Walnut Oil and Double Oaked Bourbon Ice Cream with Mother’s Nutmeg and Coffee Election Cake
The fight against John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and his business Standard Oil was partly personal for Ida M. Tarbell. Decades before Tarbell began her investigative journalism career, she was a teenager in Western Pennsylvania. Her father was an oilman and moved the family around the state for his job, with the unintended consequence that Tarbell witnessed many burn victims and deaths from explosions and other oil-related incidents. In 1872, the South Improvement Company, which was established to control oil and gas industries, forced Tarbell’s father, among countless others, out of business.
Tarbell wasn’t the best student, but she was very intelligent and often surrounded by her mother’s suffragist friends, although Tarbell herself was not a supporter. It was science that woke Tarbell’s interest in learning and she ended up graduating at the head of her school. As the only female in her class of 41 at Allegheny College, Tarbell studied biology, wrote for the campus women’s literary society, made a scientific discovery about the common mudpuppy, and pushed for the creation of a sophomore stone for her class that read “Everyone is his/her own hope” in Latin.
After receiving her masters in 1883, Tarbell served as a teacher for a couple years, but then returned home due to mental and financial exhaustion. It then only took her three years to work her way up to managing editor of the magazine The Chautauquan. While at the magazine, Tarbell wrote an article proving that there were 2,000 women patent owners and that women were capable of becoming inventors. But she also wrote articles in which she encouraged women to enter journalism, yet only if they were not weak and kept tears to themselves.
At the height of the Belle Époque, Tarbell moved to Paris. She admired Impressionist art, attended Can-can dances, hosted a French-English salon, contributed to several American newspapers, and started her first biography of French revolutionary Madame Roland. Hoping to salvage women from the depth of history, Tarbell was upset to learn that Roland was not the independent thinker Tarbell had believed. As she begrudgingly finished the book, Tarbell, began writing freelance for McClure’s Magazine and then moved back to America to take an editorship position with the magazine. Her first big assignment was a seven-part biographical series on Napoleon. It was so popular that it not only increased the magazine’s readership, but it landed Tarbell a publisher for the Roland book. After being told that all had been written about Abraham Lincoln already, Tarbell interviewed hundreds of people who knew the president, met with his son, recovered a lost speech, discovered hundreds of unpublished letters and speeches, and disproved myths. While a competing magazine belittled Tarbell, saying, “They got a girl to write the Life of Lincoln,” McClure’s popularity boomed and Tarbell resolved to be a writer. With five books on Lincoln under her belt and as part-owner of McClure’s, Tarbell rented a Greenwich Village apartment that had strong reminders of her beloved France.
In 1902, Tarbell began her 19-part series for McClure’s, and what would two years later become a bestselling book, that rattled the big business world. “The History of the Standard Oil Company” was one of the first examples of muckraking journalism, which we know today to be investigative journalism, a style that had not previously existed. The negative exposé led to the dissolution of the company as a monopoly and several legislative acts to prevent anticompetitive practices and give the Interstate Commerce Commission power over oil and railroad rates. One of the most damning revelations in the series was the discovery of one last, and thankfully not destroyed, copy of a book, found at the New York Public Library, that verified that Standard Oil had been involved in the South Improvement Company’s illegal scheme that had caused Tarbell’s father to lose his job all those years ago. The articles provoked Rockefeller to refer to Tarbell as “Miss Tarbarrel” and one of the businessman’s banks to bluster the magazine to which Tarbell slyly said, “Of course that makes no difference to me.”
President Roosevelt gave progressive writers like Tarbell the term muckrakers, but Tarbell believed that “historian” was a more accurate term for her work, as the truth and unbiased reporting mattered most to her. After this attention died down, Tarbell decided to move to and run a 40-acre Connecticut farm named Twin Oaks and continued to write freelance. Her life story would surely imply that Tarbell was a feminist, yet Tarbell often critiqued the Suffrage Movement. While her mother’s fellow suffragists ignored a young Tarbell, her father’s friends paid attention to her. As an adult, Tarbell disliked the militant suffragists, who she viewed as anti-male and even declared that a woman's place was in the home. But after (white) women won the right to vote in 1920, Tarbell accepted the importance of this achievement and even alluded to the possibility of a female president. Tarbell kept writing, including a novel and a sympathetic series on Mussolini, lecturing, participating in social work, and serving on presidential committees and conferences. She died at 86 in 1944 as she was working on her second autobiography. The legacy of her career and the impact she had on the world of journalism is paramount.
