushed a conservative Congress to
pass reforms to improve some of the dangerous conditions these writers highlighted. In the
summer of 1906, Roosevelt signed the Meat Inspection Act, which addressed health hazards
described by Sinclair. He also approved the Pure Food and Drug Act, which added protections
Adams had championed. These muckraker-inspired laws forever changed the country by
expanding federal authority over the previously unregulated capitalist economy.
The muckrakers’ influence was not confined to Washington. By the end of the
muckraking era, twenty-five states had enacted workers compensation laws, twenty had
approved new pension laws, and most had passed child labor protections. Municipal
governments adopted stronger building codes to reduce the squalor of tenements and passed new
laws to curb corruption. Still, business interests were able to persuade legislators to leave
loopholes in the laws with vague standards and weak enforcement provisions. The Meat
Inspection Act, for example, did not require the dating of inspection labels, allowing the packers
to sell old cans of meat.50
After their attacks against corporate greed and political corruption, the muckrakers turned
their attention to poverty, racial discrimination, and the daily struggles of working women and
children. Photographer Lewis Hine posed as a fire inspector and a Bible seller to enter mines and
factories to document the cruel conditions faced by child laborers. Edwin Markham’s “The HoeMan in the Making” exposed the dangerous and bleak conditions suffered by children as young
as five years of age working in the textile mills of the South and the factories of the North.
Baker’s “Following the Color Line” described the segregation, poverty, race riots, and lynch
mobs faced by African Americans. And Will Irwin’s “The American Newspaper” revealed how
publishers and editors muzzled their news coverage to suit the needs of large advertisers. For
example, Irwin divulged that San Francisco newspapers suppressed coverage of a bubonic
plague outbreak because they feared the news would harm the city’s economic interests.51
But muckraking began to decline by the end of the century’s first decade. Rising printing
costs, pressure from advertisers, a growing number of libel lawsuits, and new ownership steered
popular magazines away from expensive and controversial stories. McClure’s and other
muckraking magazines lost their investigative edge after being bought by large corporations, and
Everybody’s and American Magazine went into bankruptcy after banks stopped extending them
credit. The new laws regulating the worst excesses of big business muffled the popular clamor
for reform, and the reading public grew weary of the constant sounding of alarms about the food
they ate, the medicines they took, and the businesses they patronized. Tarbell, Steffens, Baker,
and other star reporters left McClure’s and bought their own publication, which they named
American Magazine. Its stories, they decided, would be more hopeful and less critical than their
prior work.52
The final curtain fell on the muckraking era with the start of World War I, which diverted
attention from problems at home and led to comprehensive restrictions on the press. The military
aggressively censored information about the war effort, and new laws allowed the government to
prosecute anyone who printed stories deemed critical of the national interest; more than a
hundred publications were suppressed as a result. In the tug-of-war between the government and
press over control of information, the advantage slid to the government’s favor. The popular
magazines that once cultivated investigative reporting turned to fiction, romance, self-help, and
other less-controversial topics.53 The muckrakers had given the investigative impulse its greatest
expression since American journalism began more than two hundred years earlier, but now it
would need to be found elsewhere.
39. Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York, 1904) in Chalmers, The
Muckrake Years, 82–83; Steve Weinberg, Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell
and John D. Rockefeller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 159, 195–97; Chalmers,
The Muckrake Years, 17–19, 171; Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (Yellow
Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1939), 81, 86; Teel, The Public Press, 240.
40. S. S. McClure, “Concerning Three Articles in this Number of McClure’s, and a
Coincidence that May Set Us Thinking,” McClure’s 20 (January 1903): 336 in Chalmers, The
Muckrake Years, 79–82; Steve Weinberg, author interview, 6 June 2008; Weinberg, Taking on
the Trust, xiv, 211–13, 224, 266; Kathleen Brady, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (New
York: Seaview/Putnam, 1984), 120–38.
41. Weinberg, Taking on the Trust, 222, 224, 227, 249–50, 254; Kathleen Brady,
“Remembering Ida Tarbell,” The IRE Journal 31, no. 1 (January/February 2008), 13; Chalmers,
The Muckrake Years, 21–24.
42. Chalmers, The Muckrake Years, 38–42.
43. Ibid., 61.
44. Charles Edward Russell, “The Tenements of Trinity Church,” Everybody’s 19 (July
1908): 47 in Chalmers, The Muckrake Years, 146–47; Robert Miraldi, “Muckraking the World’s
Richest Church,” in Miraldi, ed. The Muckrakers, 53–67.
45. Samuel Hopkins Adams, “The Great American Fraud,” Collier’s 36 (October 7,
1905): 14–15, 29 in Chalmers, The Muckrake Years, 102–7; Serrin and Serrin, Muckraking!
309–15; Robert Miraldi, Muckraking and Objectivity: Journalism’s Colliding Traditions (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 29, 34–35; Teel, The Public Press, 22.
46. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York, 1906), in Chalmers, The Muckrake Years,
107–9; Samuel P. Winch, “Ethical Challenges for Investigative Journalists,” in Greenwald and
Bernt eds., The Big Chill, 126.
47. David Graham Phillips, “New York’s Misrepresentatives,” Cosmopolitan (March
1906) in Serrin and Serrin, Muckraking! 105–9.
48. Filler, Contemporaries, x; Chalmers, The Muckrake Years, 43–46; Miraldi,
Muckraking and Objectivity, 23–29, 38.
49. Herman Hagedorn, ed. The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, 16 (New York, 1926) in
Chalmers, The Muckrake Years, 125–30; Weinberg, Taking on the Trust, 241; Teel, The Public
Press, 17–18, 22–23.
50. Protess et al., The Journalism of Outrage, 40; Chalmers, The Muckrake Years, 31–37;
Teel, The Public Press, 21–24.
51. Winch, “Ethical Challenges for Investigative Journalists,” 126; Edwin Markham,
“The Hoe-Man in the Making,” Cosmopolitan 41 (September, 1906): 480–84 in Chalmers, The
Muckrake Years, 133–36; Chalmers, The Muckrake Years, 52–58; John A. Fitch, “Old Age at
Forty,” American Magazine (March 1911), in Serrin and Serrin, Muckraking!, 25–28; Will Irwin,
“The American Newspaper, A Study of Journalism in Its Relation to the Public,” Collier’s 47
(June 17, 1911): 18 in Chalmers, The Muckrake Years, 147–49.
52. Miraldi, Muckraking and Objectivity, 62–71; Thomas Leonard, “Did the Muckrakers
Muck Up Progress?” in Miraldi, ed., The Muckrakers, 146; Protess et al., The Journalism of
Outrage, 42–44; Chalmers, The Muckrake Years, 60–63; Bennett and Serrin, “The Watchdog
Role,” 177.
53. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 64; Teel, The Public
Press, 74–79; Michael S. Sweeney, The Military and the Pres: An Uneasy Truce, Medill School
of Journalism Visions of the American Press, ed. David Abrahamson (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 2006), 35–59.