Muckrakers for Dummies -- Muckraking and the Tradition of Investigative Reporting

[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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