November 1902 – Ida Tarbell’s series of stories on the Standard Oil Co. begins in McClure’s magazine. It will last for 19 issues.
Ida Tarbell was born in Erie County , Pennsylvania in 1857, near the burgeoning oil fields that would fuel the great industrial revolution. There is some dispute among scholars as to whether her proximity to the oil fields and her father’s business in the area resulted in her fascination with John D. Rockefeller’s consolidation of the industry in later years. Chalmers notes that Tarbell and editor S.S. McClure discussed writing about either the sugar or steel trusts in McClure’s, but decided on the oil industry after a letter from fellow muckraker Ray Stannard Baker about the discovery of oil in California arrived at the magazine. 10 In her preface to the later book The History of the Standard Oil Company, Tarbell wrote that the company was also selected because it was one of the few businesses that could have its history traced by trustworthy documentation through the years. Such a decision would prove valuable for the future of business journalism, for it gave other reporters a template of how to tell a story of a corrupt organization with facts and not innuendo.
Tarbell had not been brought to the magazine to write business stories. She caught McClure’s attention due to her writing about Napoleon, and some of her early stories in the magazine focused on the French leader and Abraham Lincoln. The magazine had carried some business stories, such as the April 1898 article about the failure of a Wall Street firm with ties to former President Ulysses S. Grant. 11
With assistant John Siddall, Tarbell dug into the Standard Oil Co., which was Rockefeller’s company. Her writing, which began in the November 1902 issue of McClure’s and lasted for 19 issues, was meticulous in its detail, documenting Rockefeller’s early interest in oil and how the industry began. But unlike other journalists of the time, Tarbell dug into public documents across the country. Separately, these documents provided individual instances of Standard Oil’s strong-arm tactics against rivals, railroad companies and other companies that got in its way. Collected by Tarbell into a cogent history, they became a damning portrayal of big business.
Tarbell obtained testimony in court cases and before Congressional committees, as well as copies of lawsuits. She talked to people inside the company and those who had competed against Standard Oil. And she was successful in gaining their trust – a step where others had failed.