by Ron Chernow
Although Tarbell pretended to apply her scalpel to Standard Oil with surgical objectivity, she was never neutral and not only because of her father. Her brother, William Walter Tarbell, had been a leading figure in forming the Pure Oil Company, the most serious domestic challenger to Standard Oil, and his letters to her were laced with anti-Standard venom. Complaining of the trust’s price manipulations in one letter, Will warned her, “Some of those fellows will get killed one of those days.”42 As Pure Oil’s treasurer in 1902, Will steered legions of Rockefeller enemies to his sister and even vetted her manuscripts. Far from cherishing her neutrality, Tarbell in the end adhered to the advice she had once received from Henry James: “Cherish your contempts.”43 Amazingly enough, nobody made an issue of Tarbell’s veritable partnership with her brother in exposing his chief competitor.
When Franklin Tarbell heard that his daughter was taking on the mighty Standard, he warned her that she was exposing herself to extreme danger. “Don’t do it, Ida—they will ruin the magazine,” he said and even broached the possibility they might maim or murder her—a far-fetched scenario but suggestive of the dread that the trust inspired.44 As her research began, she made a sentimental trip to Titusville, which rekindled her old animosity toward Standard Oil. Her father was slowly dying of stomach cancer while she was writing her series, and this might have further embittered her toward Rockefeller, however unfairly; Franklin Tarbell would die on March 1, 1905. Contrary to her father’s predictions, Ida inflicted far more damage on Standard Oil than she received in return. The closest she came to being threatened was at a Washington dinner party where Frank Vanderlip, a vice president of National City Bank, drew her into a side room to voice his strong displeasure with her project. Sensing a vague financial menace to McClure’s, she retorted, “Well, I am sorry, but of course that makes no difference to me.”45 In fact, what was most notable about Standard Oil’s response was its haughty, self-defeating silence.
Tarbell approached her work methodically, like a carpenter, but she soon reeled under the weight of documentary evidence. After a week spent combing through reports of the Industrial Commission in February 1902, she wrote despairingly, “The task confronting me is such a monstrous one that I am staggering a bit under it.”46 By June, having completed three installments, she confessed that the material had acquired an obsessive hold over her mind and even invaded her sleep. On the eve of a needed European vacation, she told her research assistant, “It has become a great bugbear to me. I dream of the octopus by night and think of nothing else by day, and I shall be glad to exchange it for the Alps.”47
Upon her return from vacation, she met with Henry Demarest Lloyd at his seaside estate in Sakonnet, Rhode Island. He insisted that, despite the Interstate Commerce Commission, large shippers were still getting the same old freight rebates, although they carefully destroyed the evidence. He told her, barely containing his rage, that Rockefeller and his associates embodied “the most dangerous tendencies in modern life.” 48 At one point, when he learned that Ida Tarbell had met with Henry H. Rogers, Lloyd thought she might be in cahoots with the company and warned his Pennsylvania contacts to watch out for her. His doubts were instantly dispelled as the series got under way. “When you get through with ‘Johnnie,’ ” he applauded her in April 1903, “I don’t think there will be very much left of him except something resembling one of his own grease spots.” 49 In the end, Lloyd handed over his abundant notes to her and urged George Rice, Lewis Emery, and other independents to talk with her. Having passed the torch, Henry Demarest Lloyd died in September 1903, before the series was finished.
Shortly before Tarbell began her research, Sam McClure tried to coax Mark Twain into editing a magazine, but Henry H. Rogers persuaded Twain to resist. As early as December 1901—almost a year before the series started to run— Rogers spotted an ad announcing McClure’s forthcoming series on Standard Oil and was startled that nobody at 26 Broadway had been contacted by the author. Concerned, he wrote to Twain, “It would naturally be supposed, that any person desiring to write a veritable history, would seek for information as near original sources as possible.”50 Fearing that Tarbell might be consorting with the enemy, Rogers suggested that Twain tell McClure that he should verify all statements with the trust before they were published. When Twain pressed for details about the series, McClure balked, saying, “You will have to ask Miss Tarbell.” To which Twain replied, “Would Miss Tarbell see Mr. Rogers?” 51 Tarbell had, of course, hoped to interview the top brass at Standard Oil, and when McClure burst into her office with the invitation, she was eager to seize the chance.
A veteran charmer, Hell Hound Rogers invited Tarbell for a two-hour chat at his home on East Fifty-seventh Street. She had never met a real captain of industry before and seemed entranced by his resemblance to Twain. “His big head with its high forehead was set off by a heavy shock of beautiful gray hair; his nose was aquiline, sensitive,” she wrote, still betraying admiration years later.52 Rogers seduced her with nostalgic recollections of the days when they were Rouseville neighbors. “That reminiscence of Henry H. Rogers is only one of several reasons I have for heartily liking as fine a pirate as ever flew his flag in Wall Street.”53
The upshot of the meeting was that Tarbell agreed to give Rogers a chance to react to any revelations she unearthed, and for two years she periodically visited him at 26 Broadway. These encounters had a quasi-clandestine aura, with the reporter whisked in one door and out another. In a spirit of guarded cooperation, Samuel Dodd assembled material for Tarbell, while Daniel O’Day passed along information on pipelines. Since Tarbell had spoken with Rogers for nearly a year before the series started, she held her breath when the first issue appeared in November 1902. “I rather expected him to cut me off when he realized that I was trying to prove that the Standard Oil Company was only an enlarged South Improvement Company.”54 To her astonishment, Rogers still received her and, while occasionally miffed by this or that article, he remained on friendly terms with her.
Rogers’s complaisance has always been a huge mystery, engendering two schools of thought. Tarbell cited Rogers’s self-interest. He and Archbold had been stung by accusations that they had conspired to blow up a Buffalo refinery that competed with Standard Oil. “That case is a sore point with Mr. Archbold and me,” he immediately told Tarbell. “I want you to go into it thoroughly.”55 Responding to his heightened sensitivity on this matter, she agreed to let him review anything she wrote about it. (Rogers’s strategy paid off as far as the Buffalo imbroglio was concerned.) In Tarbell’s view, Rogers was willing to see Standard Oil’s reputation sullied as long as his own was preserved.
Another school of thought hypothesized that Rogers was both deflecting attention from his own misdeeds and taking revenge against Rockefeller, who had disapproved of his stock-market speculations. This argument suggests that Rogers enjoyed Tarbell’s series as a rebuke to his colleague’s sanctimony. Rockefeller privately denounced Rogers as a traitor who had fed Tarbell false, garbled information to defame him.56 Many years later, after a confidential chat with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Allan Nevins recorded in a memo, “Junior thinks that [Rogers’s] part in the publication of Ida Tarbell’s book was far from unselfish; that he was secretly glad to see Rockefeller attacked, and supplied some of the material.”57 Tarbell’s own notes reveal that while Rogers often defended Rockefeller, he also kept the spotlight tightly focused on the founder and away from himself. Rogers did not terminate his meetings with Tarbell until February 1904, when she published a shocking account of railway agents spying on Standard Oil competitors—a practice that Rogers had strenuously denied. When she next arrived at 26 Broadway, he demanded, “Where did you get that stuff?” That tense, brief meeting ended their relationship.58
While stewing about Rogers, Rockefeller would have been equally shocked and wounded had he seen the acidulous comments made to Ida Tarbell by his old pal Henry M. Flagler, who portrayed the titan as petty and miserly. After their confid
ential talk, Tarbell recorded in her notes, “Mr. Flagler talked to me of J.D.R. Says he is the biggest little man and the littlest big man he ever knew. That he would give $100,000 one minute to charity and turn around and haggle over the price of a ton of coal. Says emphatically: ‘I have been in business with him 45 years and he would do me out of a dollar today—that is, if he could do it honestly.’ ”59 Though Flagler dispensed some pious claptrap about how “the Lord had prospered him,” Tarbell could not draw him into any serious, sustained discussion of Standard Oil history.60
From the start, sensing that Tarbell was full of malice toward Standard Oil, Archbold had refused to cooperate. As for Rockefeller, he was slow to fathom the magnitude of the gathering threat and had no notion that this magnificent journalist could wield her slingshot with such deadly accuracy. Having weathered thirty years of assaults in the courts and statehouses, he must have felt invulnerable. When associates clamored for a response to Tarbell, Rockefeller replied, “Gentlemen, we must not be entangled in controversies. If she is right we will not gain anything by answering, and if she is wrong time will vindicate us.”61 To sit through an extended grilling from Tarbell would have violated his lifelong approach to business. This was a tactical blunder, for in dodging Tarbell he inadvertently seemed to validate her portrait.
From the perspective of nearly a century later, Ida Tarbell’s series remains the most impressive thing ever written about Standard Oil—a tour de force of reportage that dissects the trust’s machinations with withering clarity. She laid down a clear chronology, provided a trenchant account of how the combine had evolved, and made the convoluted history of the oil industry comprehensible. In the dispassionate manner associated with McClure’s, she sliced open America’s most secretive business and showed all the hidden gears and wheels turning inside it. Yet however chaste and clearly reasoned her prose, it was always informed by indignation that throbbed just below the surface. It remains one of the great case studies of what a single journalist, armed with the facts, can do against seemingly invincible powers.
Tarbell is perhaps best appreciated in comparison with her predecessor, Henry Demarest Lloyd, who was sloppy with his facts, florid in his prose, and too quick to pontificate. A meticulous researcher, Tarbell wrote in a taut, spare language that conveyed a sense of precision and restraint—though she had more than her quota of strident moments. By writing in such a relatively cool style, she made her readers boil with anger. Instead of invoking political panaceas or sweeping ideological prescriptions, she appealed to the reader’s sense of common decency and fair play and was most effective where she showed something small and mean-spirited about the Standard Oil style of business.
Like Teddy Roosevelt, Tarbell did not condemn Standard Oil for its size but only for its abuses and did not argue for the automatic dismantling of all trusts; she pleaded only for the preservation of free competition in the marketplace. While she was by no means evenhanded, she was quick to acknowledge the genuine achievements of Rockefeller and his cohorts and even devoted one chapter to “The Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company.” “There was not a lazy bone in the organization, not an incompetent hand, nor a stupid head,” she wrote.62 It was the very fact that they could have succeeded without resorting to unethical acts that so exasperated her. As she said, “They had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me.”63
If Tarbell gave an oversimplified account of Standard Oil’s rise, her indictment was perhaps the more forceful for it. In the trust’s collusion with the railroads, the intricate system of rebates and drawbacks, she found her smoking gun, the irrefutable proof that Rockefeller’s empire was built by devious means. She was at pains to refute Rockefeller’s defense that everybody did it. “Everybody did not do it,” she protested indignantly. “In the nature of the offense everybody could not do it. The strong wrested from the railroads the privilege of preying upon the weak, and the railroads never dared give the privilege save under the promise of secrecy.”64 To the contention that rebates were still legal, Tarbell countered with the questionable theory that they violated the common law. She argued that Rockefeller had succeeded by imbuing subordinates with a ferocious desire to win at all costs, even if that meant trampling upon others. “Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair.”65 Tarbell rightly surmised that Standard Oil received secret kickbacks from the railroads on a more elaborate scale than its rivals did. This is abundantly borne out by Rockefeller’s private papers, which show that the practice was even more pervasive than Tarbell realized.
Beginning with the Cleveland Massacre of 1872, Tarbell showed that Rockefeller had taken over rival refineries in an orchestrated atmosphere of intimidation. She exposed the deceit of an organization that operated through a maze of secret subsidiaries in which the Standard Oil connection was kept secret from all but the highest-ranking employees. She sketched out many abuses of power by the Standard Oil pipelines, which used their monopoly position to keep refractory producers in line while favoring Standard’s own refineries. And she chronicled the terror tactics by which the trust’s marketing subsidiaries got retailers to stock their product exclusively. Like Lloyd, she also decried the trust’s threat to democracy and the subornation of state legislators, although she never guessed the depths of corruption revealed by Rockefeller’s papers.
Nevertheless, as Allan Nevins and other defenders of Rockefeller pointed out, Tarbell committed numerous errors, and her work must be cited with caution. To begin with, the SIC was initiated by the railroads, not Rockefeller, who doubted the plan’s efficacy. And for all its notoriety, the SIC did not cause the oil crisis of the early 1870s but was itself a response to the glut that forced almost everybody to operate at a loss. It is also true that, swayed by childhood memories, Tarbell ennobled the Oil Creek drillers, portraying them as exemplars of a superior morality. As she wrote: “They believed in independent effort—every man for himself and fair play for all. They wanted competition, loved open fight.”66 To support this statement, she had to overlook the baldly anticompetitive agreements proposed by the producers themselves. Far from being free-marketeers, they repeatedly tried to form their own cartel to restrict output and boost prices. And, as Rockefeller pointed out, they happily took rebates whenever they could. The world of the early oil industry was not, as Tarbell implied, a morality play of the evil Standard Oil versus the brave, noble independents of western Pennsylvania, but a harsh dog-eat-dog world.
Though billed as a history of Standard Oil, the Tarbell series presented Rockefeller as the protagonist and center of attention. Tarbell made Standard Oil and Rockefeller interchangeable, even when covering the period after Rockefeller retired. Sometimes it is hard to tell whether Rockefeller is a real person or a personification of the trust. Significantly, Tarbell chose for her epigraph the famous line from Emerson’s essay on self-reliance, “An Institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” When Henry Rogers questioned this approach, Tarbell noted the dramatic effect of focusing on one individual, writing in her notes after the meeting, “Illustrate it by Napoleon work and the effort to keep the attention centered on Napoleon, never mentioning anybody if I could help it.”67 This great-man approach to history gave a human face to the gigantic, amorphous entity known as Standard Oil but also turned the full force of public fury on Rockefeller. It did not acknowledge the bureaucratic reality of Standard Oil, with its labyrinthine committee system, and stigmatized Rockefeller to the exclusion of his associates. So Flagler came off relatively unscathed, even though he had negotiated the secret freight contracts that bulk so large in the McClure’s exposé.
However pathbreaking in its time and richly deserving of its accolades, the Tarbell series does not, finally, stand up as an enduring piece of history. The more closely one examines it, the more it seems a superior screed masquerading as sober history. In the end, Tarbell could not
conquer her nostalgia for the Titusville of her girlhood, that lost paradise of heroic friends and neighbors who went forth doughtily to do battle with the all-devouring Standard Oil dragon.
The most celebrated and widely quoted charge that Tarbell made against Rockefeller was the least deserved: that he had robbed Mrs. Fred M. Backus— forever known to history as “the Widow Backus”—blind when buying her Cleveland lubricating plant in 1878. If every melodrama needs a poor, lorn widow, cheated by a scheming cad, then Mrs. Backus perfectly fitted Tarbell’s portrait of Rockefeller. “If it were true,” Rockefeller later conceded, it “would represent a shocking instance of cruelty in crushing a defenceless woman. It is probable that its wide circulation and its acceptance as true by those who know nothing of the facts has awakened more hostility against the Standard Oil Company and against me personally than any charge which has been made.”68
The background of the story is simple. In his early Cleveland days, Rockefeller had befriended Fred M. Backus, who worked as a bookkeeper in his office and taught in the Sunday school of their church. In time, Backus married, had three children, and started a small lubricating company. In 1874, the forty-year-old Backus died, likely from consumption, and his widow inherited an obsolete plant that consisted of little more than a primitive cluster of sheds, stills, and tanks. Its hilltop site meant that raw materials had to be hauled up the slope at great expense, and then the lubricating oils had to be carted down the same steep path—not the most efficient of venues. Before it entered the lubricating business, Standard Oil had tolerated this marginal operation. When it branched out into lubricating oils and greases in the late 1870s, it absorbed three small lubricating companies, of which Backus Oil was probably the most backward. In fact, the Backus operation was so outmoded that Standard Oil eventually shut it down. This did not prevent the Widow Backus from stirring up a rabid national controversy about Rockefeller’s supposed theft of her priceless plant.