Ida Tarbell - The History of the Standard Oil Company

The History of the Standard Oil Company

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 History of the Standard Oil Company

Ida Tarbell

Introduction copyright 2018, Elizabeth Catte

All rights reserved. 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.

First Belt Publishing Edition 2018

ISBN: 9781948742153

Belt Publishing

2306 West 17th Street, Suite 4, Cleveland, Ohio 44113

www.beltpublishing.com

Book design by Meredith Pangrace

Cover by David Wilson

contents

by Elizabeth Catte

Publishers 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. A free digitized version of the complete text can be found at Internet Archive (www.archive.org).

introduction

How Ida Tarbell came to write The History of the Standard Oil Companyher landmark 1904 muckraking expos that directly contributed to the dismemberment of a corporate behemoth and the public downfall of an industry titanis a fraught subject.

In one version of the investigations origin story, the account preferred by John D. 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. Her fathers 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 Tarbells biographers, however, the choice to investigate Standard Oil was more practical. Samuel McClure, Tarbells employer and owner of McClures Magazine, believed that monopolies were the red-hot subject of the time. Tarbell had earned her reputation, and McClures Magazine readers, from biographies of powerful, almost unknowable men. A similar treatment of Rockefeller would play to Tarbells skills and her working knowledge of the oil industry, while simultaneously capitalizing on the nations antitrust fervor.

The truth of her motives, perhaps, lies somewhere in between. Tarbell, a tidy list-maker and careful researcher, set to the task before her with dispassion and coolness. 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 saw firsthand the emergence of Rockefellers Standard Oil Company, and her family did indeed suffer from its insatiable appetite. She was born in 1857 in pastoral Hatch Hollow, Pennsylvania, and her father soon moved the family to Cherry Run during the great oil rush, where one estimate counted at least twenty-five oil wells per acre of land. A traveler wrote of their new home, No one lives amid this sea of oil but those who are making money Men think of oil, talk of oil, dream of oil; the smell and taste of oil predominate all they eat and drink; they breathe an atmosphere of oil-gas and the clamor of ile, ile, ile rings in ones ears from daylight until midnight.

Franklin Tarbell, Idas father, attached his fortunes to the oil businessfirst as a carpenter constructing storage barrels, then as an oil producer with partnership in a small company. Franklins successes allowed the Tarbells to relocate to Titusville in 1870, away from the muck of the oil camps, where business took place not through drills and derricks but the magic of rail as the regions precious cargo went forth to fuel the coming of the new century.

The railroad, once a blessing, soon became a curse for men like Franklin Tarbell. In 1871, the owners of the Erie, Central, and Pennsylvania railroads struck a deal with Rockefeller, who had established Standard Oil the year prior, to skyrocket oil freight prices and bully small producers into joining his joint venture, the South Improvement Company, which offered members steep transportation discounts and rebates. Franklin, along with most Titusville producers, refused to join. Their organized actions, which included protests and violent unrest, got results. The Southern Improvement Company ceased operations in 1872, but its defeat was only a fleeting setback in the development of Rockefellers oil empire. By the end of the decade, Standard Oil controlled over ninety percent of oil production in the United States. Tarbell later wrote of coming of age during the oil wars that In that fine fight, there was born in me a hatred of privilege.

Rockefeller and those who formed the upper echelons of his empire presented themselves as canny businessmen who unapologetically exploited legal loopholes and the vagueness of regulation for the mutual benefit of both consumers and producers. It was well-known, for example, that operating as a trust allowed Rockefeller to proceed with the normally forbidden practice of uniting his companies across state lines. To call these companies his might actually be misleading; they were often formed from the remnants of small businesses unable to compete with Standard Oils growing monopoly. Rockefeller and his associates would admit to ruthlessness, but never dishonesty. Staying one-step ahead of the law required a healthy respect for it, they argued.

The passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 proved only a minor inconvenience for Rockefeller. The law was ambiguous, leaving interpretation in the hands of pro-business courts, and the government lost the majority of its first cases. In some respects, the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act may have accelerated the growth of monopolies as business leaders observed lax enforcement. The majority of trusts, for example, were formed in the decade after the passage of the act.

But all that was little concern to Tarbell in the moment. A curious obsession with the French Revolution had tempted her to Paris in 1890. After an unenjoyable stint as a teacher in Ohio led her to try her hand as an assistant editor for Chautauquan magazine back home, Tarbell set off to France. In Paris, she met future associate Samuel McClure, a hyperactive editor eager to start a publication that could tap into the publics enthusiasm for sensational, scandal-filled journalism and redirect it to more enlightened topics.

Tarbells work for McClures Magazine made her famous. She perfected her brand of investigative journalism by first writing character studies of great change-makers: her serialized profiles of Napoleon and Lincoln marry historical fact and gentle speculation. One reporter called McClures circle the most stimulating, yes intoxicating, editorial atmosphere then existent in Americaor anywhere else!

Rockefeller and Standard Oil, though, would prove to be far more controversial subjects. Her father tried to warn her off the assignmentDont do it Idathey will ruin the magazine, he wrote to herbut at the start she didnt believe her investigation would uncover anything more nefarious that a common tale of greedy businessmen. Villains, to be sure, but doubtful criminals. Nor did she believe the story would attract wide readership. Who would want to read about the day-to-day operations of a large corporation?