Stories That changed America proves the pen is mightier than the sword and provides the evidence to support that thesis. It describes the backgrounds of 21 authors and retells the stories that changed America: from Lincoln Steffens, king of the muckrakers, who exposed political corruption in the cities at the turn of the century, to Jessica Mitford, queen of the muckrakers, who revolutionized the funeral industry in the 1960s, to Woodward and Bernstein who won a Pulitzer Prize for their exposes that brought down Richard Nixon.

A brief introductory chapter provides the reader with an insight into the important role muckraking, or investigative journalism, played in America during the 1900s and speculates on what we can expect from journalism in the 21st Century. The heart of the book consists of a brief biography of each of the authors and a representative excerpt from their work.
Following are the 21 authors portrayed in the book and the original work excerpted in the book.

1—Ida Mae Tarbell—The History of the Standard Oil Company

2—Lincoln Steffens—The Shame of the Cities

3—Upton Sinclair—The Jungle

4—Margaret Sanger—The Woman Rebel: No Gods—No Masters

5—George Seldes—In fact

6—John Steinbeck—The Grapes of Wrath

7—J. William Fulbright—The Pentagon Propaganda Machine

8—Rachel Carson—Silent Spring

9—I.F. Stone—I.F. Stone’s Weekly

10—Edward R. Murrow—See It Now

11—Jessica Mitford—The American Way of Death

12—Betty Friedan—The Feminine Mystique

13—Malcolm X—The Playboy Interview and the Letter From Mecca

14—Michael Harrington—The Other America

15—Paul Brodeur—Expendable Americans

16—Paul Ehrlich—The Population Bomb

17—Ralph Nader—Unsafe at Any Speed

18—Seymour Hersh—My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath

19—Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein—Watergate

20—Frances Moore Lappé—Diet for a Small Planet

Following is excerpted from the introduction:

MUCKRAKING IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Every society has stories to tell. Stories about its heroes, stories about its history, stories about its achievements. Some of them are stories that enliven the spirit and stimulate the reader to want make a difference. This is a book of stories that changed America told by storytellers who are sometimes called muckrakers.

For more than two thousand years, the muckrake was a harmless three-pronged pitchfork-like tool used on farms to clean up stables and barns. Its first recorded use was in Mesopotamia in 750 BC. In 1906, it became a term used to vilify some of the most prominent and effective journalists and authors of the time.

The end of the 19^th century was a time of prosperity and excess for the power elite in America. In 1860 there were three American millionaires; in 1901, just 40 years later, there were about 3,800. Corporate America ruled the country with few regulations and little monitoring by the government. Everyone else, it seemed, was at the mercy of the "Robber Barons," an apt term used by author Matthew Josephson to describe the leading businessmen of the time. This formidable and wealthy rogues' gallery included John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, John Jacob Astor, and Andrew Carnegie—names that are familiar to this day.

It didn’t take great vision to recognize that poverty, vice, electoral fraud, unsafe foods, monopolistic practices, segregation, child labor exploitation, and civil rights violations were leading to the disintegration of the society. But it did take some courageous individuals, who saw the problems, to dedicate their lives and talents to solving them.

In their reaction to the corruption of the time, a group of men and women made their voices heard and successfully challenged the Robber Barons. They exposed the political and economic corruption and social hardships caused by greedy businessmen and corrupt politicians.
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Following is excerpted from the biography for Rachel Carson:

RACHEL CARSON
 

When she was a young girl, her mother took her for long walks in the woods and along streams where she learned to marvel at the beauty of nature. She read the poems of John Masefield and was struck with the beauty of words describing nature. She was later to combine both these experiences and build a life and a career around them. She was a writer, scientist, and ecologist. While sometimes disparaged as a "hysterical woman," she was an unlikely revolutionist whose words launched a worldwide environmental movement in the early 1960s.

Rachel Louise Carson was the youngest of three children born to Robert Warden and Maria McLean Carson, in Springdale, Pennsylvania, on May 27, 1907. She had an older sister, Marion, ten years of age, and brother, Robert, aged eight. Her father was a quiet, reserved man who worked as a travelling insurance salesman and an electrician. He was frequently in poor health and unable to provide little more than the basics for his family. Her mother, a former school teacher who was raised in a strong feminine household, was an avid reader and passed her love of books and an independent value system along to her daughters. One of her prime interests was natural history and she came to love nature and made a personal commitment to its protection. It was a love and commitment she passed on to Rachel.

Nurtured mostly by her mother, she grew up in a simple farmhouse on 64 acres outside Springdale, a western Pennsylvania river town. As soon as she was old enough to walk, her mother took her for explorations in the nearby woods and along springs and streams. Her mother is credited with teaching her the joy of nature and the marvel of the creatures of the woods, streams and ponds near her home. Rachel soon came to have the love and respect for nature that her mother had and it would become the hallmark of her later writings.

She was introduced to the poetry of John Masefield describing the beauty of the sea and world of nature from the time she could read. Sensing she was destined to be a writer, she started writing stories almost as soon as she learned to write. Her first official publication was in the children’s section of St. Nicholas Magazine at age 10. It was a popular medium for aspiring young authors of the time, including William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E.B. White. After she had four stories published in the prestigious St. Nicholas Magazine within a year, Rachel believed she could fulfill her dream of being a writer.
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Following is a 1941 excerpt from George Seldes' In Fact:
In fact
January 13, 1941
"Tobacco Shortens Life"

Smoking shortens life. Between the ages of 30 and 60, 61% more heavy smokers die than non-smokers. A human being’s span of life is impaired in direct proportion to the amount of tobacco he uses, but the impairment among even light smokers is "measurable and significant."

The facts for the foregoing statements come from Johns Hopkins University, department of biology. They constitute one of the most important and incidentally one of the most sensational stories in recent American history, but there is not a newspaper or magazine in America (outside scientific journals) which has published all the facts.
"Make User’s Flesh Creep"

For generations there have been arguments about tobacco. Moralists preached against cigarets. Scientists differed. But in Feb. 1938 Dr. Raymond Pearl, head biologist, Johns Hopkins, gave the New York Academy of Medicine the scientific result of a study of the life histories of some 7,000 Johns Hopkins cases which, for newspapers, should have constituted a story "to scare the life out of tobacco manufacturers and make the tobacco users’ flesh creep," as Time commented (March 7, 1938).

The Associated Press, United Press and special correspondents of New York papers heard Dr. Pearl tell the story. But a paragraph or two buried under less important matter, in one or two papers was all the great free press of America cared to make known to its readers, the consumers of 200,000,000,000 cigarets a year.
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