Muckraker’s Society

This morning, I popped open my regular news and commentary feeds and was suddenly struck with the sensation that Teddy Roosevelt spoke presciently about this age, dying well before he could imagine its zenith in our current day. The speech I am referring to, which many of you may be familiar with, is Roosevelt’s The Man with the Muckrake speech, delivered in 1906. Here’s an excerpt:

We now administer the affairs of a nation in which the extraordinary growth of population has been outstripped by the growth of wealth and the growth in complex interests. The material problems that face us to-day are not such as they were in Washington’s time, but the underlying facts of human nature are the same now as they were then. Under altered external form we war with the same tendencies toward evil that were evident in Washington’s time, and are helped by the same tendencies for good. It is about some of these that I wish to say a word to-day.

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 filth 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 carnal 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 flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth 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 evil.

Roosevelt even foresaw the common objection of those who would argue that we must expend our energies on revealing the muck at the expense of extolling the virtuous:

Now, it is easy to twist out of shape what I have just said, easy to affect to misunderstand it, and, if it is slurred over in repetition, not difficult really to misunderstand it. Some persons are sincerely incapable of understanding that to denounce mud slinging does not mean the endorsement of whitewashing; and both the interested individuals who need whitewashing, and those others who practice mud slinging, like to encourage such confusion of ideas.

This is true. Muckrakers and whitewashers alike love to see themselves as crusaders for a lofty goal, when in reality they are both simply serving their own base interests. We are constantly being invited to dig around in the muck, and ignore the sublime, all in the service of “we need to know these things.” But do we?

Spend a few days away from it and then decide.

Go. Enjoy a weekend filled with Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.