Ida Tarbell Takes on Rockefeller

Editor’s Note: In 1893, Adapted from Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America by Stephanie Gorton (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020)

In January 1903, journalist Ida Tarbell felt her usual cheerful stamina wearing thin. In the midst of an investigative series on John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil for McClure’s magazine, she began to long for escape. Not content with monopolizing the oil industry, Standard Oil had swallowed her life, too. 

“It has become a great bugbear to me,” she told her assistant, John Siddall, adding that she longed to trade in the task at hand for a trip to Europe. Instead, her work plunged her into reliving one of the most fearful chapters of her youth: the brief rebellion against Standard Oil instigated by independent oilmen of Pennsylvania including Tarbell’s own father, and memorialized as the Oil War of 1872. 

The resulting is a passionate piece of writing, balanced tightly between investigation and the vivid force of memory. The New York Times said the series was “[a]s readable as any ‘story’ with rather more romance than the usual business novel,” while the Boston Globe called it a work “of unequalled importance as a ‘document’ of the day.” The review concluded, “The results are likely to be far-reaching; she is writing unfinished history.” 

Her editor, S. S. McClure, crowed victory. “You cannot imagine how we all love & reverence you. You are the real queen of the establishment,” he wrote from his own holiday in a French spa town. He wrote to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of rival magazine The Century, that the investigative turn of McClure’s reflected a new social responsibility that now belonged to the magazines. 

McClure’s hope, he told Gilder, was to “get the people to see that we have been left simply the husks of liberty while the real substance has been stolen from us.” Magazines, he posited, had a better chance of waking up their readership than any other medium. “It evidently is up to the magazines to arouse this public opinion, for the newspapers have forfeited their opinion by sensationalism and by selling their opinions to a party.” 

McClure and Tarbell were born in the same year, 1857. Until their lives converged nearly forty years later, they were a study in contrasts. Sam McClure was a boy out of the Old Country, accustomed to hunger and the scorn dealt to the Irish by his American peers. McClure was a restless, rumpled figure of a man, a bantamweight five foot six. He was born on February 17, in his grandfather’s sturdy world — a drive born from coming of age among doubters, in a stone house in County Antrim, Ireland, the first of four boys. 

His family belonged to the “well-to-do poor,” and he would later remember his childhood as a country idyll. When his father died at a young age, Elizabeth, his mother, continued working their land alone, refusing to foster out her boys to separate homes despite falling behind in her debts. Instead she took the family to America, settling around the southern tip of Lake Michigan near Valparaiso, Indiana. Much later, keeping the brothers together would prove formative in more ways than one: when Sam founded McClure’s, all three of his brothers (as well as a cousin, Harry McClure) came to be magazine men with him. 

The McClures were part of a demographic sea change. Immigrants flooded into the fractured country, while former slaves migrated to northern cities and towns, if they could. From 1860 to 1910, the rural population of the United States almost doubled while the urban population multiplied nearly seven times. But the McClures noticed little of that upheaval through their first year in America. They were preoccupied with survival. Trying to fit in at school, McClure began to call himself Samuel Sherman McClure, borrowing a middle name from the Civil War general he had read about. Later he changed it to Sidney, possibly to sound more literary, and from his school days onward signed his name S. S. McClure. “[L]ike most things in my life,” recalled McClure, this hurried self-invention was “entirely accidental.”

Tarbell, for her part, grew up well fed and well-read in Pennsylvania’s rapidly industrializing Oil Region, before making a life for herself as a writer in Paris. She stood nearly six feet, a thick topknot of hair giving her extra height and a regal air, and was punctilious about keeping her modest suits brushed and mended. Her parents, Franklin and Esther Tarbell, were reluctant settlers in northwestern Pennsylvania’s Erie County, which would soon be transformed by a boom in oil drilling. Franklin became an oil prospector and tank builder, and the family moved to Rouseville, a prospectors’ settlement at the mouth of a steep-banked stream called Cherry Run. A local observer reported, “Men think of oil, talk of oil, dream of oil; the smell and taste of oil predominate in all they eat and drink; they breathe an atmosphere of oil-gas, and the clamor of ‘ile, ile — ile’ rings in one’s ears from daylight until midnight.” 

In the year of 1872, a crisis in the community overwhelmed the Tarbells and many of their neighbors. The terror was set off by a scheme called the Southern Improvement
Company: a sweetheart deal between John D. Rockefeller and three railroad companies that increased oil freight prices by 100 percent — with an exemption for oil from refineries controlled by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. 

Oil region families rebelled, but even an eventual victory in the courts couldn’t stave off a catastrophic shift for the Tarbells and their neighbors, many of whom went bankrupt before the ruling came into effect. In adulthood, Ida too remembered the experience as a bewildering physical trauma, a “blow between the eyes.” At fifteen, she could also see that Rockefeller and his ilk, despite the failure of their scheme, were insulated from anything like this fate.

Still, both Tarbell and McClure were ruled by a drive to prove something to the world — a drive born from coming of age among doubters. In her resolve to be both educated and self-sufficient, Ida began pushing the bounds of a life of easy convention and social approval. After graduating college and writing and editing for The Chautauquan, a monthly pamphlet that grew from the Chautauqua Assembly Institute’s popular adult education programs, she decided to follow her dream to move to Paris, at the age of thirty-three. She had disavowed the traditional feminine calls to service; now she rejected other conventions. “There were friends who said none too politely: ‘Remember you are past thirty. Women don’t make new places for themselves after thirty.’” 

McClure also had the advantage of not hearing criticism when he really believed in an idea. After stints at magazines in Boston and New York, he concocted a plan to found a literary syndicate, in which he would discover and publish new fiction, editorials, and cartoons across newspapers in every state in America. His family and friends were skeptical. “Everyone with whom I discussed the idea,” he recalled, “manifested a great indifference.”

Finally, in 1892, the two personalities collided. McClure had noticed Ida’s article on the streets of Paris, “The Paving of Paris by Monsieur Alphand,” in the syndicate’s submissions pile back in
New York. It was an unexpectedly engrossing article that cast new light on an everyday necessity; the piece revealed the man who held himself responsible for the streets trod by Parisians rich and poor. As he finished it, McClure held it up and said to Phillips, “This girl can write.”

It was the start of a transformative relationship for both. During his visit to her in Paris in 1892, Ida was soon listening to McClure’s full Horatio Alger story, from peddling around the midwestern prairies to trying to learn every word in the dictionary at Knox College, winning his wife, Hattie, building the syndicate, and a new plan that was sure to take the world by storm. He spoke to her as though she were familiar with Galesburg and New York, and as if she had already met the other people in his life, and knew already that he was at heart a magazine editor; as Ida recalled, it was “always John this, John that, and last a magazine to be — soon.”

After three years in Paris, Ida boarded a steamship headed back across the Atlantic. She could not afford not to. McClure, still wooing her, had sent enough money for a second-class ticket. Her first assignment for the magazine took her to Washington, D.C., where she raced to put together a series on Napoleon. Her next was a twenty-part profile of Abraham Lincoln, which took four years to research and write and which, upon publication, doubled the circulation of the magazine. With each subject, she allowed a surprising capacity for obsession to take over and became immersed in as many archives, interviews, and follow-up fact checks as resources allowed. A woman writer traveling on her own for work — a modern, somewhat bohemian concept — she quickly earned her interviewees’ trust and sympathy, and knew how to shape her discoveries into clear, lively articles.

By the turn of the century, Mis Tarbell wasn’t quite famous enough to be stopped on the street, but she was the most senior writer at a heavyweight magazine that had risen from obscurity largely on her shoulders. McClure’s now had close to 400,000 subscribers, making it one of the most-read magazines in the country. Journalists looked to her technique and persistence as a model; as she told a colleague, “I proceed on the theory that there is nothing about which everything has been done and said.” It helped that she had become McClure’s confidante, worthy of inventing the position of staff writer — the realizer of his visions. 

In 1901, when she was forty-two, Miss Tarbell traveled once again to Europe, this time to visit McClure and pitch the most important story of her career: a series on John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. It seemed uncertain that this could be the germ of her next great undertaking: Miss Tarbell was used to writing about conquerors and heroes, not the misdeeds of businessmen. She liked writing about the dead, conjuring bold lines of character from archives and interviews. But McClure’s needed a big investigative story on corporate trusts, and fast.

 The trusts were already a subject of outrage in the press, yet McClure’s was behind the curve. They needed a subject that already had a direct and personal impact on households across America. In January 1901, news filtered in that an unprecedented “gusher” well had been tapped in Spindletop, Texas. The more the McClure’s staff discussed an oil story, the more it made sense: Standard Oil was the largest and oldest trust of them all, run by an enigmatic tycoon, John D. Rockefeller. By the turn of the century, he controlled more than 80 percent of oil production and sales in America.

For Miss Tarbell, the topic evoked unwelcome emotions. Her memory of her father’s bankruptcy when she was fifteen was still fresh. Franklin Tarbell regularly talked of Rockefeller and his company as the “Cleveland ogre” and “the great Anaconda.” Newspaper cartoons commonly used snakes or octopi to represent the big trusts, sometimes wearing top hats and always extending tentacles farther than any man could reach. Miss Tarbell tried to write what bankruptcy had truly felt like, before the newspaper cartoons had come about: “a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.”[1]

Tarbell described the Oil War from the perspective of the Pennsylvania oilmen; it was in this installment of the series that she pointed at her villain in no uncertain terms: “It was inevitable that under the pressure of their indignation and resentment some person or persons should be fixed upon as responsible, and should be hated accordingly. . . . It was the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland, so the Oil Regions decided, which was at the bottom of the business, and the ‘Mephistopheles of the Cleveland Company,’ as they put it, was John D. Rockefeller.” 

The tinge of biblical language in her lines wasn’t accidental. At a moment when inequality of wealth and the rise of a few industrial giants seemed irreversible, McClure’s Standard Oil story assigned a face to a phenomenon that many saw as outright evil. Christian metaphor pervaded Progressive Era reform writing, and in time, McClure’s investigations were painted in newspaper cartoons and the popular imagination as spearheading a cleansing crusade against the mendacious rule of robber barons. 

Despite high praise in the papers and McClure holding her up as an avenging angel of liberty, one of the final pieces in the series was giving her trouble. She was determined to write a character profile of Rockefeller himself, believing the epigraph she had taken from Emerson’s essay “Self- Reliance:” “An Institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” But had no access to him. Her subject had been completely walled off from her ever since her rupture with Rogers. 

She had no way to construct Rockefeller’s character from direct experience, so instead she worked from documentary sources and interviews, just as when she wrote her groundbreaking biography of Lincoln. Initially she let his publicly documented actions speak for his character. Then, as she gleaned more from records and witnesses, she began to get personal. 

This yielded surprising sympathies. John’s estranged brother, Frank Rockefeller, tried to influence her portrait, offering “the most unhappy and the most unnatural” of the grievances she’d heard levied against the tycoon. Tarbell went to Frank’s office in Cleveland, entering the building in disguise so word could not leak out. She found him “excited and vindictive,” listened to him, and came away with a sad impression of Frank’s free spending and love of good horses, and John’s consequent disapproval and withdrawal of Standard stock from his brother during the Panic of 1893. 

Tarbell found herself appreciating John’s hard wisdom and strict morals, rather than Franklin Rockefeller’s sense of entitlement, which she would try to convey in her profile. Her colleagues, though, insisted that grudge-driven anecdotes weren’t enough. She had to find a way to portray Rockefeller the man for the readers. 

It took nearly a year to find the right time and place to see him with her own eyes. On Sunday, October 11, 1903, she and two other McClure’s employees slid into the pews at Euclid Avenue Baptist Church in Cleveland, one of the few places where Rockfeller was known to emerge in public from his home in nearby Forest Hills. Tarbell was agitated by the dark, stuffily decorated room, the covertness, and the physical presence of the man she had portrayed as a tyrant.  Rockefeller, Tarbell noted, repeatedly glanced at the gallery area where she was sitting, and she wondered whether he knew she was there. Feeling “a little mean,” she gathered her impressions of “the oldest man I had ever seen . . . but what power!” 

At the time, Rockefeller was sixty-four and she was forty-six. She saw a man with a large, clear yet deeply lined face, a thin nose “like a thorn,” and “no lips.” She noted his uneasiness, the darting of his eyes, and the sincerity of his voice. His fellow parishioners seemed to admire him, and Tarbell was surprised by the emotion that took hold of her as she took in the scene: “I was sorry for him. . . . Mr. Rockefeller, for all the conscious power written in face and voice and figure, was afraid, I told myself, afraid of his own kind.” 

When it came time in the service to shake hands, she went down to join the throng around Rockefeller. He looked Tarbell “fully in the face” before she quickly moved away. A blazing current of revulsion ran through her. “It was too awful,” she recorded just after the fact. In her loose handwritten notes from the morning, she wrote wildly of Rockefeller’s “colorless” eyes and, under them, “the puffiness I have long associated in men and women with sexual irregularity . . . Great power written on his mummy-like head and lust and death.” As if describing a Dickensian villain, she embedded her impression of Rockefeller’s morals into his physical features.

Writing about Rockefeller was an ordeal for reasons that ran deeper than the lines of his features. As a journalist, she was tasked with being a watchdog rather than an activist; the idea of a wholehearted character assassination made her pause. She knew she could not in good faith base her reportage on her feelings alone, but still that antipathy refused to subside. 

Tarbell recognized her obligation to impartiality. She saw there was authentic industriousness, skill, and intelligence in the organization Rockefeller had assembled, and titled one of her chapters “The Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company.” She searched newspaper archives and set Siddall, still in Cleveland, to searching for reports of Rockefeller’s professional deals, charitable gifts, and personal anecdotes; she asked Standard Oil competitors if they would be willing to share any letters or memos they had received from Rockefeller or his men. When it came to reporting on Standard Oil, “I never had an animus against their size and wealth, never objected to their corporate form,” she claimed. 

Every word of this statement is worthy of interrogation, for she did have an animus against Rockefeller, a rancor that seemed to gather force as the series drew to a close. She knew there was little intellectual justification for hating a wealthy man for his wealth, even if much of the evidence she had painstakingly gathered bore out her suspicions of Rockefeller as an embodiment of a ruthless fortune hunter. Confirmation bias, or the application of newly discovered evidence to back up an existing frame of mind, undoubtedly figured into her skewering final profile of Rockefeller and his career. Her finished narrative sketched a bloodless tycoon, a parasite bent on bringing financial and moral disaster upon his host. 

Even in the early installments of the series, her far-from-neutral feelings about Rockefeller were palpable. As one perceptive historian said of the character who emerged, “a reptilian John D. Rockefeller slither[ed] into view.” Her opinion became the hinge on which the narrative turned, gave it an activist quality, and extended it into a larger argument about society. As she argued, it was the perception and evidence that “they had never played fair” that turned Standard Oil from a company into a cause, a symbol of all that was wrong with big business’s scant regard for the individuals who fed it. “Human experience,” in Tarbell’s words, “long ago taught us that if we allowed a man or a group of men autocratic power . . . they used that power to oppose or defraud the public.” From her initial perception of the Standard as voracious and sly, her framing of the facts smoldered with judgment. 

Much later, as she neared eighty, Tarbell told a friend that Standard Oil had cast a permanent sense of tragedy over her Oil Region home. She wrote, “This district saw and lived through the mad search for petroleum and the long labor to make it fit to give men more light, more power and heat. And along with it went the struggle of a few to get all that was in it for themselves. It was enough to curse the land forever.” Rockefeller was always, for her, the destroyer of home and hope. 

As one of Tarbell’s own biographers has noted, her slant on Rockefeller is nearly as revealing of the author as the subject. Her tentative boundary between the professional and personal spheres of life was being dismantled. More and more, it seemed her heart itself hung in the balance. 

After Cleveland, Tarbell returned to New York subdued by her sneaky encounter with Rockefeller, yet driven to finish what she had started. Emotion began to drain from her, and she had some trepidation about her character study being read by an attentive critical audience, as she wrote Siddall in early December 1903: “I think I shall watch the effect this article produces on the press more anxiously than any other. . . . I feel sometimes that my judgment of these papers is all raveled out; by the time I get to the end of one I cease to have any feeling about it at all.” 

She underestimated her own ability to convince readers. The Chicago Inter-Ocean called her series “one of the most stirring in our commercial history,” an endeavor that “illustrates most strikingly the strange new conditions of business life in America.” Perhaps most complimentary to her scientist’s heart, the New York World said her work “gives us the same insight into the nature of trusts in general that the medical student gains of cancers from a scientific description of a typical case.” “Woman Does Marvelous Work” exclaimed another paper, while the New York Globe called the series “so thrilling and dramatic that even those superior people whose boast is that they never read a serial made an exception for this one.” 

After Tarbell’s write-up from the church, arguments and counter-arguments about Rockefeller’s ethics, and hers, ricocheted through the media, from the Newark News to the Sacramento Bee and abroad, to Canada, Germany, and France. The Nation printed a scornful review, which cut Tarbell deeply. The Denver Republican predicted that Tarbell’s reputation would endure as “the greatest of all literary vivisectionists.” One of the most partisan attacks came from a small newspaper, the Derrick, of Oil City, Pennsylvania, under the headline “Hysterical Woman Versus Historical Fact.” The Derrick was faithful to the Standard, accusing Tarbell of being “venomous,” producing “history made to order,” and single-handedly discrediting the literature of exposure. 

Gender was a frequent theme among critical letters and reviews. In the near-universal acclaim for her Lincoln series, the fact that she was a woman was rarely mentioned as a factor behind any guiding quality of the work. The Rockefeller profile provoked a very different reaction, one that derided a “nagging,” “scolding” Tarbell for seeing her subject through the blurry lens of unchecked subjectivity. In the words of one Detroit-based critic, “it should not be forgotten that Miss Tarbell, as her name implies, is a woman . . . [w]ith all a woman’s weakness of will, ideals of manly beauty, desire for showy entertainment, magnificent dinners, [and] personal adornment.” In sketching a monster, the writer argued, Tarbell had shown herself as being monstrous. She was, like all women, “ruled by her sympathies.” 

A diverging but equally reductive tack painted Tarbell as robotic and merciless—unnatural qualities for a woman. One Los Angeles reporter, comparing her to her colleague William Allen White, wrote that while White was bubbling and exuberant, “Miss Tarbell’s wonderful intellect is a pitiles [sic], disinterested, white light. “She would long be seen as a fascinating enigma; twenty years later, as she toured the Midwest on the speaking circuit and sat by the stage as local luminaries introduced her, she would hear herself described as a “notorious woman” and the subject of long musings as to why she had never married. 

There were entire books published in protest of Tarbell’s investigation, too.  The best-known rebuttal started as a Harvard senior thesis. Gilbert Holland Montague, with the collaboration of Standard Oil’s in-house lawyer, hastily finished The Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company in 1903. Montague’s book was, in Tarbell’s view, “not exactly a best seller but certainly a best circulator” — and deliberately so. Public libraries were sent generous stock by an anonymous funder, and ministers, teachers, and politicians similarly received free copies from the publisher. She read Montague’s account as soon as she could, noting that it “separated business and ethics in a way that must have been a comfort at 26 Broadway.” 

Despite Rockefeller’s work as a philanthropist, his money was now seen as contaminated. Increasingly, politicians and institutions turned away gifts from the nation’s richest man, whose net worth was around 1.5 percent of the country’s total economic output—roughly equivalent to triple the wealth held by Bill Gates in 2019. Starting in 1904, Theodore Roosevelt declined campaign donations from Standard Oil, keenly aware that public image, once compromised, rarely recovers. A newspaper cartoon showed the harried, top-hatted tycoon asking a newsstand merchant, “Have you any reading matter that isn’t about me?” 

When Rockefeller was questioned about Tarbell’s series, he was tight-lipped, saying only that her claims were “without foundation” and that “it has always been the policy of Standard Oil to keep silent under attack and let our acts speak for themselves.” The idea of directly contradicting McClure’s struck him as “unstatesmanlike.” Rockefeller refused to budge from his decision to remain silent. One day, walking near his Forest Hill estate, a friend questioned this policy. Rockefeller told him, gesturing toward a worm in their path, “If I step on that worm I will call attention to it. If I ignore it, it will disappear.” 

But to those in his circle, he showed a flinching resentment against Ida Tarbell and her story. Her perspective seemed to fit in with his sense that the world turned against true greatness and leadership. “Not a word about that misguided woman,” he said when he heard her name. To one acquaintance, he remarked, “Things have changed since you and I were boys. The world is full of socialists and anarchists. Whenever a man succeeds remarkably in any particular line of business, they jump on him and cry him down.” 

Rockefeller had decided to play the long game, but could not have known how long it would remain in the forefront of public consciousness. Tarbell had not yet finished her series, which would be compiled and released as a book two years later and bolster a Supreme Court case against him soon thereafter. The concerted PR campaign to counteract Tarbell’s influence was quietly sustained for years. 

Tarbell yearned to return to writing about history long past: writing about the dead seemed much easier than trying to deliver a fair and accurate picture of the living.. “There would be none of these harrowing human beings confronting me, tearing me between contempt and pity, admiration and anger, baffling me.” Her brain was “fogged,” hastening her desire to put the story behind her and start something new. Instead, she would become mired in a new calamity — one that would lead to the dissolution of McClure’s at the very height of its power and prestige. 

The story of Standard Oil came to represent America’s moral fitness moving into the new century. “What I most feared,” Tarbell later wrote in her memoir, “was that we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.” In the mythology of her own family’s struggles, the Standard’s scale had allowed it to suppress healthy individualism. In Titusville, she had seen what selling out to Rockefeller could do to a man’s place in society. “The most tragic effect I had seen in my girlhood,” she recalled, “was partial ostracism of the renegade . . . a man’s old associates crossed to the other side of the street rather than meet him.” As for herself, she wrote, “In those days I looked with more contempt on the man who had gone over to the Standard than on the one who had been in jail.” 
new material, taken from various chapters in part I

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