Not long after the publication of The Jungle, Congress passed and Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Meat Inspection Act of the same year.

In June 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Complex in Washington, DC. Two young reporters at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were intrigued that one of the burglars was on the payroll of President Richard Nixon’s reelection committee and began digging further. Woodward and Bernstein uncovered a series of political crimes and “dirty tricks” that connected the burglary back to the White House. Their reporting led to indictments of 40 administration officials and the eventual resignation of President Nixon. The paper won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for the investigative reporting.

“The job of the reporters in Vietnam,” Halberstam wrote in 1965, “was to report the news, whether or not the news was good for America.”

Ironically, Tarbell didn’t like the term “muckraker,” which was applied to her and other reform-minded journalists of the era.

In the year after their acquittal, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam told their story to William Bradford Huie in a piece for Look magazine. According to Huie, the two admitted to killing the teenager. Upon abducting Till at the home of his great-uncle Mose Wright, Milam recalled asking him: "You the nigger who did the talking?" "Yeah," Till answered. "Don't say 'Yeah' to me: I'll blow your head off.'"27 In his account, Milam continued to characterize the incident as a legitimate effort to maintain white-black social hierarchy. Blaming an unrepentant Till for his own murder, Milam explained, "He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers in their place. I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time to put a few people on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are going to stay in their place."28

In other words, lynching images, such as those of Emmett Till, are too visually provocative, too viscerally challenging, to be contained by time or distance.

If the men who killed Emmett Till had known his body would free a people, they would have let him live.

It does not follow, because our difficulties are stupendous, because there are some souls timorous enough to doubt the validity and effectiveness of our ideals and our system, that we must turn to a State-controlled or State-directed social or economic system in order to cure our troubles.  That is not liberalism; it is tyranny.  It is the regimentation of men under autocratic bureaucracy with all its extinction of liberty, or hope, and of opportunity.  Of course, no man of understanding says that our system works perfectly.  It does not.  The human race is not perfect.  Nevertheless, the movement of a true civilization is toward freedom rather than regimentation.  This is our ideal

Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private business and the Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counter attack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.  We put it into action.

The countries of Europe proved unable to withstand the stress of the depression.  The memories of the world had ignored the fact that the insidious diseases left by the Great War had not been cured.  The skill and intelligence of millions in Europe had been blotted out by battle, disease and starvation.  Stupendous burdens of national debts had been built up.  Poisoned springs of political instability lay in the treaties which closed the war.  Fears and hates held armaments to double those before the war.  Governments were fallaciously seeking to build back by enlarged borrowing, by subsidizing industry and employment with taxes that slowly sapped the savings upon which industry must be rejuvenated and commerce solidly built.  Under these strains the financial systems of many foreign countries crashed one by one.

To meet our domestic emergencies in credit and banking arising from the reaction to acute crisis abroad the National Credit Association was set up by the banks with resources of $500,000,000 to support sound banks against the frightened withdrawals and hoarding. It is giving aid to reopen solvent banks which have been closed. Federal officials have brought about many beneficial unions of banks and have employed other means which have prevented many bank closings. As a result of these measures the hoarding withdrawals which had risen to over $250,000,000 per week after the British crisis have substantially ceased.

The emergencies of unemployment have been met by action in many directions. The appropriations for the continued speeding up of the great Federal construction program have provided direct and indirect aid to employment upon a large scale.

There has been the least possible Government entry into the economic field, and that only in temporary and emergency form.

These measures have served those purposes and will promote recovery.

But of highest importance was the necessity of cooperation on our part to relieve the people of Germany from imminent disasters and to maintain their important relations to progress and stability in the world.

As our difficulties during the past year have plainly originated in large degree from these sources,

Not surprisingly, foes of the yellow press were more eager to disparage than define. Thus were the yellow journals accused of such malevolent effects as "corrupting the young and debauching the old, championing vice and lewdness, and defying respectability and decency."39 The practice of yellow journalism was likened, moreover, to a "contest of madmen for the primacy of the sewer."40

The Journal gloated about its extravagant spending on newsgathering. Not atypical was this claim, in which the Journal disparaged its rivals, notably the New York Sun: "The reason the old journalism doesn't like the Journal is that the Journal gets the news, no matter what it costs. The Sun and its kind cannot afford to spend money since the Journal has taken their readers away from them, and the probability is they would not do so if they could afford it. They are still living in the Silurian age."16

, "I didn't get into the profession because of Thomas Nast, but the profession is here because of Thomas Nast."

In 1868 Nast started his cartoon campaign against Boss Tweed and his corrupt Tammany Hall political machine, which had been bilking New York City of tens of millions of dollars since 1865.The first salvo was "A Respectable Screen Covers a Multitude of Thieves," a small cartoon that appeared on the back page of the October 10 Harper's Weekly. It showed New York Mayor John T. Hoffman with a self-satisfied look on his face, standing in front of a screen. Behind the screen, a group of men grab fistfuls of money from a box Nast labeled "City Treasury." A sign hanging over their heads reads, "Thou shall steal as much as thou canst. The Ring."

How did an illustrator and cartoonist come to have so much power during the Civil War and Reconstruction? Part of the answer has to do with the fact that Nast's message was conveyed through a brand-new medium, the mass circulated illustrated news weekly magazine. He published more than 2,200 illustrations, cartoons and caricatures for Harper's from 1862 to 1886. His "cartoons and sketches attracted the attention of the entire country," Nast's New York Times obituary noted.

When Ulysses S. Grant was asked to name the one American civilian who had the most impact on the course ofthe Civil War, he replied: "I think, Thomas Nast. He did as much as any one to preservé the Union and bring the war to an end."

Tweed was much affected by Nast's cartoons and is even alleged to have said: 'I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures.' As a result, in the run-up to the elections of November 1871 huge bribes were offered both to Harper's "Weekly and to Nast himself, in an attempt to encourage him to stop. Nonetheless, Nast continued reputedly turning down an offer of $500,000 to go to Europe to 'study art' - and the circulation of the magazine tripled.

On September 23rd, 1871, Nast drew Boss Tweed and his three Tammany Ring' associates - New York Mayor Oakey Hall, Peter Sweeny and Richard Connolly - as a group of vultures on a stormy mountain ledge squatting on a body marked 'New York'. They were shown picking over bones with labels such as 'Rent Payer', 'Liberty', 'Law', 'Tax Payer', 'Justice' and 'Suffrage' and above their heads could be seen a lightning bolt about to start a landslide that would sweep them away.

A staunch Republican himself (and a Protestant), Nast - together with Harper's Weekly - campaigned vociferously against William Marcy Tweed, the corrupt leader or 'boss' of Tammany Hall (named after its headquarters on East 14th Street), the political machine which ran New York City's Democratic Party. A former New York State Senator, Tweed and his Irish Catholic associates had by January 1869 taken control of the city, and were looting millions of dollars of taxpayers' money by 'invoice padding', bribes, kickbacks, intimidation and other means. It was said that construction of the Brooklyn Bridge could not proceed until Tweed had got a seat on the construction company's board, and a particular scandal was the massive overspending on the construction of the New York County Courthouse (begun in 1861), which finally cost more than the USA's purchase of Alaska in 1867.

Thomas Nast was born in 1840 in Landau-inder-Pfalz, near Heidelberg in southern Germany. He was the son of a musician in a military band and emigrated to New York with his sister and mother in 1846 (his father followed later). After studying as an artist at the National Academy of Design for three years he started work, aged fifteen, as an illustrator/reporter for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. In 1860 he joined the New York Illustrated News and also drew for the Illustrated London News before moving to Harper's Weekly as a political cartoonist in 1861 at the start of the American Civil War. Here he quickly became the magazine's chief artist and, a supporter of the Union cause of the North, was reputedly called by Lincoln Our best recruiting sergeant'. He also famously created the Republican Elephant and the Democrat Donkey - both of which are still in use as US party symbols today - and produced the original (pre-Coca Cola) image of Father Christmas as a bearded old man.

On July 8, 1776, a 2,000-pound copper-and-tin bell now known as the “Liberty Bell” rings out from the tower of the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, summoning citizens to the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.