American Muckrakers and Muckraking: The 50-Year Scholarship

Certain attitudes about muckraking have been common to many studies, chief among them a liberal sympathy for muckrakers & a corresponding antipathy toward United States business. Muckraking has usually been associated with liberal reform movements; it has evolved through journals read by the middle class & has voiced middle class social goals & moral impulses. Richard Hofstadter argued that social critics did not go far enough in their proposals for social change, being too closely tied to middle class attitudes of the Progressive period (The Age of Reform, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1955). Scholarly investigation has focused on pre-World War I muckraking; although the practice has continued since, it has lacked unified popular support. Criticized is a literary exploitation of works by Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, & others, which neglects the authors' social purpose. The entire body of scholarship suffers from a vagueness in concept & terminology. D. Dunseath.