5,353,595 ( 1988).
It was in a speech by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 that the label of "muckraker" was coined, borrowed from John Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress, to describe the journalistic investigations of some of the major newspapers and magazines of the day. By common assent, McClure's Magazine was the leading muckraking journal, and its founder, staff, and readers all regarded the magazine's role in the reform movement in heroic terms.
Samuel Sidney McClure was an Irish immigrant who had been raised in poverty and educated at Knox College, a New York school of evangelical Christians, where he had met John Sanborn Phillips, who was to become the cofounder of the magazine. This institution gave McClure and Phillips a background in progressive reform, instilling them with the ideals of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. In 1893, when McClure's was founded, the world of publishing was undergoing drastic changes that would spur the growth of the magazine. The population of the United States had doubled, and because of the establishment and advances of public schooling, most of the population was literate and avid for specialized, current reading matter. In addition, authors were afforded protection by stricter copyright laws, and the development of services by the Post Office, such as second-class mailing privileges and free rural delivery, enabled magazine subscribers to get their issues quickly and cheaply. Another factor in the increased availability of publications was the series of technological advancements in printing, such as the development of the linotype machine and the rapid cylinder press, plus the invention of the halftone photoengraving process. Above all, a cheap and well-produced magazine became a possibility when the price of paper manufacturing fell after wood replaced cloth, and when the demand for advertising grew in the new industrial society of abundance that the United States had become at the end of the nineteenth century. Much of the initial success of McClure's new ten- cent magazine was based on the syndicate that he and Phillips had managed for eight years. During this period, McClure had established contact with a large number of writers in the New York literary circle, such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edward Hale, and with famous writers abroad, such as Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson. Much of the literature in McClure's during its first two years was material already in print through syndication to American newspapers; by 1895, however, most of the syndicated features were dropped.
McClure's initially suffered a financial crisis when it began in 1893, the year of a sudden stock market crash and severe depression in the country. But within