As Tarbell hammered at the Standard, Lincoln Steffens was peppering away at political corruption and Baker was investigating union abuses. The third installment of the Standard Oil story—describing the oil war of 1872 and how the independents defeated Rockefeller’s South Improvement scheme—appeared in January 1903, and was accompanied by Steffens’ exposé of Minneapolis and Baker’s “The Right to Work” about miners who were harassed, beaten, and murdered for refusing to strike. Baker was sympathetic to the workingman and was concerned over the way unions were abusing their growing power.
As McClure looked over the issue before it finally went to press, he was inspired to insert a last-minute editorial comment:
“The leading article, ‘The Shame of Minneapolis,’ might have been called ‘The American Contempt of Law.’ That title could well have served for the current chapter of Miss Tarbell’s ‘History of Standard Oil.’ And it would have fitted perfectly Mr. Baker’s ‘The Right to Work.’ All together, these articles come pretty near showing how universal is this dangerous trait of ours … Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it? The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in this country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some ‘error’ or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand. There is no one left; none but all of us.”
McClure’s editorial introduced a new chapter to the literature of exposure. The January issue sold out. Subscriptions soared. Editors took note. Leslie’s began a fight against railway accidents. Everybody’s announced “Frenzied Finance” by Thomas Lawson, which delved into Standard Oil’s copper interests. The Ladies’ Home Journal opened fire on patent medicines.
McClure’s knew it was on to something, and the staff was united as never before. “Anyone who thought we sat around with our brows screwed together trying to reform the world was far from the truth. We were after, as McClure always insisted, interesting reading material and if it contributed to the general good, so much the better,”29 Tarbell maintained.
McClure liked to jolt people, but the Scotch-Irish immigrant also felt a sense of mission. He wrote Richard Gilder of The Century: “I hope the people will rouse themselves. It is up to magazines to rouse public opinion and newspapers have forfeited their opinion by sensationalism and partisanship.”30
McClure’s band could not claim to be the first investigative reporters. Henry Demarest Lloyd preceded Tarbell and Thomas Nast’s cartoons limned the corruption of city government before Steffens came along. Josiah Flynn had written of the criminal class for McClure’s in 1901 and 1902. Other McClure writers such as Hamlin Garland showed through novels the venality of politicians and the victimization of omnipresent little people.
But Tarbell and her colleagues hit with combined force. Their reach and scope were national. They not only exposed miscreancy, but they pointed to the specific perpetrators. No one was surprised if New York was a den of iniquity corrupted by foreigners, but McClure’s made it clear that crime crisscrossed Minneapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Chicago. This sweep may have accounted for their success. It was not because they found lawbreaking in Cleveland, Titusville, Colorado, or St. Louis that they were read; but because they went to those cities and states and regarded them as equally worthy of attention and colorful description as Paris or Moscow.
One young staffer named Mark Sullivan, who went on to become a noted conservative journalist, took a dim view of the goings-on at McClure’s: “Steffens was so busy finding shame here, there and elsewhere that he could not cover all the cities that clamored for his attention … a remarkable feature of that series was that cities, or many citizens in them, seemed to take a morbid pleasure in being included. They wrote letters to McClure’s crying ‘Expose us next!’ Many enclosed briefs or fragmentary manuscripts or ‘leads’ to the mine of shame.”31
Why were Americans, proud of their growth and sure of their moral superiority over the rest of the world, ready to see the dark side of themselves? Perhaps it was because these writers believed in the ideals of the country at the same time as they exposed its hypocrisy. All were from pioneer stock, reared by hardworking parents on the principles of plain living, inspired by American history, and reverential toward Lincoln. They had the American penchant for facts over philosophy and they not only searched for corruption, but they also unmasked power in America and found that that power did not rest with the people.
With like-minded people, Tarbell joined a larger stream that was to be known as the Progressive Movement. Confident of their moral values and the perfectability of the world, Progressives pointed out what needed to be changed, and fully believed in the fundamental rightness of things as they had been when the individual entrepreneur and the farmer were America’s kings.
As journalists, she, Baker, and Steffens spearheaded a popular investigative movement. Already renowned, their work would braid them together in American history books. They would be known as “Muckrakers,” and the man who would give them that name, President Theodore Roosevelt, did not like the discontent he saw them effecting.
Roosevelt thought the abuses of the trusts needed to be curbed, but he feared that if the public were encouraged to hate business combinations, more harm than good would result. In his first annual speech, a year before Tarbell’s work was published, he tried to minimize public alarm by saying the trusts would be controlled by making public facts about the ways they bent the law. He said:
“There is a widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare … It is based upon sincere conviction that combination and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled, and in my judgment this conviction is right … The first essential in determining how to deal with the great industrial combinations is knowledge of the facts—publicity … What further remedies are needed in the way of governmental regulations or taxation can only be determined after publicity has been obtained.”32
Roosevelt believed that the federal government should oversee the trusts by means of commissions and a new cabinet officer, the Secretary of Commerce and Industries. In this speech, Roosevelt also noted that railroads abused some privileges. He said the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 had been in some provisions wrong, in others weak. He declared that many citizens complained that rates were not maintained, and rebates were habitually offered to the large shipper at the expense of the smaller competitor. “The act should be amended,” he said. “The railway is a public servant. Its rates should be just to and open to all shippers alike.”
Roosevelt did take action. In his first year in office, while Tarbell worked on her articles, Roosevelt charged the Beef Trust with restraint of trade and brought suit against the Northern Securities railroad combination that monopolized transportation in the Northwest. Northern’s principals—J. Pierpont Morgan, James J. Hall, and E. J. Harriman—were so powerful that their battle for control in 1901 had caused a stock market panic, so Teddy Roosevelt sought to clip their eagle wings. As Republican party leaders told him to go slowly, the public agitated for more legal action against the trusts. Teddy, mindful of the upcoming election and fearful of the mob, began to backpedal.
Tarbell’s series made it even harder for him to avoid the issue of trusts. In his annual message on November 11, 1902, he assured congressmen who clamored for a constitutional amendment to curb business combinations that they already had the power to regulate trusts. Taunted by De
mocrats who wanted to appropriate a quarter million dollars to the attorney general’s office to prosecute the trusts, House Republicans felt compelled to show they too were with the people on the suddenly visible issue. They voted half a million dollars for the purpose without one dissenting vote. MADE GOP POSE AS TRUST-BUSTERS33 the New York World shrieked.
Whatever Tarbell thought of Roosevelt’s handling of business combinations, she found the president a fascinating figure, worthy of her microscopic vision. One night at a White House musical she watched him and thought he looked as if he were about to burst out of his suit. “I felt his clothes might not contain him, he was steamed up, so ready to go, attack anything, anywhere.”34
That thought may have returned to her when Roosevelt went after the Panama Canal. Viola Roseboro described Tarbell’s reaction on the day in November 1903 when the United States acquired it by treaty: “The morning we got the word at McClure’s that Roosevelt had snatched Panama there were gasps and amusement and excitement, but IMT was very grave. That was a dishonorable outrage of strength and she got a line on Teddy that she never lost sight of thereafter. Also she always thought him a delight and a wonderful person and of great value as well as of some disadvantage to his country.”35
Teddy Roosevelt did his best to beguile the press. He sent Baker an advance copy of his annual address, made Lincoln Steffens feel as though he were an adviser, and summoned them all individually to lunch. When Ida Tarbell’s turn came, Finley Peter Dunne commented tartly, “If he can’t convince the lady, he’ll vamp her.”36
Perhaps it was at that White House meeting that she insisted that McClure’s was only concerned with reportage, not revolution. “I don’t object to the facts,” Roosevelt exclaimed, “but you and Baker are not practical!“37
As for John D. Rockefeller, within twelve months of Tarbell’s first exposé, the Rockefeller Institute for medical research announced a pension plan for his employees and made gifts of land to benevolent institutions. Newspapers reported his largess, but highlighted other events as well.
William Randolph Hearst in particular thought the Rockefeller story could boost his newspaper’s circulation. His Evening Journal fairly smacked its figurative lips in a story headed OIL KINGS DIVIDE $20,000,000 MORE. It said: “JDR went down to his office at 26 Broadway to-day and a few hours later emerged $8,000,000 richer than when he entered. Standard Oil had declared its quarterly dividend of $20 per share. This was an increase of $10 over the dividend declared last November.”38
In April 1903, a reporter for Hearst’s Journal asked Ida about Rockefeller’s father, William, insisting he was still alive. She had thought his parents were both in a Cleveland graveyard, but now she began to fear that Hearst would scoop McClure’s. She was so rattled that she got the publication’s name wrong when she wrote Siddall: “I think The World is contemplating an interview with the old gentleman. I am sure we would have done that long ago if he had been in a land where he could be interviewed.”39
The race was on to find the elder Rockefeller. Ida had that most useful of assets, a friend in the enemy’s camp. Through her Lincoln research, she had met Hiram Brown, a former Rockefeller neighbor. Siddall talked to him and learned that Rockefeller’s father had been a dubious character who spent long stretches of time away from home, had been charged with rape, and had quite possibly started a bigamous family.
Tarbell was enchanted: “As to the story of the ‘Old Gentleman,’ I do not know how much I can use of it; that I can use it, however, in some form, is evident, when I come to the character sketch.” She coaxed Siddall to hurry: “I am beginning to be mortally afraid that he will die before we have his photograph.”40
Month after month, Rockefeller and Standard Oil were pilloried in McClure’s but did not respond directly. Craving to know Rockefeller’s reaction, Siddall dispatched Brown to visit the multimillionaire. Brown discovered him physically fitter than in years. In an observation indicative of some humor as well as their attention to detail, Brown told Siddall he was wrong to think an ailment had cost Rockefeller his hair—he still had his eyelashes. However, Rockefeller was openly preoccupied by business despite his “retirement” and in constant touch with the telegraph office in his home that connected him to New York. Possibly, the extremely cautious Rockefeller also smelled a trap. At last, in response to Brown’s questions, he revealed that his father was senile and living on his farm in Iowa, cared for by nieces.
Brown mentioned his “lady friend,” Ida Tarbell, and Rockefeller countered that he should read a book by Gilbert Montague that had been done with the help of S. C. T. Dodd, Standard’s corporate counsel. Free copies of this work, The Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company, were turning up in libraries, newspaper offices, and church rectories around the country.
At length, Rockefeller said of Tarbell’s series: “I tell you, Hiram, things have changed since you and I were boys. The world is full of socialists and anarchists. Whenever a man succeeds remarkably in any particular line of business, they jump on him and cry him down.”
Siddall reported this to Tarbell and concluded: “Brown says that [Rockefeller’s] whole attitude is that of a game fighter who expects to be whacked on the head once in a while. He is not in the least disturbed by any blows he may receive. He maintains the Standard has done more good than harm.”41
A few weeks later Ida journeyed to Cleveland to have a look at Rockefeller for herself. She feared what might happen if Rockefeller discovered her. She arrived early, went to the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, and slipped out later that same day. Meeting her at the morning service was the illustrator George Varian who sketched surreptitiously, flanked by Tarbell and Siddall who blocked the sight of his sketchpad. Tarbell was intent on Rockefeller and was surprised by his attempt to hide his baldness under a skullcap. As his eyes scanned the crowd she was sure he would recognize her and throw them all out. She later described him as dry and massive, an amphibian creature with the neck of a bull and the skin of a snake. She thought him the oldest man in the world. He was sixty-six.42
Once her series began, those with a grievance knew where to apply for redress. Frank Rockefeller, an estranged brother, sent word he would give her documents about the oil man if she would come to him secretly. Somehow disguised with Siddall’s aid, she appeared in his Cleveland office. Frank Rockefeller was vituperative about the way he and a family friend had been relieved of Standard Oil stock; he said venomously that he planned to disinter his children from the family plot lest they ever be forced to lie beside his brother. Tarbell thought his hatred so ugly she left, sympathizing for once with John’s point of view, but carrying away with her information about the stock deal nonetheless.
Standard Oil’s wastebasket, not the courthouse or family friends, furnished her with the most sensational article. According to Ida, a man called on her late one evening bearing an armload of records that proved that the Standard systematically spied on competitors by exploiting access to confidential shipping records.
Over the years, Rockefeller’s firm had evinced an uncanny ability to move ahead of its rivals. Pennsylvanians ruefully called the Standard “The Great Invisible Oil Company.” Many of the independents claimed that their secrets were being leaked via railroad freight offices around the country; but when the charges were investigated, Rockefeller’s men always produced plausible explanations. One told the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 that his employees simply inspected public lists of incoming cars, their contents, and consignors at the depot and that anyone might have done the same.
Ida’s nighttime visitor told her this: a boy he had taught in Sunday school worked for Standard Oil and had had the regular monthly duty of burning records. One day he noticed a familiar name entered repeatedly on forms and letters. Sorting them, he realized that the local railroad office was sending the Standard full details of his teacher’s dealings and that the Standard was using this information to pirate his trade. Amid the rest of the refuse the boy found were simi
lar tabs on other businesses and lists of all competitors’ shipments gathered from confidential freight office books. Much information was on plain white paper, but sometimes recorders carelessly used railroad stationery or signed their names.
The boy took the material to his teacher who conveyed it to Tarbell. When she examined it under her lamp she found so many states represented in detail that it showed that the practice of spying on competitors was not random but was in fact a function of Standard Oil’s marketing division. Using this data, the Standard could decide where to cut prices and by how much so as to drive a competitor from an area; then it could raise prices once a monopoly was secured.
To have come upon this was a great coup, but it revealed that Rogers had lied to her. Sometime before, at his invitation, she had visited the Standard canning works in Long Island City, New York. Its capacity was an astounding seventy-five thousand gallons, yet it was run with an economy that oil region boomtowners never would have considered. Always as captivated by machinery as a mystic by the divine, Tarbell had watched as flat sheets of tin were twirled into containers, filled and capped with the turn of a valve, then boxed, nailed, and carted to the river and on to ports as far away as China. In her enthusiasm, she had decided to write a chapter on the legitimate greatness of the Standard Oil Company.
In this article, which ran in July 1903, Tarbell mentioned “The Standard Information Bureau”—a widespread system of reporters who picked up gossip about competitors for the Standard: “Spies they are called [in the oil regions]. They may deserve the name sometimes, but the service may be perfectly legitimate.”
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