Muckrakers in the Progressive Era

Muckrakers The term “muckraker” was originally coined in a speech in 1906 accredited to President Theodore Roosevelt. It was alluding to the man with the Muck-Rake in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Process. The Man with the Muck rake seeks material advances by raking filth. Roosevelt defined this term as "one who inquires into and publishes scandal and allegations of corruption among political and business leaders". Muckrakers in the Progressive Era, a time from 1820 until 1920 when America quickly industrialized, pushed for reform and have altered the way we live today. These reformers brought about the awareness and tackled women’s rights, economic concentration, corporate power, poverty, food safety, and political corruption. Extraordinary muckrakers are Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, Upton Sinclair, Alice Paul, and Edwin Markham.
Jane Addams was an advocate for the rights of improving social conditions in the urban areas for the poor immigrants and workers living in slums. People living in the slums had to live in terrible conditions. Large households were living in a small, cramped living space in tenements that were overcrowded with people. Young children were sent to work along with their parents in order to provide daily meals to feed their families and there was no sanitation. In 1889, Addams along with her college classmate and friend Ellen Gates Starr founded the Hull House. This was a famous settlement house in Chicago which relieved the effects of poverty by providing social services for people in the neighborhood such as teaching English to immigrants, pioneering early-childhood education, teaching industrial arts, and establishing neighborhood theaters and music schools. By its second year of existence, Hull House proved for about two thousand people each week. Addams sparked the settlement house movement in America; there were soon more than four hundred settlement houses throughout America’s largest cities. Settlement workers were