The Morality of Politics: The Muckrakers' Vision of Democracy

Abstract

FR at least two lmtndred years word has fired American emotions. Denounced as leveling and mob rule or praised as equality of condition and majority rule, term has remained central to language of politicians and reformers. Whether a reformer has embraced cause of landed aristocrat, farmer, laborer, small entrepreneur, or industrial capitalist, he most often has claimed to be American democrat seeking to preserve legacy of national dream. hybrid character of democracy has made almost any appeal reasonable to some.' As popular journalists in early twentieth century, muckrakers mounted a concentrated attack against citadels of evil which they believed dominated republican landscape. Lincoln Steffens, Ida M. Tarbell, Charles Edward Russell, and others posed as democrats trying to turn into success failures of a democratic society. Many hoped, as Ray Stannard Baker later recalled, that they could shake walls of corrupt Jericho by blasts of their trumpets.2 Both journalists and their historians congratulated themselves for heralding potency of traditional principles to solve current problems. In 1905 Frederick C. Howe lauded concept of popular government and confessed that from a conviction that we had too much democracy I have come to conviction that we have too little democracy. Benjamin 0. Flower, editor of Arena, agreed with Tocqueville that the cure for evils of democracy is more democracy.3 In a recent essay, The Muck-