Pittsburgh’s seedy side was a fertile field for early muckrakers

Some of the best-known names in journalism history visited Pittsburgh at the dawn of the 20th century to report on the city’s worst-hidden historical secret — that the Steel City was actually Sin City. Muckraking journalists found Pittsburgh to be fertile territory for salacious stories about organized crime, corrupt politicians, and crooked cops. Between 1901 and 1960, stories about Pittsburgh gambling, prostitution, and bribery appeared in magazines and books read around the nation and the world. Some of the reporters spent weeks or months getting to know the city’s underside and its people. Others mined local newspapers and made pitstops here on national reporting projects, sampling seedy stories and writing hit pieces.  The reporters’ own stories were often as colorful as the tales they spun about Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh muck Muckrakers have a long and complicated history in American journalism history. Work by some has led to important changes in laws and policies. For example, Upton Sinclair ’s fictionalized 1905 meat industry exposé, The Jungle , led to tighter food protection laws. Ida Tarbell’s writing about the Standard Oil Company contributed to the Supreme Court ordering the monopoly’s breakup. And Ida B.Wells brought the horrors of lynching into peoples’ homes around the world. President Theodore Roosevelt gets credit for attaching the term muckraker to journalists. Responding to negative press coverage, Roosevelt gave a speech decrying the man with the muck-rake.  Sound familiar? “It is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing,” Roosevelt said on April 14, 1906. “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.” Roosevelt’s pejorative label stuck. Muckrakers were a breed of reporter that pushed and sometimes broke the bou