Ida Tarbell

Ida Tarbell
Portrait taken in 1904
Born	Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857-11-05)November 5, 1857 Hatch Hollow, Amity Township, Erie County, Pennsylvania, United States
Died	January 6, 1944(1944-01-06) (aged 86) Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States
Occupation	Teacher, writer and journalist
Notable work(s)	The History of the Standard Oil Company

Ida Minerva Tarbell (November 5, 1857 – January 6, 1944) was an American teacher, author and journalist. She was one of the leading "muckrakers" of the progressive era. She wrote many notable magazine series and biographies. She is best known for her 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company, which was listed as No. 5 in a 1999 list by New York University of the top 100 works of 20th-century American journalism.^[1] She depicted John D. Rockefeller as crabbed, miserly, money-grabbing, and viciously effective at monopolizing the oil trade.

Early life and education

Tarbell was born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, on November 5, 1857.^[2] She was born in a log cabin that was the home of her maternal grandfather, Walter Raleigh McCullough, a Scots-Irish pioneer.^[3] She grew up in the western region of the state, where new oil fields were developed in the 1860s. She was the daughter of Esther Ann (née McCullough) and Franklin Summer Tarbell, a teacher and a joiner by trade,^[3] who used his trade to build wooden oil storage tanks.

In 1860 Ida's father moved the family to Titusville, Pennsylvania. There he built a house, which was her mother's first home of her own.^[3] He later became an oil producer and refiner in Venango County. Her father's business, along with those of many other small businessmen, was adversely affected by the South Improvement Company scheme (circa 1872) between the railroads and larger oil interests. Later, Tarbell would vividly recall this situation in her work, as she accused the leaders of the Standard Oil Company of using unfair tactics to put her father and many small oil companies out of business.^[2]

Tarbell graduated at the head of her high school class in Titusville and went on to study at Allegheny College in 1876, where she graduated in 1880, the only woman in her class.

Career

Tarbell began her career as a teacher in Poland, Ohio. She taught two classes each of four subjects, geology, botany, geometry and trigonometry. After two years, she realized teaching was too much for her and that she enjoyed writing more.

Tarbell returned to Pennsylvania, where she met Theodore L. Flood, editor of The Chautauquan, a teaching supplement for home study courses at Chautauqua, New York. She was quick to accept Flood's offer to write for the publication; as she said, “I was glad to be useful, for I had grown up with what was called the Chautauqua movement.” In 1886 she became managing editor. Her duties included proofreading, answering reader questions, providing proper pronunciation of certain words, translating foreign phrases, identifying characters, and defining words. “Doing this job I began to think about facts and reading proofs. It was an exacting job which never ceases to worry me. What if the accent was in the wrong place? What if I brought somebody into the world in the wrong year?”^[4]

In 1890 Tarbell moved to Paris to do postgraduate work and write a biography of Madame Roland, the leader of an influential salon during the French Revolution. While in France, she wrote articles for various magazines, catching the eye of publisher Samuel McClure. He offered her the position as editor for the magazine. While working for McClure's Magazine, Tarbell wrote a popular series on Napoleon Bonaparte.

Her 20-part^[5] series on Abraham Lincoln doubled the magazine's circulation and was published in a book, giving her a national reputation as a major writer and the leading authority on the slain president. Her research in the backwoods of Kentucky and Illinois uncovered the true story of Lincoln's childhood and youth. She vividly chronicled his rise to the presidency in a series of articles and books, recounting her discoveries to large lecture audiences.

Tarbell was a suffragist and had determined not to marry but to instead pursue a journalistic career. After 1909, her articles and novels about women began to change. The feminism faded as she became an advocate of home life and the family, a position she held until her death. ^[6]

Influence on the oil industry

Tarbell in 1904

In 1900 Tarbell began to research the Standard Oil trust with the help of an assistant, John Siddall.^[7] Tarbell began her interviews with Henry H. Rogers. Rogers had begun his career during the American Civil War in western Pennsylvania oil regions where Tarbell had grown up. In 1902 she conducted detailed interviews with the Standard Oil magnate.

Rogers, wily and normally guarded in matters related to business and finance, may have been under the impression her work was to be complimentary. He was apparently unusually forthcoming. However, Tarbell's interviews with Rogers formed the basis for her negative exposé of the business practices of industrialist John D. Rockefeller and the massive Standard Oil organization. Her investigative journalism series first appeared in a 1903 issue of McClure's Magazine alongside articles by Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker that ushered in the era of muckraking journalism. The series was later published as a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company in 1904.

"Tarbell's biggest obstacle, however, was neither her gender nor Rockefeller's opposition. Rather, her biggest obstacle was the craft of journalism. She proposed to investigate Standard Oil and Rockefeller by using documents - hundreds of thousands of pages scattered throughout the nation - then fleshing out her findings through well-informed interviews with the company's current and former executives, competitors, government regulators, antitrust lawyers, and academic experts."^[8]

"And then, in an inspirational tale for journalists, Ida Tarbell went to work. Her History of the Standard Oil Company spotlighted Rockefeller's practices and mobilized the public. Readers nationwide awaited each chapter of the story, serialized in 19 installments by McClure's between 1902 and 1904."^[9]

Her stories on Standard Oil began in the November 1902 issue of McClure's and lasted for nineteen issues. She was meticulous in detailing Rockefeller's early interest in oil and how the industry began. After the series was over, she wrote a profile of Rockefeller, perhaps the first CEO profile ever, though she never met or even talked to Rockefeller.

Tarbell developed investigative reporting tactics, digging into public documents across the country. Separately, these documents provided individual instances of Standard Oil's strong-arm tactics against rivals, railroad companies and others that got in its way. Organized by Tarbell into a cogent history, they became a damning portrayal of big business. Indeed, a subhead on the cover of Weinberg's book encapsulates it this way: "How a female investigative journalist brought down the world's greatest tycoon and broke up the Standard Oil monopoly."^[10]

Tarbell's exposé of Standard Oil was the first corporate coverage of its kind, and it attacked the business operations of Rockefeller, the best-known businessman in the country at the time, even though he had retired from the oil business several years before, and was devoting his time to philanthropy.^[10]

Tarbell disliked the muckracker label and wrote an article, "Muckraker or Historian," in which she justified her efforts for exposing the oil trust. She referred to

"this classification of muckraker, which I did not like. All the radical element, and I numbered many friends among them, were begging me to join their movements. I soon found that most of them wanted attacks. They had little interest in balanced findings. Now I was convinced that in the long run the public they were trying to stir would weary of vituperation, that if you were to secure permanent results the mind must be convinced."^{[citation needed]}

Death and legacy

Ida Tarbell died of pneumonia at Bridgeport Hospital in Bridgeport, Connecticut on January 6, 1944, after being in the hospital since December 1943. She was 86.^[11]

Tarbell's name has been well remembered in the decades after her death. In 1993, half a century after her death, the Ida Tarbell House was declared a National Historic Landmark. This was followed in 2000 by Tarbell's induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.^[12]

On September 14, 2002, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Tarbell as part of a series of four stamps honoring women journalists.^[13]

References

Notes

Books and writings by Ida Tarbell

• All in the day's work : an autobiography, 1939
• A reporter for Lincoln; story of Henry E. Wing, soldier and newspaperman 1927
• He knew Lincoln, and other Billy Brown stories, 1922
• Peacemakers—blessed and otherwise; observations, reflections and irritations at an international conference, 1922
• Boy scouts' life of Lincoln, 1921
• The rising of the tide; the story of Sabinsport 1919
• In Lincoln's chair 1920
• New ideals in business, an account of their practice and their effects upon men and profits 1916
• The ways of woman 1915
• The tariff in our times 1911
• Father Abraham 1909
• He knew Lincoln 1907
• Madame Roland: a biographical study 1905 1916
• The history of the Standard Oil Company 1905 1912 1950
• The life of Abraham Lincoln 1900 1903 1909 1917 1920 1924 1928
• A life of Napoleon Bonaparte : with a sketch of Josephine, Empress of the French 1901 1909 1919
• The early life of Abraham Lincoln 1896
• A short life of Napoleon Bonaparte 1895
• More Than a Muckraker: Ida Minerva Tarbell's Lifetime in Journalism Tarbell essays edited by Robert C. Kochersberger Jr., The University of Tennessee Press, 1995
• The History of the Standard Oil Company, 2 vols., Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1963 {1904}.
• The Business of Being a Woman, The Macmillan Company, 1921
• Books online by Tarbell

Further reading about Tarbell

• Brady, Kathleen. Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (2004)
• Randolph, Josephine D. "A Notable Pennsylvanian: Ida Minerva Tarbell, 1857-1944," Pennsylvania History (1999) 66#2 pp 215-241, short scholarly biography
• Weinberg, Steve Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller (2008)
• Limerick, Patricia, and Brian Black. (2002, February 27). "Country forgets an old Big Oil lesson, and Enron results", USA TODAY, p. A.13.
• Serrin, Judith and William. Muckraking! The Journalism that Changed America, New York: The New York Press, 2002.
• Somervill, Barbara A. Ida Tarbell: Pioneer Investigative Reporter Greensboro, nc : M. Reynolds., 2002
• Goodwin, Doris Kearns. "The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism." New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Ida Tarbell

• New York Times Obituary
• Ida Tarbell Papers at the Sophia Smith Collection
• Harvard University Library Open Collections Program. Women Working, 1870–1930, Ida Tarbell (1857–1944). A full-text searchable online database with complete access to publications written by Ida Tarbell.
• The Ida Tarbell Home Page
• American Experience: The Rockefellers
• National Women's Hall of Fame - Ida Tarbell
• Ida Tarbell on Isaac Marken's Lincoln Research: Original Letters Shapell Manuscript Foundation
• The History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Tarbell
• Works by Ida M. Tarbell at Project Gutenberg
• Ida Tarbell and the "Business of Being a Woman" by Paula Treckel
• Ida Tarbell Society Monthly Giving Program with Corporate Accountability International
• February 13, 1916, New York Times, Our Rich Authors Make Cheap Literature; Ida M. Tarbell Laments Tendency of Some of Our Modern Writers to Sacrifice Their Independence and Self-Respect for the Sake of High Prices
• The nationalizing of business, 1878-1898. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• The Ida Tarbell Papers, 1896-1943. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Archives, Smith College.

Ida Tarbell Papers Finding Aid, Sophia Smith Collection http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss114_main.html