A Time for Anger

THE MUCKRAKERS (449 pp.)--Edited by Arthur and Lila Weinberg--Simon & Schuster ($7.50).

Collectors of old scandals are always welcome to dinner, even though it often happens that their only tales are embalmed anachronisms, tamer than a turn-of-the-century bathing suit. But though the freshest report the Weinbergs present is 50 years old, this collection of the writings of the energetic group known as the muckrakers seems charged still with proper indignation; the stories are as sturdy and enduring as the fearsome old names--Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Edwin Markham, Ray Stannard Baker, William English Walling.

With an amazing capacity to seek out scoundrels and scold them, the muckrakers exhumed disgrace everywhere. They goaded Congress into adopting a bristling bouquet of reform legislation, gave birth to the Progressive movement, and stirred the U.S. into new social consciousness.

Filth on the Floor. It was Teddy Roosevelt whose Administration had to contend with the muckrakers, and it was Teddy who gave them their name. Riled by David Graham Phillips' attacks on the Senate, Roosevelt drew an analogy from Pilgrim's Progress: "You may recall the description of the Man with the Muckrake, the man who could look no way but downward, with a muckrake in his hands; who was offered a celestial crown for his muckrake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown that was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor." Such a man typified these new writers, Roosevelt said, excepting Steffens and Tarbell because of their great scholarship.

But the scholarship of the writers is much less arresting than their scorn, their scolding, their sense of civic virtue. Their language is filled with the old words of Christian righteousness ("spoliations," "disorderly house," "men of evil"), but in every case their targets were more formidable than their words. Ida Tarbell made Standard Oil "her province, referring to it here and there as "the Monster." Phillips, the wildest of them all, took out after the Senate, calling its leaders that "group of traitors in the service of the thieves."

Perhaps the most successful job of muckraking was Upton Sinclair's searing novel, The Jungle, which contained among other things an indictment of the meatpacking industry that was grotesque but effective: "Here came also cattle which had been fed on 'whiskey-malt,' the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called 'steerly'--which means covered with boils that were full of matter. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foulsmelling stuff into your face." The Jungle came out in 1905; in 1906 Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act. Said Sinclair: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

The 10-c- War. The heyday of muckraking was the ten years from 1902 to 1912. Ironically enough, the movement was launched by McClure's not with any high impulse toward reform but as a coldly calculated device to boost circulation. Soon the new journalism of exposure was taken up by a score of magazines-- Munsey's, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, Everybody's, Hampton's, the Independent, the American Magazine. They all followed the same formula, and they ranged far for new public enemies, setting their sights on everything from New York's Trinity Church to Georgia's prison system.

There are still crusades in the press but the muckraker's tone of high-collar righteousness seems out of key in today's more complicated world, in which Americans have found that they have more to worry about, from Berlin to Laos, than civic corruption or spoiled meat. Laws and the nation's conscience have eliminated most of the outrages the muckrakers attacked. But the Weinbergs' book is a readable reminder of the days when a handful of serious scolds could make a whole nation feel as embarrassed as a small boy caught with dirt behind his ears.

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