THE SOCIALIZATION OF MUCKRAKING
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muckraking gives the customers less for their money and holds
back more than did the solvent muckraking
businesses
that flour–
ished at the turn of the century.
This is not surprising. The evolution of muckraking parallels
the enfeeblement and atrophy of many other social functions dur–
ing the declining period of American capitalism. Here is the
sequence of this evolution as it appears to a writer who grew up
during the heyday of American muckraking, who read Samuel
Hopkins Adams, Ray Stannard Baker, the Steffens of
The Shame
of the Cities,
Thomas Lawson (billed as the Wolf of Wall Street),
Harvey W. Wiley, David Graham Phillips, and many others as
they appeared serially in
Colliers, American Magazine, Hearst's
Metropolitan, McClures, Hampton's, Everybody's,
and
Cosmopoli–
tan;
who at the age of nineteen was excited by H. G. Wells'
Tono–
Bungay;
who has been himself a practicing muckraker for the past
fifteen years.
l.
Muckraking Was Good Business.
The Golden Age of Muckraking lasted only about fifteen
years: roughly, from 1900 to the outbreak of the Great War.
It
was during this period that monopoly capitalism completed its
conquest of power in America. In a sense, the outstanding muck–
rakers were like war correspondents engaged in reporting, to a ter–
rified and struggling audience of little business men, with their
employees and other peripheral dependents, the progress of this
conquest. It was a large and vitally interested audience. Muck–
raking became the accepted method by which magazines piled up
circulations of 500,000 and upward. In effect, muckraking was
one of the going capitalist industries of the period, attracting the
energies of some of the most brilliant business entrepreneurs and
demagogues-S. S. McClure is an example of the first type; Hearst
of the second-and employing at good wages many of the best lit–
erary and journalistic talents. The latter had two year contracts
and fat expense accounts. They hired leg men, secretaries, research
assistants, and other stooges like contemporary
Fortune
editors and
radio news commentators. As the chief breadwinners of the periodi–
cal journalism of the period, they could afford even such things as
a modicum of idealism.
Undoubtedly there were sacred cows in most of these maga-
