The muckrakers' name actually came from a derogatory term coined by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Beltz, Preachers of Social Discontent: The Rhetoric of the Muckrakers, diss., Indiana University, 1968; L.
The muckraker David Graham Phillips had a different version of integrity, described by a contemporary at The Saturday Evening Post: "He was always himself, with a program of his own....
"
The Muckrakers figure it's fairly incumbent upon us to follow our own lead in word and deed.
* Writers such as the muckrakers are crucial to the process of necessary social change,
But the writers proudly wore their nickname: the muckrakers.
In short sentences and purple prose this British-born, self-proclaimed child of
the muckrakers throws the book at the funeral industry in America.
Baida draws from the classics to present brief biographies of personages ranging from John Jacob Astor to ad man David Ogilvy; he gives equal space to what he calls "dissenting voices," antibusiness thinkers from Henry David Thoreau to
the muckrakers to Ralph Nader.
President Theodore Roosevelt praised
the muckrakers by comparing them to a fictional character.
The muckrakers, meanwhile, defended their right to exert influence ("to become part of the event," in Baker's words), but they remained curiously unconcerned that they themselves might be "influenced" by others.
When Viceroy Lord Lillybottom himself brought a bevy of beauties to the Taj Mahal,
the muckrakers of Madras looked the other way.
Perhaps even more alarming--and arguably underscoring a core modern problem when compared to the Progressive Era--is the erosion of confidence in government among the very professional class that once made up
the muckrakers and reformers.
