(MC) in this speech, Roosevelt termed, for the first time, journalists as muckrakers
Muck-rake-n. A rake for scraping up muck or dung
Muckrake-v. To search out and publicly expose real or apparent misconduct of a prominent individual or business
SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1906
In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck-rake in his hand, who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who
would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the fith of the floor.
In Pilgrim's Progress the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on camal instead of on spiritual things. Yet 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 Now, it is very necessary that we should not finch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is fith on the floor and it must be scraped up with the
muck-rake, and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the
muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evit
There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the stemest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or
business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hall as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such
attack, provided always that he in his tum remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful. To assall the great and admitted evils of our political and industrial life with such crude and sweeping generalizations as to
include decent men in the general condemnation means the searing of the public conscience. There results a general attitude either of cynical belief in and indifference to public corruption or else of a distrustful inability to discriminate
between the good and the bad. Either attitude is traught with untold damage to the country as a whole. The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well-nigh as dangerous as the man who does
discriminate and yet chooses the bad. There is nothing more distressing to every good patriot, to every good American, than the hard, scoffing spirt which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a cause for laughter Such
laughter is worse than the cracking of thoms under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been choked before they could grow to frution
Read this line from the text
Now, it is very necessary that we should not finch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is fith on the floor and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake
What purpose does this line serve in the text?
OIt makes Roosevelt seem as if he's considered both sides of the issue.
O it conveys Roosevelt's understanding of the terms history.
Oft sets up the discussion of the definition of muck rake
O it creates tension between the issue of honesty and the methods of protecting t
