Political Realism as Anti-scholastic Practice: Methodological Lessons from Muckraking Journalism

A Useful Comparison?

It is common for academic political scientists to express their sense of superiority over political journalists informally, in seminar rooms and other professional spaces. As noted by one political science Ph.D. who worked outside academia, doing survey research for a national news website, “if academics think I’m a reporter, some become extremely condescending” (Jackson 2016, 516). During times of introspection about political science’s basic methods and purposes, however, the comparison with political journalism is more likely to be explored deliberately and publicly.

In recent debates about the future of the profession and of higher education itself, the growing role of Internet-based communications in public discourse has brought this comparison into focus. Some scholars have urged political journalists and bloggers to make greater efforts to submit to the wisdom of political science (Noel 2010; Nyhan and Sides 2011). New Internet-only journals have been created to connect academic research more closely with the real world, an effort at engagement also embodied in the online Scholars Strategy Network. Meanwhile, leaders of recent moves to standardize procedures of “data access and research transparency” (DA-RT) are also responding to the power of the Internet and the influence of journalists. A central concern in the DA-RT effort is about the need to demonstrate the academic discipline’s superior “capacity for honesty” or “openness” with respect to “news reports” (Lupia 2014, 3). The underlying hope is that DA-RT standards will both enable and require scholars to provide the public with “information that is distinct from media commentary” (Lupia and Aldrich 2015, 1).

How exactly is political science different from and better than political journalism? For generations of political scientists in the twentieth century, the gap seemed to be easily bridged. de Sola Pool (1969, 215–17) placed journalism and the social sciences on a par, as professions using case-study methods toward the end of offering practical advice to policy-makers. Lasswell (1963, 189–93) viewed political science as pursuing a more systematic style of inquiry than journalism but believed that an intermediate style of research was both possible and desirable. Both Lasswell and Sola Pool identified Walter Lippmann as a relevant real-world example from the early and middle decades of the century (de Sola Pool 1969, 215; Lasswell 1963, 206).

The decline in political scientists’ level of reverence for political journalism in the last fifty years or so is unmistakable. The reasons for the self-professed superiority of political science may be motivated less by its own virtues than by journalism’s deficiencies. To the extent that the news media provide “echo chambers” (Jamieson 2008) for partisan or ideological audiences who seek self-confirmation, or “infotainment” (Thussu 2007) for ignorant or disengaged audiences who seek escapism, the journalistic model of political methodology is bound to be dismissed as alien to the self-image of political science as a knowledge-building enterprise. If promotion (echo chambers), amusement (infotainment), and investigation can be considered three distinct dimensions of the journalist’s mission, we might say that the ideal journalist should succeed with all three purposes but that only the investigative purpose overlaps with most political scientists’ sense of their vocation. For this investigative dimension, the development of American journalism during the “muckraking” era (ca. 1890–1910) has left us a rich body of evidence with a surprisingly direct bearing on issues of political methodology.

What Was Muckraking?

Niccolo Machiavelli, considered by some to be the father of modern political science (for references, see Dyer and Nederman 2016, 430–31), was also considered by some readers to be a kind of muckraker. In 1642, with civil war underway between parliamentarians and royalists in England, a rare pamphlet in defense of Machiavelli praised him for having exposed the corruption of kings and courtiers. If “a Common-wealth is like a natural body,” the author reasoned, Machiavelli’s contribution was to reveal its inner workings of “blood, filth, and stench”; his detractors objected only because Machiavelli “hath raked too far in this,” and they could not tolerate the odors of real politics (Bovey 1642, 7).

A few decades after Machiavelli was appreciated for “raking” through the body politic, Paul Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1672) introduced “the Man with the Muck-Rake” (Bunyan 1909), a character preoccupied by the mundane world and heedless of the afterlife. It was by reference to this literary figure that the modern terms “muckraker” and “muckraking” were spawned much later, by U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt. In a widely reported speech in Washington, D.C., in 1906, Roosevelt used an allusion to Bunyan’s character to describe the new investigative journalism of his day: “there is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake” (Phillips 1964, 217). Despite this concession, Roosevelt charged the muckrakers with resorting to “gross and reckless assaults on character” which “create a morbid and vicious public sentiment” (Phillips 1964, 218), and he demanded that they “know when to stop raking the muck and to look upward to the celestial crown above them” (Phillips 1964, 219).

The unnamed targets of Roosevelt’s attack were the editors and reporters of McClure’s magazine, with whom he had already been remonstrating in private correspondence. Nowadays, we reserve the word “mudslinging” for the morally questionable practice of revealing private information in the service of character assassination, whereas “muckraking” usually refers to exposing the truths of power in the service of reform. But Roosevelt exploited the fact that the two can be difficult to distinguish, having previously warned against “mudslinging” in a letter to Baker (Bannister 1966, 103). He urged Baker and other personal acquaintances on the McClure’s staff that, when exposing the ills of a bustling industrial society, they should blame labor as much as business and should be “as much against anarchic violence and crimes of brutality as against corruption and crimes of greed” (Bannister 1966, 102).

Contemporaries agreed that the new journalism first appeared as a coherent phenomenon in 1903. In that year a landmark issue of McClure’s was headlined by the third installment of Ida Tarbell’s serialized History of the Standard Oil Company (about corruption in J. D. Rockefeller’s firm), and following it were R. S. Baker’s “Right to Work” (about corruption in both management and labor organizations in the coal industry) and Lincoln Steffens’ “Shame of Minneapolis” (about corruption at City Hall) (Wilson 1970, 143–46). Muckraking’s exposure of obscure and unpleasant facts about political and economic power, in mass-circulation weeklies and monthlies, was framed as a prelude to altering or abolishing those facts. Indebted to the work of Edward Bok, H. D. Lloyd, and Jacob Riis in the 1880s and 1890s (Dilliard 1973; Jernigan 1976), the new investigative journalism was notably associated with D. G. Phillips (“The Treason of the Senate,” 1905) and Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1906) in addition to Baker, Steffens, and Tarbell.

The frankly reformist agenda of this investigative journalism seems, at first blush, to foreshadow the pundits and other partisan personalities who populate the twenty-first-century media landscape. For this reason, many political scientists may be tempted to discount the muckrakers as methodological models. But I aim to show that muckraking had much in common with today’s growing chorus of those advocating “realism” in political theory and political science, and that the realist trend implies not just normative but also methodological commitments. Such commitments can be identified, historically, in the many personal and institutional points of contact between early muckraking and early social science.

Muckraking and the Origins of the Social Sciences

The early 1900s in the United States witnessed a shared maturation process of muckraking journalism and academic social science. Leading protagonists in both fields tended to come from family backgrounds in New England puritanism or Midwestern evangelical Protestantism (but more often the latter), carrying into their professions a quasi-religious mission to promote social betterment and the deepening of democracy. Periodicals and universities were two key components of the “para-state” that Gilded Age and Progressive Era reformers were building to overcome the corruptions and limitations of America’s formal governing institutions (Eisenach 1994, 129–37). In the universities, reformist prescriptions were often explicitly predicated on the Social Gospel and the ethical categories of “post-millennial Christianity” (Ciepley 2006, 59, 63–64).

Although New York magazines made the biggest national impact with muckraking, Chicago was the hub of the symbiotic reformism of journalism and social science. Famously, it was the scene of Sinclair’s research while writing The Jungle. At least three prominent academics—the sociologist Robert Park, the economist Wesley Mitchell, and the political scientist Arthur Bentley—worked as reporters for Chicago newspapers either before or after joining the faculty of the University of Chicago (Ross 1991, 307–308). Simon Patten and Albion Small, key institution-builders in the same three disciplines, not only founded and edited academic journals but also published articles in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Outlook, and Survey. John Dewey counseled scholars to engage with artists and journalists to give their research social significance (Jewett 2012, 173), and he himself collaborated with Jane Addams, the Chicago reformer and settlement-house advocate. Although not a full-time reporter, Addams published in some of the New York magazines most closely associated with the muckraking movement. She serialized parts of her acclaimed 1910 book, Twenty Years at Hull-House, in The American Magazine; then, in 1911 to 1912, she published two more articles there as well as seven pieces in McClure’s (Elshtain 2002, 458–60).

Such points of contact between professional journalism and professional social science tended to introduce strains of realism and anti-scholasticism in the latter. Dewey characterized most university professors as “Scholastics” because “the writing upon writings goes on till the substructure of reality is long obscured” (Jewett 2012, 98). Yet it is not obvious that the historical impact of muckraking on academic research was either deep or enduring. Bentley and Park endured uncomfortable stints in the academy before moving on, whether because the academic establishment could not stomach the “urban realism” of the younger generation of street-wise scholars (Ross 1991, 308–10) or because they shared some of Dewey’s unease with the self-referential conventions of academia. Bentley is an appropriately ambiguous case. Granted, his Process of Government (1908) proved to be a landmark in the history of American political science. But it took decades for this sort of appreciation to mature, and Bentley’s follow-up book never found a publisher during his lifetime (Ross 1991, 338–39). More to the point, his introduction of interest-group realpolitik as the explanatory framework for American politics was famously predicated on a dismissal of normative categories of the common good (Ross 1991, 334)—a rather striking departure from the Social Gospel of Chicago’s para-state institutions. It was also a break, presumably, from the moral climate of the small Nebraska town in which he had developed Populist sympathies as a boy (Ross 1991, 304).

My attempt below to characterize the professional methodology of muckraking journalism in terms of political realism, therefore, opens up a road not taken in the history of academic social science in the United States. Whatever else might be said for the influences of the new journalism of the 1900s on big names in American political science like Bentley and Charles Merriam, the charge of scientism or positivism (see Ross 1991, 390ff.) cannot be leveled at the muckrakers. Crucially, they were not simply Christian crusaders with typewriters. Steffens and Baker discovered that the process of investigation could be coldly analytical without pretending to be normatively innocent, foreshadowing one of the bedrock aspirations of advocates of civically engaged scholarship to this day. In short, they were morally skeptical without being morally disengaged—and showed how it is possible to imagine and to practice such an approach.

Muckraking as Political Realism

To the extent that twenty-first-century academics see the practice of journalism as dominated by promotion and amusement, the American muckraking tradition offers a restorative reminder. What makes an academic researcher uncomfortable with promotion and amusement is also what makes the investigative branch of journalism worth notice: political realism. The goal of promoting a particular party, cause, or commodity is best served by insulating your audience from countervailing considerations in the real world, hence the prison of the echo chamber. The goal of amusing the audience can lead to escapism. Both goals are objectionable to political scientists who view themselves as responsible for understanding the realities of power, which in turn requires acceptance of the possibility of surprising, unpredictable, or uncomfortable results from investigation of matters outside the researchers’ control. Journalism that provides only echo chambers or infotainment cannot confront its audience with autonomous or unanticipated conclusions in this sense.

Similar assumptions appear to undergird the movement toward realism in recent political theory, which in turn is indebted to conversations about realism in the philosophy of science over the last three decades. The autonomy, complexity, and obscurity of the thing studied vis-à-vis the thing studying has been an abiding concern. As Isaac put it, “the real is not simply the events we experience . . . Science is precisely the use of reason to figure out what real mechanisms are causally responsible for the phenomena of experience” (Isaac 1987, 46); thus, “the aim of social science is to explain causal mechanisms that are not reducible to their empirical effects” (Isaac 1987, 71). A similar logic underlies the realist assumption that “there are causal mechanisms that operate in nature independently of our ability to comprehend or even perceive them” (Shapiro 1990, 234); thus, “the scientific outlook requires a commitment to discovering what is actually going on in a given situation without prejudging what that is” (Shapiro 2005, 8).

The scholarly vogue for political realism is a broader phenomenon that is not reducible to any one position in the philosophy of social science. But recent theorists’ preoccupation with defusing and debunking ideals and ideologies is arguably predicated on the same core sensibility: a healthy respect for the autonomy, complexity, and obscurity of the things we study. Inspired by books pitting “illusion” against “real politics” (Geuss 2001, 2008) and critiquing “the flight from reality” (Shapiro 2005) in both empirical and normative branches of political science, multiple recent works have undertaken intensive study of political realism as a historical or contemporary phenomenon (e.g., Dienstag 2009; Galston 2010; Honig and Stears 2011; Maloy 2013; Mantena 2012; Philp 2010; Sagar 2011; Sleat 2013; Wiens 2015). Not all of them, of course, are fully advocating realism—but this fact only confirms the idea’s intellectual currency.

Narrowing down to methodologies or disciplinary purposes, political realism has an obvious affinity with wide-ranging condemnations of “scholasticism,” defined by Mead (2010, 453) as “academic work that is over-refined at the expense of substance” and “pre-occupied with method and past literature.” The underlying complaint of anti-scholastics is that “scholars are focusing more on themselves, less on the real world” (Mead 2010, 453). From qualitative scholars’ perspective, the anti-scholastic message has been to pursue broad and “substantive” rather than narrow and “analytic” questions (Sil and Katzenstein 2010). From quantitative scholars’ perspective, it has been to demand more intellectual rigor than is customary from “normal science” that is designed merely to advance careers and to marginalize datasets that lack “any meaningful relation to the real world” (Schrodt 2014, 287–88, 291). From the perspective of political theory, where the kindred complaint against “methodism” (Wolin 1969) is long-lived, anti-scholasticism has been motivated by the sense that “too often the aspiration to do better than journalists is cashed out as manufacturing esoteric discourses with high entry costs for outsiders” (Shapiro 2005, 189).

The muckrakers shared some of the sensibilities of social-science realism because they found that the realities of power in the American political and economic system tended to be hidden, concealed, or otherwise obscure to their readers. But they also managed, in their best moments of pursuing complex causal forces, to navigate a path between an insular scholasticism and a simple-minded moralism. Their realism was about both purposes and methods, and their identities as researchers had both normative and empirical dimensions.

I will now attempt to detail the early muckraking journalists’ offerings for the realist and anti-scholastic canons, their lessons for scholars who want to practice what realism preaches. Below I flesh out two case studies, a small but critical sample of their larger body of work. First, the so-called “It” series, published by Lincoln Steffens in 1910 and 1911, illustrates a kind of skeptical empiricism. Second, R. S. Baker’s “In the Land of Promise,” penned in 1906, illustrates a kind of skeptical ethics.

Steffens and Empirical Methods ¹

Lincoln Steffens was already famous for his muckraking by the time he launched the first installment of the six-part “It” series in September of 1910. In many ways, this project was the culmination rather than the modal type of his journalistic practice. Its subject had been a major item of public debate in America since the recurring financial panics and depressions of the 1870s and 1880s: the power of Wall Street banks over the broader economy and the consequences of that power’s abuse. The “It” series was a grand undertaking, a truly national story different in kind from Steffens’ earlier case studies of corrupt political machines in cities such as Minneapolis and St. Louis, offering a broad lens for viewing the methodological issues raised by muckraking journalism.

Research for the “It” series was undertaken over the course of several years for Everybody’s magazine, a mass-circulation monthly based in New York which had been founded collectively by Steffens and several other journalists. Steffens’ objective with this project was to present a series of case studies and thought experiments designed to characterize a large, abstract, impersonal system of financial and political power. The first article, “The Boss of All the Bosses” (Steffens 1910a), offered an account of how J. P. Morgan had come to be “king of Wall Street.” The third article, “The Power of the Money Power” (Steffens 1910c), pursued a thought experiment about how much credit any businessman anywhere in the United States could or could not get if Morgan and other top financiers chose to intervene. The fifth and sixth installments (Steffens 1911a, 1911b) offered detailed case studies of the rogue vice-president of a life-insurance company in New York who controlled the firm through “dummy” directors and of an Illinois railroad’s negotiation of a sweetheart land deal from the state legislature at taxpayers’ expense. The second (Steffens 1910d) and fourth (Steffens 1910b) items in the series were more synthetic in nature, using a variety of interviews to reflect on the nature of the American financial system and the politics of corporate governance.

In a narrow sense, Steffens’ journalistic methods were hardly unusual, since the articles were based on a mixture of official records and interviews, including some with anonymous sources. Steffens’ over-arching thesis was that the seat of American “sovereignty” was Wall Street, not Capitol Hill (Steffens 1910a, 292–93). Explaining how and why this dislocation had taken place, however, required something more than mere reporting: constructing a complex causal story out of numerous disparate facts about wealth and power. Interesting things were happening, therefore, at the level of research design.

The reason for the awkward title of the series, and what made it a novel contribution to the muckraking literature, lay in Steffens’ desire to depersonalize his subject. “It” was an alternative to “He,” and the “he” in question would have undoubtedly been Morgan, a widely recognized love-or-hate figure of the time. Steffens’ intent was to shift the focus from persons to systems. “It” was his shorthand for “the sovereign political power of organized business,” which was used as the running title accompanying the first three pieces in Everybody’s. Steffens sometimes used phrases like “the Thing” or “the System” interchangeably with “It.” Often he used anonymous sources and in other ways avoided naming names. Steffens was revealing something about his purposes, and not just making excuses, when he advised readers that “names are not necessary yet, and the use of them is too interesting. It distracts the attention from ‘It’ to persons” (Steffens 1910b, 818). This approach is quite different from the sensationalism and personal-interest stories that we sometimes associate with political journalism today; arguably, it is a hallmark of muckraking as distinct from mudslinging.

When trying to understand impersonal systems, on Steffens’ view, abstract analysis cannot do without narrative and imagination. “I am addressing the imagination,” he told his readers,

deliberately and rather boldly. I must. The eye cannot see this Thing; only the mind can picture it, and the mind perceives only when the imagination is stirred. So I would stir all men and women to look and to look hard; but without feeling. I make no appeal to passion. If my terms are startling, blame the truth. (Steffens 1910a, 293)

Steffens’ case studies and thought experiments, then, were attempting to enlist the power of stories in a campaign of abstract analysis.

The thought experiment about obtaining business loans illustrates Steffens’ use of imagination. He explicitly conceived this aspect of his research design as an alternative or at least a supplement to the collection of data.

Money is no true measure of power. The total capitalization of all they own would not bring home to us the influence of Morgan and his associates, direct and indirect, honest and corrupt, over presidents and Congress; governors and legislatures; in both political parties and over our political power. And no figures would remind us of their standing at the bar and in the courts; with the press, the pulpit, the colleges, schools, and in society. And, even if all their property and all their power could be stated in exact terms, it would not show their relative wealth and strength. We must ask how much they have not. We must ask how much power they haven’t got (Steffens 1910c, 648).

Toward this end, Steffens interviewed a range of businessmen from as far away as Denver to obtain their opinion about “how much credit you could not get” if powerful individuals on Wall Street saw a reason to interfere. The response was that local banks were themselves so dependent on Wall Street that they could not afford to ignore the wishes of the likes of Morgan (Steffens 1910c, 648–56). A business loan above a certain threshold of value, therefore, would be under the de facto jurisdiction of the largest banks even if they were not formally involved in the transaction.

The thought experiment of Steffens and his interviewees illustrates the uses of imagination in research design, but imagination does not abolish detachment. The analysis of impersonal systems still requires a dispassionate distance from the subjects of study. Steffens learned this truth when interviewing people on Wall Street about the power of Wall Street.

The Money Power is a big, blind, footless, thoughtless thing, but it exists. The System, which it denies, is being thrown up like a reef by tiny, innocent polypi that have no more notion of wrecking a ship than they have of the beauty of coral. The prophetic Populists who foresaw the Money Power were right, but they had a clearer vision of it from the prairies way back in the early 1990s than Wall Street has today. Only a small part of “the Street” is only just beginning to see a small part, and that’s all there is to see—with the naked eye—so far (Steffens 1910d, 458).

It was precisely for going beyond the naked eye that Steffens conceived his whole project. Thus, the “It” series lays to rest any notion that muckraking journalism was the product of brute empiricism. Although the muckrakers were obsessed with the power of facts (see Tichi 2004, 69–72), the conceit that they were “naive realists” who “let the facts speak for themselves” (Crick 1959, 83–86) puts too much credence in their rhetorical style and too little in their methodological substance. The muckrakers’ principal challenge was to weave the scattered strands of empirical reality which tickle the eyes and ears and nose into coherent and comprehensible causal stories that touch the farther regions of intellect and will. In short, there was a premium on narrative skill. Upton Sinclair’s Jungle, after all, was a novel. The efforts of modern political campaigners like Ralph Nader to present raw data in a compelling and accessible way suggest that the narrative dimension of political reformism survived beyond the muckrakers’ time (Tichi 2004, 59–60).

Combining imagination and detachment, narrative and data, may not come easy to most academic researchers—or most journalists or reformers, for that matter. But this combination is precisely what we should remember muckraking for: not only telling stories but telling causal stories. The same Sinclair who wrote The Jungle also took credit for the causal turn in Steffens’ muckraking. Sinclair ([1919] 1970, 18) lamented that, in their crusades against “lies and injustice,” “the newspapers revealed the existence of them but never seemed to know the causes of them, nor what to do about them, further than to support a reform candidate who did nothing but get elected.” Sinclair failed to see any positive account of what did cause corruption and therefore confronted Steffens with a plea for causal analysis (Sinclair [1919] 1970, 22–23).

Steffens’ response was colored by a kind of realism that should sound familiar to social scientists who believe that their attention must escape the ivory tower from time to time. Steffens reflected that

facts have had to beat their way into my head, banging on my brain like the bullets from a machine-gun to get in; and it was only by being hit over and over again that I could let my old ideal and college-made picture of life be blown up and let the new, truer picture be blown in. (Steffens 1931, 238)

In a similar vein, Max Weber described what this assumption requires of a scholar in “Politics as a Vocation” (1915), when he claimed that “what is decisive is the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and the ability to face up to such realities and to measure up to them inwardly” (Weber [1946] 1958, 126–27). Steffens’ example suggests that the muckraking journalists of his era should be viewed by political scientists as closer to Weber than to Fox News.

Baker and Normative Methods

An obvious worry for social scientists about the muckrakers is that they were, as has been said more generally of the Progressive reformers whom they inspired, “moralists with bells on” (McWilliams 1999, 115). Overt or thinly veiled normative agendas may threaten the scientific commitment to detachment and partiality. What could be more antithetical to professional political science, as this intuition would have it, than Sinclair’s Jungle—a work of fiction subsidized by the Socialist Party and serialized in its official newspaper? As with their empirical methods, however, this image of the muckrakers’ naive approach to normative questions ignores a rich vein of skepticism in their practice.

Nothing illustrates the muckrakers’ skeptical ethics better than the trajectory of R. S. Baker, Steffens’ colleague at McClure’s and one of the few to rival Steffens in terms of national reputation. As a boy, Baker earned a silver dollar for reading his father’s copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress from cover to cover (Bannister 1966, 12). In adulthood, however, he was among the principals whom Theodore Roosevelt criticized by citing “the Man with the Muck-Rake” from the same book.

Baker’s skeptical approach to the normative dimensions of his journalism is best captured in an article for Collier’s in 1906, the year of Roosevelt’s attack. “In the Land of Promise” (Baker 1906) is in many respects a characteristic specimen of the muckrakers’ narrative craft, a human-interest story about a Polish coal-miner named Gorinsky. He disobeyed his union’s strike action when, after weeks of unemployment and hunger, he returned to work on the sly at lower wages. In retaliation, he was beaten to within an inch of his life. Gorinsky and his wife bravely brought charges and testified in open court after his miraculous recovery from this assault. To add insult to injury, however, the jury found the accused “not guilty.” Baker tells the story with alternating emphasis on the beauty of economic opportunity for immigrants like Gorinsky (thereby fulfilling the expectations raised by the article’s title); on the dignity, comradeship, and prosperity arising from his membership in the union; on the menace and greed of his employers; on the menace and greed of his union brothers; on the mercies of a solitary neighbor who helped his family during the trial; and on the cruelties of the legal system that protected the union thugs.

In conclusion, where readers doubtless expected a Rooseveltian flourish on “the right to work” to vindicate the scab miner, Baker (1906, 22) gave them this instead:

As a result of the struggle the union is more powerful than ever before, guards more zealously and with greater certainty the rights of its people, is able to grapple more securely with the real—oh, the very real—greed of the operators. And who shall stand and judge upon these men? Shall we stamp out the democracy of the union—its aspirations, its ideals, its educative influence, along withs its cruelty, its violence—and let Gorinsky live? Or shall we watch Gorinsky and his sick wife starve there in the tenements, or be beaten down for working, that the union may win its victory? This indeed is the problem of the century: Where shall we set limit upon the individual, and where admit the power of collective action? And can we in any sphere of life possess to ourselves the good of either without the evil?

This ambivalent passage suggests that modern industrial society faced a choice between two alternative systems or regimes of labor relations: one in which the individual rights of non-union laborers are protected and unions are correspondingly weakened, or another in which the power of unions to discipline their members is sanctioned and dissenters within their ranks are left vulnerable to violence and intimidation. Even if Baker’s own leanings (on my reading) run toward the second option, he does not suggest that “the end justifies the means” because he is not concerned with normative justification in the usual sense. He does nothing to dehumanize Gorinsky or to deny his ethical status—quite the contrary. Nor does he offer a utilitarian calculus to measure the scab’s individuality against “the greater good.” What Baker was arguing is that some rules and practices hang together with other rules and practices in things called systems, and that no system that we might choose can free us from the taint of some injustice.

On my reading, then, Baker adopted a “lesser evil” kind of logic to which the language of justification (of excuse, absolution, or salvation) is superfluous and inappropriate. Whereas justification implies closure, Baker presents only a wrenching trade-off. This was neither scientific objectivity nor partisan advocacy; the muckraker was engaged and detached at the same time.

A similar but not identical posture was in evidence in Baker’s earlier work, in the same field of labor relations which had long been his specialty. In 1903 and 1904, miners’ strikes across Colorado were met with violent crackdowns by both state government and private detectives working for the affected mines and mills. Baker covered the running battles for McClure’s in “The Reign of Lawlessness: Anarchy and Despotism in Colorado” (1904). Bill Haywood’s Western Federation of Miners (WFM) called a series of strikes against mines and mills servicing the gold and silver industries, to support its political push for a mandatory eight-hour working day. Business owners rejected the proposal so vehemently that, even after it passed a statewide referendum in 1902, they successfully lobbied the governor and legislature to take no action on enabling legislation (Suggs [1972] 1991, 72–75). Baker vividly depicted, of course, the confrontation of martial law and union dynamite. He also carefully constructed a kind of immoral equivalence between the government’s and mining magnates’ resort to legal chicanery and legislative corruption, on one hand, and the labor movement’s resort to violence against scab labor and sympathy strikes in unrelated industries, on the other. Echoing the characteristic stance of Theodore Roosevelt on conflicts between capital and labor (Lukas 1997, 383–84), Baker depicted both sides as equally guilty of “lawlessness” (DeNevi, Friend, and Bookout 1973, 252–65).

This type of effort to demonize all and sundry is liable to alienate most scholars, at first blush, reminding them of the contagious cynicism of modern mudslinging. Yet the deeper skepticism of “In the Land of Promise” could be more appealing, with its emphasis on the contexts of agents’ ethical choices and the abstract, impersonal systems that shape those contexts. Baker’s later work, indeed, was consistent with his gradual alienation from the moralism of Roosevelt, as embodied in his private letter to the president about the futility of “over-emphasizing personal goodness” (Chalmers 1958, 428).

Baker’s posture was not unique among active muckrakers. It had something in common with Steffens’ desire to depersonalize power and to understand it, imaginatively, in systemic terms. Speaking of “It” in 1910, Steffens (1910a, 292) wrote,

I am not finding fault. This thing may be good. I am inclined to think it is. Certainly there is great good in it, and undoubtedly some good will come out of it. But it is too big to pre-judge, and we have had enough both of hatred and adoration of it. My purpose is, if possible, to measure its power and imagine its outlines; to trace its ramifications, describe its methods, get hold of its point of view, and so comprehend it, not in technical detail but as one mighty whole . . . Whether it is plain or mysterious, right or wrong, a menace or a promise, we all must try to know it well.

Thus, the muckrakers were not merely puritans with press passes. Acknowledging and confronting ethical dilemmas do not preclude a skeptical posture toward normative questions in pursuit of knowledge about the conditions in which they are embedded. Recognizing the normative dimensions of research design, however, becomes difficult when social science is at its most scholastic. Yet, the muckrakers’ example, once recovered, is likely to resonate in an era when some empirical scholars have contemplated a “normative turn” in political science (Gerring and Yesnowitz 2006).

Four Muckraking Lessons

Some trends in political methodology today are, in practice, eroding the assumption of the discipline’s superiority vis-à-vis journalism, largely though not exclusively in the arena of qualitative methods. “Process tracing” or “causal-process observation” (Bennett 2010; Van Evera 1997, 31–32) is a well-established approach that uses careful examination of a single case to understand causal relationships (Collier, Brady, and Seawright 2004, 252–53, 256–58), similar to “detective work” (Brady 2004, 267) and an older tradition of “soaking and poking” (Fenno 1977, 884). The notion of a “critical case study” (Flyvbjerg 2006) whose characteristics may be treated as particularly revealing or typical is more common in anthropology and sociology but has an increasing presence in political science (Schram 2016). Various kinds of ethnographic research (see Schatz 2009a) are used to understand political phenomena from “the nearest possible vantage-point” (Schatz 2009b, 307).

Related trends have been making inroads into quantitative research as well, especially by dint of the notion that case description can illuminate relations among data points. The “black box” problem, in which statistical results by themselves fail to reveal how phenomena are causally related, has been addressed through supplementary case analysis in a study of American media coverage of war over time (Althaus et al. 2011). A quantitative analysis of transitional presidential elections in Africa has employed “qualitative information” to improve statistical significance and to increase confidence in the magnitude of variables’ effects (Glynn and Ichino 2015). More broadly, the tendency of quantitative scholars to reanalyze old data at the expense of the descriptive task of generating new data is a matter of increasing concern (Gerring 2012, 734; Mead 2010, 454) and is cited as a symptom of research lacking “any meaningful relation to the real world” (Schrodt 2014, 291).

Such trends are true to the spirit of the muckrakers’ methodological model, which itself can be distilled into four lessons for future research practice.

Conclusion

The American Political Science Association was founded in 1903, the same year that muckraking first appeared as a coherent movement in the pages of McClure’s. The need for simultaneous affinity and differentiation with respect to investigative journalism may therefore be considered foundational to the discipline. I have argued that the scholarly conversation about political realism which has emerged in recent years shares some key traits with the realism of the muckrakers. Chief among these is anti-scholasticism, which laments the fact that the “journalistic dimension to research has almost disappeared” and that “unrealistic images persist in the literature because common sense, general knowledge, and field observation have lost the authority to discredit them” (Mead 2010, 454). One possible response to this view is to move political science closer to the realm of investigative journalism which commercial media have been increasingly vacating, thereby accenting the discipline’s public relevance and strengthening its case for public support. As investigative journalists whose purposes and methods bore some similarities to those of social scientists, the muckrakers offer a model of how to turn political realism into anti-scholastic practice.

The enduring value of the muckrakers’ methods of investigation has both an empirical and a normative component. They were not obsessed with case studies for their own sake, at the expense of generalization, notwithstanding conventional academic assumptions about investigative reporting. The search for valid generalizations about complex systems therefore cannot prop up political science’s sense of superiority. Nor can the conceit that academic research is causally oriented while journalism is not. In fact, the determination of reporters like Baker and Steffens to tell causal stories that “added up” arguably made their work more causal, not just more story-like, than much of academic political science today.

In addition, I have shown that muckraking was not hopelessly biased by predetermined normative agendas of the kind that academics sometimes attribute to political journalism in general. This second point requires special emphasis because it flies in the face of what even academic textbooks on journalism teach about the muckrakers, as when they are said to have been “propelled by a monumental moral indignation” to become “the nation’s voices of conscience” (Mencher 2003, 389, 636). Many scholars in the social sciences might hope for a different sort of epitaph. But Baker and Steffens, at least, defied the stereotype. They conducted their research as something more than moralizing scribblers, achieving normative awareness and sensitivity while taming the potentially distortive and unreal tendencies of normative commitment. They did so by adopting in their writing—whatever may have been inside their hearts and heads—a kind of moral skepticism. In this approach, normative intuitions and assumptions were brought to the surface of the reader’s consciousness to be interrogated by the reportorial details, rather than soothed or championed.

The four lessons associated above with muckraking methods—address public concerns, tell causal stories, make stories “add up,” and acknowledge normative trade-offs—highlight some areas where the gap between political science and political journalism can and should be narrowed. These areas should be distinguished from others in which the gap is already narrowing but perhaps should not be. In academia, increased expectations for peer-reviewed publication and the rapid-response processes of electronic systems of review are requiring many scholars—especially in quantitative methods—to work with shorter time horizons. Concurrently, the investigative branch of journalism is struggling as for-profit media companies become less and less willing to invest the time and money required for thorough and systematic research of the sort that approximates the goals of social science. A muckraking brand of political science, then, could carve out a special and essential space in the pursuit of knowledge about politics—preserving the notion of long-term and deep-digging projects while also reaching out to a broad public. Those members of the profession who retain privileged access to the resources of academic tenure and institutional research funding are better placed than perhaps any class of persons in human history to realize this model in practice. Caveats may apply, of course, where funds come from vested interests that refuse to support a core mission of posing “uncomfortable fundamental questions” (Smith 2015, 372).

Some practical steps that could be taken toward a muckraking model of political science are readily imagined. In the realm of graduate-level instruction, methods courses might expose students to portions of Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company or Lincoln Steffens’ Autobiography; in the latter, the design and execution of several research projects (e.g., on municipal government in Boston and Greenwich, Conn.) are described in detail (Steffens 1931, 592–97, 604–11). A graduate-level methods sequence might also incorporate segments on narrative style and audience awareness, whether through the muckrakers’ texts or others’. Smatterings of the muckrakers’ published work have been collected in modern editions (e.g., DeNevi, Friend, and Bookout 1973), but a new and more comprehensive edited volume for a graduate-student audience would be preferable.