Muckrakers


    Our assignment was to find an example on a Muckraking articles. After looking I found one that especially intrigued me. This article was called The Real Story of Thanksgiving. In this blog I will explain why this happens to be a muckraking article and what it was about.


   The article starts off telling us about how we know Thanksgiving. We know the history as the Pilgrims had a bountiful harvest so in celebration they had a feast. And it was all good between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans. Well, this article defies and goes against by what we know by depicting  the Pilgrims as "Lazy" and "Thieves". The men who were healthy wouldn't work and the men who were weak who would work in the fields. This lead to famine and widespread starving throughout the colonies. To put it simply, they didn't do much other than sit around and watch others do their work.


   The main focus of this article is that the Pilgrims used an early form of socialism. This lead to laziness because they didn't have to work, which lead to widespread famine because no crops were being produced in the fields. Which in turn, lead to the demise of nearly 90% of Jamestown's population. What this article is saying is that Socialism lead to the decline of productivity in the colonies. But the leader of the colony, Mr. William Bardford, found an answer to these questions of how to survive. The colony's market or political views changed from Socialism to Free Market. And just like that, famine stopped, people worked harder, and they produced as much crop as they have ever had in most years beforehand.


   Each family got a parcel of land and basically could keep all crops on it or trade the land away for a sum of money. It was a genius thought and basically saved the colony from complete obliteration. So yes, in a way there was time for celebration between the years of 1623-1624. They had so much spare food, they could export it make a profit. In a way they did celebrate Thanksgiving but it was way less glorified than what it has been hyped up to be. The question behind the statement that changing to a free market economy saved the colony from certain demise. I believe it did. The evidence shown proved that because of this change the colony was saved. The statement said that the Pilgrims were lazy may have been true. If these comments said by the mayor Bardford were valid, it defies everything we ever learned about the pilgrims saying that they were hard-working settlers with good work ethic. The man did live there and was a citizen of the colony so we have every right to believe the man. But then again, it may also be his personal opinion.


  There is no way we will ever truly no for sure if any of the things said about the pilgrims and their laziness and the change from a socialistic to a free market view are totally true. But we can get an idea by looking into these muckraker articles that maybe these do have truth to them. The only way to find out is to look into these accounts written by these settlers and to form an opinion. That's all these arguments on the history of the settlers turn into is opinions. No one will ever truly no the answer because we never experienced it first hand. I think that we should look past the negative in this article and take Thanksgiving for what it is, a time for thanks. This article was extremely interesting in the fact that it opened up a whole new view for me. But then again, isn't that what a Muckraker article is supposed to do. Its job is to inform you and tell about what isn't normally talked about and exposes the stuff that doesn't get shown in mainstream articles.


   These muckraking articles are at times a very good thing to have. It exposes what we don't know and mostly tells the truth in the article. Anyways, the reason they investigated this was to show that everything in history isn't always as glorified as we make it out to be. This article was written recently I believe because of the main purpose of showing everyone today on the internet that this wasn't all joy back in the 1600's. There was death and very much famine.


  In conclusion, I have stated why I believe this article would fit in with the Muckraking category. It exposes truth behind a topic that was normally thought to be a peaceful, joyful subject. I believe though that we will never truly know if the Pilgrims were actually lazy or if the free market economy saved the colony. The only way to find out is to look at the real truths in actually realizing that it wasn't the way we picture it nowadays with the table and peacefulness but actually realize that back then there wasn't enough time to do this except for maybe 1 or 2 years. The article Real Story of Thanksgiving did a very detailed job explaining this.


Source: http://mccluresmagazine.com/_featured-2/real-story-thanksgiving