Such vigorous inquiry soon revealed that critical memos and reports had vanished from the record. Informed that Standard had destroyed them, Tarbell refused to give up, convinced that if a document had been printed, it would eventually “turn up.” Usually, she was right. In the archives of the New York Public Library, she found the sole remaining report of an obscure thirty-year-old investigation; all the other copies had curiously disappeared. After reaching out to the lawyers and plaintiffs who had conducted the cases, she gradually found everything she needed. “Her sources of information,” McClure proudly noted, “were open to any student who had the industry and patience to study them.”
As the immense scope of her project became evident, Tarbell realized she would need an assistant in Cleveland, where Rockefeller had gotten his start and established the early headquarters of Standard Oil. She wanted someone who was not only clever and curious but who would also “get his fun in the chase” and “be trusted to keep his mouth shut.” In John M. Siddall she found the ideal comrade. “Short and plump, his eyes glowing with excitement,” the twenty-seven-year-old reporter manifested such exuberance during their first interview that she “had a sudden feeling of alarm lest he should burst out of his clothes.” Tarbell later reflected that she “never had the same feeling about any other individual except Theodore Roosevelt.” In the months that followed, she found the partnership “a continuous joy”; eventually the entire McClure’s staff looked forward to “Sid’s” lengthy letters, fascinated by the revealing statistics he compiled or the curious details he had unearthed of Rockefeller’s day-today existence in the city where he lived and worked, Cleveland. Their alliance, Tarbell’s biographer Kathleen Brady writes, “was as illustrious a meeting as that of Holmes and Watson. Only in this case, each was to be Sherlock and no leap of deduction, only clear evidence, was allowed.”
Such evidence could only be gathered through methodical, painstaking research. “Someone once asked me why I did not go first to the heads of the company for my information,” Tarbell explained to an interviewer. “This person did not know overmuch of humanity I think, else he would have realized instantly that the Standard Oil Company would have shut the door of their closet on their skeleton. But after one had discovered the skeleton and had scrutinized him at a very close range, why then shut the door? That is the reason I did not go to the magnates in the beginning.”
Although Tarbell never did secure an interview with the reclusive Rockefeller, she established a warm relationship with Henry H. Rogers, a Standard Oil partner who staunchly believed in the firm and wanted to present his perspective to the public. Learning of the impending series in McClure’s, Rogers sent word to Sam McClure through their mutual friend, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), offering to meet with Tarbell at his home at 26 East 57th Street. “I was a bit scared at the idea,” Tarbell later acknowledged. Previous attempts to arrange personal meetings with company executives had either proven unsuccessful or rendered little beyond generic policy statements: “I had been met with that formulated chatter used by those who have accepted a creed, a situation, a system, to baffle the investigator trying to find what it all means.” Despite her prior frustrations, she was eager for another chance. “It was one thing to tackle the Standard Oil Company in documents . . . quite another thing to meet it face to face.”
Rogers immediately put her at ease. Sixty-two years old, with “a heavy shock of beautiful grey hair,” he struck Tarbell as “by all odds the handsomest and most distinguished figure in Wall Street.” Decades later, she could still recall his features: his “aquiline” nose, “blazing” eyes, and the white mustache partially obscuring his mouth, which she imagined to be “flexible, capable of both firm decision and of gay laughter.” As they began to converse, Tarbell discovered that Rogers had once lived close to her childhood home in a white house on a neighboring hillside. “Oh, I remember it,” Tarbell exclaimed; “the prettiest house in the world, I thought.”
They reached an amicable agreement that day to continue their conversation in a regular series of meetings: Tarbell would share with Rogers her evidence concerning the controversial aspects of Standard’s history; he, in turn, would offer “documents, figures, explanations, and justifications—anything and everything which would enlarge [her] understanding.” From the start, Tarbell made it clear that her own judgment would supersede his on all points. Their talks remained friendly; when the debate grew tense or unproductive, one or the other would simply change the subject. For Tarbell, the interchange proved invaluable, helping her construct work of “unimpeachable accuracy.”
The rigorous editing process at McClure’s and the constant support of her colleagues were both vital to the excellence of Tarbell’s finished work. Early on, when she was “deep into appalling heaps of documentary stuff,” Jaccaci wrote her in Titusville to assure her that the immense jumble of research “will clear up little by little and you will begin to see the possibilities of your story.” And throughout the process, McClure offered reassurance, reading her early letters from the field, counseling her not to “hurt your health or hurt the work by speed.” She should not feel compelled “to write on the monthly demand of a magazine,” he insisted, for “this work will turn out to be our great serial feature for next fall.” This regular exchange of letters sustained Tarbell while she was “separated so completely” from the office colleagues with whom she had shared daily meals and conversation.
By late May 1902, ten months after she began, Ida had completed a rough draft of the first three articles. She wrote to Phillips, then recovering from an illness at his summer home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. She hoped to send the articles and, if he was feeling well enough, plan a visit to discuss them. “They are in such shape that you can see the character of the material and the treatment I propose,” she explained. “I want very much to have your criticism and judgment. It is certainly a great deal more to me than anybody else’s.” Indeed, her deep respect for Phillips’s opinion led her to delay publication until she could answer his concerns.
Viola Roseboro marveled at Tarbell’s willingness to accept harsh criticism from both Phillips and McClure. Both expected to “be satisfied and thrilled; they pounded her and her stuff to make the best of it page by page,” Roseboro recalled. Tarbell absorbed the barrage and never flinched. She kept revising, cutting, organizing, and rewriting to meet their demands that she move the narrative forward and strip the text of inessential material. Finally, when she felt “moderately comfortable” with her opening articles, she decided to put the work aside for her regular summer vacation—hoping to return with clearer perspective and renewed intensity. “It has become a great bugbear to me,” she confessed to Siddall. “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.”
Tarbell’s first installment explores the birth of the oil industry in the region where she was raised. The “irrepressible energy” of the pioneers who settled “this little corner of Pennsylvania” transformed the landscape and created an entire commercial machine. Scores of small businesses flourished: refineries were necessary to distill the oil, storage tanks to hold it, barrels to carry it, and teamsters to haul it to shipping points on the river or the railroad. In twelve years, as hamlets became towns and towns became cities, the region metamorphosed “from wilderness to market-place.” The residents “boasted that the day would soon come when they would refine for the world.”
As Tarbell’s story unfolds, she describes how the enterprising individuals whose energy and independence brought such prosperity to the region finally proved no match for the regimented power of Standard Oil. Her narrative plainly documents how the ascendancy of the company was aided at every stage by discriminatory railroad rates and illegal tactics—bribery, fraud, criminal underselling, and intimidation. While Tarbell acknowledges John D. Rockefeller’s “genius for detail” and admires his rare strength “in energy, in intelligence, in dauntlessness,” she demonstrates com
pellingly that he would never have achieved his monopoly without special transportation privileges. At a time when Rockefeller and his partners in Cleveland held only one tenth of the refining business in the county, he certified to the railroads that he had control of the industry. Providing his organization cheaper rates than their competitors, he argued, was in their interests. “You will have but one party to deal with,” he inveigled. “Think of the profits!” And so, swayed by the prospect of avoiding rate wars and enduring the “wear and tear” of securing quotas, the railroad owners entered into clandestine contracts providing Rockefeller with substantial rebates from the published prices.
With this insider deal granting him rates far below those of competitors, and simultaneously kicking back “the extra hundred percent” that outsiders were now forced to pay, Tarbell described how Rockefeller “swooped down” on the independent oil men in Cleveland. “There is no chance for anyone outside,” he announced, “but we are going to give everybody a chance to come in. You are to turn over your refinery to my appraisers.” Resistors soon found they could not compete against the lower freight rates Standard enjoyed. Within three months, twenty-one of the twenty-six refiners in Cleveland had sold their assets to Standard.
Rockefeller next laid siege to the Oil Creek refiners. “They were there at the mouth of the wells,” noted Tarbell. “What might not this geographical advantage do in time?” In her suspenseful installment, “The Oil War of 1872,” Tarbell chronicles the defiant struggle of independents when they learned freight rates would suddenly double. More than 3,000 people gathered at the Opera House in Titusville to protest the ruinous rate inflation. It had long been understood that since “the railroad held its right of way from the people,” it must “be just to the people, treating them without discrimination,” regardless of the volume of business. The Creek oilmen formed a Petroleum Producers Union, demanding investigations by state and federal authorities, and instituted a series of lawsuits. Unlike Rockefeller they had neither the patience nor the capital for protracted litigation. In the end, “from hopelessness, from disgust, from ambition, from love of money,” the majority of the local oil producers “gave up the fight for principle” and succumbed to Standard Oil.
Nevertheless, a few intrepid independents refused to submit. “To the man who had begun with one still and had seen it grow by his own energy and intelligence to ten, who now sold 500 barrels a day where he once sold five, the refinery was the dearest spot on earth save his home,” Tarbell explained. Where persuasion and simple coercion failed, Rockefeller resorted to more iniquitous tactics. Tarbell uncovered a system of espionage by which Standard bribed railroad agents to access confidential shipping records, detailing “the quantity, quality, and selling price of independent shipments.”
Information in hand, Rockefeller knew exactly how much to undercut prices in a particular region to guarantee the elimination of small competitors. One woman testified that “her firm had a customer in New Orleans to whom they had been selling from 500 to 1,000 barrels a month, and that the Standard representative made a contract with him to pay him $10,000 a year for five years to stop handling the independent oil and take Standard oil!” If undercutting the refiners proved insufficient, retailers were directly threatened. Indeed, grocery stores selling oil refined by independents were themselves hounded and harassed to the point that their businesses failed. Of all the machinations that enabled Rockefeller to build his monopoly, Tarbell found these measures the most insufferable. “The unraveling of this espionage charge, the proofs of it,” she later said, “turned my stomach against the Standard in a way that the indefensible and robust fights over transportation had never done. There was a littleness about it that seemed utterly contemptible compared to the immense genius and ability that had gone into the organization.”
By 1887, Tarbell writes, Rockefeller “had completed one of the most perfect business organizations the world has ever seen, an organization which handled practically all of a great natural product.” With “competition practically out of the way, it set all its great energies to developing what it had secured.” Most important, Rockefeller now had the power to control prices. Rather than use this domination and the efficiencies of scale to reduce costs, Standard Oil sought to maximize profits. Wherever competition was extinguished, Tarbell maintained, the consumer paid more. Under investigative duress Standard would temporarily reduce prices, only to jack them up in the same area once the scrutiny ceased. “Human experience long ago taught us,” she warned, “that if we allow a man or a group of men autocratic powers in government or church, they use that power to oppress and defraud the public.”
Throughout her series, Tarbell acknowledged Standard Oil’s “legitimate greatness” and recognized the extraordinary business acumen of John D. Rockefeller: “Plants wisely located—The smallest detail in expense looked out for—Quick adaptability to new conditions as they arise—Economy introduced by the manufacture of supplies—Profit paid to nobody—Profitable extension of products and by-products—A general capacity for seeing big things and enough daring to lay hold of them.” Nevertheless, she concludes, while “these qualities alone would have made a great business . . . it would not have been the combination whose history we have traced.”
Tarbell’s final assessment of Rockefeller’s practices and unethical maneuvering is unsparing: He began his ascent by flouting the common law to secure favorable rates from the railroads, allowing him to drive his rivals out. “At the same time he worked with the railroads to prevent other people getting oil to manufacture, or if they got it he worked with the railroads to prevent the shipment of the product. If it reached a dealer, he did his utmost to bully or wheedle him to countermand his order. If he failed in that, he undersold until the dealer, losing on his purchase, was glad enough to buy thereafter of Mr. Rockefeller.” In the end, “every great campaign against rival interests which the Standard Oil Company has carried on has been inaugurated, not to save its life, but to build up and sustain a monopoly in the oil industry.”
In her closing paragraph, Tarbell issues a challenge: “And what are we going to do about it?” Echoing McClure’s celebrated editorial, she exhorts her readers, the American public, to take action. “For it is OUR business,” she insists, “we, the people of the United States, and nobody else, must cure whatever is wrong in the industrial situation, typified by this narrative of the growth of the Standard Oil Company.”
“YOU ARE TODAY, THE MOST famous woman in America,” McClure told the forty-five-year-old Tarbell six months after her sensational series appeared. “People universally speak of you with such a reverence that I am getting sort of afraid of you,” he bantered. For the accolades were imposing: A journalist for The Outlook proclaimed her “a Joan of Arc among moderns,” crusading “against trusts and monopolies.” Another journalist declared her “The New Woman,” a powerful and independent agent of social change. “At least one American takes rank with the leading biographers and historians of the old world,” the Lowell (Massachusetts) Sun remarked, and “women are proud to know that one is a woman, Miss Ida Minerva Tarbell.” The Los Angeles Times called her “the strongest intellectual force among the women of the United States,” while the Washington Times maintained that she had “proven herself to be one of the most commanding figures in American letters.”
Tarbell was invited to speak at numerous colleges, clubs, and law schools. Members of the Twentieth Century Club were reportedly enthralled to hear “the woman who talks like a man,” while a Missouri newspaperman described an audience enthralled by the tall, stately woman, “so feminine as to appear décolleté in order to make her assault more effective!” Yet, despite her immense professional achievement, influence, and acclaim, Ida Tarbell was the only person in her office not invited to the first annual publishers’ dinner. Newspapermen had met annually for several years, but this was the first such official assemblage of magazine publishers and editors together with writers and public officials. President
Roosevelt served as the keynote speaker, and the men-only guest list included cabinet and Supreme Court members as well as prominent senators and congressmen. “It is the first time since I came into the office that the fact of petticoats has stood in my way,” Ida confessed to Ray Baker, “and I am half inclined to resent it.”
The emergence of humorous commentary surrounding “Miss Tarbell” and her exploits only served to underscore her growing popularity. The Washington Post facetiously suggested “that Mr. Rockefeller would be glad to pay the expense if some man should win Miss Ida Tarbell and take her on a leisurely tour of the world for a honeymoon.” The Chicago Daily Tribune noted that “Miss Ida Tarbell goes calmly on jabbing her biographical hatpin into Mr. Rockefeller.” Even on Broadway, the season’s biggest hit, The Lion and the Mouse, featured a thinly veiled Tarbell character as the mouse that frees the lion Rockefeller from “the net of avarice.” The play’s young female author enters the magnate’s household under the guise of writing a benign biography. In fact, she seeks documents that will clear her father of unjust corruption charges leveled by the Rockefeller character. Once inside, she successfully clears her father’s name, changes “Rockefeller’s disposition from sordid to benevolent,” and, in a final melodramatic twist, is wooed by the tycoon’s son!
The McClure’s series that had inspired this theatrical parable was read and discussed across the nation. Most important for Tarbell, the reaction from critics was overwhelmingly positive. They applauded her “accumulation of facts,” stunning “in their significance,” her “intimate style,” and her ability to tell a complex story “remarkable for being nearly all plot.” With each installment, she left the reader “in a state of lively suspense” as to what might follow. Above all, she was praised repeatedly for the fairness of her presentation. “She never rants,” one critic observed. “She never howls and waves her arms.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 49