Drift and Mastery > Chapter 1 > The Themes of Muckraking
There is in America today a distinct prejudice in favor of those who make the accusations. Thus if you announced that John D. Rockefeller was going to vote the Republican ticket it would be regarded at once as a triumph for the Democrats. Something has happened to our notions of success: no political party these days enjoys publishing the names of its campaign contributors, if those names belong to the pillars of society. The mere statement that George W. Perkins is an active Progressive has put the whole party somewhat on the defensive. And there is more than sarcasm in the statement of the New York Times Annalist that:
'If it be true that the less bankers have to do with a scheme of banking and currency reform the more acceptable it will be to the people, it follows that the Administration's Currency Bill ...must command popular admiration.’
You have only to write an article about some piece of corruption in order to find yourself the target of innumerable correspondents, urging you to publish their wrongs. The sense of conspiracy and secret scheming which transpire is almost uncanny. 'Big Business,’ and its ruthless tentacles, have become the material for the feverish fantasy of illiterate thousands thrown out of kilter by the rack and strain of modern life. It is possible to work yourself into a state where the world seems a conspiracy and your daily going is beset with an alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil. Everything askew—all the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a deliberate evil intelligence, and men like Morgan and Rockefeller take on attributes of omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity would reduce to a barbarous myth. I know a socialist who seriously believes that the study of eugenics is a Wall Street scheme for sterilizing working-class leaders. And the cartoons which pictured Morgan sitting arrogantly in a chariot drawn by the American people in a harness of ticker tape, — these are not so much caricatures as pictures of what no end of fairly sane people believe. Not once but twenty times have I been told confidentially of a nation-wide scheme by financiers to suppress every radical and progressive periodical. But even though the most intelligent muckrakers have always insisted that the picture was absurd, it remains to this day a very widespread belief. I remember how often Lincoln Steffens used to deplore the frightened literalness with which some of his articles were taken. One day in the country he and I were walking the railroad track. The ties, of course, are not well spaced for an ordinary stride, and I complained about it. 'You see,’ said Mr. Steffens with mock obviousness, 'Morgan controls the New Haven and he prefers to make the people ride.’
Now it is not very illuminating to say that this smear of suspicion has been worked up by the muckrakers. If business and politics really served American need, you could never induce people to believe so many accusations against them. It is said, also, that the muckrakers played for circulation, as if that proved their insincerity. But the mere fact that muckraking was what people wanted to hear is in many ways the most important revelation of the whole campaign.
There is no other way of explaining the quick approval which the muckrakers won. They weren't voices crying in a wilderness, or lonely prophets who were stoned. They demanded a hearing; it was granted. They asked for belief; they were believed. They cried that something should be done and there was every appearance of action. There must have been real causes for dissatisfaction, or the land notorious for its worship of success would not have turned so savagely upon those who had achieved it. A happy husband will endure almost anything, but an unhappy one is capable of flying into a rage if his carpet-slippers are not in the right place. For America, the willingness to believe the worst was a strange development in the face of its traditional optimism, a sign perhaps that the honeymoon was over. For muckraking flared up at about the time when land was no longer freely available and large scale industry had begun to throw vast questions across the horizon. It came when success had ceased to be easily possible for everyone.
The muckrakers spoke to a public willing to recognize as corrupt an incredibly varied assortment of conventional acts. That is why there is nothing mysterious or romantic about the business of exposure, — no putting on of false hair, breaking into letter-files at midnight, hypnotizing financiers, or listening at keyholes. The stories of graft, written and unwritten, are literally innumerable. Often muckraking consists merely in dressing up a public document with rhetoric and pictures, translating a court record into journalese, or writing the complaints of a minority stockholder, a dislodged politician, or a boss gone 'soft.’ No journalist need suffer from a want of material.
Now in writing this chapter I started out to visualize this material in systematic and scholarly fashion by making a list of the graft revelations in the last ten years. I wished for some quantitative sense of the number and kinds of act that are called corrupt. But I found myself trying to classify the industrial, financial, political, foreign and social relations of the United States, with hundreds of sub-heads, and a thousand gradations of credibility and exaggeration. It was an impossible task. The popular press of America is enormous, and for years it has been filled with 'probes’ and 'amazing revelations.’ And how is a person to classify, say, the impeachment of a Tammany governor by a Tammany legislature? A mere list of investigations would fill this book, and I abandoned the attempt with the mental reservation that if anyone really desired that kind of proof, a few German scholars, young and in perfect health, should be imported to furnish it.
They could draw up a picture to stagger even a jaded American. Suppose they began their encyclopedia with the adulteration of foods. There would follow a neat little volume on the aliases of coffee. The story of meat would help the vegetarians till the volume on canned foods appeared. Milk would curdle the blood, bread and butter would raise a scandal, candy, —the volume would have to be suppressed. If photographs could convey odors the study of restaurants might be done without words. The account of patent medicines, quack doctors, beauty parlors, mining schemes, loan sharks, shyster lawyers, all this riff-raff and fraud in the cesspool of commercialism would make unendurable reading. You would rush to the window, cursing the German pedants, grateful for a breath of that air which filters through in spite of the unenforced smoke ordinance of your city.
But the story would proceed. Think of your state of mind after you had read all about the methods of drummers, advertising agents, lobbyists, publicity men, after you knew adulteration of every description, and had learned the actual motives and history of political conferences, of caucuses, and consultations with the boss; suppose you understood the underground history of legislatures, the miscarriages of justice, the relations of the police to vice and crime, of newspapers to advertisers and wealthy citizens, of trade union leaders to their unions, the whole fetid story of the war between manufacturers and labor organizations. A study of the public domain in America would employ a staff of investigators. What railroads have done to the public, to their employees, what directors do to the stockholders and the property, the quantitative record of broken trust, the relation of bankers to the prosperity of business enterprise, of stock gamblers to capitalization, —taking merely all that is known and could be illustrated, summed up and seen at once, what a picture it would make.
And yet such a picture would be false and inept. For certainly there must be some ground for this sudden outburst of candor, some ground beside a national desire for abstract truth and righteousness. These charges and counter-charges arose because the world has been altered radically, not because Americans fell in love with honesty. If we condemn what we once honored, if we brand as criminal the conventional acts of twenty years ago, it's because we have developed new necessities and new expectations.
They are the clue to the clouds of accusation which hang over American life. You cannot go very far by reiterating that public officials are corrupt, that business men break the law. The unbribed official and the law-abiding business man are not ideals that will hold the imagination very long. And that is why the earlier kind of muckraking exhausted itself. There came a time when the search for not-dishonest men ceased to be interesting. We all know now what tepid failures were those first opponents of corruption, the men whose only claim to distinction was that they had done no legal wrong. For without a vivid sense of what politics and business might be, you cannot wage a very fruitful campaign.
Now if you study the chief themes of muckraking I think it is possible to see the outlines of what America has come to expect.
The first wave of exposure insisted upon the dishonesty of politicians. Close upon it came widespread attack upon big business men, who were charged with bribing officials and ruining their competitors. Soon another theme appeared: big business men were accused of grafting upon the big corporations which they controlled. We are entering upon another period now; not alone big lousiness, but all business and farming too, are being criticized for inefficiency, for poor product, and for exploitation of employees.
This classification is, of course, a very rough one. It would be easy enough to dispute it, for the details are endlessly complicated and the exceptions may appear very large to some people. But I think, nevertheless, that this classification does no essential violence to the facts. It doesn't matter for my purposes that some communities are still in what I call the first period, while others are in the third. For a nation like ours doesn't advance at the same rate everywhere. All I mean to suggest is that popular muckraking in the last decade has shifted its interest in something like this order: First, to the corruption of aldermen and mayors and public servants by the boss acting for a commercial interest, and to the business methods of those who built up the trusts. Then, muckraking turned, and began to talk about the milking of railroads by banks, and of one corporation by another. This period laid great emphasis on the 'interlocking directorate.’ Now, muckraking is fastening upon the waste in management, upon working conditions as in the Steel Mills or at Lawrence, or upon the quality of service rendered by the larger corporations. These have been the big themes.
Why should they have been? Why, to begin with, should politicians have been attacked so fiercely? Some people would say flatly: because politicians were dishonest. Yet that is an utterly unfounded generalization. The morals of politicians cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as exceptionally bad. Politicians were on the make. To be sure. But who in this sunny land isn't? They gave their relatives and friends pleasant positions. What father doesn't do that for his son if he can, and with every feeling of righteousness? They helped their friends, they were loyal to those who had helped them: who will say that in private life these are not admirable virtues? And what were the typical grafts in politics? the grafts for which we tried to send politicians to jail? The city contracts for work, and the public official is in league with the contractor; but railroads also contract for work, and corporation officials are at least as frequently as politicians, financially interested in the wrong side of the deal. The city buys real estate, and the city official manages to buy it from himself or his friends. But railroad directors have been known to sell their property to the road they govern.
We can see, I think, what people meant by the word graft. They did not mean robbery. It is rather confused rhetoric to call a grafter a thief. His crime is not that he filches money from the safe but that he betrays a trust. The grafter is a man whose loyalty is divided and whose motives are mixed. A lawyer who takes a fee from both sides in some case; a public official who serves a private interest; a railroad director who is also a director in the supply company; a policeman in league with outlawed vice: those are the relationships which the American people denounce as 'corrupt.’ The attempt to serve at the same time two antagonistic interests is what constitutes 'corruption.’
The crime is serious in proportion to the degree of loyalty that we expect. A President of the United States who showed himself too friendly to some private interest would be denounced, though he may not have made one cent out of the friendship. But where we have not yet come to expect much loyalty we do very little muckraking. So if you inquired into the ethics of the buyer in almost any manufacturing house, you would find him doing things daily that would land the purchasing agent of a city in jail. Who regards it as especially corrupt if the selling firm 'treats’ the buyer, gives him or her a 'present,’ perhaps a commission, or at least a 'good time’? American life is saturated with the very relationship which in politics we call corrupt. The demand for a rake-off penetrates to the kitchen where a sophisticated cook expects a commission from the butcher, and tampers with the meat if it is refused; you can find it in the garage where the chauffeur has an understanding about the purchase of supplies; it extends to the golf caddie who regards a 'lost’ ball as his property and proceeds to sell it to the next man for half the original cost, ? it extends to the man who buys that ball; and it ramifies into the professions when doctors receive commissions from specialists for sending patients to them; it saturates the work-a-day world with tips and fees and 'putting you on to a good thing’ and 'letting you in on the ground floor.’ But in the politician it is mercilessly condemned.
That is because we expect more of the politician. We say in effect that no public servant must allow himself to follow the economic habits of his countrymen. The corrupt politician is he who brings into public service the traditions of a private career. Perhaps that is a cynical reflection. I do not know how to alter it. When I hear politicians talk 'reform,’ I know they are advocating something which most drummers on the road would regard as the scruples of a prig, and I know that when business men in a smoking-room are frank, they are taking for granted acts which in a politician we should call criminal.
For the average American will condemn in an alderman what in his partner he would consider reason for opening a bottle of champagne. In literal truth the politician is attacked for displaying the morality of his constituents. You might if you didn't understand the current revolution, consider that hypocrisy. It isn't: it is one of the hopeful signs of' the age. For it means that unconsciously men regard some of the interests of life as too important for the intrusion of commercial ethics.
Run a government today, with the same motives and vision that you run a dry goods store, and watch for the activity of the muckrakers. Pursue in the post office the methods which made you a founder of colleges, you will be grateful for a kind word from Mr. Lorimer? Poor as they are, the standards of public life are so much more social than those of business that financiers who enter politics regard themselves as philanthropists. The amount of work and worry without reward is almost beyond the comprehension of the man whose every act is measured in profit and loss. The money to be accumulated in politics even by the cynically corrupt is so small by comparison that able men on the make go into politics only when their motives are mixed with ambition, a touch of idealism, vanity, or an imaginative notion of success.
But the fact that a public official took no bribe soon ceased to shield him from popular attack. Between the honest adherent of machine politics and the corruptionist himself the muckrakers made no sharp distinction. And that was because they had in a vague way come to expect positive action from men in office. They looked for better school systems, or health campaigns, or a conservation policy, that is for fairly concrete social measures, and officials who weren't for them were lumped together and denounced. The official might have read too much Adam Smith, or been too much of a lawyer, or taken orders from the boss, or a bribe from a lobbyist? the rough result was the same: he wasn't for what public opinion had come to expect, and the muckrakers laid their traps for him.
I suppose that from the beginning of the republic people had always expected their officials to work at a level less self-seeking than that of ordinary life. So that corruption in politics could never be carried on with an entirely good conscience. But at the opening of this century, democratic people had begun to see much greater possibilities in the government than ever before. They looked to it as a protector from economic tyranny and as the dispenser of the prime institutions of democratic life.
But when they went to the government, what they found was a petty and partisan, slavish and blind, clumsy and rusty instrument for their expectations. That added to the violence of their attacks. When they had no vision of what a democratic state might do, it didn't make so very much difference if officials took a rake-off. The cost of corruption was only a little money, and perhaps the official's immortal soul. But when men's vision of government enlarged, then the cost of corruption and inefficiency rose: for they meant a blighting of the whole possibility of the state. There has always been corruption in American politics, but it didn't worry people very much, so long as the sphere of government was narrowly limited. Corruption became a real problem when reform through state action began to take hold of men's thought.
As muckraking developed, it began to apply the standards of public life to certain parts of the business world. Naturally the so-called public service corporation was the first to feel the pressure. There is obviously a great difference in outlook between the Vanderbilt policy of 'the public be damned’ and the McAdoo policy of 'the public be pleased.'' The old sense of private property is very much modified: few railroad men today would deny that they are conducting a quasi-public enterprise, and that something more is demanded of them than private exploitation. Thus President Mellen of the New Haven railroad could not have been handled more roughly by the people of New England if they had elected him to office? And his successor, President Howard Elliott, finds it necessary to remind the people that 'the railroad is a public servant in fact as well as in name and that the service which it renders depends largely upon the treatment which it receives from its master.’ Mr. Elloit’s grandfather would, I think, have said that his descendant lacked a sense of private property. That is true: Mr. Elliott's remark is a recognition that the cultural basis of property is radically altered, however much the law may lag behind in recognizing the change. So if the stockholders think they are the ultimate owners of the Pennsylvania railroad, they are colossally mistaken. Whatever the law may be, the people have no such notion. And the men who are connected with these essential properties cannot escape the fact that they are expected to act increasingly as public officials.
That expectation has filtered into the larger industrial corporations. I have here, for example, a statement by Roger Babson, a recognized financial expert:
'Suppose the mayor of a town should appoint his brother police commissioner; his daughter's husband, fire commissioner; his uncle, superintendent of the water works; and put his son in charge of the street cleaning department. How long would it be before the good citizens would hold an indignation meeting? It would not be long. No city in America would stand that kind of graft. Yet pick up the letterhead of a private corporation and what are you likely to find? It usually reads something like this: Quincy Persimmon, president; Quincy Persimmon, Jr., vice-president; Persimmon Quincy, treasurer; Howard Lemon, secretary. The presence of Howard Lemon in this select family circle is somewhat puzzling until one learns that Prunella Quincy Persimmon is the wife of Howard Lemon. Then all is clear. To be sure, the general manager of the concern, who is the man to see on any matter of special importance, is a man named Hobbs or Smith or Hogan, but it soon appears that the salary of the general manager is just about what it costs young Lemon to run his motor for one year ...Has there ever been an American mayor who dared to run his city as this private corporation is run? In their leisure moments the Persimmons, Quincys and the Lemons are constantly advising their fellow citizens of the danger of permitting an American city to advance one step toward the sort of municipal work which is done by a great many foreign cities with success. The reason against this is given as the graft in public life.’
Now when the Persimmons are muckraked, what puzzles them beyond words is that anyone should presume to meddle with their business. What they will learn is that it is no longer altogether their business. The law may not have realized this, but the fact is being accomplished, and it's a fact grounded deeper than statutes. Big business men who are at all intelligent recognize this. They are talking more and more about their 'responsibilities,’ their 'stewardship.’ It is the swan-song of the old commercial profiteering and a dim recognition that the motives in business are undergoing a revolution.
But muckraking has grown in scope, which is another way of saying that it has come to expect still more. We hear now about the inefficiency of business. Men like Brandeis, Redfield, Taylor have taken the lead in this criticism. Try if you can to imagine a merchant in the '70's subject to criticism on a national scale because he didn't know how to run his business. He would have sputtered and exploded at the impudence of such a suggestion. As a matter of fact some remnants of that age have sputtered and exploded at the impudence of Mr. Brandeis. But in the main the younger business men have been willing to listen. They do not think it a preposterous notion when the Secretary of Commerce suggests that if they are to conduct business they must do it efficiently. Then too, the farmers are being criticized. They are no longer deluged with adulation: they are being told quite frankly that they have a very great deal to learn from the government and the universities. And now there is a tremendous agitation about the quality of the goods and the conditions of labor under which they are produced.
Why all this has happened: why there are new standards for business men, why the nature of property is altered, why the workers and the purchasers are making new demands,? all this muckraking never made very clear. It was itself considerably more of an effect than a sign of leadership. It expressed a change, and consequently it is impossible to say that muckraking was either progressive or reactionary in its tendency. The attack upon business men was listened to by their defeated competitors as well as by those who looked forward to some better order of industrial life. Muckraking is full of the voices of the beaten, of the bewildered, and then again it is shot through with some fine anticipation. It has pointed to a revolution in business motives; it has hinted at the emerging power of labor and the consumer ? we can take those suggestions, perhaps, and by analyzing them, and following them through, gather for ourselves some sense of what moves beneath the troubled surface of events.