Writer takes on big oil, and wins

As oil approaches $100 a barrel, I can’t help but wonder what pioneering investigative reporter Ida Minerva Tarbell would say about its stranglehold on people, politics, and economies around the globe.

Today marks the 150th birthday of Miss Tarbell, best known for exposing the predatory business practices of John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Trust, which at its peak controlled 90 percent of the nation’s oil business. First published as a magazine series in McClure's and later as a two-volume book, A History of the Standard Oil Company ranks fifth of the top 100 works of 20th-century journalism. Pulitzer-prize-winning author Daniel Yergin (The Prize) called it one of the most important business books ever written.

Tarbell pioneered the new practice investigative reporting during an age of reform, when writers were determined to search out corruption in government, politics, and all phases of American life.

The curious young girl who grew up among the oil derricks of northwestern Pa., not long after the discovery of oil there in 1859, dreamed of becoming a famous biologist, but soon turned her scientific inquiry to the people, places and issues she was most passionate about. 

Among the first women to graduate from Allegheny College, Tarbell became an eyewitness to one of the most dramatic episodes in American history during the Progressive era, using her pen as an instrument of social change. Champion of the underdog, outspoken advocate of the poor, righter of the nation’s wrongs in business and government, her career took her from Pennsylvania’s oil region to Chautauqua, NY, to Paris, Washington, and New York, until in 1904 she was arguably the most famous woman in America.

She was fearless and in her mid-forties at the time, and had already written formidable biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln.

“The four years I put in on The Life of Abraham Lincoln did more than provide me with a continuing interest,” she recalled in her memoir, All in the Day’s Work, “They aroused my flagging sense that I had a country, that its problems were my problems. Now I was beginning to ask myself why we had gone the way we had since the Civil War. Was there not enough of suffering and of nobility in that calamity to quiet the greed and ambitions of men, to soften their hates, to rouse in them the will to follow Lincoln’s last counsels?”

Tarbell’s work continues to resonate with readers at the turn of another century – our own.

Read more about her life and legacy here:

Brady, Kathleen. Ida Tarbell, Portrait of a Muckraker, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.

Chernow, Ron. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr., New York: Random House, 1998.

Kochersberger, Robert C., Jr. More than a Muckraker: Ida Tarbell’s Lifetime in Journalism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994.

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Lisa Gensheimer and her husband, Rich Gensheimer, are the producers of Ida Tarbell: All in the Day’s Work, a Main Street Media documentary distributed nationally on public television in 2000. Lisa’s story about journalist Ida Tarbell, "The Lady and the Titan," published in Pennsylvania Heritage magazine (Spring, 2002), was selected for inclusion in the SIRS Renaissance database, a collection of articles with enduring value and historical impact.