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In truth, the telegrams were sent by Junior after prodding from Archbold. Shocked and embarrassed by the uproar, Junior resented Archbold for having dragged him into the ill-advised lobbying operation. That everybody believed his revered father had authored the telegrams only made it the more mortifying. “I came out of college something of an idealist,” he later reflected, “and I was immediately thrust into the tough give and take of the business world. I really wasn’t ready for it.” No stranger to controversy, Rockefeller told his son to ignore his critics—“Let the world wag,” he said—but Junior kept brooding. He desperately wanted to rehabilitate the family name and live an irreproachable life, and here he was already wading hip-deep in Standard Oil muck. It was one of several events that finally convinced him that he was too squeamish for a business career.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · John D. Archbold · Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 43 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Fiercely self-righteous, Teddy Roosevelt never forgot Standard Oil’s attempt to sabotage his new department, but he was a practical politician and recognized the value of winning Standard Oil support in his 1904 election campaign. Trying to mediate a truce between Standard Oil and the White House, Congressman Joseph C. Sibley told Archbold that the president thought the oil trust was hostile toward him, to which Archbold said facetiously, “I have always been an admirer of President Roosevelt and have read every book he ever wrote, and have them, in the best bindings, in my library.” Sibley relayed this flattering news to Roosevelt—minus, of course, the sarcasm. “The ‘book business’ fetched down the game at the very first shot,” Sibley reported back to Archbold. “You had better read, at least, the titles of those volumes to refresh your memory before you come over.” The rapprochement did not survive the 1904 election, for once the voting was over the president had an unpleasant surprise in store for Standard Oil.
Names: John D. Archbold · Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil · Joseph C. Sibley · White House
EPUB paragraph 44 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
In stalking Standard Oil, Teddy Roosevelt had no more potent ally than the press. In the spring of 1900, Rockefeller could still reassure a correspondent that favorable publicity about him overshadowed adverse coverage. “No man can succeed in any calling without provoking the jealousy and envy of some,” he observed. “The strong level-headed man will go straight forward and do his work, and history will rightly record.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 45 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Several trends gave birth to a newly assertive press. The gigantic trusts swelled the ranks of national advertisers, fattening the pages of many periodicals. Aided by new technologies, including linotype and photoengraving, glossy illustrated magazines streamed forth in such numbers that the era would be memorialized as the golden age of the American magazine. Paralleling this was the rise of mass-circulation newspapers, which catered to an expanding reading public. Competing in fierce circulation wars, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and other press barons plied readers with scandals and crusades. Nonetheless, the turn of the century marked more than the heyday of strident tabloids and yellow journalism, as sophisticated publications began to tackle complex stories, illustrating them lavishly and promoting them aggressively. For the first time in history, college graduates went to work on newspapers and magazines, bringing a new literary flair to a world once considered beneath the dignity of the educated elite.
Names: William Randolph Hearst · Joseph Pulitzer
EPUB paragraph 46 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Studded with star writers and editors, the most impressive periodical was McClure’s Magazine, which was started by Samuel S. McClure in 1893. In September 1901, the same month that Roosevelt ascended to the presidency, the magazine’s managing editor, Ida Minerva Tarbell, sailed to Europe to confer with McClure, then taking a rest from his strenuous life in Vevey, Switzerland. In her suitcase she carried an outline for a three-part series on the Standard Oil Company, though she wondered whether anyone would ever wade through a long, factual account of a business empire—a journalistic enterprise never assayed before.
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil · Europe · Switzerland · McClure’s Magazine · Vevey
EPUB paragraph 47 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
The Standard Oil story was intertwined with Tarbell’s early life. Born in 1857 in a log cabin thirty miles from where Drake struck oil two years later, she was a true daughter of the Oil Regions. “I had grown up with oil derricks, oil tanks, pipe lines, refineries, oil exchanges,” she wrote in her memoirs. Her father, Franklin Tarbell, crafted vats from hemlock bark, a trade easily converted into barrel making after Drake’s discovery. The Tarbells lived beside his Rouseville barrel shop, and Ida as a child rolled luxuriously in the heaps of pine shavings. Down the hill from her house, across a ravine, lived an amiable young refiner named Henry H. Rogers, who later recalled seeing the young girl picking wildflowers on the slope.
Names: Henry H. Rogers · Ida M. Tarbell · Franklin Tarbell · Standard Oil · Edwin Drake · Oil Regions · Rouseville · Tarbells
EPUB paragraph 48 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Ida watched men with queer gleams in their eyes swarming through Rouseville en route to the miracle-turned-mirage of Pithole Creek. Franklin Tarbell set up a barrel shop there and cashed in on the boom before Pithole’s oil gave out. But Franklin’s prosperity was tenuous, based on an antiquated technology. Wooden barrels were soon replaced by iron tanks—the first of several times that Ida’s father was hurt by progress. He then sought his fortune as an independent oil producer and refiner, just as Rockefeller was consolidating the industry and snuffing out small operators.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Franklin Tarbell · Franklin · Rouseville · Pithole Creek · Pithole
EPUB paragraph 49 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
In 1872, as an impressionable fifteen-year-old, Ida saw her paradise torn asunder by the South Improvement Company. As her father joined vigilantes who sabotaged the conspirators’ tanks, she thrilled to the talk of revolution. “On the instant the word became holy to me,” she later wrote. The SIC darkened her sunlit world. The father who once sang, played the Jew’s harp, and told funny stories became a “silent and stern” man, breeding in his sensitive daughter a lifelong hatred of Standard Oil. For her, Standard Oil symbolized the triumph of grasping men over decent folk, like her father, who played fair and square.
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil · South Improvement Company
EPUB paragraph 50 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
She remembered the Titusville of her teenage years as divided between the valiant majority who resisted the octopus and the small band of opportunists who defected to it. On the street, Franklin pointed out turncoats to his daughter. “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,” she said. After a time, Franklin’s family would not speak to blackguards who had sold out to Rockefeller. It revolted Ida that the trust could turn proud, independent entrepreneurs into beaten men taking orders from distant bosses.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil · Titusville · Franklin
EPUB paragraph 51 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Although Tarbell had a more genteel upbringing than Rockefeller, with more books, magazines, and small luxuries, one is struck by the similarity of the Rockefellers’ Baptist and the Tarbells’ Methodist households. The straitlaced Franklin Tarbell forbade cards and dancing and supported many causes, including the temperance movement. Ida attended prayer meetings on Thursday nights and taught an infant class of the Sunday school. Shy and bookish, she tended, like Rockefeller, to arrive at brilliant solutions by slow persistence.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Franklin Tarbell · Rockefeller family · Tarbells’ Methodist
EPUB paragraph 52 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
What set Tarbell apart from Rockefeller was her intellectual daring and fearless curiosity. As a teenager, despite her family’s fundamentalism, she tried to prove the truth of evolution. By the time she enrolled at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1876—she was the sole girl in the freshman class of this Methodist school—she loved to peer through microscopes and planned to become a biologist. What distinguished her as a journalist was how she united a scientific attention to detail with homegrown moral fervor. After graduation, Tarbell taught for two years at the Poland Union Seminary in Poland, Ohio, then got a job on the editorial staff of The Chautauquan, an offshoot of the summer adult-education movement, which originated as a Methodist camp meeting. The fiery, militant Christian spirit of the movement made Ida even more high-minded in her expectations.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Ohio · Pennsylvania · Allegheny College · Meadville · Poland Union Seminary · Poland
EPUB paragraph 53 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Tall and attractive, with dark hair, large gray eyes, and high cheekbones, Tarbell had an erect carriage and innate dignity and never lacked suitors. Yet she decided never to marry and to remain self-sufficient. She steeled herself against any feelings that might compromise her ambitions or integrity, and she walked through life, perhaps a little self-consciously, in a shining moral armor.
Names: Ida M. Tarbell
EPUB paragraph 54 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
In 1891, the thirty-four-year-old Tarbell moved to Paris with friends and set up Bohemian quarters on the Left Bank—an unusually courageous decision for a young American woman at the time. She was determined to write a biography of the Girondist Madame Roland while selling freelance articles to Pennsylvania and Ohio newspapers and attending classes at the Sorbonne. Hardworking and levelheaded, she mailed off two articles during her first week in Paris alone. Even though the prim Tarbell was taken aback when lascivious Frenchmen flirted with her, she adored her time in Paris. She interviewed eminent Parisians, ranging from Louis Pasteur to Emile Zola, for American newspapers and won many admirers for her clean, accurate reportage; she claimed that her writing had absorbed some of the beauty and clarity of the French language. Still, she struggled on the “ragged edge of bankruptcy” and was susceptible when McClure wooed her as an editor of his new magazine.
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Paris · Ohio · Pennsylvania · Louis Pasteur · Bohemian quarters · Left Bank · Emile Zola
EPUB paragraph 55 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
While she was still in Paris, two events occurred that would lend an emotional tinge to her Standard Oil series. One Sunday afternoon in June 1892, she found herself roaming the Paris streets, unable to shake off a sense of doom. Later that afternoon, she read in the Paris newspapers that Titusville and Oil City had been ravaged by flood and fire, with 150 people either drowned or burned to death. The next day, her brother, Will, sent a single-word cable—“Safe”—relieving her anxieties, but the event reinforced a guilty feeling that she had neglected her family. In 1893, one of her father’s oil partners shot himself in despair because of poor business, forcing Franklin Tarbell to mortgage his house to settle the debts he inherited. Ida’s sister was in the hospital at the time, and “here was I across the ocean writing picayune pieces at a fourth of a cent a word while they struggled there,” she later recalled. “I felt guilty, and the only way I had kept myself up to what I had undertaken was the hope that I could eventually make a substantial return.” While in Paris, Ida Tarbell laid hands on a copy of Wealth Against Commonwealth, where she rediscovered the author of her father’s woes: John D. Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Franklin Tarbell · Standard Oil · Titusville · Oil City · Paris · Wealth Against Commonwealth
EPUB paragraph 56 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Once in New York in 1894, Tarbell published two biographies in serial form that might have predisposed her to focus on a single figure at Standard Oil. Anticipating her portrait of Rockefeller, she presented Napoleon as a gifted megalomaniac, a great but flawed man lacking “that fine sense of proportion which holds the rights of others in the same solemn reverence which it demands for its own.” Lifted by this series, McClure’s circulation leaped from 24,500 in late 1894 to more than 100,000 in early 1895. Then followed Tarbell’s celebrated twenty-part series on Lincoln, which absorbed four years of her life (1895–1899) and boosted the magazine’s circulation to 300,000. She honed her investigative skills as she excavated dusty documents and forgotten courthouse records. In 1899, after being named managing editor of McClure’s, Tarbell took an apartment in Greenwich Village and befriended many literary notables, including Mark Twain, who would soon provide her with entrée to Henry H. “Hell Hound” Rogers. By this time, having sharpened her skills, she was set to publish one of the most influential pieces of journalism in American business history. The idea of writing about Standard Oil had fermented in her mind for many years before she worked for McClure’s. “Years ago, when I dreamed of some day writing fiction.… I had planned to write the great American novel, having the Standard Oil Company as a backbone!”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry H. Rogers · Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Mark Twain · Standard Oil · New York · Lincoln · Napoleon · Greenwich Village
EPUB paragraph 57 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
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 days and laid out his whole career for careful inspection. All the depredations of 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.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Cleveland · United States
EPUB paragraph 58 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
The inspiration for publishing the anatomy of a major trust came from Samuel McClure, one of the most gifted windbags ever to occupy an editorial chair, who recruited writers with marathon speeches about his magazine’s greatness. High-strung, mercurial, seized by hourly brainstorms, McClure was described by Rudyard Kipling as a “cyclone in a frock coat.” Moving through life at breakneck speed, he seemed forever to be veering toward a nervous collapse. When McClure first materialized in Tarbell’s Paris apartment in 1892, he appeared distracted and breathless. “I’ve just ten minutes,” he told her, checking his watch, “must leave for Switzerland tonight to see [English physicist John] Tyndall.” Eager to sign up this startled young woman, the man with the tousled, sandy hair and electric blue eyes stayed for three hours. “Able methodical people grow on every bush but genius comes once in a generation and if you ever get in its vicinity thank the Lord & stick,” Tarbell once told a colleague apropos of McClure.
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Paris · Switzerland · Rudyard Kipling · John
EPUB paragraph 59 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
That McClure hired a young, relatively inexperienced woman as his first full-time staff writer attests to his unorthodox style. He would collar every talented young writer in America—Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather—as well as more established figures, such as Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. O. Henry, Damon Runyon, and Booth Tarkington debuted in his pages. Yet it was perhaps in nonfiction that McClure left his most lasting imprint, for the best investigative reporters, from Lincoln Steffens to Ray Stannard Baker, gravitated to the magazine. Of his first office visit, Baker reminisced, “Even with S. S. McClure absent, I was in the most stimulating, yes intoxicating editorial atmosphere then existent in America—or anywhere else.” McClure watched over the creative chaos like a restless genie. “I can’t sit still,” he once told Lincoln Steffens. “That’s your job. I don’t see how you can do it.” Amid this swirling lunacy, Ida Tarbell sat in her high collar and shirtwaist dress, a model of calm sanity. As Lincoln Steffens recalled, she “would come to the office, smiling, like a tall, good-looking young mother to say, ‘Hush, children.’ ”
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Mark Twain · United States · Theodore Dreiser · Lincoln Steffens · Ray Stannard Baker · Rudyard Kipling · Frank Norris · Stephen Crane · Willa Cather · O. Henry · Damon Runyon · Booth Tarkington · Baker
EPUB paragraph 60 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
A man with a weakness for big, startling facts, McClure commissioned articles on new gadgets, scientific research, and futuristic technologies. This penchant for facts enabled him to spot Tarbell’s talent for enlivening a dry subject when she wrote an entertaining article about the paving of Parisian streets. Instead of the scandalmongering being offered by Pulitzer or Hearst, McClure wanted to analyze complex issues and explore them with scientific precision. Aiming at a comprehensive critique of American society, McClure concluded by 1901 that two great issues confronted the country: the growth of industrial trusts and political corruption. Before long, Lincoln Steffens was digging out municipal corruption in a series entitled “The Shame of the Cities” that started to run in October 1902. (In the February 24, 1905, issue, he skewered Senator Aldrich in a piece on Rhode Island corruption.) The choice of the proper trust to expose was a trickier issue. At first, Tarbell contemplated the steel trust and the sugar trust before the discovery of oil in California turned her attention to Standard Oil as the “most perfectly developed trust.” Since it had been investigated by various government bodies for three decades, it had left a rich documentary trail. At first projected for three issues, the Standard Oil series eventually stretched, by popular demand, to nineteen installments. It was inaugurated in November 1902 against an especially timely backdrop: An anthracite coal strike during the winter of 1902–1903 deprived the poor of coal, forcing them to heat their homes with oil, and the subsequent sharp rise in oil prices made energy an incendiary issue.
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · William Randolph Hearst · Joseph Pulitzer · Nelson W. Aldrich · Standard Oil · Lincoln Steffens · California · Rhode Island
EPUB paragraph 61 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Although Tarbell pretended to apply her scalpel to Standard Oil with surgical objectivity, she was never neutral and not only because of her father. Her brother, William Walter Tarbell, had been a leading figure in forming the Pure Oil Company, the most serious domestic challenger to Standard Oil, and his letters to her were laced with anti-Standard venom. Complaining of the trust’s price manipulations in one letter, Will warned her, “Some of those fellows will get killed one of those days.” As Pure Oil’s treasurer in 1902, Will steered legions of Rockefeller enemies to his sister and even vetted her manuscripts. Far from cherishing her neutrality, Tarbell in the end adhered to the advice she had once received from Henry James: “Cherish your contempts.” Amazingly enough, nobody made an issue of Tarbell’s veritable partnership with her brother in exposing his chief competitor.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil · Henry James · William Walter Tarbell · Pure Oil · Pure Oil Company
EPUB paragraph 62 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
When Franklin Tarbell heard that his daughter was taking on the mighty Standard, he warned her that she was exposing herself to extreme danger. “Don’t do it, Ida—they will ruin the magazine,” he said and even broached the possibility they might maim or murder her—a far-fetched scenario but suggestive of the dread that the trust inspired. As her research began, she made a sentimental trip to Titusville, which rekindled her old animosity toward Standard Oil. Her father was slowly dying of stomach cancer while she was writing her series, and this might have further embittered her toward Rockefeller, however unfairly; Franklin Tarbell would die on March 1, 1905. Contrary to her father’s predictions, Ida inflicted far more damage on Standard Oil than she received in return. The closest she came to being threatened was at a Washington dinner party where Frank Vanderlip, a vice president of National City Bank, drew her into a side room to voice his strong displeasure with her project. Sensing a vague financial menace to McClure’s, she retorted, “Well, I am sorry, but of course that makes no difference to me.” In fact, what was most notable about Standard Oil’s response was its haughty, self-defeating silence.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Franklin Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Standard Oil · National City Bank · Titusville · Washington · Frank Vanderlip
EPUB paragraph 63 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Tarbell approached her work methodically, like a carpenter, but she soon reeled under the weight of documentary evidence. After a week spent combing through reports of the Industrial Commission in February 1902, she wrote despairingly, “The task confronting me is such a monstrous one that I am staggering a bit under it.” By June, having completed three installments, she confessed that the material had acquired an obsessive hold over her mind and even invaded her sleep. On the eve of a needed European vacation, she told her research assistant, “It has become a great bugbear to me. I dream of the octopus by night and think of nothing else by day, and I shall be glad to exchange it for the Alps.”
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · Alps · Industrial Commission
EPUB paragraph 64 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Upon her return from vacation, she met with Henry Demarest Lloyd at his seaside estate in Sakonnet, Rhode Island. He insisted that, despite the Interstate Commerce Commission, large shippers were still getting the same old freight rebates, although they carefully destroyed the evidence. He told her, barely containing his rage, that Rockefeller and his associates embodied “the most dangerous tendencies in modern life.” 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 her. His doubts were instantly dispelled as the series got under way. “When you get through with ‘Johnnie,’ ” he applauded her in April 1903, “I don’t think there will be very much left of him except something resembling one of his own grease spots.” In the end, Lloyd handed over his abundant notes to her and urged George Rice, Lewis Emery, and other independents to talk with her. Having passed the torch, Henry Demarest Lloyd died in September 1903, before the series was finished.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry H. Rogers · Ida M. Tarbell · Henry Demarest Lloyd · George Rice · Lewis Emery, Jr. · Pennsylvania · Rhode Island · Interstate Commerce Commission · Johnnie · Sakonnet
EPUB paragraph 65 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Shortly before Tarbell began her research, Sam McClure tried to coax Mark Twain into editing a magazine, but Henry H. Rogers persuaded Twain to resist. As early as December 1901—almost a year before the series started to run—Rogers spotted an ad announcing McClure’s forthcoming series on Standard Oil and was startled that nobody at 26 Broadway had been contacted by the author. Concerned, he wrote to Twain, “It would naturally be supposed, that any person desiring to write a veritable history, would seek for information as near original sources as possible.” Fearing that Tarbell might be consorting with the enemy, Rogers suggested that Twain tell McClure that he should verify all statements with the trust before they were published. When Twain pressed for details about the series, McClure balked, saying, “You will have to ask Miss Tarbell.” To which Twain replied, “Would Miss Tarbell see Mr. Rogers?” Tarbell had, of course, hoped to interview the top brass at Standard Oil, and when McClure burst into her office with the invitation, she was eager to seize the chance.
Names: Henry H. Rogers · Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Mark Twain · Standard Oil · 26 Broadway · Rogers · Sam McClure
EPUB paragraph 66 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
A veteran charmer, Hell Hound Rogers invited Tarbell for a two-hour chat at his home on East Fifty-seventh Street. She had never met a real captain of industry before and seemed entranced by his resemblance to Twain. “His big head with its high forehead was set off by a heavy shock of beautiful gray hair; his nose was aquiline, sensitive,” she wrote, still betraying admiration years later. Rogers seduced her with nostalgic recollections of the days when they were Rouseville neighbors. “That reminiscence of Henry H. Rogers is only one of several reasons I have for heartily liking as fine a pirate as ever flew his flag in Wall Street.”
Names: Henry H. Rogers · Ida M. Tarbell · Mark Twain · Rouseville · Rogers · East · Wall Street
EPUB paragraph 67 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
The upshot of the meeting was that Tarbell agreed to give Rogers a chance to react to any revelations she unearthed, and for two years she periodically visited him at 26 Broadway. These encounters had a quasi-clandestine aura, with the reporter whisked in one door and out another. In a spirit of guarded cooperation, Samuel Dodd assembled material for Tarbell, while Daniel O’Day passed along information on pipelines. Since Tarbell had spoken with Rogers for nearly a year before the series started, she held her breath when the first issue appeared in November 1902. “I rather expected him to cut me off when he realized that I was trying to prove that the Standard Oil Company was only an enlarged South Improvement Company.” To her astonishment, Rogers still received her and, while occasionally miffed by this or that article, he remained on friendly terms with her.
Names: Daniel O’Day · Samuel C. T. Dodd · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil · South Improvement Company · 26 Broadway · Rogers
EPUB paragraph 68 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Rogers’s complaisance has always been a huge mystery, engendering two schools of thought. Tarbell cited Rogers’s self-interest. He and Archbold had been stung by accusations that they had conspired to blow up a Buffalo refinery that competed with Standard Oil. “That case is a sore point with Mr. Archbold and me,” he immediately told Tarbell. “I want you to go into it thoroughly.” Responding to his heightened sensitivity on this matter, she agreed to let him review anything she wrote about it. (Rogers’s strategy paid off as far as the Buffalo imbroglio was concerned.) In Tarbell’s view, Rogers was willing to see Standard Oil’s reputation sullied as long as his own was preserved.
Names: John D. Archbold · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil · Buffalo · Rogers
EPUB paragraph 69 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Another school of thought hypothesized that Rogers was both deflecting attention from his own misdeeds and taking revenge against Rockefeller, who had disapproved of his stock-market speculations. This argument suggests that Rogers enjoyed Tarbell’s series as a rebuke to his colleague’s sanctimony. Rockefeller privately denounced Rogers as a traitor who had fed Tarbell false, garbled information to defame him. Many years later, after a confidential chat with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Allan Nevins recorded in a memo, “Junior thinks that [Rogers’s] part in the publication of Ida Tarbell’s book was far from unselfish; that he was secretly glad to see Rockefeller attacked, and supplied some of the material.” Tarbell’s own notes reveal that while Rogers often defended Rockefeller, he also kept the spotlight tightly focused on the founder and away from himself. Rogers did not terminate his meetings with Tarbell until February 1904, when she published a shocking account of railway agents spying on Standard Oil competitors—a practice that Rogers had strenuously denied. When she next arrived at 26 Broadway, he demanded, “Where did you get that stuff?” That tense, brief meeting ended their relationship.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Allan Nevins · Standard Oil · 26 Broadway · Rogers
EPUB paragraph 70 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
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, “Mr. Flagler talked to me of J.D.R. Says he is the biggest little man and the littlest big man he ever knew. That he would give $100,000 one minute to charity and turn around and haggle over the price of a ton of coal. Says emphatically: ‘I have been in business with him 45 years and he would do me out of a dollar today—that is, if he could do it honestly.’ ” Though Flagler dispensed some pious claptrap about how “the Lord had prospered him,” Tarbell could not draw him into any serious, sustained discussion of Standard Oil history.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry M. Flagler · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil · Rogers · J.D.R.
EPUB paragraph 71 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
From the start, sensing that Tarbell was full of malice toward Standard Oil, Archbold had refused to cooperate. As for Rockefeller, he was slow to fathom the magnitude of the gathering threat and had no notion that this magnificent journalist could wield her slingshot with such deadly accuracy. Having weathered thirty years of assaults in the courts and statehouses, he must have felt invulnerable. When associates clamored for a response to Tarbell, Rockefeller replied, “Gentlemen, we must not be entangled in controversies. If she is right we will not gain anything by answering, and if she is wrong time will vindicate us.” To sit through an extended grilling from Tarbell would have violated his lifelong approach to business. This was a tactical blunder, for in dodging Tarbell he inadvertently seemed to validate her portrait.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 72 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
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 withering clarity. She laid down a clear chronology, provided a trenchant account of how the combine had evolved, and made the convoluted history of the oil industry comprehensible. In the dispassionate manner associated with McClure’s, she sliced open America’s most secretive business and showed all the hidden gears and wheels turning inside it. Yet however chaste and clearly reasoned her prose, it was always informed by indignation that throbbed just below the surface. It remains one of the great case studies of what a single journalist, armed with the facts, can do against seemingly invincible powers.
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Standard Oil · United States
EPUB paragraph 73 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Tarbell is perhaps best appreciated in comparison with her predecessor, Henry Demarest Lloyd, who was sloppy with his facts, florid in his prose, and too quick to pontificate. A meticulous researcher, Tarbell wrote in a taut, spare language that conveyed a sense of precision and restraint—though she had more than her quota of strident moments. By writing in such a relatively cool style, she made her readers boil with anger. Instead of invoking political panaceas or sweeping ideological prescriptions, she appealed to the reader’s sense of common decency and fair play and was most effective where she showed something small and mean-spirited about the Standard Oil style of business.
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Standard Oil
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