Ida Minerva Tarbell had a privileged childhood in Ohio. Her father had a well paying oil business and her family, indeed her whole town, was doing well.

All that changed when she was 14, in 1871. The South Improvement Company came through town, and convinced all three railroads to raise their prices for everyone, except them. The local small oil men took the South Improvement Company to court, and won. But too late. Twenty two of the 26 oil men were forced to sell their businesses to the company. Ida’s father’s business remained. Her father mortgaged the house to pay their debts .His partner committed suicide.

The South Improvement Company, now known by its new name of Standard Oil, said that the people complaining about their methods simply didn’t understand business. This wasn’t the first town they would destroy, and it wasn’t the last.

Ida was 15, angry, but felt helpless.

Ida would go to college to study biology, but found she really loved writing. So she got a job as an editor and moved to Paris to write. Being a tall woman, she would wear men’s clothes to escort her American friends around town without being accosted by men. Freelancing paid her bills, but not reliably.

She met SS McClure, who had worked his way up from poverty to magazine owner and editor. The steady income promised by a magazine made Ida hang up her freelancer hat and settle into writing for McClure.

And write she did. She started interviewing people like Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola, and Alexandre Dumas. Seeing what a strong researcher and writer she was, McClure asked for her to write a serial on Napoleon’s life. She did and magazine sales took off.

Then McClure told her to write a serial on Lincoln. Ida didn’t think it was a good idea, as a 10 volume book set on Lincoln had just been publish a few years before. But McClure had a tendency to push unlikely stories on his writers, and they often worked out, so she gave in. Her writing angered the men who had written the recent book on Lincoln, but Lincoln’s son, Robert, liked her and her work. He gave her a never before published portrait of his father, and helped her with her research. She ended up writing a 20 part series on Lincoln than made her a leading authority on his early life. And her writing, again, caused subscriptions to skyrocket.

So she was well respected when she decided to take on Rockefeller. Samuel Clemens introduced her to the Vice President of Standard Oil, who welcomed her and her interviews and gave her documents to read. She pored over the documents, finding other places Standard Oil had destroyed towns, and how. He had thought she was going to write a glowing story about him and Standard Oil, like she had done with Lincoln. He also connected her with other men, who was less open but still happy to talk.

Ida’s father didn’t like what she was doing. He knew that Standard Oil was powerful and could crush her like they had crushed the town, and he warned her away. But Ida was determined. She spent years researching Standard Oil across the country, finding many places where Rockefeller had done the same thing, or worse.

Ida finally wrote a 19 part series for McClure’s on Standard Oil. Month by month. she exposed the rot at the center of the ‘Gilded Age’, where unregulated power destroyed businesses, small and medium. Like her series on Lincoln, her serial was combined into a single volume called “The History of the Standard Oil Company.”

This book whipped up enough public fury that Standard Oil was again brought to court. In 1911, The US Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. Rockefeller was exposed as using underhanded ways to drive competitors from business and Standard Oil was broken up into smaller companies.

Ida was 54 years old. It had taken 40 years, but her hard work and determination finally exposed the Rockefeller who had destroyed her home town. Her book, The History of the Standard Oil Company, is now considered the fifth most important work of journalism of the 20th-century. On Rockefeller himself, she wrote, “our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises.”

For further reading:

The court transcript from 1909:
http://justice.gov/atr/page/file/1119131/dl?inline=

An article about Ida’s work on Lincoln.

https://www.shapell.org/historical-perspectives/articles/ida-tarbell-influence-abraham-lincoln/

A recent book about McClure and his magazine that heavily features Ida

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/citizen-reporters-stephanie-gorton?variant=32130205581346

A Smithsonian article on her:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-woman-who-took-on-the-tycoon-651396/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia

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