Glossary on the Republic

Muckraker

Press

A president meant it as an insult. The journalists liked it so much they wore it as a badge of honor.

On April 14, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech aimed at the aggressive investigative reporters of his era. He reached for a character from John Bunyan's 1678 allegory The Pilgrim's Progress: the Man with the Muck-rake, a figure so busy raking the filth at his feet that he never looked up to see the crown of heaven offered above him.

Roosevelt's point was a scolding. He admired reporters who exposed real corruption, but he thought some of them saw only the vile and the debased, raking muck for its own sake. The muckraker, in his telling, was a journalist who could look no way but downward.

Here is the twist. The reporters he was criticizing, people like Ida Tarbell who took on Standard Oil and Upton Sinclair who exposed the meatpacking industry, did not slink away from the label. They claimed it. Muckraker became a title of pride, the name for journalism that dug into the corruption linking money and power.

Origin

From the Man with the Muck-rake in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, 1678, applied by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.

Why it matters

The muckrakers helped force a laissez-faire government to take on robber barons, tainted food, and corporate abuse. An insult coined from a 17th-century sermon became the proud name of the journalism that holds power to account. The next time someone in power calls the press a name, remember: muckraker started exactly that way.