Story

Ida Tarbell Takes on Rockefeller

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Authors: Stephanie Gorton

Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)

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| Volume 70, Issue 4

Editor’s Note: In 1893, Adapted from Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America by Stephanie Gorton (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020)

In January 1903, journalist Ida Tarbell felt her usual cheerful stamina wearing thin. In the midst of an investigative series on John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil for McClure’s magazine, she began to long for escape. Not content with monopolizing the oil industry, Standard Oil had swallowed her life, too. 

“It has become a great bugbear to me,” she told her assistant, John Siddall, adding that she longed to trade in the task at hand for a trip to Europe. Instead, her work plunged her into reliving one of the most fearful chapters of her youth: the brief rebellion against Standard Oil instigated by independent oilmen of Pennsylvania including Tarbell’s own father, and memorialized as the Oil War of 1872. 

The resulting is a passionate piece of writing, balanced tightly between investigation and the vivid force of memory. The New York Times said the series was “[a]s readable as any ‘story’ with rather more romance than the usual business novel,” while the Boston Globe called it a work “of unequalled importance as a ‘document’ of the day.” The review concluded, “The results are likely to be far-reaching; she is writing unfinished history.” 

Her editor, S. S. McClure, crowed victory. “You cannot imagine how we all love & reverence you. You are the real queen of the establishment,” he wrote from his own holiday in a French spa town. He wrote to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of rival magazine The Century, that the investigative turn of McClure’s reflected a new social responsibility that now belonged to the magazines. 

McClure’s hope, he told Gilder, was to “get the people to see that we have been left simply the husks of liberty while the real substance has been stolen from us.” Magazines, he posited, had a better chance of waking up their readership than any other medium. “It evidently is up to the magazines to arouse this public opinion, for the newspapers have forfeited their opinion by sensationalism and by selling their opinions to a party.” 

McClure and Tarbell were born in the same year, 1857. Until their lives converged nearly forty years later, they were a study in contrasts. Sam McClure was a boy out of the Old Country, accustomed to hunger and the scorn dealt to the Irish by his American peers. McClure was a restless, rumpled figure of a man, a bantamweight five foot six. He was born on February 17, in his grandfather’s sturdy world — a drive born from coming of age among doubters, in a stone house in County Antrim, Ireland, the first of four boys. 

His family belonged to the “well-to-do poor,” and he would later remember his childhood as a country idyll. When his father died at a young age, Elizabeth, his mother, continued working their land alone, refusing to foster out her boys to separate homes despite falling behind in her debts. Instead she took the