Muckraking Journalism Shedding Light on the Issues with Urbanization in The Gilded Age
In my findings, I have come to the conclusion that rapid urbanization was ultimately a great thing for the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The progress that was made socially, politically, economically, and technologically is too much to overlook. Looking through some scholarly interpretations, one essay by Edward E. Cassady in 1941 caught my attention. His essay titled Muckraking in the Gilded Age describes how muckraking journalists used their investigative abilities to expose the issues of the Gilded Age to the public.
Cassady starts his essay by referring to the initial paragraph of Oscar Cargill's preface to The Social Revolt, "It is obviously unfair and possibly uncritical to regard men of letters as the custodians of public morals or the prime inculcators of idealism, yet the almost complete silence of teh contemporary authors in the face of business rapacity and political corruption of the Gilded Age saddens the heart."<sup?1 Cargill ends his preface by saying, "American people in the main dismissed both the rapacity and corruption as essential to 'Progress' and, if practiced on a small scale, as ludicrous, while American authors by their silence concurred."2 As far as I can interpret, it seems as though Cassady does not agree with my line of thinking. While I do not believe that corruption is "essential" to progress, it was a massive part of the rapid urbanization of the Gilded Age. Can there be progress without corruption?
Cassady goes on to highlight what the muckrakers of the late 19th century focused on in their writings, "As with the later muckrakers, these early writers usually explored some specific economic or political problem, such as fraudulent land speculation, illicit mining schemes, bad labor conditions, the threat of monopoly, or corruption in government."3 He also identifies how muckrakers differed from each other in terms of their thinking, "Some of them perceived a unifying principle underlying the various problems; others considered the problems as isolated phenomena."4 While they did have differences in their interpretations of the many issues, "all were outspoken in their dissatisfaction with affairs of the status quo."5
His essay continues by going over different muckrakers who uncovered the various forms of government corruption, greed, and monopoly that ran rampant throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He ends his essay with this statement, "the evidence I have so briefly sketched indicates the need for reappraising the Gilded Age in terms of literary facts"6, with his last line being, "conspicuous in the true picture would be those many courageous writers who insisted upon telling the reading public what was wrong with their social and economic system."7 The overarching theme of Cassady's essay is praising the incredibly difficult work of the muckraking journalists that went out of their way to inform the public of what was going on behind the scenes in the social and economic system of Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It seems as though Cassidy feels that, while progress in our country is an incredibly positive thing, one has to remember how we got where we are, by looking at where we came from. We cannot overlook the struggles that every lower-class citizen of the United States went through when discussing the Guilded Age, their struggles are just as important. It seems as though Cassidy does agree with my thesis, that the progress and advancements that were made during the Guilded Age because of rapid urbanization were important, but he does not agree with the ways in which some businessmen and factory owners went about pushing that progress forward.
Footnotes
[1] Cassady, Edward E. “Muckraking in the Gilded Age.” American Literature 13, no. 2 (1941): 134–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2921106.
[2] Cassady, Edward E. “Muckraking in the Gilded Age.” American Literature 13, no. 2 (1941): 134–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2921106.
[3] Cassady, Edward E. “Muckraking in the Gilded Age.” American Literature 13, no. 2 (1941): 134–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2921106.
[4] Cassady, Edward E. “Muckraking in the Gilded Age.” American Literature 13, no. 2 (1941): 134–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2921106.
[5] Cassady, Edward E. “Muckraking in the Gilded Age.” American Literature 13, no. 2 (1941): 134–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2921106.
[6] Cassady, Edward E. “Muckraking in the Gilded Age.” American Literature 13, no. 2 (1941): 134–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2921106.
[7] Cassady, Edward E. “Muckraking in the Gilded Age.” American Literature 13, no. 2 (1941): 134–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2921106.
[8] Jacob A. (Jacob August) Riis (1849-1914). The Riverside Tenements in Brooklyn. ca. 1900. Museum of the City of New York. https://jstor.org/stable/community.12164209.