Ida Tarbell

Ida Tarbell, between 1910 and 1930.

Ida Minerva Tarbell (November 5, 1857 – January 6, 1944) was an American teacher, author and journalist. She was known as one of the leading "muckrakers" of her day, work known in modern times in the progressive era as "investigative journalism." She wrote many notable magazine series and biographies. She is best-known for her 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company, which is 654 pages long and was listed as number five in a 1999 list by the New York Times of the top 100 works of twentieth-century American journalism. She began her work on The Standard after her editors at McClure's Magazine called for a story on one of The Trusts. She thought the public would be bored by the story of the oil regions, even though its head John D. Rockefeller, Sr. had bankrupted her father.

Early Life and Education

Tarbell was born in Erie County, Pennsylvania. She grew up in the western portion of the state where new oil fields were developed in the 1860s. She was the daughter of Frank Tarbell, a contractor, who built wooden oil storage tanks and later became an oil producer and refiner in Venango County. Her father's business, and those of many other small businessmen was adversely affected by the South Improvement Company scheme around 1872 between the railroads and larger oil interests. Later, she 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.

Tarbell graduated at the head of her high school class in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Tarbell attended Allegheny College college beginning in 1876. She majored in biology and was the only woman in her class of 1880.

After graduating from college, Tarbell began her career as a teacher at Poland Union Seminary in Poland, Ohio. She taught two classes each of four languages, geology, botany, geometry and trigonometry. After two years she realized teaching was too much for her and she enjoyed writing better. She moved back to Pennsylvania and began writing for The Chautauquan, a teaching supplement for home study courses at Chautauqua, New York. She moved back to Pennsylvania where she met Theodore L. Flood, editor of The Chautauquan, and began writing for The Chautauquan. She was quick to accept because “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 proofing, answering reader questions, and provide proper pronunciation of certain words, translation of 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?”

In 1890 Tarbell moved to Paris to do post-graduate 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, earning her the position of editor for the magazine. She went to work for McClure's Magazine and wrote a popular series on Napoleon Bonaparte. Her series on Abraham Lincoln doubled the magazine's circulation, and was published in a book. These gave her a national reputation as a leading writer and made her 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 and chronicled his rise to the presidency.

In 1900, Tarbell began to research the Standard Oil trust. Tarbell began her interviews with Henry H. Rogers. Rogers had begun his career during the American Civil War in western Pennslyvania 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 ingenious business practices of industrialist John D. Rockefeller and the massive Standard Oil organization. Her work, which became known at the time as muckraking (now called investigative journalism), first ran as a series of articles in McClure's Magazine, which were later published together as a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company in 1904.

Ida M. Tarbell, 1904

She didn’t like the label Muckraker and wrote an article “Muckraker or Historian” where 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."

She exposed Rockefeller's ruthless tactics and their destructive effect on smaller oil businesses. Her book failed to mention that her brother ran a competing oil company, the Pure Oil Company. Tarbell's exposé fueled negative public sentiment against Standard Oil and was a contributing factor in the U.S. government's antitrust actions against the Standard Oil Trust which eventually led to its breakup in 1911.

Death and Legacy

Tarbell died of pneumonia at a hospital in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1944 after being in a coma since December 1943. She was 87. The Ida Tarbell House was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993.

In 2000, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

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.

"Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists — with it all things are possible."

Ida M. Tarbell

Further reading

• The History of the Standard Oil Company, 2 vols., Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1963 {1904}.

• All in The Days Work: An Autobiography, New York: Macmillan, 1939.

• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Ron Chernow, London: Warner Books, 1998. and also was one of the very famous muckrakers.

• "Ida Tarbell Portrait of A Muckraker", Kathleen Brady, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press

External links

• 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
• 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