May/June 2001

IDA TARBELL, PATRON SAINT

BY STEVE WEINBERG

It does not look like anything especially impressive today. It sits on an out-of-the-way shelf, one of millions of volumes in a cavernous university research library. Its green cover has faded after ninety-seven years of heavy use, occasional abuse and, ultimately, lack of use. It is mentioned in Twentieth Century American history courses on college campuses. But hardly anybody alive has read it from beginning to end, all 815 pages.

That is a shame, because the book is probably the greatest work of investigative journalism ever written. The History of the Standard Oil Company is the unprepossessing title. By Ida M. (for Minerva) Tarbell.

Born in 1857 in rural northwestern Pennsylvania, Tarbell was forty-three when she started researching the world's most powerful corporation and its chief executive, John D. Rockefeller. By the time she started, Tarbell had won a measure of fame for her serialized biographies in McClure's Magazine on Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln. Finding new material about those historical figures had been difficult, given how much had already been published about them. But a determined, talented Tarbell had succeeded.

Rockefeller presented a different kind of challenge. He was alive, not dead, and at the zenith of his power. He had no intention of letting a mere journalist -- and a woman, at that -- assault his empire.

Tarbell's biggest obstacle, however, was neither her gender nor Rockefeller's opposition. Rather, her biggest obstacle was the craft of journalism. She proposed to investigate Standard Oil and Rockefeller by using documents -- hundreds of thousands of pages scattered throughout the nation -- then fleshing out her findings through well-informed interviews with the company's current and former executives, competitors, government regulators, antitrust lawyers, and academic experts.

In other words, Tarbell proposed to practice what today is considered investigative reporting. But in 1900, as she began her research, investigative reporting did not exist on such a scale. Tarbell would have to reshape the form.

So who was this reporter willing to take on Standard Oil and Rockefeller? Ida Tarbell possessed a relentless curiosity from a young age. The circumstances of her upbringing eventually focused that curiosity on Standard Oil. The first major oil find in the continental United States occurred in northwestern Pennsylvania, just a short ride from Tarbell's birthplace, and just two years after her birth. Like many others in the region, Tarbell's father Franklin did his best to capitalize on the oil boom. He started a tank-building business, given the pressing need for containers to transport the liquid gold.

So Tarbell grew up in the oil culture. She heard her father and his contemporaries talk about the rapacious corporation that Rockefeller had built from scratch. All those decades later, when editor S.S. McClure decided somebody had to explain the tentacles of the gigantic trusts to his magazine's readership, it seemed natural to focus on the biggest trust of all, Standard Oil. It also seemed natural to assign the project to Tarbell.

But it did not seem natural at all for Tarbell to approach the assignment by seeking documents such as transcripts of congressional hearings, court files, probate papers, and land deeds. She invented the paper-trail school of journalism. Previous exposés in newspapers and magazines had been based largely on a combination of interviewing, gossip, and observations made while undercover. The result -- lots of inaccurate journalism that sometimes contained kernels of truth.

Tarbell's new brand of investigative reporting had an impact. Rockefeller, almost universally considered an aggressive but fair businessman and a devout Christian practicing world-class philanthropy before Tarbell's exposé, saw his reputation around the world forever altered. President Theodore Roosevelt used Tarbell's findings of anti-competitive practices, especially lower-than-market shipping rates Standard Oil negotiated with the railroads, to push for increased government regulation. In that atmosphere, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil had to be broken into smaller units to decrease its sometimes adverse impact on wholesale and retail fuel prices.

Tarbell, only mildly devoted to organized religion, instead made accuracy her bible. Whether they know it or not, the investigative journalists of A.D. 2001 owe a great deal to Ida Tarbell.

Steve Weinberg, a longtime contributing editor to CJR, is writing a biography of Ida Tarbell with the help of an Alicia Patterson Fellowship and a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.