Idle oil tycoon negotiator archive#

Tarbell saw firsthand the emergence of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, and her family did indeed suffer from its insatiable appetite. She did not see herself as a crusader her aim was only to “give a notion of the process by which a particular industry passed from the control of the many to that of the few.” Nevertheless, she was “always informed by indignation that throbbed just below the surface,” Chernow wrote. Tarbell, a tidy list-maker and careful researcher, set to the task before her with dispassion and coolness. The truth of her motives, perhaps, lies somewhere in between. A similar treatment of Rockefeller would play to Tarbell’s skills and her working knowledge of the oil industry, while simultaneously capitalizing on the nation’s antitrust fervor. Tarbell had earned her reputation, and McClure’s Magazine readers, from biographies of powerful, almost unknowable men. Samuel McClure, Tarbell’s employer and owner of McClure’s Magazine, believed that monopolies were the “red-hot” subject of the time. Her father’s tragedies doomed her objectivity, compromised her methods, and compelled her to render a portrait of Rockefeller that his biographer Ron Chernow characterized as “evil incarnate.” To many of Tarbell’s biographers, however, the choice to investigate Standard Oil was more practical. Rockefeller sympathists, Tarbell was the vengeful daughter of a dying oil producer cast down in the world by Standard Oil, whose formative years in the derrick-studded towns of the Pennsylvania oil fields primed her for a reckoning. In one version of the investigation’s origin story, the account preferred by John D.

Idle oil tycoon negotiator archive#

A free digitized version of the complete text can be found at Internet Archive (introduction How Ida Tarbell came to write The History of the Standard Oil Company-her landmark 1904 muckraking exposé that directly contributed to the dismemberment of a corporate behemoth and the public downfall of an industry titan-is a fraught subject. Publisher’s Note To make the text more accessible to contemporary readers, this edition has been abridged from its original version, the appendices and illustrations excised, and certain spellings modernized. The Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company XVIII. The Standard Oil Company and Politics XIV. The Rise of the Standard Oil Company III. First Belt Publishing Edition 2018 ISBN: 9781948742153īelt Publishing 2306 West 17th Street, Suite 4, Cleveland, Ohio 44113 Book design by Meredith Pangrace Cover by David WilsonĬontents Publisher’s Note Introduction by Elizabeth Catte Author’s Preface I. This introduction or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Introduction copyright © 2018, Elizabeth Catte All rights reserved. The History of the Standard Oil Company Ida Tarbell More Belt Revivals Poor White by Sherwood Anderson Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic Stories from Ohio by William Dean Howells The Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company