The Great American Fraud: the Patent Medicine Evil

Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Great American Fraud. Collier’s Weekly, 7 October 1905. “…[T]he introductory article of a [six-part] series…contain[s] a full explanation and exposure of patent-medicine methods, and the harm done to the public by this industry, founded mainly on fraud and poison. Results of the publicity given to these methods can already be seen in the steps recently taken by the National Government, some State Governments and a few of the more reputable newspapers. The object of the series is to make the situation so familiar and thoroughly understood that there will be a speedy end to the worst aspects of the evil.”

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The Jungle: The Horrific Conditions of Labor and Meat Production in the Meatpacking Industry

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (link to Project Gutenberg). Appeared in Appeal to Reason in serial form between 25 February and 4 November 1905. Christopher Hitchens: “[Upton Sinclair’s] intention was to direct the conscience of [people in the US] to the inhuman conditions in which immigrant labor was put to work. However, so graphic and detailed were his depictions of the filthy way in which food was produced that his book sparked a revolution among consumers instead (and led at some remove to the passage of the [Pure Food and Drug Act] and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. He wryly said of this unintended consequence that he had aimed for the public’s heart but had instead hit its stomach.”

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The Shame of the Cities

Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities. March 1904. Introduction: “When I [Steffens] set out to describe the corrupt systems of certain typical cities, I meant to show simply how the people were deceived and betrayed. But in the very first study–St. Louis–the startling truth lay bare that corruption was not merely political; it was financial, commercial, social; the ramifications of boodle were so complex, various, and far-reaching, that one mind could hardly grasp them….” The seven articles in The Shame of the Cities appeared first in McClure’s in 1902 and 1903 in the following order: “Tweed Days in St. Louis;” “The Shame of Minneapolis: The Rescue and Redemption of a City That Was Sold Out;” “The Shamelessness of St. Louis” (a sequel to “Tweed Days”); “Pittsburgh: A City Ashamed;” “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Content;” “Chicago: Half Free and Fighting On;” and “New York: Good Government in Danger.”

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The History of the Standard Oil Company

Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company. 19-part series in McClure’s published from 1902-1904. Published as a book in 1904. “Written by journalist Ida Tarbell in 1904, The History of the Standard Oil Company was an exposé of the Standard Oil Company, run at that time by oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, the richest figure in America’s history. Originally serialized in 19 parts in McClure’s magazine, the book was a seminal example of muckraking (known today as “investigative journalism”) and inspired many other journalists to write about trusts. Trusts were large businesses that (in the absence of strong antitrust law in the 19th century) attempted to gain monopolies in various industries. The History of the Standard Oil Company was credited with hastening the breakup of Standard Oil, which came about in 1911.”

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Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. First published in The New York Age, 25 June 1892. From The Anti Lynching Pamphlets of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1920 by Patricia A. Schechter: “In order to launch resistance to lynching, [Ida B. Wells] had to prove that lynching’s primary victims, African American men, were people worthy of sympathy and citizens deserving protection. At the same time, she needed to present herself — an educated, middle-class Southern woman of mixed racial ancestry — as a credible dispenser of truth, a “representative” public figure able to command social and amoral authority. The context of racism and sexism in which she functioned made both tasks difficult. Wells-Barnett described lynching as an expression of conflict over rights, physical integrity, human dignity, and social power and the movement to end it was similarly fraught and contentious.”

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How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York in the 1880s

Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Scribner’s, November 1890. Harvard University Press: “Jacob Riis’s pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title from Rabelais’s Pantagruel: ‘One half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of that Country.’ An anatomy of New York City’s slums in the 1880s, it vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of ‘the other half,’ who might well have inhabited another country. The book pricked the conscience of its readers and raised the tenement into a symbol of intransigent social difference. As Alan Trachtenberg makes clear in his introduction, it is a book that still speaks powerfully to us today of social injustice.” [Read more…]

Ten Days in a Mad-House

Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House. Book version of a two-part series published in the New York World on 9 October and 16 October 1887. From Time magazine, 12 April 2009: “It was rare for a woman to hold a job in the 19th century. It was even rarer for one to work at as a newspaper reporter — and rarer still to have that paper send her undercover, to expose the brutality and neglect within a New York mental institution. But in 1887, that’s exactly what Nellie Bly did. Bly had herself involuntarily committed to the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum for ten days. (She checked into a women’s boarding facility, acted erratically, and then allowed the all-too-eager boarding house employees to call the loony bin). After gaining entrance to the facility, the 23-year-old reverted back to a normal, sane pattern of behavior and tried to get them to release her. ‘Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be,’ she wrote in her series of articles for the New York World. Bly recounted stories of spoiled food, nurses who kept patients awake all night, ice cold baths, beatings and forced feedings. The articles aroused public outcry, [and] brought on much needed political reform….”

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