Muckraking essay

In the early 1900s, there was a time in which the ways of the people were changing in America. In this era, there was a group of people that successfully changed America and brought the problems to the people. These people were known as the Progressives. Nevertheless, the progressives would not have changed nearly as much without the help of the muckrakers. They were a group of journalists that exposed problems. My paper is about three main things like urban poor living conditions, child labor, and the conditions of food. I feel that these were horrible problems and were addressed the way they were supposed to be. The way Muckrakers in the 1900’s and journalists today showed these problems were similar.
One of the three biggest problems the Muckrakers addressed was where the urban poor lived, which is like today because journalists write articles on poor living conditions in cities and people’s houses. Tenement buildings were crowded, unsafe, and rat-infested. One influential muckraker centered his attention on this problem. His name was Jacob Riis, and he was a photographer for the New York Evening Sun. Between 1890 and 1903, he published How the Other Half Lives, which led to reforms. A quote from Jacob Riis- “Long ago it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives’…. It did not know because it did not care.”

A muckraker who exposed a problem in America was John Spargo when he wrote the book The Bitter Cry of the Children in 1906. In this book, Spargo describes the terrible use of child labor used in the states. This is similar to today’s society because there are many in countries and sometimes in the U.S. that do it illegally, and journalists work to expose this. Spargo’s book is very similar to The Jungle in a way because it also exposed a problem. Although, Spargo did not get as immediate of reaction as Sinclair did. When Spargo wrote this book, he shows “how children of twelve years of age are legally employed in the