Tarbell, Ida 1857-1944

TARBELL, IDA 1857-1944

Muckraker

Born in an Oil Boom

Ida Tar-bell was raised in northwest Pennsylvania at a time when the discovery of oil was transforming the region into an industrial hub. While many people made for-tunes, including her father (who invented a storage system for oil), Ida remembered the terrible accidents, explosions, and fires that claimed many lives and the environmental devastation drilling caused. With her family's new wealth came access to books and magazines, and Ida grew up reading the popular magazines of the day. The only woman in her class at Allegheny College, she trained for a teaching career but soon grew bored with it. In 1882 she took a job with a monthly magazine The Chautauquan.

From Social Issues to Biography

She wrote on the great reform movements of the 1880s and 1890s: temperance, antimonopoly crusades, housing reform, the eight-hour workday, and other labor issues connected with the Knights of Labor. Her interest in women's roles in social change led her to research a biography of Madame Ro-land and her part in the French Revolution. In France she decided to try to make her living as a freelance writer for American newspapers and magazines, which were then undergoing a boom of their own as printing technologies brought down costs. She sold stories on French culture and politics to McClures and Scribner's. A biographical series on Napoleon for McClure's, richly illustrated with portraits, became a sensation. Her series on Abraham Lincoln, which drew on prodigious research, boosted the magazine's circulation by more than one hundred thousand. She became a contributing editor in 1896.

History of the Standard Oil

Company. Whe n McClure's suggested that Ida commence major research into John D. Rockefeller's powerful holding company known as Standard Oil, her father, who had fallen on hard times, warned her against it. He said Standard Oil would ruin the magazine. For five years she searched the public record: court documents, congressional investigations, newspaper accounts, pamphlets put out by reformers. What was envisioned as a three-part series turned into nineteen articles that ran for more than two years. Published as a book in 1904, The History of the Standard Oil Company constituted a devastating exposé of how Rockefeller had used ruthless measures to drive his competitors out of business and secure a monopoly. One Standard Oil executive, Henry H. Rogers, who had been an independent oil refiner and was forced to join the company, met with Tarbell for a period of more than two years and introduced her to others high in the corporate structure. As the series began to appear, other "victims" contacted Tarbell with their own evidence of Standard Oil's domination.

Plus and Minus

Never a radical, Tarbell tried to see both sides of every story. She concluded the series by reflecting on the "legitimate greatness" of Standard Oil, the intelligence, organization, and vision it represented. But she found the cost of its success too great: the power it amassed, like all absolute power in history, was used against the public. In further articles on Rockefeller, she called such tactics "Commercial Machiavellianism." In 1906, with Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker, Tarbell set out to launch the American M.agazine> but it failed. She continued to write as a freelance journalist well into the twentieth century, traveling to Italy to write on the ascendant Benito Mussolini, whom she found "gallant" but a "fearful despot." She never became an advocate of women entering public life, finding their domestic role, which she never performed, more crucial. She died in 1944 in a hospital near her Connecticut farm at the age of eighty-six.

Sources:

Kathleen Brady, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (New York: Seanew Putnam, 1984);

David Mark Chalmers, The Muckrake Years (New York: Van Nostrand, 1974);

Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976);

Ellen Fitzpatrick, Muckraking: Three Landmark Articles (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).