Search results
Jan 6, 2022 · She also 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 ...
Mar 19, 2021 · Ida M. Tarbell’s name would become synonymous with the term muckraker after publication of her 19-part expose of the business practices of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company that had destroyed her father’s oil business, as well as many other small oil related companies in Pennsylvania’s oil region in the 1870s. Tarbell’s work ...
Jul 5, 2012 · Tarbell was, in effect, a young woman betrayed, not by a straying lover but by Standard Oil’s secret deals with the major railroads—a collusive scheme that allowed the company to crush not ...
- Gilbert King
- Ida Tarbell
- The South Improvement Company
- Wrong
- Cleveland Massacre
- Lessons Learned
- Investigating Standard Oil
- Henry Rogers
- Ida Tarbell, ‘Misguided Woman’
- Aftermath
She was born on her grandfather’s farm in Hatch Hollow, Pa., on Nov. 5, 1857. Her parents were Franklin S. Tarbell, a carpenter and a teacher, and Esther Ann McCullough Tarbell, also a teacher. She was only three when her family moved to the pioneer town of Rouseville, Pa., in the Oil Creek Valley. The Tarbells arrived just before great streams of ...
For 12 years, the Oil Creek Valley had yielded 33 million barrels of oil. An industry had grown up producing, transporting, refining, marketing, exporting and selling byproducts. The entrepreneurs of northwest Pennsylvania believed they had a splendid future, she wrote. The businesses were self-dependent, wrote Ida Tarbell, except for one thing: tr...
News leaked about the South Improvement Company scheme in Oil Creek Valley. Ida Tarbell, 14 at the time, witnessed the backlash among the local oil refiners and producers. “As soon as the Oil Region learned of it a wonderful row followed,” she wrote. She recalled nightly antimonopoly meetings, violent speeches, processions, vandalism and appeals to...
On April 2, 1872, the State of Pennsylvania revoked the South Improvement Company’s charter. But it didn’t matter. John D. Rockefeller had moved onto a predatory new scheme called the Cleveland Massacre. In six weeks in February and March, he bought up 22 of his 26 competitorsin hostile takeovers. Henry Rogers and Charles Pratt eventually realized ...
Rockefeller then marched out of Cleveland and did the same thing with the railroads in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore and beyond, wrote his biographer, Ron Chernow. He had “figured out every conceivable way to restrain trade, rig markets and suppress competition,” he wrote. He left hundreds, if not thousands, of Franklin Tarbells in ...
It began, And it created a sensation. McClure’s ultimately ran it as a 19-part series from late 1902 to late 1904 as The History of the Standard Oil Co. Tarbell had plenty of material to work with. State legislatures and Congress had held many hearings and written reports about Standard Oil’s depredations. They just hadn’t done anything about it. S...
Tarbell’s friend Mark Twain had connected her with Rogers, then the acting head of Standard Oil. She liked him, and he was surprisingly willing to talk to her. He may have thought she was writing a puff piece. But Rogers lied to her. He told her the company had never illegally spied on competitors. But she had proof that wasn’t true. A boy about 16...
She praised Rockefeller in the series, which became a book and ignited public anger against the Standard Oil monopoly. But she also described him as a “living mummy” with small, steady, expressionless eyes. “Our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises,” she concluded. He called her “t...
Seven years later, the U.S. Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil into 34 companies, including those now known as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Amoco, and Marathon Petroleum. But if Ida Tarbell intended to impoverish John D. Rockefeller, she failed spectacularly. Rockefeller had undercapitalized his company, and in 10 years the value of its successor companie...
Jul 17, 2023 · And as an adult, Tarbell used her pen to fight back. Her 19-part exposé of Standard Oil’s backroom tactics came out between 1902 and 1904 and explained the oil industry’s machinations in easy-to-understand terms. It placed Tarbell among the best-known muckrakers of her day, and helped lead to the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911.
Notable works. The History of the Standard Oil Company. Ida Minerva Tarbell (November 5, 1857 – January 6, 1944) was an American writer, investigative journalist, biographer, and lecturer. She was one of the leading muckrakers and reformers of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was a pioneer of investigative ...
People also ask
Did Ida Tarbell bring down Standard Oil?
How did Ida Tarbell change history?
Why did Ida Tarbell find a copy of Rockefeller's book?
What did Franklin Tarbell tell Ida about Rockefeller & Standard Oil?
How much oil did Rockefeller control?
What impact did Ida Tarbell have on society?
By the early 1900s,John D. Rockefeller, Sr. had finished building his oil empire. ... Ida Tarbell's magazine series "The History of the Standard Oil Company," would not only change the history of ...
