Taking on the Trust: How Ida Tarbell Brought Down John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil

246 Pages·2008·1.16 MB·English

by  Weinberg

T O T
AKING N THE RUST
ALSO BY STEVE WEINBERG
The Reporter’s Handbook: An Investigator’s Guide to Documents and Techniques Telling the Untold Story:
How Investigative Reporters Are Changing the Craft of Biography Armand Hammer: The Untold Story
Trade Secrets of Washington Journalists Terrace Hill: The Story of a House and the People Who Touched It
(with Scherrie Goettsch)
T T
AKING ON THE RUST
T E B I T J D. R
HE PIC ATTLE OF DA ARBELL AND OHN OCKEFELLER
S W
TEVE EINBERG
W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London
Copyright © 2008 by Steve Weinberg All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New
York, NY 10110
Production manager: Andrew Marasia Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weinberg,
Steve.
Taking on the trust: the epic battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller / Steve Weinberg.
—1st ed.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-39307253-2
1. Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva), 1857–1944. 2. Rockefeller, John D. (John Davison), 1839–1937.
I. Title.
PN4874.T23W45 2008
070.92—dc22
[B] 2007044699
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
FOR SCHERRIE
C
ONTENTS
Preface
1 Ida Tarbell: A Childhood Portrait in Oil
2 John D. Rockefeller: A Young Adult Portrait in Oil
3 Civil War: Dodging Bullets as the Oil Flows
4 Moving Up
5 Lost, and Found
6 Discovering the Power of the Printed Word
7 Far from Home, Close to Home
8 McClure’s Magazine
9 Napoleon
10 Unearthing Skeletons
11 The Exposé Mentality
12 Researching the Behemoth
13 Exposed
14 A Question of Character
15 Aftermath of an Exposé
16 For the Rest of Their Lives
Bibliographic Essay and Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
P
REFACE
The tome does not look especially impressive today. It rests on an out-of-the-
way shelf, one of millions of volumes in a cavernous university research library.
Its green cover is faded now, after decades of steady wear, occasional abuse, and,
ultimately, lack of use. It is still mentioned in early-twentieth-century-America
history courses on campuses. But few have read it from beginning to end, all 815
pages of dense type.
This is a shame. The book is arguably the greatest work of investigative
journalism ever written. The History of the Standard Oil Company, published in
1904, is its unprepossessing title.
More than a century has passed since the painstaking research and writing
that went into the book. Today, the years 1900 through 1905 feel like a bygone
era. Yet during that tumultuous period, the book created a social maelstrom that
built and destroyed reputations, altered public policy, and changed the face of the
nation. This was the era of the great robber barons. Powerful men colluded to
create even more powerful monopolies. By the dawn of Theodore Roosevelt’s
presidency, however, there arose a cadre of devoted journalists and publishers
intent on uncovering the perfidy of the economic juggernauts.
The confrontation embedded in this remarkable time, characterized by The
History of the Standard Oil Company, pitted the unparalleled documentary skills
of America’s most recognizable investigative journalist against the financial
resources of the most rapacious, most powerful businessman in the nation. This
investigative journalist, Ida Minerva Tarbell, worked as a staff writer for
McClure’s Magazine. A woman of formidable intelligence and character, she
labored at a time when men dominated the realm of journalism. The tycoon,
John Davison Rockefeller, born into a broken family, had built an empire on
black gold and had become the wealthiest individual of the Gilded Age. With
impressive business savvy and upright character, Rockefeller served as the
guiding force within Standard Oil Company, the nation’s most sprawling
corporate “trust,” a term out of fashion today except as part of the word
“antitrust.”
Tarbell’s book, which began as a magazine series, brought her fame and
established a new form of journalism known as muckraking. She became a
model for countless journalists, and despite the passage of more than a century,
her work remains an example of how a lone journalist can uncover wrongdoing.
Moreover, through her exposé, Tarbell forever tarnished the peerless reputation
of John D. Rockefeller. Charles R. Morris expresses the consensus among
historians when he writes that Tarbell’s analysis “has dominated the perception
of the man and his rise ever since.” Ideas about Rockefeller changed because
Tarbell researched and wrote a great book. Allan Nevins, a Columbia University
history professor, wrote a friendly biography of Rockefeller, but he nonetheless
praised Tarbell’s exposé. Rockefeller, who refrained from discussing Tarbell
publicly, told an employee privately that much of what his own son knew about
Standard Oil “is his memory of what he has read in her book, with only here and
there a statement of fact by me.”
Reading Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company is a remarkable
experience; in many ways it seems that it could have been composed only
yesterday, not more than a century ago. The strangleholds that Sam Walton’s
Wal-Mart and Bill Gates’s Microsoft demonstrate in their business realms are
reminiscent of the sway held by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.
Tarbell’s book played a significant role in my own career. In addition to
practicing the craft of investigative journalism since 1969, I have studied it
carefully—in large part because I served as a spokesman of sorts for that branch
of journalism while serving as executive director of Investigative Reporters and
Editors (IRE). Based at the University of Missouri Journalism School, IRE
serves thousands of members around the United States and increasingly around
the world. The techniques Tarbell used to gather information about a secretive
corporation and its evasive, powerful chief executive taught me that a talented,
persistent journalist can penetrate any façade through close readings of
government documents, lawsuits, and interviews with knowledgeable sources
inside and outside the executive offices. Tarbell’s methods have allowed me to
train investigative journalists around the world while directing IRE and ever
since.
This book is a hybrid of biography and dramatic narrative. That dramatic
narrative cannot be told effectively without studying Rockefeller’s life as well as
Tarbell’s. Previous authors have chronicled the long lives of Tarbell (1857–1944)
and Rockefeller (1839–1937). But none has devoted an entire book to their epic
collision course.
Tarbell’s life has been written about much less frequently and in much less
detail than Rockefeller’s. Only two books examine her life with some depth—
her factually accurate but selective autobiography, All in the Day’s Work, and
Kathleen Brady’s Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker. Brady told her readers,
citing Tarbell’s journalist colleague Ray Stannard Baker, “that anyone who
attempted to write Ida Tarbell’s life would have the problem of writing about
goodness.” She commented, “This proved to be true, but the real challenge was
trying to explain an enigma.” She quoted Tarbell’s own words: “I have often
found it difficult to explain myself to myself, and I do not often try.” As Brady
noted, “She was seldom more forthcoming to anyone else, and those who knew
her best have long been dead.”
More recently, a few scholars have called attention to Tarbell’s writings. In
1994, Ellen F. Fitzpatrick edited the collection Muckraking: Three Landmark
Articles, focusing on exposés by Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard
Baker published by McClure’s Magazine. In 1996, Robert C. Kochersberger, Jr.,
edited a book that reprinted a wide range of Tarbell’s published pieces, More
Than a Muckraker: Ida Tarbell’s Lifetime in Journalism.
First in the class of numerous Rockefeller chronicles is Ron Chernow’s
Titan, published in 1998. Chernow’s chapter on the Tarbell-Rockefeller
confrontation is titled “Avenging Angel,” a reference to the investigative
journalist. Some of the biographies published before Chernow’s contain useful
facts, insights, and conclusions, but they include worrisome biases. For example,
Allan Nevins at times seems like little more than an apologist for Rockefeller in
his 1953 book Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and
Philanthropist. The Nevins Papers at Columbia University, not so incidentally,
contain considerable important raw material on Rockefeller the private
individual, Rockefeller the corporate chieftain, and Tarbell too.
All the Rockefeller biographies address the impact of Tarbell’s exposé. One
of the earliest, published by John T. Flynn in 1932, called Tarbell’s book “a
mixture of historical narrative and indictment. No critic could complain that she
had not examined the facts, for the evidences of minute and painstaking
investigation were stamped upon every part of the work.” Flynn judged Tarbell’s
epic to be “the ablest document of its kind ever produced by an American
writer.”
David Freeman Hawke, whose Rockefeller biography appeared in 1980,
commented that “only three times in the American past have writers produced
works that transcended their literary qualities and became in themselves
powerful enough to shape history. The first was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense;