A single issue of a magazine rarely changes the shape of journalism, but in January 1903 McClure's did just that. Three long, detailed, and pathbreaking articles on the relationship between business, labor, and government appeared together in the preeminent reformist magazine. Its editor, Samuel S. Mc-. Clure, contributed an editorial that marked the ad vent of muckraking as a coherent movement in investigative journalism, although that term would not be used by Theodore Roosevelt for three more years. His "Concerning Three Articles in this Number of McClure's, and a Coincidence that May Set Us Thinking" noted the corruption common to corporations in Ida Tarbell's "The History of the Standard Oil Company," labor unions in Ray Stannard Baker's "The Right to Work," and city government in Lincoln Steffens's "The Shame of Minneapolis."

Who is left, McClure asked, to uphold the law when businessmen, workingmen, politicians...