Muckrakers
Muckrakers, the name applied to certain United States writers who exposed social, economic, and political evils in the two decades before World War I. Their writings aroused public indignation and brought reform legislation such as the Food and Drugs Act (1906) and Federal Reserve Act (1913). The term “muckrake,” applied to their work in 1906 by Theodore Roosevelt, comes from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.