REMEMBERING IDA TARBELL: Standard Oil investigation set out to capture an era-and readers

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jan/Feb 2008 by Brady, Kathleen

Publishers, editors and reporters struggling to keep journalism forceful and print itself vital might take heart in the story behind The History of the Standard oil Company, the classic exposé published in McClure's Magazine a century ago. The story hit with the force that the Enron scandal would have a century later, but coming up with the idea took more than a year.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the age of what Teddy Roosevelt dismissed as "muckraking," McClure 's was the incubator of investigative journalism with crusading series on municipal corruption by Lincoln Steffens and on the labor movement by Ray Stannard Baker. Its most famous and enduring work, of course, was The History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida M. Tarbell, the first installment of which appeared in November 1902 and ultimately led the Supreme Court to dissolve the company in 1911.

Her work was historic, but her original intention was not high-minded. She and her editors simply wanted more readers to buy their magazine. "Anyone who thought we sat around with our brow screwed together trying to reform the world was far from the truth," Tarbell wrote to author Alice Hegan Rice in 1933. "We were after... interesting reading material and if it contributed to the general good, so much the better."

In the closing years of the 19th century, McClure put his staff under relentless pressure to come up with a new series that the public would crave. The writer Finley Peter Dunne, who created Mr. Dooley, a literary character who was the Stephen Colbert of his day, proposed "the trust," the monopoly that was overtaking major industries, transforming American business from ownership by many people to control by a few.

McClure liked Dunne's idea. He said, "It seems to me that he has found the great feature, and the great feature is trusts. ...That will be the great red-hot event. The magazine that puts [together] the various phases of the subject that people want to be informed about will be bound to have a good circulation."

Tarbell and her colleagues wanted to select one trust that would represent the pattern that was common to all of them and one living man who had consolidated that power and reigned over an industry and everyone who participated in it.

Tarbell proposed the Sugar Trust, led by Henry O. Havemeyer. She wanted to show how the Sugar Trust pressured and cajoled legislators to keep protective tariffs high and then show how that affected the prices paid by housewives.

But McClure thought that too trivial.

Her suggestion did focus the editors' attention on how corporate endeavors affected the American dinner table. As a result, they selected the Beef Trust and Philip Armour, who had turned meat-packing into a national industry centered in Chicago by developing in-plant slaughtering and refrigerated railroad cars that distributed meat across the country. However, Armour had the good fortune to the in January 1901, thus eliminating himself as a candidate for an in-depth investigation.

Ray Stannard Baker then suggested that the discovery ten years earlier of large oil fields in California, particularly Los Angeles, could be interesting. Tarbell thought not. She was interested in the boardroom strategies and planning that went into the making of monopolies that crushed and swept up local businesses as central offices assumed every aspect of production and sales.

She wrote Baker, "Unquestionably we ought to do something in the coming year on the great industrial developments of the country, but it seems clear to me that we must not attempt to do this by describing the discovery and opening of great natural resources such as in the case of the oil.

"We have got to find a new plan of attacking [industrial development]. Something that will show clearly not only the magnitude of the industries and commercial developments, and the changes they have brought in various parts of the country, but something which will make clear the great principles by which industrial leaders are combining and controlling these resources."

This inspired Baker's relatively quick study of the steel industry. The result was his article "What the U.S. Steel Corp. Really Is," which described J. Pierpont Morgan's company as a government unto itself. It appeared in the November 1901 issue of McClure's six months after Tarbell wrote him.

But there was more to a trust than the fact that it functioned virtually unchecked. There was the story of its great efficiencies and organization and the story of its human cost. McClure 's series on the trust had to explain all that in narrative form. To give McClure's editor John Phillips an example, Tarbell told him how her father had prospered in the oil business. Franklin Tarbell had made a small fortune by developing an innovative oil tank, then struck oil himself in the wild oil fields of Pithole, Pa. He prospered until John D. Rockefeller took over the oil business, pipelines and railroads, thus strangling the ability of independent oil men to get their product to market and reducing the value of Franklin's oil leases.