Ida Tarbell

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

by Bhu Srinivasan  · 25 Sep 2017  · 801pp  · 209,348 words

ear was attuned to fortune’s call, and who had the daring and the energy to risk everything he possessed on an oil lease,” wrote Ida Tarbell. With this influx of men, along with Drake’s technique, “oil poured forth in floods.” Tarbell’s father was such a man. He was a

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rough-hewn, swaggering reputation: “They loved the game, and every man of them would take his last dollar on the chance at striking oil,” concluded Ida Tarbell. To her there was something heroic in the character of such men, both winners and losers, and their willful and enthusiastic participation in this rugged

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paid, but the indisputable fact is that the vast majority of Cleveland refineries sold out to Standard Oil within an alarmingly short time frame. To Ida Tarbell this was Standard Oil’s original sin that tainted all future achievements. Rockefeller often defended the transactions by saying that he offered stock in Standard

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take on other powerful interests, with magazines such as Harper’s, Collier’s, and McClure’s leading the charge against big business. The previous year, Ida Tarbell had eviscerated John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil in a series of articles in McClure’s. As if on cue, Collier’s found a target

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Mariani: Ibid., 22. a prohibition law: Ibid., 27. Pemberton’s “temperance drink”: Ibid., 29, 30. labyrinth of transactions: Ibid., 36. “ideal brain tonic” . . . : Ibid., 60. Ida Tarbell had eviscerated: Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, ed. David M. Chalmers (New York: Dover, 2003). the industry’s revenue: Ibid

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

by Daniel Yergin  · 23 Dec 2008  · 1,445pp  · 469,426 words

of the Standard Oil Company (New York: McClure, Phillips & Company, 1904), vol. 1, pp. 105-06. [13] Vinnie Crandall Hicks to Ida Tarbell, June 29, 1905, T-020 and Marshall Bond to Ida Tarbell, July 3, 1905, T-021, Tarbell papers ("Sunday school" and "Buzz"); Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences, pp. 25-26; Nevins, Study in

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. Pratt, "The Petroleum Industry in Transition: Antitrust and the Decline of Monopoly Control in Oil," Journal of Economic History 40 (December 1980), pp. 815-37; Ida Tarbell, All in the Day's Work (New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. 215 ("no end of the oil"). Chapter 5 The Dragon Slain The old house

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Beef Trust, but discarded both. One of the writers then suggested the discovery of oil in California. No, replied the managing editor, a woman named Ida Tarbell. "We have got to find a new plan of attacking it," she said. "Something that will show clearly not only the magnitude of the industries

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decided to take it on. Making a pilgrimage with McClure to a mud bath at an ancient spa in Italy, she won his approval. So Ida Tarbell began the research that would eventually topple Standard Oil. Life is not without its ironies, and the book that emerged from Tarbell's research would

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stand as the final revenge of the Oil Regions against their conquerors. For Ida Tarbell had grown up in the boom-and-bust communities of the Oil Regions. Her father, Frank Tarbell, had gone into business as a tank maker

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build a handsome new house for his family. In that remnant and reminder of one of the most extreme of all the booms-and-busts, Ida Tarbell spent her adolescence. (Later, she considered writing the story of Pithole—"nothing so dramatic as Pithole in oil history," she said.) Frank Tarbell allied himself

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Regions, his working life was to be dominated by the struggles against the advance of Standard Oil and the pain that went with it. Later, Ida Tarbell's brother William was to become one of the senior officers of the independent Pure Oil Company and set up its German marketing operation. From

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threatening exactly what her father had warned her about when he raised a question about the condition of McClure's finances. "Well, I'm sorry," Ida Tarbell replied sharply, "but of course that makes no difference to me."[5] She would not be stayed. An indefatigable and exhaustive researcher, she also became

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. Twain was also a friend of McClure's, and he inquired of the publisher. One thing led to another, and Twain ended up arranging for Ida Tarbell to meet Rogers. She now had her connection. Her meeting with Rogers took place in January 1902. She was apprehensive about encountering the powerful Standard

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been happier than in those eariy days. He may have been sincere—or a good psychologist who had done his homework. He succeeded in charming Ida Tarbell; years later she was still to call him fondly "as fine a pirate as ever flew his flag in Wall Street." Over the next two

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as big and rich as they could, but only by legitimate means. But they had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me." Ida Tarbell was not yet quite done with her story. She followed up in 1905 with a final attack, a furious personal portrait of Rockefeller. "She found

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were coming out, an old neighbor, dropping in to visit the oil tycoon, brought up the subject of what he called Rockefeller's "lady friend"—Ida Tarbell. "I tell you," Rockefeller replied, "things have changed since you and I were boys. The world is full of socialists and anarchists. Whenever a man

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: Harvard University Press, 1977); Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chap. 7; Kathleen Brady, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (New York: Seaview/Putnam, 1984), pp. 120-23 ("great feature" and "new plan of attacking"). H. H. Rogers complained to

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Ida Tarbell that he could not understand how Harper's could have published William Demarest Lloyd's Wealth Against Commonwealth, as he "had known Harry Harper socially

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out of society that had something to do with the Harpers publishing that book." Interview with H. H. Rogers, T-004, Tarbell papers. [5] Brady, Ida Tarbell, pp. 115 ("holding people off'), 110 ("playing cards"), 123 ("Well, I'm sorry"); Tarbell, All in the Day's Work, pp. 19, 204 ("Pithole"), 207

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("Don't do it"). [6] Joseph Siddell to Ida Tarbell, T-084 ("most interesting figure"); Standard Oil—Rachel Crothers Group, T-014, p. 3 ("confession of failure"), Interviews with H. H. Rogers, T-004 ("ask

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's Letters (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917), pp. 612-13 ("only man I care for"); Hidy and Hidy, Standard Oil, vol. 1, p. 662; Brady, Ida Tarbell, pp. 125-29 ("straightforward narrative"); "Would Miss Tarbell See Mr. Rogers," Harper's Magazine, January 1939, p. 141. [7] Standard Oil—Rachel Crothers Group, T

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-014, p. 13, Tarbell papers ("turned my stomach"); Brady, Ida Tarbell, pp. 137-57 ("very interesting to note," "most remarkable," McClure's comments, "guilty of baldness," "lady friend" and Rockefeller's response); Tarbell, History of Standard

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onslaughts of the Standard Oil Trust. He hated Standard Oil, and had been one of the heroic battlers against it depicted in the pages of Ida Tarbell's history of the trust. Both Gulbenkian and Teagle had been outstanding students of petroleum technology. At Cornell University, Teagle seemed to be manager or

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competitors. In 1909, Teagle became a director of Standard Oil, taking the chair of the powerful H. H. Rogers, who had, among other things, been Ida Tarbell's inside source. Teagle was only thirty-one. One newspaper predicted that he had been picked to fill the "John D. shoes" and reported that

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far as to chair an official investigation into prostitution, on behalf of the city of New York. The younger Rockefeller even established a dialogue with Ida Tarbell, his father's "lady friend" and muckraking nemesis. He had met her at a conference in 1919 and had gone out of his way to

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." That was in 1924. Now, four years later, the younger Rockefeller was no less aroused by the specter of wrongdoing in Standard of Indiana than Ida Tarbell had been by the wrongdoing in the old Trust. By profession, he was a philanthropist, not an oil man, and he had made a habit

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Indiana, pp. 366-434 (the battle); M. A. & R., "Continental Trading Co. Ltd.," March 10, 1928, J.D.R., Jr., Business Interests, Rockefeller Archives; Brady, Ida Tarbell, pp. 210,232 (Tarbell and Rockefeller, Jr.). On John D. Rockefeller, Jr., see Collier and Horowitz, Rockefellers, pp. 79-83,104-6. [7] Gibb and

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eventually lodged not in the NRA, but in the Interior Department, where Harold Ickes held undisputed sway. Rooted in the progressive, trust-busting tradition of Ida Tarbell and Theodore Roosevelt, Ickes had spent much of his career campaigning against "interests." He was not exactly an advocate or even a friend of business

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and stylish, she carried the European savoir faire required to get her through all sorts of situations. While she had the resoluteness and independence of Ida Tarbell, she was not a critic of the industry, but rather provided a channel for communication and intelligence in its great years of global expansion. Wisecracking

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Louisiana, who "customarily ran for office against Standard Oil." (As part of his personal war against Standard, Long had once offered the by-then-elderly Ida Tarbell one hundred dollars for an out-of-print copy of her Standard Oil history.) Rathbone soared through the Jersey organization to the top position. As

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. Sharp papers, University of Texas at Austin Slade-Barker papers, Middle East Center, Oxford George Otis Smith papers, University of Wyoming Stimson Diary, Yale University Ida Tarbell papers, Drake Well Museum, Titusville, Penn. James M. Townsend papers, Drake Well Museum, Titusville, Penn. Private archives Oral Histories Winthrop Aldrich, Baker Library, Harvard Business

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, 1978. Bowie, Robert R. Suez 1956. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Bradley, Omar N. A Soldier's Story. New York: Henry Holt, 1951. Brady, Kathleen. Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckracker. New York: Seaview/Putnam, 1984. Brands, H. W. "The Cairo-Tehran Connection in Anglo-American Rivalry in the Middle East, 19511953

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his first car. 1901 William Knox D'Arcy acquires a concession in Persia. Gusher at Spindletop in Texas; beginning of Sun, Texaco, Gulf. 1902-04 Ida Tarbell's History of Standard Oil Company serialized in McClure's. 1913 Wright Brothers' first flight. 1904-05 Japan defeats Russia. 1905 Revolution of 1905 in

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chaos of the oil business, created the great Standard Oil Trust, which soon dominated the industry and made him the richest man in America, (3) Ida Tarbell, muckraker and America's first great woman journalist, fearlessly exposed Standard Oil. Her main target, John D. Rockefeller, called her "Miss Tar Barrel.", (4) Arthur

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

by Tim Wu  · 14 Jun 2018  · 128pp  · 38,847 words

no particular technological advantages over its rivals. It did, however, have the strategic genius of Rockefeller and his particular talent for industry conquest. As journalist Ida Tarbell would write of him, Rockefeller “was like a general who, besieging a city surrounded by fortified hills, views from a balloon the whole great field

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. His opportunity was created by the publication, in 1904, of a sensational and widely read history of Standard Oil in McClure’s magazine by reporter Ida Tarbell. The History of the Standard Oil Company, nineteen parts in total, was a product of extensive reporting, and it told the full story of both

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Citizens,” Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Perspectives on Politics 12 (2014): 3. 59 “was like a general who”: “John D. Rockefeller, A Character Sketch,” Ida Tarbell, McClure’s Magazine, July 1905. 60 “‘But we don’t want to sell’”: The History of the Standard Oil Company

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, Ida Tarbell, Macmillan Company, 1904. 61 “there was no more faithful baptist”: The History of the Standard Oil Company, Ida Tarbell, Macmillan Company, 1904. 61 “A man always has two reasons”: The House of Morgan: An American

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

by Ron Chernow  · 1 Jan 1997  · 1,106pp  · 335,322 words

to be missing from his own biographies, flitting through them like a ghostly, disembodied figure. For the principal muckrakers, such as Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell, he served as shorthand for the Standard Oil trust, his personality submerged in its machinations. Even in the two-volume biography by Allan Nevins, who

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to have access to the papers of five distinguished predecessors, all of whom left behind complete research files. I combed through the abundant papers of Ida Tarbell at the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Pennsylvania, Henry Demarest Lloyd at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and Allan Nevins at Columbia University,

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from dodging controversy, Rockefeller suggested a novel structure for this retrospective talk: Inglis would read passages from Rockefeller’s two chief antagonists, Henry Lloyd and Ida Tarbell (whose influential broadside had been published in the early 1900s), and Rockefeller would refute them, paragraph by paragraph. Having dismissed their indictments as beneath his

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years its wells were exhausted from fire and overproduction. Before the town reverted back to sylvan peace, people began to scavenge for scrap. For $600, Ida Tarbell’s father bought the fancy Bonta House hotel, constructed a few years earlier for $60,000, and carried off its lumber, doors, and windows

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, whether in drilling or in auxiliary services; people could charge two or three times as much as they dared to ask in the city. Ida Tarbell speculated that “this little corner of Pennsylvania absorbed a larger portion of men probably than any other spot in the United States. There were lieutenants

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savage competitive strife. Without doubt, the Lake Shore deal marked a turning point for Rockefeller, the oil industry, and the entire American economy. Decades later, Ida Tarbell condemned it as Rockefeller’s original sin from which all others sprang. “Mr. Rockefeller certainly saw by 1868 that he had no legitimate superiority over

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colossal scale as Rockefeller’s. It was therefore disingenuous of him to suggest that rebates played only an incidental role in his success. So were Ida Tarbell and other detractors justified in tarring Rockefeller’s whole career based on railroad rebates? Unfortunately, the controversy was played out in a gray area of

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slackened. He therefore paid a price for his rebates and felt that equal rates for all shippers would have unfairly penalized his firm. Perhaps because Ida Tarbell trained a glaring spotlight on the rebate issue, Rockefeller insisted vehemently in later interviews that the real profitability of his firm lay elsewhere. In an

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Nevertheless, by the end of the Civil War, a widespread belief had begun to take hold that railroads were common carriers and should shun favoritism. Ida Tarbell cited provisions in the Pennsylvania state constitution that, as she interpreted them, compelled railroads to serve as common carriers and avoid discrimination. Yet in the

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industry’s early history. The man with the hypertrophied craving for order was about to impose his iron rule on this lawless, godless business. As Ida Tarbell described Rockefeller in 1870, he was “a brooding, cautious, secretive man, seeing all the possible dangers as well as all the possible opportunities in

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sales to the cabal. By moonlight, the producers patrolled Oil Creek on horseback to guard against any clandestine drilling that would subvert their cause. Ida Tarbell recalled how her father had proudly spurned a lucrative contract to ship oil to the conspirators for a tempting $4.50 a barrel. In the

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no outside refiner could bring crude oil to Cleveland and manufacture it without a loss,” rival refiner J. W. Fawcett of Fawcett and Critchley told Ida Tarbell in the early 1900s.62 “The refiners became prematurely alarmed at the reports of destructive competition and inability to secure crude oil, and they ‘fell

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want to be saved. They want to go on and serve the devil and keep on in their wicked ways.”4 In her influential polemic, Ida Tarbell evoked a paradise of free, independent producers in western Pennsylvania, “ruddy and joyous” men, enamored of competition, who were snuffed out by the sinister

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malignant personality. In truth, like many retiring personalities, he provoked varied reactions in people. One cooper who sold him barrels in the early days told Ida Tarbell that “Rockefeller was never a great talker; that he was not liked by his fellows; that everybody was afraid of him; and that he was

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of 1876. Perhaps he believed his wife would find relief from the lake breezes at Forest Hill. Eager to expose Rockefeller as a tasteless vulgarian, Ida Tarbell mocked the Forest Hill house as “a monument of cheap ugliness,” and other satirical critics rushed to pile on equally insulting epithets. 1 This

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them a refining quota. In thrashing out this deal, Rockefeller and his new secret partners agreed to communicate by a special post-office box, prompting Ida Tarbell to write, “In fact, smugglers and house-breakers never surrounded their operations with more mystery.”45 If Rockefeller imagined he had neutralized a rival, he

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of bribery; of course nothing could be proved.”14 In all likelihood, Potts didn’t want to admit that he had been outwitted by Rockefeller. Ida Tarbell, in her romanticized view of some of Rockefeller’s foes, converted Colonel Potts into an incorruptible martyr, the Abraham Lincoln of the oil industry, crucified

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connecting oil wells to railroad trunk lines. He would have extended his reach, in short, into every nook and cranny of the oil industry. As Ida Tarbell noted, after the Columbia Conduit fell into Rockefeller’s lap, “Practically not a barrel of oil could get to a railroad without [Rockefeller’s]

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17 Whether this deal was executed is unclear, but it was a blatant bid to connive with a major railroad executive. In later years, when Ida Tarbell made railroad manipulation the focal point of her Standard Oil indictment, Rockefeller pleaded ignorance of such dealings, claiming they were handled by his colleagues while

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Rockefeller tried to deny responsibility for his more deplorable actions, he had legions of critics who loudly proclaimed that he had maliciously ruined them. As Ida Tarbell noted, his foes endowed him with superhuman powers. “Strange as the statement may appear, there is no disputing that by 1884 the Oil Regions

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had no kind words to spare for Standard Oil. Lloyd marshaled every wispy allegation made against the trust and printed it as gospel truth. Where Ida Tarbell later portrayed Rockefeller and his cohorts as superb if immoral businessmen, Lloyd presented them as brazen criminals who owed everything to diabolical deeds. Later on

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. When he argued that the South Improvement Company never died but became Rockefeller’s master blueprint, he laid down a line of argument followed by Ida Tarbell. What also gave the book its force was Lloyd’s political message: “Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.”27 As the trusts’ power

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116 At the time, few companies published annual reports. Yet Frank interpreted his brother’s behavior in darkly conspiratorial terms. Several years later, he told Ida Tarbell that when he met with him to plead for more time for Corrigan, John said, “Frank, persuade Corrigan to sell me his Standard Oil

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friends, and Baptist clergy who had always formed his social circle. He showed no interest in old-money clubs, parties, or organizations. Commenting on this, Ida Tarbell branded Rockefeller a “social cripple” and detected an inferiority complex that made him afraid to venture beyond his home turf, but his behavior actually connoted

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, a hater of cities and lover of the open air (playing golf & skating all the time at Lakewood) etc.65 James wrote this while Ida Tarbell was inflaming popular opinion against Standard Oil. He urged Rockefeller to discard his policy of silence and combat the attacks by letting the public become

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writing fiction. . . . I had planned to write the great American novel, having the Standard Oil Company as a backbone!” 34 After receiving McClure’s blessing, Ida Tarbell launched the series in November 1902, feeding the American public rich monthly servings of Rockefeller’s past misdeeds. She went back to the early Cleveland

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a long career, everything Rockefeller had thought safely buried and forgotten, rose up before him in haunting and memorable detail. Before she was done, Ida Tarbell turned America’s most private man into its most public and hated figure. The inspiration for publishing the anatomy of a major trust came from

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barely containing his rage, that Rockefeller and his associates embodied “the most dangerous tendencies in modern life.” 48 At one point, when he learned that Ida Tarbell had met with Henry H. Rogers, Lloyd thought she might be in cahoots with the company and warned his Pennsylvania contacts to watch out for

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meeting ended their relationship.58 While stewing about Rogers, Rockefeller would have been equally shocked and wounded had he seen the acidulous comments made to Ida Tarbell by his old pal Henry M. Flagler, who portrayed the titan as petty and miserly. After their confidential talk, Tarbell recorded in her notes, “

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business. This was a tactical blunder, for in dodging Tarbell he inadvertently seemed to validate her portrait. From the perspective of nearly a century later, Ida Tarbell’s series remains the most impressive thing ever written about Standard Oil—a tour de force of reportage that dissects the trust’s machinations with

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the character study steeled Rockefeller against Tarbell’s valid strictures about his business methods. For Rockefeller, this malice was the final proof he needed of Ida Tarbell’s bias against him. As legions of Rockefeller enemies sought interviews with Tarbell, she was bound to encounter the most vituperative foe, his brother Frank

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ungrateful brother about the true source of the money that had so long sustained him. For nearly three years, from November 1902 to August 1905, Ida Tarbell fired projectiles at Rockefeller and Standard Oil without taking fire in return. As one newspaper wondered aloud, “Is the Pen Mightier than the Money-

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for many years. An articulate critic of the trusts, he was a leader of the social-gospel movement. Now, armed with facts supplied directly by Ida Tarbell herself, Gladden rose up in his Congregational church one Sunday morning to deliver a stinging tirade against the $100,000 gift. “The money proffered

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protested that Standard Oil dominated the state’s pipelines, and they also accused it of conspiring with the railroads. Their passions were fanned both by Ida Tarbell’s articles and by a dramatic tour she made through the oil fields. Suddenly, Commissioner Garfield was summoning Archbold and Rogers to question them about

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moment when corporations had not adapted to the new media and lacked any public-relations apparatus. For nearly three years, Standard Oil was assailed by Ida Tarbell and made only halfhearted responses. When editorials appeared impugning the McClure’s series, for instance, Rockefeller had copies circulated widely. And for years, Standard

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scrapbooks, stuffed with the hundreds of articles about him that appeared around the world each year. Though he had spurned many chances to respond to Ida Tarbell and declined offers to write his life, Rockefeller now decided to publish his memoirs in Tarbell-like monthly installments in The World’s Work.

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and development that are needed.” 65 Though Rockefeller’s memoirs received mixed reviews, they helped to humanize his image. Everyone, of course, was eager for Ida Tarbell’s reaction, and she duly delivered a booming cannonade of criticism to a Chicago newspaper: Listen: There is the Mr. Rockefeller of his autobiography, for

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father’s factotum and to acquire a separate identity. Emerging from Senior’s shadow, Junior re-created himself as a reformer, placing himself alongside the Ida Tarbells and Henry Demarest Lloyds of the world. Junior explored the murky realm of Manhattan bordellos at arm’s length, as if afraid to expose himself

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toadying and reverential” and advised the Rockefellers not to publish it.41 Following a suggestion from Ivy Lee, Junior naively rushed the manuscript over to Ida Tarbell in her apartment on Gramercy Park in Manhattan. They had worked together at an industrial conference arranged by President Wilson in 1919 and developed a

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shantytowns. Even something of a muckraker in his early days, he had admired the work of Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and other colleagues of Ida Tarbell. In 1922, he delivered a controversial sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” that was such a strong, unadulterated statement of modernist beliefs that he was

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atmosphere of the Depression. In such polemics as The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson, critics returned to the view popularized by Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell that Rockefeller had been the greatest corporate brigand of his day and owed his success to his ruthlessness and dishonesty, not to his business acumen

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Oil successor firms—Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and Chevron—numbered among the fifty largest companies on earth. To an extent that would have seemed inconceivable in Ida Tarbell’s heyday, the newspaper obituaries dwelled on Rockefeller the benign philanthropist, not Rockefeller the ferocious trust king. He was “the world’s greatest philanthropist and

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. RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Cleveland.” RAC, Inglis notes, 4.12, “Hoster Manuscript,” p. 71. IMT, B 1/14, letter from J. M. Siddall to Ida Tarbell, October 26, 1903 RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Cleveland.” William H. Allen, Rockefeller, p. 249. John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences, p. 52. Ibid., p.

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, Inglis interview, p. 1477. Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, vol. I, p. 208. RAC, III 1.2 B36 F270. Brady, Ida Tarbell, p. 11. Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 272. John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences, p. 59. RAC, Inglis interview, p. 1. AN, B130.

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John D. Rockefeller and Party Summer 1906. Privately printed copy in RAC. Birmingham, Stephen. The Grandes Dames. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. Brady, Kathleen. Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker. New York: Seaview/Putnam, 1984. Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 . New York: Simon and

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30–31, 1932. McGuire, William. “Firm Affinities: Jung’s Relations with Britain and the United States.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 40 (1995). Miller, Ernest C. “Ida Tarbell’s Second Look at Standard Oil.” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 39 (Winter 1956). “Millions to Spend and the Brains to Spend Well.” New York Daily

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a.k.a. Dr. William Levingston—in Freeport, Illinois. (Courtesy of Heather Brownfield) The cover of McClure’s Magazine containing the malevolent “character sketch” by Ida Tarbell that so deeply wounded Rockefeller. (Courtesy of the Drake Well Museum) Rockefeller en route to testify in an antitrust case against Standard Oil, November 18

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

by Andrew Ross Sorkin  · 14 Oct 2025  · 664pp  · 166,312 words

were starting to appear everywhere in the press. * * * For most of the roaring twenties, financial journalism had not covered itself in glory. The legendary muckraker Ida Tarbell, known for her pathbreaking foray into the complex dealings of the Rockefeller family and Standard Oil, remained active into the 1920s, but her later work

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: Ida M. Tarbell, “John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study,” McClure’s Magazine, August 1905. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT credulous portraits of Benito Mussolini: Ida Tarbell, “Mussolini, Italy and the World,” McCall’s, June 11, 1926. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT General Electric chairman Owen Young: John H. Finley, “Owen

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy

by Linsey McGoey  · 14 Apr 2015  · 324pp  · 93,606 words

the manner in which Rockefeller had amassed his fortune. Published in McClure’s Magazine in the early 1900s, a series of articles by the journalist Ida Tarbell exposed decades of corporate espionage, price-fixing, bribery, and the creation of bogus companies to disguise illegal activities. In 1909, the Department of Justice launched

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the social and economic inequalities that he seemed to deplore.51 The Justice Department’s anti-trust suit against Rockefeller’s company was launched after Ida Tarbell’s investigation into Rockefeller’s company was serialized in the popular McClure’s Magazine and later collected in her bestselling volume, The History of the

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Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2001), 159–63. 50Chernow, Titan, 191. 51Levenick, ‘The Rockefeller Legacy’. 52Steve Weinberg, Taking on the Trust: How Ida Tarbell Brought Down John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 225. 53Ibid., 233. 54Chernow, Titan, 468. 55Ibid. 56Quoted in Samuel Crowther

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance

by Julia Angwin  · 25 Feb 2014  · 422pp  · 104,457 words

an apocalypse. And even more strangely, the apocalypse seems to be right around the corner. I was turning into a data survivalist. 9 INTRODUCING IDA Ida Tarbell was an investigative journalist who exposed the abuses of the Standard Oil Company at the turn of the twentieth century. She is also my alter

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about me effortlessly. I chose Ida because she is part of a generation of journalists that I admire. Known as “muckrakers,” investigative journalists such as Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair exposed the underbelly of the industrial revolution, from monopolistic price gouging by the trusts to working conditions in slaughterhouses. Their work led

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code for her. I decided that she lived in Berkeley, California, and was born in 1966. Then I started making reservations in the name of Ida Tarbell at a few restaurants. The problem was that Ida didn’t have a cell phone—and restaurants often asked me for a phone number when

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lying, I regrouped and started again with Ida’s online identity. This time I was serious: I was going to get a credit card for Ida Tarbell. I got the idea for Ida’s credit card from the cryptographer Jon Callas. He had come to my office to show me apps he

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was the threat. If I was suspected of a crime, a prosecutor could send a subpoena to American Express to learn the true identity of Ida Tarbell. I decided to do it. I tried requesting a new card through the American Express website, but the website said that I needed to call

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, when my husband came home from work, I showed the card to him proudly. “Oh!” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were Ida Tarbell? I have been throwing out her mail for weeks.” Note to self: in the future, warn husband before setting up fake identity. * * * Now Ida needed

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big apartment building where everyone’s mail is sorted into mailboxes, similar in size to post office boxes. All I had to do was tape Ida Tarbell’s name inside the mailbox and, presto, Ida had an address. With a credit card and an address, Ida’s possibilities were limitless. Still, I

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purchases. I also realized I would arouse suspicion if I suddenly switched identities. So when it came time to pay the bartender, I tucked my Ida Tarbell card back in my purse and pulled out my Julia Angwin card. The more I used Ida, the more I worried about overusing her identity

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from a different store. But I knew I would eventually miss a monthly deadline if I relied on cash. I went home and used my Ida Tarbell credit card to sign up for a monthly prepaid service from Virgin Mobile. After all, my goal is not to be perfectly anonymous: it’s

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my phone wouldn’t know where I was coming from. (Of course, my cell phone provider still knew where I was, or at least where Ida Tarbell was.) I had thought that the anonymizing software—Tor—was slow when I used it to set up Ida’s online accounts on my laptop

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the online world,” she said. “Pseudonymity is key to our online privacy.” In honor of Donath, I created a LinkedIn profile for my online pseudonym, Ida Tarbell. Ida has no “connections,” but she does allow me to log in to LinkedIn and see what is going on there. And her presence assuaged

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game was to build better passwords, not to break mine. Harriet soon became curious about my other privacy experiments. She loved my fake identity of Ida Tarbell. Harriet decided she would use her fake name for her online accounts as well. Neither kid is old enough for a social media profile, but

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ad tracking. My passwords—made by my daughter by rolling dice and picking words out of a dictionary—were pretty good. My fake identity as Ida Tarbell had allowed me to disassociate my true identity from sensitive purchases and some phone calls and in-person meetings. And I had managed to convince

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began using my fake name for increasingly trivial transactions; a friend was shocked when we took a yoga class together and I casually registered as Ida Tarbell. I didn’t want to live in the world that I was building—a world of subterfuge and disinformation and covert actions. It was a

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collective posted: Riseup.net, “Riseup and Government FAQ,” accessed August 20, 2013, https://www.riseup.net/en/riseup-and-government-faq. 9. INTRODUCING IDA Ida Tarbell was: Kathleen Brady, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (New York: Seaview/Putnam, 1984). Some studies show that avoiding: Jeffrey T. Hancock, Michael T. Woodworth, and Saurabh Goorha

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by Nicholas Shaxson  · 10 Oct 2018  · 482pp  · 149,351 words

, the most impressive feat of investigative journalism in world history. This was an exposé of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly by the journalist Ida Tarbell, who uncovered a conspiracy and cartel the likes of which the world had never seen. Rockefeller, she revealed, was a master of Veblenite sabotage, rigging

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of sabotage’. Veblen and Tarbell were often pilloried by their contemporaries, yet they have both been repeatedly proved correct. After her exposé of Standard Oil, Ida Tarbell was vilified by sections of the media. ‘The dear girl’s efforts … are pathetic,’ wrote one academic. She and her followers were ‘sentimental sob sisters

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wouldn’t have a finance curse if we really did live in Adam Smith’s world.’ 6. From Steve Weinberg, Taking on the Trust: how Ida Tarbell brought down John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, W.W. Norton & Co., 2008, pp.219–20. Rockefeller defended himself by arguing that he had found

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primarily to promote safety and health for workers. This was the predecessor of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which was created in 1971. IDA TARBELL: SMALL BUSINESSES UP AGAINST A MONOPOLY Another way economic domination can undercut a basic sphere of dignity is when entrepreneurs and small business owners are

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freedom has long been that competition between sellers of goods and services is driven by price, quality, and fair opportunities—not by arbitrary, brute power. Ida Tarbell was a fourteen-year-old eyewitness to the ruin that took over her once prosperous hometown in the oil-rich region of western Pennsylvania in

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new. The core impulse behind that technology pervaded plantations, which sought innermost control over the bodies of their enslaved work force.94 FINANCIAL DOMINATION: FROM IDA TARBELL TO ELIZABETH WARREN AND THE CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU Ensuring that Americans can participate in the economy without domination and humiliation should never be an

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Law Journal—which questioned the current focus on consumer price at the expense of issues of abusive power over competitors95—carries forward the work of Ida Tarbell, as I will discuss further in my chapter on structuring markets for economic dignity. It is also essential to an economic dignity framework to understand

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). BRIDGE, RAILROAD, AND TECH PLATFORMS The harm from monopoly power that I highlighted in my discussion about the humiliation and devastation inflicted by Rockefeller on Ida Tarbell’s father and his friends was precisely the type of brute force bordering on violence at odds with FDR’s vision of “freedom from unfair

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as Elizabeth I, James I, John Evelyn, Abraham Darby, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Newcomen, James Watt, George Stephenson, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, Herman Melville, Edwin Drake, Ida Tarbell, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Enrico Fermi, Hyman Rickover, the coal barons of old Pennsylvania, and the oil barons of California and Saudi Arabia—to

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the strike while Drake scouted barrels. “They had to begin with so simple and elementary a matter as devising something to hold the oil,” writes Ida Tarbell, the Titusville native and contemporary reporter. “There were not barrels enough to be bought in America, although turpentine barrels, molasses barrels, whiskey barrels—every sort

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Oil Creek oil production was less depletion than environmental destruction of the valley through which Oil Creek flowed and the waterways adjoining and downstream. When Ida Tarbell was three, in 1860, she moved with her family into what she calls a “shanty” on a tributary of Oil Creek so that her father

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