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Henry Demarest Lloyd was one of the post-bellum 19th-century's best known journalists and non-fiction writers. In fact, only E.L. Godkin exceeded Lloyd in influence and prestige, and Godkin wrote no book-length expose with the impact of Lloyd's 1894 Wealth Against Commonwealth. This biography, based ...

Henry Demarest Lloyd was one of the post-bellum 19th-century's best known journalists and non-fiction writers. In fact, only E.L. Godkin exceeded Lloyd in influence and prestige, and Godkin wrote no book-length expose with the impact of Lloyd's 1894 Wealth Against Commonwealth. This biography, based in part on previously unpublished archival information, is a study of the mentality of the journalist as an advocate for reform. It is an examination of Wealth Against Commonwealth, the most influential expose and "starting point for every public investigation" of the late 19th-century industrial monopolies. Lloyd's pre- and post-Wealth journalism is investigated as well, including "Story of a Great Monopoly," Lloyd's 1881 Atlantic Monthly article said to be the first example of American muckraking, and Lloyd's published investigations of reforms such as cooperatives, labor arbitration, minimum wage, and social security. His contact with a variety of his intellectual contemporaries is also featured, including Horace Greeley, Jane Addams, Ida M. Tarbell, Samuel F. Gompers, Clarence S. Darrow, Joseph Medill, Henry George, William Dean Howells, and Eugene V. Debs.

This collection of essays provides a critical and scholarly assessment of muckraking journalists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributors discuss how spiritual values led journalists to seek social change, through crusades and exposes, sometimes at the price of public confusion and ...

This collection of essays provides a critical and scholarly assessment of muckraking journalists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributors discuss how spiritual values led journalists to seek social change, through crusades and exposes, sometimes at the price of public confusion and cynicism. They explore how the richest church in America was forced to clean up its tenement houses, how a Buffalo newspaper crusaded for improvements in living conditions for immigrants, why women journalists were keys to civic improvement efforts, and how muckraking and the crusading spirit permeated the press even in small towns. The authors place these stories in the context of various facets of early 20th century American culture.

An account of California journalist and wit Ambrose Bierce and his struggle with the railroad "octopus" controlled by "the Big Four" (Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins). This is the first book to look at Bierce's early muckraking campaign in depth through ...

An account of California journalist and wit Ambrose Bierce and his struggle with the railroad "octopus" controlled by "the Big Four" (Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins). This is the first book to look at Bierce's early muckraking campaign in depth through Bierce's acid journalism and the railroad's private and public reactions. After a brief literature review and biography of Bierce, one of America's greatest wits, journalists, and short-story writers, the study turns to his thirty-year battle with the Central Pacific Railroad, which controlled much of California's economy and politics, often through bribery of politicians and newspaper editors and publishers. Lindley looks at the initial funding of the railroad through the U.S. government, the development of railroads as symbols of hope and progress, and the eventual corruption of that optimistic outlook by railroad owners and politicians.

In 1895, a 27-year-old journalist named William Allen White returned to his home town of Emporia, Kansas, to edit a little down-at-the-heels newspaper he had just purchased for $3,000. "The new editor," he wrote in his first editorial, "hopes to live here until he is the old editor, until some of ...

In 1895, a 27-year-old journalist named William Allen White returned to his home town of Emporia, Kansas, to edit a little down-at-the-heels newspaper he had just purchased for $3,000. "The new editor," he wrote in his first editorial, "hopes to live here until he is the old editor, until some of the visions which rise before him as he dreams shall have come true." White did become "the old editor," remaining with the Emporia Gazette until his death 50 years later. During his long tenure he gained nation-wide fame as an author, political leader, and social commentator. But more than anything else, he became the national embodiment of the small-town newspaperman and all the treasured virtues that small towns represented in the minds of Americans. Home Town News is both a fascinating biography and a compelling social history. As Sally Foreman Griffith shows, White's popular image--kindly yet crusading, fiercely independent yet deeply rooted in his community--doesn't do justice to the man's complexity. Shrewdly carving out a position of leadership in a faction-torn town, White carefully shaped his paper's vision of its community to promote local economic growth, Republican political control, and social harmony. With his emergence as a leader among Midwestern progressives, he carefully adapted the ideas and rhetoric of small-town boosterism to changing economic realities. The book uses White's career to help us understand the role of journalism--and the journalist--in turn-of-the-century American culture. Far from being a simple chronicler of daily events, the small-town newspaperman carried considerable weight in his community. He was a leading force in local business, a galvanizing influence in civic life, and a key political activist. As giant corporations came to dominate the national economy, the newspaperman played a pivotal yet ambivalent role in the resulting social transformation: he sought to preserve local autonomy even as his paper introduced his readers to mass-produced consumer goods. Home Town News also tells the story of Emporia, Kansas, during this period of social change. Its richly textured descriptions of small-town life take us beyond abstractions like "modernization," "progressivism," and "boosterism." As we observe the Emporia Street Fair of 1899, the heated controversy over the morality of a local doctor in 1902, and the elaborate campaign to build a Y.M.C.A. in 1914, we gain new insights into the processes that have shaped modern America.