READING: “The Muckrakers”
QUESTIONS:
1. The Muckrakers
How did industrialization lead to the emergence of muckraker journalists?
2. Child Labor
Summarize the meaning of the Child Labor poem
3. The Bitter Cry of the Children by John Spargo
Describe the details of working conditions for children. Provide evidence from the reading to support your argument.
4. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
What are the ethics (dilemmas or controversies) discussed by Sinclair?
5. (Continuing with The Jungle).
Discuss the changes over time with regard to the food industry. Consider parallel’s with today’s society.
INTRO
By 1906 a number of writers for popular magazines had attempted to expose the social evils created by unregulated industrialism. Theodore Roosevelt, President from 1901-1909, labeled those writers “Muckrakers.” He named them after a character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress who carries a rake and is primarily interested in digging in the filth and muck. Among the most common targets of muckraker attacks were the problems of workers. Child labor, in particular, drew the fire of these writers. In this reading, you will find a poem and portions of a book written by muckrakers.
CHILD LABOR - By Charlotte Gillian
No fledgling feeds the father bird:
No chicken feeds the hen!
No kitten mousse for the cat –
This glory is for men:
We are the wisest, strongest race –
Loud may our praise by sung!
The only animal alive
That lives upon its young!
EXCERPT FROM The Bitter Cry of the Children - By John Spargo
… In the spinning and combing rooms of cotton and woolen mills, where large numbers of children are employed, clouds of lint-dust filled the lungs and menace the health. The children have a distressing cough, caused by the irritation of the throat, and many are hoarse from the same cause. In bottle factories and other branches of glass manufacture, the atmosphere is constantly charged with microscopic particles of glass. In the wood-working industries, such as the manufacture of cheap furniture and wooden boxes, and packing cases, the air is laden with fine sawdust. Children employed in soap and soap powder factories work, many of them, employed in filling boxes of soap powder work all day long with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths. In the coal mines the breaker boys breathe air that is heavy and thick with particles of coal, and their lungs become black in consequence…
In some occupations, such as silk-winding, flax-spinning, and various processes in the manufacture of felt hats, it is necessary, or believed to be necessary to keep the atmosphere quite moist. The result of working in a close, heated factory, where the air is artificially moistened, in summer time, can be better imagined than described. So long as enough girls can be kept working, and only a few of them faint, the mills are kept going; but when faintings are so many and so frequent that it does not pay to keep going, the mills are closed. The children who work in the dye rooms and print shops of textile factories, and the manufactured, are subject to contact with poisonous dyes, and the results are often terrible. Very frequently they are dyed in parts of their bodies as literally as the fabrics are dyed…
Children employed as varnishers in cheap furniture factories inhale poisonous fumes all day long and suffer from a variety of intestinal troubles in consequence. The gilding of a picture frame produces a stiffening of the fingers. The children who are employed in the manufacture of wall papers and poisonous paints suffer from slow poisoning. The naphtha fumes in the manufacture of rubber goods produce paralysis and premature decay…
EXCERPT FROM The Jungle - By Upton Sinclair
Before the carcass was admitted here, it had to pass a government inspector, who sat in the doorway and felt of the glands in the neck for tuberculosis. This government inspector did not have the manner of a man who was worked to death. He was apparently not haunted by a fear that the hog might get to him before he was quite wiling to enter into conversation with you, and to explain to you the deadly nature of the ptomaine’s which are found in tubercular pork; and while he was talking with you, you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched…
There were the men in the pickle-rooms… scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as to scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floors-men, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man presses the knife to hold it. The hands of those men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails – they had worked them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan.
There were men who worked in the cooking-rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at 4:00 in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years.
There were those who worked in the chilling=rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling-rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle-men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping-machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself, and have a part of his hand chopped off.
There were the “hoisters,” as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham’s architects had not built the killing room for convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them into the habit of swooping, so that in a few years, they would be walking like chimpanzees.
Worst of any, however, were the fertilizers-men, and those who served in the cooking-rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats (large cooking pots) near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting – sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Beef Lard!