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Henry D. Lloyd
In 1894, Henry Demarest Lloyd charged headlong into the Standard Oil Company with his book entitled Wealth Against Commonwealth. He altered the course of both labor relations and journalism through his progressive polemics in the late 19th century. His book was an expose and critic of the business methods of Standard Oil.
Meat Inspection Act
Big meat packers were being shut out of certain European markets because American meat-- for small packinghouses, claim the giants-- had found to be tainted. Foreign markets were even threatening to ban all American meat imports. Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, sickened the American public with its exposition on the unsanitary slaughterhouses. In 1906, Roosevelt induced Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. It decreed that the preparation of meat shipped over state lines would be subject to federal inspection from corral to can. The Act established a minimum standard of quality and safety for meat, and it helped to restore public confidence in the industry.
Jacob Riis
Danish immigrant, Jacob A. Riis, a reporter for the New York Sun shocked middle class Americans in 1890 with How the Other Half Lives. His account was a damning indictment of the dirt, disease, vice, and misery of the rat-gnawed human rookeries known as New York slums. The book deeply influenced a future New York City police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt. Preceded muckraking journalism, the novel stimulated the first significant New York legislation to curb poor conditions in tenement housing.
Theodore Dreiser
Novelist Theodore Dreiser used his blunt prose to batter promoters and profiteers in the The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). These two novels are important examples of the business novel and represent probably the most meticulously researched and documented studies of high finance in first-rate fiction. They exposed the machinations of big capital.
Jane Addams
Feminists in multiplying numbers added social justice to suffrage on their list of needed reforms. Urban pioneer, Jane Addams in Chicago. She was a trailblazer as women entered the fight to clean up corrupt city governments, to win pensions for single mothers with dependent children, and to protect women on the hazardous factory floor. Her efforts highlighted the need for social reform during a time of significant immigration and industrialization establishing herself as a key figure in the Progressive era.
Muckrakers
Beginning about 1902 the exposing of evil became a flourishing industry among American publishers. Enterprising editors financed extensive research and encouraged pugnacious writing by their bright young reporters, whom President Roosevelt branded as "muckrakers." In 1906, muckrakers boomed in circulation, and some of their most scandalous exposures were published as best-selling books. The reform-writers ranged far, wide, and deep in their crusade to lay bare the muck of iniquity in American society.
Lincoln Steffans
In 1902, a brilliant New York reporter, Lincoln Steffens launched a series of articles in McClure's entitled "The Shame of the Cities." He fearlessly unmasked the corrupt alliance between big business and municipal government, Steffen's work galvanized public awareness and spruced reform movements aimed at combatting corruption and improving municipal government.
Ida Tarbell
Ida M. Tarbell, a pioneering woman journalist who published a devastating but factual expose of the Standard Oil Company. Muckraker magazines went to great pains and expense to check their material-- paying as much as three thousand dollars to verify a single Tarbell article. Tarbell helped to expand the role of the newspaper in modern society and stimulate the progressive reform movement. Her expose brought the Standard Oil Company's shady dealings to light and the federal government sued Standard Oil.
Thomas Lawson
Thomas W. Lawson, an erratic speculator who had himself made $50 million on the stock market, laid bare the practices of his accomplices in "Frenzied Finances." This series of articles, appearing in 1905-1906, rocketed the circulation of Everybody's. Lawson, by fouling his own nest, made many enemies among his rich associates, and died a poor man.
David Phillips
David G. Phillips shocked an already startled nation by his series in Cosmopolitan entitled "The Treason of the Senate" (1906). He boldly charged the 75 of the 90 senators did not represent the people of all but the railroads and trusts. The Phillips series finally broke Senate resistance and opened the way for the 17th Amendment's ratification in 1913.
John Spargo
In 1906, John Spargon published The Bitter Cry of the Children. This novel highlighted the abuses of child labor, and it became the most influential and widely read accounts of child labor written during the Progressive Era. This would lead to increased social reform and eventually led to the passage of child labor laws.
Pure Food and Drug Act
As a companion to the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act was designed to prevent the adulteration and mislabeling of doods and pharmaceuticals. Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle played a significant role in exposing the disgusting condition of the meat packing industry. To which the act laid a foundation for the nation's first consumer protection agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
