ABSTRACT
Inheritors of a sentimental mantle, dependent upon literary strategies bequeathed to them by popular writers of the nineteenth century, the muckrakers shot for the heart in their reform journalism. The journalist Lincoln Steffens was correct to identify morality as the dominant note of muckraking journalism but too hasty, perhaps, in his summary judgment. Steffens's remarks typify postwar discomfort with prewar enthusiasm—as well as twentieth-century distaste for nineteenth-century literary style. Muckraking, Steffens suggests, was a throwback to the sentimental literature of the previous century: a regressive force in a progressive age. To examine muckraking's debt to nineteenth-century literary strategies, it is high time to revisit the age of honest bunk. Some critics have argued that muckraking was incapacitated the moment it was named by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. The muckraking impulse has produced such groundbreaking exposes as The Jungle, Silent Spring, and the Watergate reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
