Ida Tarbell and the Dismantling of Standard Oil

Ida Tarbell's father had been a barrel maker in western Pennsylvania, and he had watched his business destroyed in the winter of eighteen seventy-two when Standard Oil moved through his region the way it had moved through Cleveland. She was a teenager. She did not forget it.

By nineteen oh two she was a staff writer at McClure's Magazine in New York, and she began publishing what would eventually become nineteen articles on the structure and methods of Standard Oil. She had obtained internal documents. She had conducted interviews with company insiders. With the help of Mark Twain, she had even secured candid conversations with one of Standard Oil's most senior executives, Henry Rogers, who apparently misjudged what she intended to do with his candor.

The series ran from November of nineteen oh two through nineteen oh four. It was the most widely read magazine journalism of its era. Tarbell laid out, methodically and with primary documentation, how the railroad rebate system worked, how competitors were forced to sell or bankrupted, how the company functioned as a political entity that purchased legislators and regulators as readily as it purchased refineries.

President Theodore Roosevelt, who had labeled investigative journalists like Tarbell "muckrakers," meaning to be dismissive, watched as her reporting built the public case that made a federal antitrust suit unavoidable. The Supreme Court ordered Standard Oil dissolved in nineteen eleven.

Tarbell became the most famous journalist in America. Rockefeller never spoke publicly about her by name. He reportedly dismissed her only as "Miss Tarbarrel." He lived until nineteen thirty-seven and watched as the companies formed from the breakup of his creation grew larger than he had ever imagined a single company could be.