The Socialization of Muckraking
James
Rorty
s
OMETHINC HAS HAPPENED
to muckraking. One finds repeated
recognition of this fact in current social criticism. For example,
in the Summer, 1939 issue of
Partisan Review,
F. W. Dupee, in
reviewing the career of Van Wyck Brooks, makes several stimu·
lating references to the "respectable profession of muckraking."
In the early nineteen hundreds, according to Mr. Dupee, the
muckraker was the "standard intellectual type" of the intelligent–
sia. After the war, this type was displaced by the Menckenesque
debunker and the expatriate "artist."
The observation would seem to
be
just enough. Yet since
muckraking is not only a respectable profession hut, like street
cleaning, an essential function of any going society, it did not
iwholly disappear. Something happened to the profession and to
the institutional apparatus at its disposal; something closely
related to the sequence of major economic changes and the shifts
in class alignment that came about during the three crucial decades
of 1909-1939.
To use the current sociological argot, the ecology of the social
and economic environment became less and less
f
avorahle to the
muckraker
per se.
But since muck accumulates, and the arteries
of social and economic traffic have to be kept more or less open,
new kinds of literary White Wings appeared, under various dis–
guises, the chief of these being the government investigator and the
social scientist.
To call what happened to muckraking "socialization" is to
he ironically suggestive rather than exact. When government is
forced to take over and discharge an essential hut financially
unprofitable social function, it does not necessarily socialize it. A
public receivership is not socialization. Moreover, the ordinary
receivership is notoriously inefficient as well as frequently corrupt.
On the whole, our contemporary socialized-or politicalized-
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