Ida Tarbell

Ida Tarbell was born on November 5, 1857 in Amity Township, PA.  She was an investigative journalist.

And she wasn't just some investigative journalist. She was a pioneer for investigative journalism and one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  She had a knack for exposing corruption among people with power, money and influence.   

What is a muckraker?   

The phrase "muckraker" came about when the president at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, used the term in one of the speeches he gave borrowing a passage from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim's Progress.  The line he used was “the Man with the Muckrake…who could look no way but downward.” 

President Theodore Roosevelt used the phrase “muckraker” in reference to Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and other journalists writing critically about the tremendous power of big business. Tarbell actually objected to the term, for she felt it minimized work she believed to be of historical importance.

Muckrakers exposed injustices of very well known institutions by writing detailed pieces full of evidence showcasing how untrustworthy and corrupt many of the powerful leaders were at the time.

Tarbell's father was a small oil producer in Ohio.  He faced a dilemma.  He had a choice of selling his life's work to John D. Rockefeller, or to compete against him, a confrontation he would surely lose.  Franklin Tarbell’s partner killed himself as he was overwhelmed with the situation.  Franklin Tarbell was forced to mortgage his family's home to meet his company’s debts. 

In 1894, Tarbell wrote biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln. That's when she accepted an offer from McClure to work for his new venture, McClure’s Magazine, where she undertook her most famous work, her expose of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Her study of Rockefeller’s practices as he built Standard Oil into one of the world’s largest business monopolies took many years to complete. McClure’s Magazine published it in 19 installments.

Her work became a two-volume book entitled, The History of the Standard Oil Company, published in 1904. Tarbell meticulously documented the aggressive techniques Standard Oil employed to outmaneuver and, where necessary, roll over whoever got in its way.

The first installment of The History of the Standard Oil Company was published by McClure's in 1902.  Tarbell's father warned her against writing the series because he feared that Rockefeller would attack the magazine.  Despite her father's advice, Ida Tarbell pushed forward and wrote the series anyway.  Tarbell exposed the questionable practices questionable practices of the oil industry.

The History of the Standard Oil Company also helped to grow the trend of investigating and exposing, a technique that in 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt would label muckraking.

Ida Tarbell took on the Standard Oil Company.  

The Cleveland Massacre was a three-month period in 1872 when Standard Oil Company gained practically all of its competing oil refineries in Cleveland, Ohio.  Standard Oil acquired 22 out of 26 rival refineries at discounted rates in a six-month span.  John D. Rockefeller led the charge in buying out the competition in order to stabilize production back to profitable levels.

The United States Government and Supreme Court were forced to take a deeper look at the Standard Oil Company. Because of Tarbell, the Standard Oil Company was disassembled because the Supreme Court found that the company was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Tarbell's techniques have shaped the way investigative journalism is done today.  She used Senate record, interviews, archival documentation, among other things, to investigate.   

In 1924, Tarbell moved to Easton, Connecticut.  At this point she was 67.  She died January 6, 1944, at age 86.