Progressive Era Muckrakers: Ida Tarbell, The Jungle and Swiss Ballots

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Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906 to rouse workers toward socialism, but readers recoiled at rats and diseased cattle in the Chicago meat supply instead, and within months Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. As Sinclair put it, he aimed at the public's heart and hit it in the stomach. That accident sits at the center of the Progressive Era, roughly the 1890s through the 1920s, when national advertising pushed magazine prices down to ten cents and a new class of investigative writers, mocked by Theodore Roosevelt as muckrakers, reached hundreds of thousands of readers. Ida Tarbell mined court records and testimony to show how Standard Oil used railroad kickbacks, and Lincoln Steffens exposed city machines in The Shame of the Cities.

Reformers then rewired voting itself. Labor activist James W. Sullivan studied Swiss direct legislation in 1888, and his 1893 book became the model for the initiative, the referendum and the direct primary, while the 17th Amendment ended the appointment of senators by legislatures. Woodrow Wilson moved from Bourbon Democrat to progressive governor to a president who signed the income tax, the Federal Reserve Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, guided by Herbert Croly's call for Hamiltonian means to reach Jeffersonian ends. Yet Wilson also segregated federal offices, and Black reformers built parallel movements, while Prohibition was sold as a blow against saloons that served as the political machines' headquarters.

• Roosevelt coined the word muckraker as an insult, though he often shared the writers' goals.
• Women's suffrage was promoted partly as a way to bring moral influence to clean up corrupt politics.
• Jane Addams used Hull House in Chicago as a research base, mapping disease and labor abuses to lobby for housing codes and child labor laws.
• Booker T. Washington stressed economic self-reliance, while W.E.B. Du Bois pressed for full political rights and helped found the NAACP.
• Ida B. Wells used data and reporting to show lynching was a tool of racial terror and founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago.