[MUSIC]
Hey, guys.
Welcome to HipHughes history.
I'm so excited to be with you here today
as we approach another
subject in American history.
Today, we're gonna learn about muckraking.
How cool of a word is that?
And I'm gonna tell you why I'm so excited
to teach you this word,
because it's a word that isn't just
taught in context of American history.
And we're gonna do that,
short and sweet and simple,
and you're gonna be like, "Oh, my God.
I understand it."
But it's something that I think is
important for today,
for all of the world's citizens to know
about, because muckraking
really is the WD-40 of change.
So, strap on your boots, man.
Put on your goggles.
Put your hat to learning on.
I don't care what the hell you do,
but get ready, because here it comes.
Fore!
Learning.
(Communication breakdown.
It's always the same).
All right, muckraking, man.
What a visual word.
Muckraking is a very simple concept.
The idea is that you first
need to gather up some muck.
So, you grab a rake and you rake up
the muck and you find some type of problem
in America or in the world,
like this stinky cloth,
and then you serve it up to people.
Maybe you put it into a book.
Maybe you put it into a hip hop song.
Maybe you put it into a movie.
But whatever you're doing, you're trying
to let people know about this problem.
And then, of course, the awesome effect is
when people start finding out about child
homelessness, or about sex abuse,
or about unsafe working conditions, or
whatever it is,
they're gonna start stomping their
feet and raising their fists.
It is really the WD-40,
like I said before, of populism,
of getting the voice spread,
so people can start to bang and yell
and scream and demand change.
Think of the Industrial Age,
and let's go to historical context now.
And in the Industrial Age, we
taught you that the government's hands
are basically up,
the idea of laissez-faire economics,
that we have rapid economic growth and
allow that occur naturally in capitalism.
Get the government out of the way and just
watch the wheels of capitalism churn out
jobs and profit and
new products and innovation.
Now, the negative effect of
that Adam Smith model of capitalism
is that you basically have some negative
effects in the short term, and probably
some people would argue in the long term.
But when the government's not watching,
profit sometime is gonna override safety.
So, you might have products going
out to the consumers that are unsafe.
You might have people that are working
in conditions that are very dangerous.
You may have child labor.
You may have pollution and, you know,
air that you can't breathe
and all of these negative effects.
So, what the muckraker is
doing is he's going, "Yo!
Problem."
And then, of course, we look
for the change, for the effect.
So, let's take a look at three or four
examples that you're definitely
gonna see on your exam.
Or if you're studying American history,
they're gonna come up, um, all the time,
and let's see if we can't nail them
to a plank and move on with our lives.
So again, historical context, right?
First start in the 19th century,
late 19th century, and talk,
if you're doing an essay or if
you're trying to get this in your head,
about the problems of the industrial age,
of the gilded age.
Mark Twain called it the gilded age,
because on the surface, you know,
it looks, it looks top-notch.
But if you dig under the surface,
you're gonna find that we have lots
of problems, especially when
it relates to poor people.
Whether that's the urban problem,
urbanization and immigration,
or it's a rural problem of farmers
and railroads and
a lack of competition and,
you know, those types of issues.
So, here are your three or
four kind of novels, books.
And remember, today,
it could be any type of media that
is informing people of a problem.
But the ones that pop up on the exam all
the time are gonna be number one,
Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle."
Without a doubt, that's the one
that I see most often on exams.
Upton Sinclair was actually a socialist,
and socialism probably has
a lot of negative connotations today.
But socialism is the idea
of some type of communal aspect of society
where we take care of a problem together.
Complete socialism would be called
communism, where the government owns
private property and businesses
and yada, yada, yada.
But, you know, if you look at something
like a school system or a library or
a fire department, that in a sense
is socialism, because we're all chipping
in and we're all paying for something
and we all, you know,
enjoy the benefits of that.
And at the same time,
it kind of operates as, you know,
an escalating staircase to opportunity.
So, Upton Sinclair is writing about that.
He's writing about workers' lives
and socialism and trying to, you know,
change capitalism to give workers more of
a control and ownership over their lives.
Unfortunately for his mission, for his
objective, he chose a slaughterhouse.
So, if you're gonna write about workers
and you want people to be like, "Oh,
the poor workers," don't
choose a slaughterhouse.
Because when people read
"The Jungle," they weren't really reading
about the lives of the immigrant workers.
They were reading about
what related to them.
I think it was Upton Sinclair who stated,
and I'll get the quote wrong, that,
"I aimed for their hearts and I
hit them in their stomachs."
So, The Jungle,
really about slaughterhouses.
It has passages in it about contaminated
meat and feces and rats and just kind
of the, you know, the brutal,
unsanitary conditions that are
going on in slaughterhouses.
So, of course, there is an immediate
public reaction to this book,
which is basically, "Ewe.
Do something."
And this is the big kind of idea,
that muckraking,
through populism and through, you know,
disseminating this information,
is gonna light a fire.
[SIRENS BLARING]
And that fire is
underneath the feet
of the federal government.
Isn't that right, Noam Chomsky?
And that if you get that fire hot enough,
and of course,
muckraking is an accelerant,
because it's gonna make the flames go even
higher, you eventually
will get the government...
to do something.
Now, Upton Sinclair wants the government
to own that factory,
but that's not what Teddy Roosevelt's
gonna do in the early 1900s.
He is going to pass, not pass a law,
but sign a law, Congress of course passes
laws, to regulate that industry,
the meat industry.
So, the laws that you would
put in an essay would,
you know,
simply be the Meat Inspection Act,
which is gonna create, you know,
a regulatory body that's
gonna inspect the meat.
And Hughes was a vegetarian, I'm not
even going there, but that's the concept.
And then we get the FDA,
the Food and Drug Act,
or the Pure Food and
Drug and Labeling Act,
which is going to put the ingredients
on the side of your food so you know what
you're consuming, that you have a right
as a consumer to have that information.
If capitalism isn't delivering
that because people are ignorant or they
don't know about it, as a group,
a communal group,
we can force the government or put
pressure on the government
to regulate that industry.
Not to own that industry, but to make
that industry safe for consumers.
So, cross that off the list, man.
Upton Sinclair the socialist,
the jungle slaughterhouses, "bub bub bub bub bubba
effect"
meat Inspection Act and the FDA.
All right, let's do a couple more.
I know we can do a couple more.
You're still awake.
Say cheese.
Jacob Riis, "How the Other Half Lives."
This shows you that it doesn't have to be
a book in the novel sense.
Jacob Riis is a photographer,
a journalist photographer that is
informing people of conditions
in the urban slums.
I'm not sure if it was Jacob Riis
that invented it,
but I know it has something to do
with the invention of indoor photography,
which is gonna allow Jacob Riis to go kind
of, not just into the city,
but into the insides of the cities,
into the tenement houses,
to take pictures like you see right now,
which are really gonna force Americans
to take a close look
at how the other half lives.
That's what the book is called,
"How the Other Half Lives."
And this is gonna lead to, really,
pressure to have the government clean up
cities, to have,
not just city management movements,
but to, you know, sewer systems.
And we get settlement houses, Jane Addams,
which is not necessarily the government,
but that there is an effect here.
So, Jacob Riis, "How the Other Half Lives,"
and the federal government,
and at least the state and local
governments, are gonna start dealing
with the problems of the effects
of urbanization, over crowdedness,
because of the influx
of immigrants and cheap labor.
All right, Jacob Riis,
"How the Other Half Lives."
Let's do a couple more.
Oh, The Octopus.
This is a very visual one, guys.
Frank Norris wrote "The Octopus,"
I believe late 1800s, early 1900s.
I'm gonna say early 1900s.
Why does 1906...
Someone's gonna Google it now.
But Frank Norris wrote the book,
but The Octopus about,
really, farmers and railroads.
This is at the time the Grange,
easy way to remember the Grange,
you go, "Home, home on the Grange."
That should at least put
you into farmer land, man.
The Grange is basically a cooperative
or a group of farmers that are pooling
their resources because they're dealing,
you know, with huge banks and huge
railroad companies that aren't
really serving their interests.
So, Frank Norris is gonna let people know
about this problem,
about railroads and basically non-competitive
the noncompetitive industry
devices they're using to screw the farmer.
And this is gonna lead to the passage
of a federal law, The Octopus,
and visually I think of a railroad because
you have the octopus, like the hub is
the central station and then
there's all the eight [LAUGHTER]
eight tentacles, which would
kind of represent the railroad.
And, you know, the idea is that those
tentacles, careful, Hughes,
is going to squeeze out the competition
and, you know, that's very unfair.
So, we're gonna get
the federal government again.
Get the idea?
Right?
Under the feet?
And then we get the Hepburn Act.
Say it with me, the Hepburn Act.
And this is, in a sense,
an anti-capitalistic law.
It says to the railroad companies,
"There's a limit, baby.
You can't charge more
than ba-da cha-ching."
And in capitalism, of course,
the idea is you should be able to charge
as much as you want,
and if people don't use your product,
then you're gonna have to lower
your price or go out of business.
But the idea here,
and Frank Norris is showing,
is there isn't competition,
that the railroad companies are taking
advantage of their position in society.
Remember, the railroads got built
through economic nationalism.
The federal government gave huge tracts
of lands away as a subsidy
in order to get the railroad built.
So, the community,
the people already have a buy-in.
You know, we already have a buy-in because
it was our government that gave that land,
so we want some fairness.
So, Frank Norris,
The Octopus, the Hepburn Act.
You guys can do that.
Look, there's other ones, man.
Ida Tarbell,
"The History of Standard Oil."
I would consider Mark Twain
to be a muckraker.
You know,
it's all over in the early 1900s.
And this is really what's going to set
into motion the progressive era,
starting with Teddy Roosevelt and going
into Woodrow Wilson before
the start of World War I.
Look, man, we could talk about this
forever, but we have to
kinda close this baby down.
But remember that there are
muckrakers today.
I tell my kids, and we talk about it
all the time, there's two kinds of music.
There's bubble gum music
and there is muckraking music.
So, whatever genre of music that you
listen to, someone out there is singing or
rapping or yelling about some type
of issue that's important that they want
to inform you about,
not so you can go into a closet and close
your eyes and forget about it,
but so you can stomp your feet,
so you can light your fires and get
your government to do something.
So, there you go, guys.
Muckraking, right?
Isn't that fun to say?
You dirty muckraker [LAUGHTER].
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