We’re All Muckrakers Now

by Patrick Halbrook

Originally Published by The Imaginative Conservative.

Today, Theodore Roosevelt prompts us to ask the same question he raised over a century ago in his speech “The Man with the Muck-Rake”: How do we devote our attention to society’s problems without allowing them to devour us? Our survival in the Information Age hinges upon on our ability to address this problem.

In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt introduced the term “muckraker” into the American lexicon. Today, many understand a muckraker to be simply a dedicated investigative journalist, a Woodward or Bernstein digging into corruption and scandal on a quest for truth and justice. But originally, Roosevelt intended to target a certain type of journalist, one who reminded him of “the man with the muck rake” in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

This man, as Roosevelt described him, “could look no way but downward, with the muck rake in his hand.” When he “was offered a celestial crown for his muck rake,” he refused the exchange. He “would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.” In Bunyan’s allegory, the muckraker represented a materialistic man who denies the spiritual realities above him. As Roosevelt adapted the image, “he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing.”

Roosevelt’s “The Man with the Muck-Rake” speech is a message for our time. We are inundated as never before by a firehose of demoralizing news made possible by new technologies. Yet our essential dilemmas, rooted as they are in unchanging human nature, were identified by Roosevelt a century ago, and his speech can provide us with much-needed perspective today…

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