IDA TARBELL

A Journalistic Masterpiece

By the early 1900s, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. had finished building his oil empire. For over 30 years, he had applied his uncanny shrewdness, thorough intelligence, and patient vision to the creation of an industrial organization without parallel in the world. The new century found him facing his most formidable rival ever -- not another businessman, but a 45-year-old woman determined to prove that Standard Oil had never played fair. The result, Ida Tarbell's magazine series "The History of the Standard Oil Company," would not only change the history of journalism, but also the fate of Rockefeller's empire, shaken by the powerful pen of its most implacable observer. 

Born in a log home in Hatch Hollow, northwestern Pennsylvania, on November 5, 1857, Ida Minerva Tarbell grew up amid the derricks of the Oil Region. Her father, Frank Tarbell, built wooden oil storage tanks and later became an oil producer and refiner. "Things were going well in father's business," she would write years later. "There was ease such as we had never known; luxuries we had never heard of. ...Then suddenly [our] gay, prosperous town received a blow between the eyes."

The 1872 South Improvement scheme, a hidden agreement between the railroads and refiners led by John D. Rockefeller, hit the Pennsylvania Oil Region like a tidal wave. It hit the Tarbells too, leaving behind painful memories that would be rekindled 30 years later. "Out of the alarm and bitterness and confusion, I gathered from my father's talk a conviction to which I still hold -- that what had been undertaken was wrong."

"I was not a writer, and I knew it," Ida Tarbell declared once, recalling her beginnings in journalism. "I knew I never should be one in the high sense which I then and still more now give to that word. … 

But if I was not a writer I had certain qualifications for the practice of the modest kind of journalism on which I had decided.

…Then there was my habit of steady, painstaking work -- that ought to count for something. And perhaps I could learn to write."

Tarbell’s lack of confidence was unfounded. In "The History of the Standard Oil Company," she skillfully infused her exposé of the complicated inner workings of Rockefeller's trust with dramatic tension. Her eloquent prose, as gripping as it was rich in detail, captivated thousands of readers and established her as one of the most accomplished non-fiction writers of her time.

Below are a few excerpts from the 19 installments published by McClure's Magazine:

Rockefeller's rise:

The strides the firm of Rockefeller & Andrews made after the former went into it were attributed, for three or four years, mainly to [his] extraordinary capacity for bargaining and borrowing. Then its chief competitors began to suspect something. Rockefeller might get his oil cheaper now and then, they said, but he could not do it often. He might make close contracts for which they had neither the patience nor the stomach. He might have an unusual mechanical and practical genius in his partner. But these things could not explain all. They believed they bought, on the whole, almost as cheaply as he, and they knew they made as good oil and with as great, or nearly as great, economy. He could sell at no better price than they. Where was his advantage? There was but one place where it could be, and that was in transportation.

The Southern Improvement Company scheme:

For several days an uneasy rumor had been running up and down the Oil Regions. Freights were going up. Now an advance in a man's freight bill may ruin his business; more, it may mean the ruin of a region...

On the morning of February 26, 1872, the oil men read in their morning papers that the rise which had been threatening had come; moreover, that all members of the South Improvement Company were exempt from the advance. At the news all Oildom rushed into the streets. Nobody waited to find out his neighbor's opinion. On every lip there was but one word, and that was "conspiracy"…

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/rockefellers-tarbell/ 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/rockefellers-mcclures/