IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  In November 1904, as the series finished, The History of the Standard Oil Company was published in two volumes—complete with 64 appendices of documentation filling 241 pages. Seemingly every newspaper in the country carried Tarbell’s picture and an article about her. She pasted reviews into a big scrapbook so that columns of the Topeka Herald and the Richmond Gazette and the News of Portland, Maine, ran side by side. The New York Times said: “As readable as any ‘story’ with rather more romance than the usual business novel … honest the writer has tried to be to both sides of the controversies …” The Critic wrote: “Miss Tarbell has beaten upon facts rather than upon a gong, and her History of Standard Oil is to the present time the most remarkable book of its kind ever written in this country.” Others continued in the same vein, praising her as restrained, dispassionate, and factual.

  Her scrapbook even included a clipping describing how Samuel McClure had been blackballed from the Ardsley (New York) Country Club by Standard supporters; a notice of Rockefeller’s gift of half a million dollars to Johns Hopkins University; a defense of JDR in the St. John-New Brunswick Globe signed “Ignoramus”; and cartoons. One depicted Ida shooting the entire Rockefeller family with a bow and arrow; another captioned “Let your light shine before men” showed her stoking up a fire. Harper’s Weekly ran an open letter from “Satan” which an editor said they had reason to believe was from Mark Twain. “Satan” detected hypocrisy and asked why charities that accepted guilt money bequeathed in wills were too good to take from the living Rockefeller. The Oil City Derrick, now a Rockefeller organ, ran page after page against Tarbell, calling her work a freak story and saying that she wanted no one but her precious independents to succeed. Next to this, Ida pasted an advisory from the S. S. McClure Company thanking the Derrick for the notices.

  One publication she and McClure’s took very seriously was The Nation. An intelligent, principled weekly which crusaded for reform of the tariff and the civil service systems, it had helped form Tarbell’s thinking; but the essentially patrician publication began to feel the breeze of revolution and chastised Tarbell. Ignoring her 241 pages of careful documentation, the reviewer wrote:

  “… This book seems to have been written for the purpose of intensifying the popular hatred. The writer had either a vague conception of the nature of proof, or she is willing to black the character of Mr. John D. Rockefeller by insinuation and detraction.”

  Tarbell had been plain-spoken in pointing out the independents’ follies, but The Nation claimed that she portrayed Standard Oil as evil incarnate and the oil regions as powers of goodness. It condemned her and other reform-minded journalists as hatemongers:

  “We need reforms badly enough, but we shall not get them until we have an electorate able to control its passions, to reserve its condemnation, to deliberate before it acts. When that time comes, a railing accusation will not be accepted as history.”59

  Tarbell and McClure were outraged, but the Standard was delighted and reprinted it with The Nation’s permission, for circulation to libraries, ministers, and other avenues of public opinion.

  McClure’s did not let up. The editors sought to compound the success of The History of the Standard Oil Company by profiling its founder, and Ida Tarbell was ready. She had said it would take a Balzac to portray the oil business, and the profile she wrote was a Balzacian description of rapacity and greed. She had been gathering anecdotes for it from the very beginning of her investigations and when she wrote, her tone was quite different from the cold arraignment that had characterized her previous articles. It was as if a rich, strong underground pool had been tapped and had come forth in a rush.

  In John D. Rockefeller she found an object worthy of her fury. She found him guilty of baldness, bumps, and being the son of a snake oil dealer. She took his appearance, affected by a stomach ailment and the alopecia that had rendered him hairless, as a moral sign.

  Not for the sake of the oil region was she angry. The victims, buck-shot to his bullet, had victimized themselves. She was furious that such an unscrupulous man could live and act and triumph and she showed no mercy. John D. Rockefeller was a Tarbell hero gone wrong. He was totally self-made, the self-educated child of poor people who had made himself a man of great power. But Rockefeller’s motive had been greed, and his methods those of the bully. Rockefeller possessed superior powers and, to Tarbell’s mind, no circumstances mitigated his misuse of them. In “John D. Rockefeller, A Character Study,” she inveighed:

  “Rich indeed should be the returns to the public for what it has cost to built up a fortune like Mr. Rockefeller’s … Cheap oil? Mr. Rockefeller’s fundamental reason for forming his first combination was to keep up the price of oil. It has been forced down by the inventions and discoveries of his competitors. He has never lowered it a point if it could be avoided, and in times of public stress he had taken advantage of the very misery of the poor to demand higher prices. Nobody has yet forgotten the raising of the price of oil in the coal famine of 1902. Even the coal barons themselves in that winter combined to see that the poor of the great cities received their little bags of coal promptly and at reasonable prices and in preference to rich patrons. But the price of oil and the price of oil-stoves went up. Does it pay the public to trust the control of a great necessity of life to such a man? … Mr. Rockefeller, much as he dislikes the light, cannot escape the fate of his own greatness. All his vast wealth spent in one supreme effort to evade the judgment of men would be but wasted … the greater the power to which he has risen the stronger the light in which he must finally and eternally rest.”60

  To fill out the page, McClure’s excerpted Ruskin on Judas Iscariot.

  Ida’s profile revealed that John D. had driven his brother Frank and a boyhood friend named James Corrigan from the business by needlessly calling in loans. Because of John D. Rockefeller’s scandalous conduct toward his brother and friend, and because of Tarbell’s personal attacks, both author and subject came under fire. Both had to issue statements.

  Silent against every charge until now, John D. Rockefeller instructed his Cleveland attorney Virgil P. Kline to point out that while he may have driven his brother and boyhood friend from the business, an arbitration court had sided with him against Corrigan. Newspapers around the country announced that Tarbell stood by her statements. She insisted, “He presents himself to the public in two phases—as the richest man in the world and as an active adherent of the Christian church. If Mr. Rockefeller did not and had not all his life declared that the church and the Bible were the most precious things in his life, I should hesitate to apply the golden rule to the Corrigan case. As it is, I claim I have that right.”61

  Tarbell, quite pleased with her reply, flattered herself that she came out ahead. Her brother praised her lavishly and John Phillips said she had never handled herself so well, but self-congratulation over the character sketch abated when Siddall received word that Frank Rockefeller was out to get him. Reportedly, Frank was bringing suit against the magazine because McClure’s had smeared their father’s reputation. Frank had only intended to attack his brother, John D.

  Tarbell, who had taken the precaution of submitting the piece to Corrigan for correction, gathered their correspondence. She also dictated an internal report defending her inclusion of the misadventures of Rockefeller père as a key to the character of his son.

  They were in the midst of contacting lawyers and summoning Siddall to New York when Tarbell received an anonymous phone call from a person who said he had come from Cleveland expressly to meet her. Curiosity triumphed over apprehension. She went to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and found Frank Rockefeller. Reports of his anger had been highly exaggerated. He was there to offer her fresh evidence of his brother’s perjury. She interrupted his diatribe to ask if he planned to sue her or McClure’s. Rockefeller admitted he had never expected her to attack his father, but said he was sure he’d get over his hurt.

  After the sketch, some members of the press set about to do to
Tarbell what she had done to Rockefeller: “Is it envy, uncharitableness or what not that induces spasms of attack upon men who get rich and give away money?” Harper’s Weekly asked. The Presbyterian Banner called the work “Sinister and indecent.” In Michigan, The Gateway questioned how Ida Tarbell would feel if she were denied her eyebrows and said a man should be judged by his acts. It said the monster was Tarbell herself and blamed her spleen on her “single blessedness” or spinsterhood.

  What made Tarbell forget judiciousness and objectivity in her all-out attack? Some said she was embittered because of what the Standard had done to her father. Actually, she always realized that people, especially those she loved, had collaborated with their fates. When she sat down to write the Rockefeller profile, her father was lying in the agonies of stomach cancer in Titusville. It is likely that her personal anguish overpowered the governing mechanism that usually made her weigh all sides of a question. She finished her assessment of Rockefeller and hurried to her father’s deathbed.

  Franklin had become ill while visiting Will in Philadelphia. He was taken to Clifton Springs for treatment, then brought home. Fearfully, Ida returned to Titusville. She was so relieved to find him still alive and capable of recognizing her that she allowed herself to hope that her father, who was seventy-eight, might still live.

  Throughout February 1905, she alternated between hope that he would recover and certainty that he would not. Finally, on March 1, after a two-month ordeal, he died, and family life as she had known it was sealed in her father’s grave.

  Sarah, just past forty, stayed with Esther in Titusville while Will and Ida returned to their jobs. Work was always Ida’s antidote to sorrow. She did not stay home long after the funeral. Instead, she took her grief to Kansas where she could throw herself into writing a report on Standard Oil’s war against a new generation of independents.

  The Kansas and Indian Territory oil fields were the richest and most spectacular pools ever discovered in the country. They signaled the shifting of the petroleum boom from western Pennsylvania to the Southwest. This fact was not lost on Standard Oil. Kansas independents and the schoolteachers who invested in the fields were so irate over John D. Rockefeller’s encroachments that the state opened its own refinery in a state prison.

  For ten days Ida Tarbell toured rambunctious Kansas oil lands in a buckboard encrusted with dust. Then, after a night in a boomtown hotel so unsavory that she felt she had to push the bureau against her door, the populace discovered her. Everyone knew about her articles.

  Thirty or forty wildcatters, native Americans among them, serenaded her while she sat talking with a newspaper editor. Then, to her horror, they requested a speech. She passed out cigars which some tied to their lapels as souvenirs. Ida Tarbell, foe of the Standard, was hailed everywhere. She described the furor to Boyden in a letter from Independence, Kansas: “Nothing more grave and more laughable, deeper or shallower, have I ever struck. I’m gradually making my way through the state but there is so much to do. I hope to Heaven that all the foolishness about my respected self which has been published in these papers out here will not reach the office. Believe nothing until I have a hearing.”62

  She added that she would be glad to leave the ruckus of Kansas, where every move she made hit the newspapers and every word she uttered was printed by reporters, sometimes erroneously. When she did agree to speak, Ida urged the Kansans: “You must make yourselves as good refiners, as good transporters, as good marketers, as ingenious, as informed, as imaginative in your legitimate undertakings as [the Standard is] in both their legitimate and illegitimate.” This was not popular. They did not want to hear they might have something to learn from Rockefeller. They wanted to hear something more rousing and less practical. “You have gone over to the Standard!” was one Populist accusation. Meanwhile, Standard Oil sympathizers denounced her as “an enemy to society.”63

  As she traveled home through Missouri, she spoke in a few towns where she was a great success. The Knife and Fork Club of Kansas City was particularly impressed. The Star reported that sensational as her message had been, she herself was the attraction. The Knife and Forkers had expected a masculine old maid. Instead, she, the first woman ever invited to speak to them, arrayed herself in a low-cut mauve gown, threw a silk scarf over her shoulders, and clasped a string of pearls around her neck.

  The Paris, Missouri Herald indicated that Tarbell had vamped her audience: “Instead of sober garb, straight lines and stern simplicity expected … the lines were circles! … Above all, imagine a woman, hated and feared by John D. Rockefeller and his fellow oligarchs, being so feminine as to appear décolleté in order to make her assault more effective!”

  Success wore her out: “It brought fantastic situations where I was utterly unfit to play the part. A woman of twenty-five, fresh, full of zest, only interested in what was happening to her, would have reveled in the experience. But here I was—fifty, fagged and wanting to be let alone while I collected trustworthy information for my articles—dragged to the front as an apostle.”64

  So much was happening that even she, who said she always shrank from self-knowledge, felt that she somehow had to sort things out. She was overwhelmed by reaction to the Standard story—especially since she originally doubted that anyone would care to read it. She was shaken by the death of her father and the hedonism of Sam McClure. Tarbell felt the need of a faithful companion, and so she bought a diary. In the next year, much would be written there.

  Outwardly she was still unflappable: to Lincoln Steffens, the twentieth-century radical with the nineteenth-century gallantry, his colleague’s chief merit was settling the boys’ rambunctious disputes: “Sensible, capable and very affectionate, she knew each one of us and all our idiosyncrasies and troubles. She had none of her own as far as we ever heard.” Upton Sinclair recalled: “Ida Tarbell was largely a conventional-minded lady, sweet and gracious.” Virgin mother, Joan of Arc, exhausted spinster. Perhaps only Mr. Dooley held the key: “That Idarem’s a lady, but she has the punch.”65

  However chaotic her emotions may have been, her professional “punch” was indeed potent. The History of the Standard Oil Company had long-ranging effects. In nearly forty years of history, the Standard Oil Company had a seemingly charmed manner of eluding the slippery fingers of government investigation. Even when the state of Ohio dissolved Standard Oil of Ohio because its charter violated state law, the Standard survived because its trustees did not surrender their certificates. Ida Tarbell’s exposé broke John D. Rockefeller’s luck.

  Let us consider her History apart from the character profile: Other men of wealth had been scrutinized, but the founder of Standard Oil was the one who struck people’s imagination. Rogers was a gambler, Morgan a potentate, and Carnegie a tyrant, but all were public about it. Rockefeller was the wolf in a prayer shawl. “There are worse men than John D. Rockefeller,” said The Arena. “There is probably not one who in the public mind so typifies the grave and startling menace to the social order.”66

  If Tarbell had been writing an analysis of all the economic forces of the era, she might have judged that Rockefeller was no worse than some others, but her ethics were not relative. She made Rockefeller’s Standard Oil a case history of the trusts. She claimed that despite his superior ability and purpose, the rebate was a major component of his success. Rockefeller was the villain of her piece, but there were no heroes. She portrayed independents as having defeated themselves time and time again in their efforts to work together or to believe that they could win, but it was not her nature to tell a hopeless tale. She hoped to inspire. Toward the end of her series, she showed how they were fighting back.

  Critics through the years have sometimes termed her quaint and schoolmarmish for applying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” to the battleground of business, but in this she was a product of her time. American economists of that day felt ethics were to be factored into their science. Even the American Economic Association, founded in
1885, included among its members twenty-three ministers. Rockefeller offered one justification of his questionable practices: “Everyone was doing it. We were not the only ones.” This was not acceptable to the ethically-minded, nor to the Supreme Court of the United States.

  The legal case against the Standard began in St. Louis on November 15, 1906, when Attorney General Charles Bonaparte (grandnephew of that military Bonaparte who was Tarbell’s first successful biographical subject) filed a petition under the Sherman Act against the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, its seventy affiliated corporations, and seven trustees, charging that the defendants had combined and conspired to restrain and monopolize interstate commerce in petroleum. The government charged, as had Tarbell in her book, that Standard Oil conspired to monopolize trade by securing rebates and preferences from railroads by controlling pipelines, by local price cutting, by espionage, by operating under the guise of sham companies, and by eliminating competition.

  The judge affirmed these contentions. The Standard appealed; then, in May of 1911, the Supreme Court upheld the decision. The Standard Oil Company was dissolved. Tarbell was never triumphant over this turn of events. She saw that while the mighty octopus had been chopped into thirty-eight bits, the group continued to function in concert. Moreover, the decision promulgated the rule of reason, which left companies free to operate in restraint of trade as long as it was “reasonable.”

  Among the divisions created by the dissolution were Standard Oil of New Jersey, which became known as Exxon; Standard Oil of New York, or Mobil; Ohio, marketed under the trade name of Boron; Standard Oil of California or Chevron; and Standard Oil of Indiana with its Amoco pumps.

  Extraordinary demand, not legality, eventually promoted rivalry among the Standard Oil companies. Oil became the national source of energy and the acceptance of the automobile created a need far greater than any one group could control. The U.S. Navy’s requirements were so great that Standard’s rivals took on a large share of the business. The industry, however, was destined to be one of cooperation and “enlightened” restraint of trade. During World War I, a Petroleum War Service Committee was formed with the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey as chairman. He and his members recommended that, in the interests of the war effort, they pool production and coordinate all efforts. Thus, emerging rivals from California and the Southwest were soon working in concert with the Standard. The government of the United States, which was to have regulated the oil business, became the client of petroleum interests.