Курс жумысы Пән: Тили уйренилип атырган мамлекетлер адебияты тарийхы Топар

The Metropolis (1908) is another Allan Montague novel. It denounces the ills of conspicuous consumption among the urban upper classes. The text is characterized by endless catalogues of luxury items depicting all the commodities the rich buy for their leisure. It articulates (rather crudely) a familiar stereotype of city novels according to which the urban moneyed classes are parasites with perverted instincts.

King Coal (1917) describes the working conditions of Colorado miners. It focuses on the violent repression of unionism by the coal operators.

Oil! 1927 is set in the California oil fields. The story is told from the point of view of bunny Ross, the son of an oil operator. Bunny comes to realize that businessmen and politicians are corrupt. The novel also offers a vivid portrayal of life in the 1920s, an age of unbridled development of capitalist speculation and consumerism (the roaring twenties).

Boston (1928) is a fictionalized account of the protest movement stirred by the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

World’s End (1940) is the first of eleven novels devoted to the adventures of Lanny Budd. These novels follow the political education of the main character from his early advocacy of socialism, through his commitment to Rooseveltian liberal Democratic politics, and to post-WWII anticommunism. This trajectory is, of course, Sinclair: this is displaced autobiography.

The Jungle is meant to alert readers to the appalling working and living conditions in urban industrial Chicago. In particular, the novel focuses on immigrant laborers working in the city’s meat packing plants—the industrial slaughterhouses. The main protagonist, Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, is initially an ideal recruit for the packing plants because he is physically fit and eager to work. Rapidly, however, Jurgis loses his strength, suffers a work accident, and is obliged to take on ever less appetizing jobs for poverty wages. His family fares as badly as he does: several of the children die due to the dangers and hardships of urban life. Jurgis’s young wife Ona is sexually exploited by her boss and dies in childbirth. One of her cousins ends up a prostitute and an addict. Jurgis attacks Ona’s boss, is sent to jail, and becomes a drifter and a con-man involved in political corruption on his release. He is eventually saved by his discovery of socialist militancy. Through the evocation of powerful socialist oratory the novel makes us understand how the dismal situation of Chicago workers could be made right, and how Jurgis himself may contribute to this struggle.

The Jungle is a typical product of the Progressive Era in so far as it is a novel of social reform originating in muckraking investigations. It was indeed conceived as a semi-journalistic project. Sinclair was to investigate in person the realities of the Chicago meat-packing industry. He carried out his on-site research in 1904, visiting the packing plants disguised as a laborer and meeting with immigrant families. His account was serialized in Fred D. Warren’s Appeal to Reason, the main organ of the socialist press. Released in book form in 1906, The Jungle was an instant success, though its fame was partly based on a misunderstanding. Sinclair had meant to write a manifesto for socialism, but the book was read mainly as a denunciation of unhealthy food processing by the industrial meatpackers. The novel’s concrete outcome was therefore the passing of a stricter Pure Food and Drugs legislation.

Once it developed in the form of a novel, The Jungle was given the structure of a Bildungsroman—a novel of education. The novel of education is a secularized form of the allegorical quest romance. While in medieval romances heroes seek religious or moral enlightenment, protagonists of novels of education follow an itinerary within the secular world through which they discover the social and existential options available to them. Eventually, they have to accept the compromises required for reconciliation with society. This implies that novels of education are about learning, about psychological maturity. Therefore, many of the main characters of these novels are the protagonist’s mentors. Each of the mentors presides over the initiation of the characters into new aspects of their world. The mentors also embody a set of social values—a particular mode of relating to reality of the social structure.

The main characters acting as mentors of to Jurgis and his wife are Jokubas, the immigrant entrepreneur; the midwife, who knows about the sufferings of women; Duane, the petty criminal; and the socialist activists Jurgis eventually meets. In addition, the main agencies of characters’ education in The Jungle are not so much individual figures as the industrial complex itself. This confers to the text a marked allegorical connotation: the helpless protagonists have to face overwhelming, impersonal forces symbolizing capitalist society as a whole. Characteristically, the main articulations of Jurgis’s story of education correspond to a change in the character’s jobs (various tasks in the meant packing plants; the fertilizer room; the harvester plant; the steel plant; tunnel digging; crime; politics; socialist militancy). The account of the technicalities of these tasks contribute Jurgis’s (and readers’) course of learning.

The succession of mentors and learning environments in the novel results in a narrative structure divided into well-demarcated episodes, separated often by a climactic, often catastrophic events—Jurgis’s and Ona’s ill-fated marriage; the ill-advised purchase of a house; Jurgis’s work accident; Ona’s rape; Jurgis’s first imprisonment; the loss of the home; blacklisting; Ona’s death; the death of Antanas; Jurgis’s decision to go tramping; a saloon brawl; the second spell in prison; the violent strike; the realization that the survivors of the family live off prostitution. Women—Ona, particularly—are given a crucial part in this narrative of suffering. The negative side of the industrial city manifest itself primarily in the fact that the urban world is hostile to life, and therefore subjects women to excruciating pain— childbirth; prostitution. Happier episodes are few: besides the ecstatic revelation of socialist politics, we could only mention a trek through the idyllic countryside, Jurgis’s fairy-tale tour through a millionaire’s mansion, and, paradoxically, the hero’s involvement in political corruption. It is quite obvious that, by the standards of realistic verisimilitude, this long chain of mishaps is too much for one man. Jurgis and his relatives are therefore allegorical figures, embodying the whole of the immigrant working class. The sum of their experiences represents the lot the American worker.

The multiplicity and heterogeneity of the characters’ experience are also determined by the requirements of the muckraking narrative: Sinclair needs to provide his reader with as broad possible a view of industrial conditions in Chicago. This explains the inclusion of thoroughly improbable episodes like Jurgis’s visit of the millionaire’s mansion. This scene is justifiable only for expository, didactic reasons: we need to be acquainted with the world of the rich, even though this area of urban experience would normally lie completely outside the scope of the protagonist. Characteristically, this scene is “motivated” (narratively justified) by means of a blatant melodramatic manipulation—a chance encounter with a young drunken millionaire. Note that Jurgis is not even allowed to keep the hundred dollars he receives from the young man. This reinforces our feeling that the millionaire episode stands apart from the rest of the narrative.

Chapter 3 - History of Muckraking

3.1 Origins

The muckrakers were reform-minded journalists in the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s–1920s) who exposed established institutions and leaders as corrupt. They typically had large audiences in popular magazines. The modern term is investigative journalism or watchdog journalism; investigative journalists in the US are often informally called "muckrakers". The muckrakers played a highly visible role during the Progressive Era. Muckraking magazines—notably McClure's of the publisher S. S. McClure—took on corporate monopolies and political machines, while trying to raise public awareness and anger at urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, prostitution, and child labor.^[2] Most of the muckrakers wrote nonfiction, but fictional exposes often had a major impact too, such as those by Upton Sinclair.

In contemporary American usage, the term can refer to journalists or others who "dig deep for the facts" or, when used pejoratively, those who seek to cause scandal. The term is a reference to a character in John Bunyan's classic Pilgrim's Progress, "the Man with the Muck-rake", who rejected salvation to focus on filth. It became popular after President Theodore Roosevelt referred to the character in a 1906 speech; Roosevelt acknowledged that "the men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck."^[4]

In his speech, titled The Man with the Muck-rake, Theodore Roosevelt created the term muckraker. Roosevelt compared muckraking authors to the Man with the Muck-rake in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” According to Roosevelt, the authors are like the man who “could look no way but downward, with the muck-rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.” (Roosevelt) Roosevelt’s new insulting description of muckraking authors was not received as negative, as he had intended. In fact, the authors started calling themselves muckrakers soon thereafter. Whereas Roosevelt thought of muckraking media as merely shoveling dirt to the surface, muckraking authors considered themselves to be something different. In The Career of a Journalist, muckraking authors are described as men with a mission. Their mission was to set forth some new and wonderful truth of world-wide importance, in a manner to make the nations of the earth sit up and take notice – to cause the heart of humanity to throb and thrill, from Greenland to the Ganges – a message in words that would enthuse and enthrall, gleam and glitter, dazzle and delight. (Salisbury 150). This mission of muckraking changes the mere filth, as described by Roosevelt, to groundbreaking news that is of high importance to the entire civilization of the world, leaving those who read it in total awe. Roosevelt had no issues with the fact that current issues were being addressed, however, he did think the way in which muckrakers were doing it, could do more harm than good. “Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself…” (Roosevelt) However, the growing popularity of muckraking media suggests that muckrakers are not being reprimanded by the public for their sensational writing.

2. 
   Muckraking Elements
   

Leading muckrakers have two factors in common, according to Marvin N. Olasky. The first factor is an elite education and the second factor is work experience with the newspapers of Pulitzer or Hearst. “Such apprenticeships often were vital in the development of writing styles that could both appeal to magazine readers and proselytize them for causes of the left.” But next to the elements muckraking authors have in common, there are also elements that the texts themselves often share. Cecelia Tichi, author of Exposés and Excess: Muckraking in America, 1900/2000, names three major elements of muckraking texts. The first element is facts, the second element is civic melodrama, and the third element is narrative. “Whichever muckraker one may choose to read, one salient criterion is palpable on the narrative surface: a commitment to verifiable fact.” Simply said, without facts, a story cannot be proven to be true. “Fact was the muckraker’s antidote to rumor and to sensationalist yellow journalism.” Often, muckrakers were not experts on the subjects they were writing on, and facts were their weapon against everyone who tried to attack their writing. Tichi notes that our understanding of facts, where they can be manipulatively used, had not yet crossed their minds in the Progressive Era. The fact that people cannot argue true facts, makes this element indisputably important to muckraking texts. Civic melodrama is a term that covers the author’s use of shock to urge for civic activism. Jeffrey D. Mason, defines the melodrama genre in his book In Melodrama and the Myth of America. Characteristics of this genre include electrifying accidents, an unconstrained display of dramatic scenes, an “open display of violence and catastrophe,” and “exaggerated expression of emotion”. Muckraking texts are known for the use of shock on their audience. “As in popular stage melodrama of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the muckrakers portrayed a world of societal ideals that had been frighteningly threatened or assaulted. The social script, so to speak, called for the forces of civic virtue to combat the villainous assailants, to defeat them and restore the good order of an earlier era—or to project an ideal, yet attainable, society into the future.” Melodrama was a popular genre in the Progressive Era, and muckrakers used it to their advantage. The use of a popular genre is a good way of turning one’s story into a popular one. Not to forget that “[muckraking narratives] were meant to stimulate recognition of citizenly identity and its obligations.” If people like the story, they are more likely to have strong feelings for the cause and are thus more inclined to take action.

“The muckrakers explicitly identified their projects as narratives. […] The muckrakers’ concerns about crucial elements of a story’s pace, its pictorial composition, emotional stimulus, and documentation are well taken […], because they are basic to any definition of narrative.” Elements of a narrative are just as much present in the narratives of exposure, as it is in novels and other fiction. Tichi argues that muckraking narratives hold the same standards for narrative as other fiction, and she uses lots of examples from muckraking texts to prove it. The case studies in this thesis further explain the narrative element.

3.3 The Rise in Popularity

There is an important factor that contributed to the expanding popularity of muckraking media. Richard Hofstadter, the author of The Age of Reform, argues that it was not the ideas or its existence that made muckraking so popular, but it was its reach. Circulation of publications had a nationwide reach, and there were vast resources for the exposés. (Hofstadter 187) Investigative journalism was not new, nor was the idea of exposés. The growing popularity could be explained by the capability of nation-wide circulation. “In 1870 there were 574 daily newspapers in the country; by 1899 there were 1,610; by 1909, 2,600. The circulation of daily newspapers increased during this time from 2,800,000 to 24,200,00.” This expansion drastically changed the newspapers. Owners and editors used the newspapers and magazines to create a bond with the readers. Many rural migrants, farmers, and villagers were not yet accustomed with this new urban world, a world that was “strange, anonymous, impersonal, cruel, often corrupted and vicious, but also full of variety and fascination.” The urban change was responsible for a disruption in the relationships with family, church, and neighborhood, and provided new, more superficial relationships to a larger crowd of people. Newspapers became the new village gossip. “It began to make increased use of the variety and excitement of the city to capture personal interest and offer its readers indirect human contacts. The rural mind, confronted with the city, often responded with shock, and the newspaper did not hesitate to exploit this.” Essentially, muckraking became increasingly popular because it emerged at the right time, the time of urbanization. As an effect, newspaper expansion meant that they became less dependent upon political parties for funding. As the newspaper expanded, so did the advertisement section in the newspaper. Newspapers were so greatly funded by ads, that they could now afford to challenge these political parties and expose corruptness. However, many newspapers had so much advertising space, that the paper needed ‘filler stories.’ This meant that they “created reportable events” by sending famous people to newspaper-organized events, and also “elevated events” that were not important enough to publish otherwise. Hofstadter calls muckraking the “exploitation of human interest.” In effect, these filler stories made it easier to spot the premium writing, which was marked by its reporter more than its editor. In fact, “in the decade between 1903 and 1912, nearly two thousand articles of a muckraking variety appeared in the popular magazines, complemented by editorials, cartoons, and serials. “[However,] close to a third were written by a small group of twelve men and one woman who concentrated on and professionalized this kind of journalism.” Even though the muckraking magazines and newspapers were expanding, most leading muckrakers were few in numbers. The reason for this might be that leading muckrakers have some commonalities.