Muckrakers In The 20th Century

During the 20th century, many groups across the nation were facing problems with the new urban-industrial order. Progressivism was defined as a broad-based response to industrialization and its social byproducts, which were immigration, urban growth, growing corporate power, and widening class divisions. Most progressives were reformers, who strived to make the new urban-industrial order more humane instead of overturning it and believed that most social problems could be solved through study and organized effort. While the reformers reoriented American social thought, novelists and journalists reported corporate wrongdoing, municipal corruption, slum conditions, and industrial abuses. Magazines like McClure’s and Collier’s stirred reform energies with articles exposing urban political corruption and corporate wrongdoing, some magazines later appeared as books. President Theodore Roosevelt criticized the authors as “muckrakers” publicizing the worst in American life, but the muckrakers actually awakened middle-class readers to conditions in industrial America. They raised skepticism toward the industrial elite and caused pressures for tougher business regulation. The corporate consolidation produced companies like Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil and the railroad industry continued, benefitting workers from corporate growth by increasing their average annual wages from $487 in 1900 to $687 by 1915, but these wages barely supported a family. Because of this, each member of the family had to go to work, including women and children, working various jobs, including factories, mills, tenement sweatshops, and street trades such as shoe shining and newspaper vending. Workers provided further pressure for reform, like when the granite industry introduced new power drills that created a fine dust that workers inhaled, the Granite Cutters’ Journal called them “widow makers.” Investigators linked the dust to a deadly lung disease called Silicosis. Work consisted of many hours and was dangerous, averaging about 9 ½ hours a day, some even 12 to 13 hours. Many workers were killed on the job and very few of them had vacation or retirement benefits. Since corporations benefited from government policies such as high protective tariffs and railroad subsidies, reformers stated that they should also be subject to government regulation. Campaigns for industrial safety and better working conditions urged the passing of fifty-six worker protection laws and by 1914, twenty-five states made employers liable for job-related injuries or deaths. Since men didn’t get paid enough to support a family, the women had to join the workforce to bring in more income. Electoral reform soon passed a 1903 Oregon Law limiting women in industry to only a ten-hour workday. Many of these “women” were actually girls as young as five years old. By 1907, as many as thirty states outlawed child labor. A woman named Florence Kelley investigated conditions in factories and sweatshops and persuaded the Illinois legislature to outlaw child labor and limit women’s working hours. Reformers also targeted prostitution, which was a major urban problem. Men …show more content…
He is a conservative American activist who produces audio and video recordings of meetings with public workers in different companies. They show abusive or illegal behaviors by the owners of the companies. He started an independent conservative newspaper in college and then began making and distributing the videos to news stations. Some of his videos have influenced congressional votes. He is a great example of someone using modern technology to