Ida Tarbell

American journalist

• Born: November 5, 1857
• Birthplace: Erie County, Pennsylvania
• Died: January 6, 1944
• Place of death: Bridgeport, Connecticut

Tarbell became a prominent leader in American magazine journalism in a period when women were almost entirely absent from the field. She is especially known for her investigative series on the Standard Oil Company in 1902, a report considered the first great work of the muckrakers of journalism.

Early Life

Ida Tarbell was born on her grandfather’s farm in western Pennsylvania four years before the Civil War began. Her father, Franklin Sumner Tarbell, had earlier struck out for Iowa and its richer farming prospects; he would not see his daughter until she was eighteen months old. Ida’s mother, Esther McCullough Tarbell, was a descendant of Massachusetts pioneers and had taught school for more than a decade before her marriage. She would ultimately bear four children, of whom Ida was the eldest.

When Tarbell was three, her father moved the family to the Pennsylvania oil region to take advantage of financial opportunities there. After the Civil War, the family would follow the oil boom to several towns in western Pennsylvania, settling ultimately in Titusville when Tarbell was thirteen. While her father made an increasingly comfortable living building wooden oil tanks, Tarbell studied in the local schools and attended Methodist church services and revival meetings with her family. When the time came for her to continue her studies, her father naturally selected Allegheny College, the Methodist coeducational college in nearby Meadville.

For the next four years, Tarbell combined diligent study in biology and languages with social activities, class offices, literary magazine editing, and public speaking. She was romantically linked with at least one young man, but the relationship did not survive college and Tarbell never married. After her graduation, she embarked on a short-lived career as a teacher at the Union Seminary in Poland, Ohio. A low salary and high expectations placed on her ability to teach all subjects led to her return to Titusville after two years.

The opportunity that led to Tarbell’s career in journalism appeared a few months after her return. She was hired as an editor for the Chautauquan, a magazine published to promote adult education and home learning by the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. Although the editorial work she was assigned initially was stultifying, she gradually expanded her responsibilities to include translating, reviewing manuscripts, and writing her own articles. The workload at first was light, and the magazine was located in Meadville, which enabled her to complete a master of arts degree at Allegheny College.

When Tarbell left the Chautauquan in 1891, she sailed to France determined to immerse herself in Parisian culture, support herself by submitting articles to American newspapers, and write a biography of Madame Manon Philipon de Roland, a hero of the French Revolution. She did all of this and more. After reading some of her work, Samuel S. McClure, the publisher of McClure’s magazine, personally visited her in Paris to offer her a job. In the fall of 1894, she accepted his offer, which included money for the passage home.

Life’s Work

Tarbell’s first work at the magazine was the surprising assignment of producing a series of articles on the life of Napoleon, whose hundred-year-old military exploits produced a flurry of activity in the popular press of the 1890’s. She had not expected to do a work of that sort, and she was astonished to be asked, after returning from Paris, to undertake a biography of a French subject using the comparatively limited sources to be found in American libraries. Nevertheless, her labors at the Library of Congress resulted in a distinctive and popular McClure’s series that was subsequently published as a book, as was the practice at the time.

The resources of the Library of Congress were excellent, as Tarbell discovered, and so were the human resources in the nation’s capital. She remained in Washington, D.C., until 1899, during which time she met influential politicians and public servants. She wrote articles about them and ghost-wrote the memoirs of other famous men. Her major work during her Washington years was another McClure’s assignment, a biography of Abraham Lincoln. She conducted interviews in Washington and Illinois and established a wide network of correspondents who provided her with information. Her study of Lincoln’s early years was published in 1896, with a complete two-volume biography following in 1900, after its serialization in the magazine.

Called to the McClure’sNew York staff in 1899 as managing editor, Tarbell joined a talented group of writers and editors. Although McClure himself was seldom in the office, his partner, John Phillips, shrewdly managed the publisher’s affairs. Among the writers McClure and Phillips published regularly were Ray Stannard Baker and William Allen White, both of whom were poised on the brink of fame as preeminent journalists of their time. Also on the staff then or shortly thereafter were Willa Cather, Finley Peter Dunne, and Lincoln Steffens. This group took the lead in a new journalistic enterprise muckraking and Tarbell’s series on the Standard Oil Company was in the forefront of that type of work.

The series that would later be published in book form as The History of the Standard Oil Company was launched in the November, 1902, McClure’s magazine. Tarbell had undertaken it in response to McClure’s idea of detailing the rise of the trusts in the late nineteenth century; she had formulated the idea of tracing the history of one such enterprise and the great entrepreneur associated with it, John D. Rockefeller. Growing up in the oilfield districts had acquainted her with the industry and the geographic area in which the boom began. Her industrious methods of working and her indomitable spirit in researching her subject ensured a thorough product. If anyone in McClure’s talented group of writers could master such a vast (and elusive) body of information, it was Tarbell.

The Standard Oil series established two things: The first was that Tarbell was a formidable author and one of the outstanding journalists of her time; the second was that muckraking (as the reform journalists’ movement was labeled in 1906 by Theodore Roosevelt) was a responsible enterprise that could produce thorough and dispassionate analyses of problems. Because of the efforts of Tarbell and her cohorts, McClure’s became the leading voice of protest among the popular magazines.

This preeminence was short-lived, however, and Tarbell became the leader of a staff revolt against the magazine in 1906. At the center of the controversy was the mercurial McClure. The publisher was famous for his ability to produce ideas for articles at a rapid-fire pace, but his erratic behavior in 1905 and 1906 seemed to Tarbell, Phillips, and others to threaten the magazine they had helped to build. They questioned his new, risky publishing ventures and wondered whether his commitment to reform had been undercut by his commitment to making money. Tarbell resigned from the magazine in April, 1906.

By June, the old McClure’s group had formed a new venture. They founded the Phillips Publishing Company, raised money to purchase a failed magazine, and launched it in the fall as their own, The American Magazine . Tarbell remained a regular staffer and contributor until the group sold its interests in 1915, although she also submitted articles to other magazines. Her major series in TheAmerican Magazine covered diverse topics: the protective tariff, the American woman, and the “golden rule” in business.

The first series highlighted the author at her best. She explained the complexities of the tariff to the general public, clarified controversies, and produced a reasoned analysis that clearly explained the costs of high tariffs to working people. Her golden rule series, her last extended writing for The American Magazine, was a defense of scientific management in industry, a work that demonstrated how efficiency could blend with humane treatment of labor. The third series on the American woman proved to be the most controversial and caused a rift between Tarbell and some of her suffragist friends.

Like many reformers during the early years of the twentieth century, Tarbell believed that the government, through protective legislation, could act in the general interest of laborers, women, and minorities. Revolutionary change in the social or political system was not necessary. She was never truly a feminist. She did not support the woman suffrage movement, since she believed that a woman’s influence was best exerted in the home, not in areas that were traditionally male preserves. Thus, for working women, she favored legislation that would limit their hours to allow them more time in the home. Raised by a suffragist mother, and herself a dominant force in a traditionally male profession, Tarbell espoused an apparently contradictory philosophy relating to women and their roles in society.

After the sale of The American Magazine in 1915, Tarbell remained active as a freelance writer. She also traveled and lectured on topics about which she had written earlier. She worked briefly in Washington during World War I until she was sidetracked by a diagnosis of tuberculosis and by the subsequent treatment. She spent much time during her later years tending to family members, often at her farm in Connecticut, which she had purchased in 1906 with her book earnings. Projects she completed in her sixties and seventies included biographies of steel magnate Elbert Gary and General Electric head Owen D. Young, a history of American business during the late nineteenth century, and her autobiography, All in the Day’s Work . Her major magazine writings were series on the Florida land boom and on Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Tarbell’s work progressed more slowly as she aged, but she doggedly kept at it. In her eighties, she used her own declining health as the subject of a work she never completed, Life After Eighty. Old age, Parkinson’s disease (diagnosed about two decades earlier), and pneumonia brought about Tarbell’s death in early January of 1944. At her request, she was buried in Titusville.

Significance

Tarbell exerted both a specific and a general influence on her times. The specific influence related to Standard Oil, whose illegal operations she documented as thoroughly as if she were preparing a legal brief. Legal action, in fact, was the result. When the attorney general filed a 1906 case against Standard Oil for violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the charges were essentially those that Tarbell had made and documented in her book. The case was heard and appealed; when the U.S. Supreme Court made its ruling in 1911, it ordered the dissolution of the giant corporation.

Tarbell’s general influence concerned the status of women in public life. Although she, ironically, did not participate in feminist or suffragist activities, her whole career exemplified what activist women attempted to achieve the opportunity for women to enter the professions.

Bibliography

Brady, Kathleen. Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker. New York: Seaview/Putnam, 1984. The most thorough treatment of the contradictions in Tarbell’s writings and of the contrast between her own achievements and her views on women and public life.

Conn, Frances G. Ida Tarbell, Muckraker. New York: Thomas Nelson, 1972. Written especially for juveniles, the book is anecdotal but informative. There is no systematic discussion of Tarbell’s works, but there are numerous quotations from her writings.

Lyon, Peter. Success Story: The Life and Times of S. S. McClure. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963. Discusses Tarbell’s writings in the context of the magazine muckraking movement generally considered to have begun in McClure’s magazine. Examines the complex relationship between Tarbell and McClure.

Tarbell, Ida M. All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1939. An unassuming autobiography made rather bland by the author’s saccharine approach to describing the controversies in which she was involved.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The History of the Standard Oil Company. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1904. Tarbell’s magnum opus was not only the first great work of the muckrakers but also a solid history of the development of the oil industry in the United States. It is the main work on which her literary reputation rests.

Tomkins, Mary E. Ida M. Tarbell. New York: Twayne, 1974. This book in Twayne’s United States Authors series mainly considers Tarbell’s writings and evaluates her contributions to literature.

Treckel, Paula A. “Lady Muckraker.” American History 61, no. 2 (June, 2001): 38. A tribute to Tarbell, focusing on her investigation of Standard Oil.