Allegheny College: McKinley, Darrow, and Ida Tarbell

In eighteen fifteen, a Harvard-trained minister named Timothy Alden arrived in Meadville, on Pennsylvania's rugged northwest frontier, and within two months had chartered Allegheny College. The goal was to carry higher education west of the Allegheny Mountains, where the closest thing to a university was a log-cabin school run by a Presbyterian missionary. Alden secured the college's future despite financial crises that forced a switch from Presbyterian to Methodist sponsorship in the eighteen thirties, and Allegheny became the oldest college in continuous operation under the same name west of the Alleghenies.

What Allegheny produced over the next century is almost improbable for a small school tucked into a northwest Pennsylvania valley. William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president of the United States, enrolled here in the late eighteen fifties. College lore insists that McKinley and his roommate led a cow to the top of Bentley Hall's bell tower, and whether or not that explains why his stay was brief, he left for the Civil War and never returned as a student. Clarence Darrow attended for a single year before the Panic of eighteen seventy-three forced him to quit and teach school to fund his own legal education, eventually making him the most celebrated defense attorney in American history.

But the name that stands tallest in Allegheny's hall of fame belongs to Ida Tarbell, who enrolled in eighteen seventy-six as the only woman in her class and graduated in eighteen eighty. Two decades later, her methodical, meticulous investigation of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company ran in McClure's Magazine beginning in nineteen hundred and two. The series, later published as a book, exposed how Standard Oil used secret railroad rebates and predatory pricing to crush competitors. It helped lead to the Supreme Court's nineteen eleven decision breaking up the Standard Oil monopoly. Historians credit Tarbell with inventing the model of investigative journalism that still operates today. From a frontier college on the Pennsylvania frontier, three of the most consequential Americans of the Progressive Era.