Literature Part Literature Part IIIIII

Evie Cobos

Henry Demarest Lloyd

• 1984

• Charged headlong into the Standard Oil Company with his book Wealth Against Commonwealth.

Thorstein Veblem• 1899• Assailed the new rich

in The Theory of the Leisure Class.

• This was a savage attack on “predatory wealth” and “conspicuous consumption”.

Jacob A. Riis• 1890• Danish immigrant• Reporter of the New York Sun • Shocked the middle class with How The Other Half

Lives • It was a damning indictment of the dirt, disease,

vice, and miseries of New York slums.• The book deeply influenced a future New York City

Police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt.

Theodore Dreiser

• Novelist• Financier (1912)• The Titan (1914)• In these two works, he

used blunt prose to batter promoters and profiteers.

Most Aggressive Magazines (1902)

• McClure’s

• Cosmopolitan

• Collier’s

• Everybody’s

Muckrackers• Exposing evil to the public was a flourishing industry.• Enterprising editors financed extensive research and

encouraged pugnacious writing by their young reporters.

• President Roosevelt branded them “Muckrackers” in 1906.

• He compared the reporters to the figure in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress who was so intent on racking manure, that he could not see the celestial crown hanging overhead.

Lincoln Steffens

• 1902

• New York reporter

• Launched a series of articles in McClure’s titled “The Shame of the Cities.”

• Unmasked the corrupt alliance between nig business and municipal government.

Thomas W. Lawson• Made $50 million on the stock market• Rocketed the circulation of Everybody’s

between 1905 and 1906• The series of articles were titled “Frenzied

Finance”• By fouling his own nest, he made many

enemies among his rich associates• Died a poor man

David G. Phillips• 1906• Wrote a series of articles in the Cosmopolitan

titled “The Treason of the Senate”• Boldly stated that 75/90 senators did not represent

the people at all, but represented railroads and trusts.

• Impressed President Roosevelt• Continued his attacks through novels and was

fatally shot by a deranged young man whose family he had allegedly maligned.

Social Evils

• Ray Stannard Baker’s Following the Color Line (1908) informed that 90% of the blacks lived in the south and 1/3 of them were illiterate.

• John Spargo’s The Bitter Cry of the Children brought to light the abuses of child labor that occurred.