![]() ![]() Lincoln Steffens unmasked the corrupt alliance between big business and municipal government and Ida Tarbell published a devastating factual expose of the Standard Oil Company.A group of aggressive ten- and fifteen-cent magazines surged to the front editors financed extensive research and encouraged writing by reports branded “muckrakers” by Roosevelt.By 1902 the exposing of evil became a flourishing industry among American publishers.Feminists added social justice to suffrage on list of needed reforms (Jane Addams, Lillian Wald).Messengers of the social gospel promoted a brand of progressivism (using religious doctrine).Socialists began to register appreciable strength at the ballot box.Theodore Dreiser battered promoters and profiteers in The Financier and The Titan. ![]() Jacob Riis shocked middle-class with How the Other Half Lives, an account of the NY slums.Thorstein Veblen assailed the new rich in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899, 1894 ↑).Henry Lloyd charged into the Standard Oil Company with Wealth Against Commonwealth.Populists branded the “bloated trusts” with the stigma of corruption and wrongdoing.Progressive theorists-society could no longer afford the luxury of laissez-faire policy.The roots of the new reformist wave went back the Green Labor party and Populists and to the mounting unrest as grasping industrialists concentrated more and more power in fewer hands.There were nearly 76 million Americans in 1900 a reform movement right convulsed the ethnically and racially mixed American people after the twentieth century had dawned. ![]()
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