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When the wrong has been done and the tribe reduced to extermination by inches of starvation, some muckraker will rise and write an article about it, or some ethnologist a brochure about an exterminated people. Meantime, the children of the Pimas and Papagoes have not enough to eat owing to the white man taking all their water. They are the people of "the Golden Age," "the Morning Glow."
I found that entire mountains were denuded each year of their forests to supply food for the rats and the ocean here. I was almost a muckraker now. Meanwhile I had gone in June to the South Brooklyn waterfront and had taken a room in a tenement near the end of a dock peninsula which jutted out into the bay.
The king tortured him six days, cut him up, and sent pieces of him to fifty villages with the message: 'You eat each other. WE eat white chop. That was ten miles from our model barracks." For some moments the muckraker considered the statement thoughtfully. "You mean," he inquired, "that the atrocities are not all on the side of the white men?" "Atrocities?" exclaimed the trader.
At the conclusion of the performance, the boss gently clicked his tongue against his palate, and the Mayor promptly stood on his head in the middle of the floor. A somewhat similar experiment was concerned with a magazine editor and a life-size mannikin made up to resemble a muckraker. The editor and the lay figure sat facing in opposite directions at a distance of about ten feet.
And so I would not ask his aid or even go to him for advice. Testing me, was he? All right, I would show him. And I returned to my editor, whom my intensity rather amused. "The joke of it is," he said, "that they think down there you're a muckraker." "I'll be one soon if this keeps on." "But it won't," he replied.
"Still I'm not without my weak spot, even there, Jim," the little man said, with an accent of pain that startled Stuart. "What do you mean?" "You see that bunch of newspaper reporters over there? They are the ghosts that haunt my dreams. Oh, not what they'll say in their dirty papers. We can control that, we own them. But there's a magazine muckraker among them.
He even remembered from his extensive reading some item which, when applied by him to the affair of the moment, acquired new pertinence and a second life. Thus, Bunyan's " muckraker" lives again; thus, "the curse of Meroz," and many another Bible reference, springs up with a fresh meaning.
Instantly, the scene transformed itself from a suffrage meeting to a social function that was unique. Leaders of the smart set rubbed elbows, and seemed to enjoy it, with working girls and agitators. Conservative and radical, millionaire and muckraker succumbed to the spell of the Ashton hospitality and the lure of the new dances.
Of the school of earnest young writers at whom the word muckraker had been thrown in opprobrium, and by whom it had been caught up as a title of honor, Everett was among the younger and less conspicuous. But, if in his skirmishes with graft and corruption he had failed to correct the evils he attacked, from the contests he himself had always emerged with credit.
That he was respectable, few believed, and no one cared. To be taken at his face value, to be refused at the start the benefit of the doubt, was a novel sensation; and yet not unpleasant. It was a relief not to be accepted only as Everett the Muckraker, as a professional reformer, as one holier than others.
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