Book Reports
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Muckraking! Edited by Judith and William Serrin. The New Press |
Judith and William Serrin, both of them journalists and teachers of journalism, have performed a major service in this anthology, retrieving journalism long condemned to the obscurity of library shelves, microfilm, and videotape. But the book is not built around muckraking as such, even in the broadest sense of that widely stretched term; indeed, the one-word title seems to be a come-on. It includes samples of muckraking, the classic literature of exposure of a hundred years ago, as well as generic muckraking — investigative reporting. But there is much more. The subtitle — “The Journalism That Changed America” — says it better. And the introduction, which contains no reference to muckraking at all, puts it best, “This is a book about doing journalism and doing good.” These two phrases, as the Serrins note, are not always linked these days. This collection offers ample evidence that journalism can do good — that journalists have aided the afflicted, exposed what Theodore Roosevelt called malefactors, and pushed America toward becoming a more democratic, more compassionate society. Big goals, and not of course ever truly attained, but the direction is what counts. The Serrins did a great deal more than paste up. Each exhibit is prefaced with historical scene-setting, and followed with an account of historical consequences, a burdensome labor, considering the wide variety of situations and results. But even more important was their assiduous searching beforehand, to find and offer items that might have escaped even historians of journalism. Some of the plums: Excerpts from John Steinbeck’s series in the San Francisco News about the squalor of the migrants’ camps in California, three years before he transmuted his reporting into The Grapes of Wrath.
Homer Bigart’s uncollected 1963 classic from The New York Times on poverty in Appalachia. “Old Age at Forty,” on working conditions in steel mills, by John A. Fitch, a researcher/writer from the pioneering Pittsburgh Survey, a pre-World War I sociological study. The horrors of work-related silicosis, exposed in 1935 by Bernard Allen in New Masses. The daring exposé by Matt Witt of failures of mine safety enforcement in the United Mine Workers Journal (1974). The bold exposition by Roy Norr in Reader’s Digest (1952) of scientific findings on cigarette smoking. The inquiry into Ford/Firestone tire failures initiated by the investigative unit at KHOU, Houston.
The Miami Herald’s revelation of vote fraud, not in 2000 but in 1997. The condemnation as a boondoggle, in the New York World-Telegram and Sun, by Gene Gleason and Fred J. Cook of a slum-clearance program under New York’s construction czar, Robert Moses (1956). The leadership of the New York’s Communist Daily Worker in pointing the way toward the integration of baseball. The article in an architects’ journal in 1921 that proposed the creation of the Appalachian Trail. The effort by the Jewish Frontier monthly in 1942 to call attention to the Holocaust. The dramatic exposure by the great but neglected muckraker Charles Edward Russell of Georgia’s convict-leasing system.
The volume contains a great deal more, including many items more celebrated or familiar than the ones cited above. The anthology is not tightly organized and is in fact something of a grabbag — not really a drawback, because one can usually dip into it and find something stimulating.
An interesting point, made here by implication, is that unlike
other recent collections Muckraking! shows a buoyant confidence
in activist journalism rather than hinting that it died thirty,
or forty, or fifty years ago. Much journalism is, and always has
been, routine; it is encouraging to read the exceptions.
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Looking Back By Russell Baker |
Russell Baker began writing essays
for The New York Review of Books because, he says, he had spent
thirty-seven years writing a column in The New York Times that
was always exactly two and a quarter inches wide and eighteen
inches long. “Years of writing constantly in this miniature
form,” he admits, “eventually conditioned my mind to
think only 750-word thoughts.” In 1997, an editor of The
New York Review began to send him books, and these are essays
he wrote about those that appealed to him. Several of the eleven
touch on journalism; those on Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker
and Murray Kempton disclose in him, he says, “a shameless
bias toward elitism in journalism.” There are reflections
as well on William Randolph Hearst, and for a change of pace,
Joe DiMaggio, Nixon on Elba, and Eugene Debs, among others. Good
reading for the millions who may not have seen the originals in
The New York Review.
| Jose Marti: Selected Writings Edited and translated by Esther Allen. Penguin Books |
José Martí, Cuban revolutionary and poet, died at the age of forty-two in the 1895 uprising against Spain. He was also an independent journalist, and this collection contains a generous selection of his reporting from the United States in the 1880s, evidently the first time these stories have appeared in English since The America of José Martí, a 1953 translation by Juan de Onis. At first glance the stories appear to be done in ornate nineteenth-century style, but it is soon apparent that in frankness and detail they come closer to the New Journalism of a much later era. In particular, Martí made high drama of the trial of Charles J. Guiteau, President Garfield’s assassin, and the prizefight between John L. Sullivan and a boxer known as the Giant of Troy (New York). The Giant lost.
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