Muckrakers (Jacob Riis & Uptown Sinclair)

1. Muckrakers
MAST HS
US HIS – Period 4
Ms. Richardson

2. • Aim: How did actions of
muckrakers during the
Progressive Era help lead to
social reform?
• SWBAT analyze the works of
Jacob Riis & Upton Sinclair
and evaluate the effects of
muckrakers.

4. The Progressive Era (1890-
1920)
• A time when people began to demand that the
problems caused by industrialization be
fixed.
• The government passed new laws and
became more responsible for protecting
citizens.
• Social Problems  Demands For Reform

5. Muckraker
• Members of the press that
investigated corruption in order to
expose problems to the American
people. They had a great amount
of influence, often resulting in the
passage of laws designed to
reform the abuse that they
reported.

6. Terms to Know
• Reform – change for the better,
improvement.
• Social reformer - anyone who
supports for change of a certain
area of society. (Examples: Booker
T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois)

7. Important Muckrakers
Jacob Riis
• Photographer & Author
• Famous work: How the
Other Half Lives (1890)
– Exposed slum living
conditions in NYC and
the the harsh living
conditions of the poor.
• Results: NYC passed
building codes to promote
safety and health.
Upton Sinclair
• Author
• Famous work: The Jungle
(1906)
– Investigated dangerous
working conditions and
unsanitary procedures in
the meat-packing industry.
• Results: Meat Inspection
Act and Pure Food and
Drug Act (1906)

8. Impact of Muckrakers
• New York State Tenement House Act (1901) -
ban the construction of dark, poorly ventilated
tenement buildings in the NY.
• Pure Food and Drug Act (1906/1911) - Required
that companies correctly label the ingredients
contained in processed food items.
• Meat Inspection Act (1906) - required that meat
processing plants be inspected to ensure the use of
good meat and health-minded procedures.

9. Jacob Riis
Photography
&
Writing

13. Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters

14. Bandits’ Roost

15. Jacob Riis - How the Other Half Lives (Modified)
The Italian in New York
The Italian comes in at the bottom. In the slums
he is welcomed as a tenant who “makes less trouble”
than the Irishman: is content to live in a pig-sty and
lets the rent collector rob him.
Ordinarily he is easily enough governed by
authority – except for Sunday, when he settles down
to a game of cards and lets loose all his bad passions.
Like the Chinese, the Italian is a born gambler. His
soul is in the game from the moment the cards are on
the table, and very frequently his knife is in it too
before the game is ended.

16. Jacob Riis - How the Other Half Lives (Modified)
Chinatown
Red and yellow are the holiday colors of
Chinatown, but they do not lend brightness in
Mott Street. Rather, the colors only add a general
dullness. Whatever happens in Chinatown goes on
behind closed doors in stealth and secretiveness.
His business, as his domestic life, shuns the light,
less because there is anything to conceal than
because that is the way of the man. The stranger
who enters through the doorway is received with
sudden silence, a sullen stare, and an angry "Vat
you vant?" that breathes annoyance and distrust.

17. Summary / Discussion
• What are Jacob Riis’s attitudes towards poverty?
• What are his attitudes towards these immigrants?
• Jacob Riis was someone who thought he was helping the immigrants
and supporting them. How could he think that if he wrote stuff like
this?
• What does this say about his audience? What were their values and
beliefs?
• What questions does this bring up for you about progressive
reformers such as Riis?
• What do these photographs and excerpts tell you about life in cities
at the turn of the century?

18. Upton
Sinclair’s
Writing

21. Uptown Sinclair - The Jungle (1902)
Meat scraps were also found being shoveled into [cans] from
dirty floors, where they were left to lie until again shoveled into
barrels or into machines for chopping. These floors, it must be
noted, were in most cases damp and soggy, in dark, ill-ventilated
rooms, and the employees in utter ignorance of cleanliness or
danger to health expectorated [spit] at will upon them. In a word,
we saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables
rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts,
…gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth, and the expectoration
[spitting] of tuberculosis and other diseases.
Where comment was made to floor superintendents about
these matters, it was always the reply that this meat would
afterwards be cooked, and that this sterilization would prevent
any danger from its use…

22. Document 1
• In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a commission to
investigate practices in meatpacking plants. This is an excerpt from
the commission’s findings that were presented to Congress. ...
“….In one well-known establishment we came upon fresh meat
being shoveled into barrels, and a regular proportion being
added of stale scraps that had lain on a dirty floor in the corner
of a room for some days previous. In another establishment equally
well known, a long table was noted covered with several hundred
pounds of cooked scraps of beef and other meats. Some of these meat
scraps were dry, leathery and unfit to be eaten; and in the heap were
found pieces of pigskin, and even some bits of rope strands and other
rubbish…”
Source: Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, July–December, 1906