Community Notebook > Our Community, Our News

Of Muckrakers & Professors
by Bob Miller . Photos Courtesy Robert Miraldi

“I still have a real Italian anarchist streak in me”—Robert Miraldi leaned across the table in the cafe where we were having breakfast—“no one tells me what I can or can’t think or say,” he said, eyes darting out from under his baseball cap and shoulders squared as if daring someone to try. “I won’t cede that right to anyone.” Miraldi is a passionate man. A professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz and a member of the faculty for 20 years, his passions include defending freedom of speech, writing about old-fashioned muckraking journalism, and teaching his students about both.

“Freedom of speech is always a tough issue in times of war. How will we handle dissent? That’s a difficult question for a democratic society. In past wars, dissenters were marginalized by the news media, or rounded up and thrown in jail,” he said, stabbing his omelet with a fork. “Democracy is about choices. People need information in order to make good choices. In wartime, we look to authorities for guidance, and sometimes they can take advantage of that—imposing restrictions on people they always wanted to shut up anyway. The First Amendment is there to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

For nine years Miraldi wrote First Freedom, an award-winning column for the Poughkeepsie Journal in which he spoke out on First Amendment issues. “I saw myself as the conscience and champion of the First Amendment in the Hudson Valley.” He gave up his column two years ago to finish writing his biography of preeminent muckraker Charles Edward Russell, The Pen is Mightier: the Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell.

The arrest of a man wearing a T-shirt with a peace slogan in March at Crossgates Mall in Albany is a case in point. “If I were still writing my column, I’d look into that.” Because the mall is private property, mall owners can control expressions of opinion. But Miraldi wonders what policies the owners have established to respond to political speech. At what point does it interfere with the mall’s right to conduct business? Five hundred protesters might pose a problem for shoppers, but at what level should mall security respond to an individual expression that is not obstructive? And who makes that determination?

Miraldi was still leaning forward, laying it out for me—he seems always to be leaning forward, about to launch into motion. His speech is crisp, typifying a native New Yorker’s rhythms and directness. He embodies the seemingly contradictory qualities of inner edginess, a bottled energy ready to move, with the ability to focus intensely on the task at hand.

His passion for journalism can be traced to his teenage years as all-star third baseman for Port Richmond High School and for Wagner College, both on Staten Island. His baseball renown led to his first job in journalism—sportswriter for the Staten Island Advance. But he was also drawn to politics and had the ultimate goals of serving in the United States Senate or playing for the Yankees—or both. Miraldi didn’t have the arm to play for the Yankees, so he enrolled at SUNY Oneonta to study political science. While in college, he continued to work on the paper where he got his first taste of muckraking journalism.
In 1972, Geraldo Rivera documented on national TV the inhumane conditions at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. Willowbrook had been established to house New York’s emotionally and mentally disadvantaged citizens, but conditions at the school were deplorable. After the national attention died down, Miraldi continued applying the heat, turning out several articles a week for the Advance to keep the public informed and to pressure the state to make reforms. He saw the press at its best, giving people information with which to make decisions and bringing about social change.

His real-life introduction to investigative reporting led to a life-long study of the history and techniques of muckraking. “I loved the academic side of journalism. I always had one foot in the newsroom, and the other in the library.” He went on to earn an MS in journalism from Boston University and a PhD in American studies from NYU. His interest in Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Edward Russell was ignited when he received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study Russell’s papers at the Library of Congress. Twelve years of research later, including reading all of Russell’s 27 books, hundreds of by-lined stories, and much of the reporting in papers Russell had edited, Miraldi published his Russell biography.

Miraldi’s writing reflects his speech—energetic, engaging, and passionate. He draws the reader instantly into Russell’s career as a young reporter, opening the book with Russell’s race to beat other reporters to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where in 1889 a dam above the town had burst. Sketchy telegraph reports claimed that several hundred people were dead or injured. Russell, working as a reporter for the New York Herald, was sent to cover the story. Trains had stopped running because tracks were washed out, but Russell, using wit, grit, and chicanery got to the disaster site first. What he saw and wrote about was one of the greatest disasters in American history.

A dam built to create a fishing pond for captains of industry like Carnegie, Frick and Mellon had failed after years of neglect. Russell was horrified by what he saw and wired a steady stream of articles to the Herald, painting a graphic picture of the devastation. Seven towns had been washed away and approximately 2,200 people killed, many burned alive when houses cascading downriver collapsed upon one another and exploded in fire. Russell’s detailed, empathetic stories made him the most famous reporter in New York, but they also helped raise relief money and mobilize public support and government action. Russell learned, first hand, the power of the press.

Miraldi, a great storyteller himself, fills the book with fascinating accounts of Russell’s development as a reformer, starting with his early years reporting such stories as the Johnstown Flood, the deadly Haymarket Riot in Chicago, and the sensational Lizzy Borden murder case. After gaining fame as a reporter, Russell worked as an editor for both Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the most powerful newspaper publishers of the late 1800s whose unscrupulous fight for readership gave us “yellow journalism.” Both were ardent crusaders who fought the political machines and industrial abuses, but who were not above using lurid stories about crime, sex, and scandal to attract readers.

This approach to reform was not lost on Russell who became one of the premiere muckrakers of the turn of the century, along with Lincoln Stephens, Upton Sinclair, and Ida Tarbell. His exposés combined carefully documented facts with heart-wrenching stories of lives devastated by the wealthy and the powerful, all wrapped in a tone of moral outrage which mirrored that of the great Pulitzer himself. Russell used his skills to take on and defeat the Beef Trust, big city bosses and, most definitively, Trinity Church, the most notorious slumlord in New York City.

Russell, points out Miraldi, not only wrote about abuses, he took action. He ran for political office, was a member of a socialist delegation that visited Europe and Russia in 1917 and 1918 to support labor groups, and was one of the three original founders of the NAACP.
Miraldi, the activist, identifies with Russell because they are both optimists. They both believe in the power of the press to drive change, slow and incremental as that change might be. “The world does not grow worse, does not stand still, but slowly grows better,” wrote Russell. “Slowly but surely we go up.”

Miraldi, the teacher, brings this energy and optimism to his students. First, be good reporters, he teaches them. Get the facts and bring the story to the people. That’s the reporter’s primary responsibility. He also teaches them about the great tradition muckraking embodied in idealists like Russell who understood and used the power of the pen. “Every generation,” says Miraldi, “must take up the burden to fight for its causes.”

What’s next for Miraldi, the writer? Two projects are in the works. First, he is researching another muckraking book—this one about Watergate and the two young Washington Post reporters who followed the trail of evidence into the White House and the Oval Office. He will explore some of the myths around the press’s performance and assess what the reaction to Watergate was in terms of how the press was viewed.
He will also be editor of a collection of the best writing of Roger Kahn, chronicler of America’s love affair with baseball, and will conduct two long-taped interviews with Kahn which will become available at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. At last, Miraldi will make the Hall of Fame—bad arm and all.