Taking on the Trust.

There is no one left: none but all of us … The public is the people. We forget that we all are the people; that while each of us in his group can shove off on the rest of the bill of today, the debt is only postponed. The rest of us are passing it on back to us. We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end the sum total of the debt will be our liberty. – Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company

Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller is Steve Weinberg’s short biography of Tarbell, perhaps the first true investigative journalist in American history and one of the original muckrakers, set off against snippets of the biography of Rockefeller. It’s a good read, but it’s not the story of the battle between these two individuals, who in fact, only met once and had no direct contact even as Tarbell was laying bare the unethical practices of Standard Oil.

Tarbell’s magnum opus was the book quoted up top, an 800-page tome first published in installments in McClure’s magazine, which at the time was an intellectual rag that combined serious (if muckraking) journalism with pieces of short fiction. Tarbell’s father had been involved in the western Pennsylvania oil boom, but also saw his fortunes derailed by the monopolistic practices of Rockefeller’s firm. Weinberg presents the thesis that Tarbell’s drive to expose Rockefeller’s dirty pool, although her earlier work indicates a passion for reformist journalism, with Standard Oil as a likely target of any dogged reporter of the time. What set Tarbell apart was her willingness to work to unearth new sources, including first-person accounts that had not previously come to light, but also documents and letters that other journalists had not bothered to find. She made great use of court documents and filings from the small towns where Standard Oil set up shop, often via shell companies, and identified people who’d had contact with Rockefeller or his minions during Standard Oil’s rise to domination.

Unfortunately, we don’t get much on the direct impact of Tarbell’s book, which only merits a chapter and a half towards the end of Taking on the Trust. Standard Oil was broken up via court ruling a few years afterward, but how direct is the link between Tarbell’s work and that legal decision? And how did Tarbell’s groundbreaking efforts affect the world of journalism afterwards? I imagine that later investigative reporters would have given her at least some credit either for directly inspiring them or for opening doors through which they could walk, but Taking comes to a fairly abrupt end once the narrative reaches the breakup.

I may post something over the weekend, but I’ll be on vacation from Sunday to Saturday and probably won’t post anything next week. I’ll keep an eye on the comments, as always.