When Roosevelt became president, Mark Hanna urged him to reassure skittish businessmen by avoiding provocative statements. With mischievous relish, the young president threw a dinner for J. P. Morgan, telling one cabinet member, “You see, it represents an effort on my part to become a conservative man in touch with the influential class and I think I deserve encouragement.”20 He sought the advice of Senator Aldrich and stayed on his best behavior around businessmen. In November 1901, after a friendly meeting with Roosevelt, an aide to Henry Flagler suggested that he meet with the president and patch up hard feelings between them. “I don’t believe there is a man in America who dreads such a thing as much as I do,” Flagler responded. “I am glad you saw him, for I am sure I don’t want to do it.”21 The statement captured the hubris that would soon be the downfall of Standard Oil, which treated the federal government as a meddlesome, inferior power.
Roosevelt trod a tightrope between radical reformers and trust kings. He had a clever way of delivering sharp, sudden blows against business, then following with conciliatory speeches. By nature, he was a political hybrid: Strident reformers brought out his conservatism while stand-pat businessmen brought out his crusading zeal. Much like Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, he introduced regulation in order to save the country from social unrest and forestall more extreme measures. He was accused of appropriating the policies of William Jennings Bryan, much as Franklin Roosevelt was later said to have undercut his left-wing critics by appropriating many of their policies.
In February 1902, as businessmen speculated about his true colors, Roosevelt showed that he had not mellowed. Without consulting Wall Street, he launched an antitrust suit against the Northern Securities Company, a holding company created by J. P. Morgan to consolidate railroads in the Pacific Northwest. Stunned businessmen sold stocks on the news. However aggrieved, J. P. Morgan did not declare open warfare on Roosevelt and later in the year helped him arbitrate an end to the anthracite coal strike. As Roosevelt turned the presidency into an honest broker between capital and labor, Morgan, unlike the more myopic Rockefeller, saw that Roosevelt stood ready to make concessions to cooperative businessmen.
In early 1903, Roosevelt supported the Elkins Act, which strengthened penalties for railroad rebates, and energetically promoted plans for a new Department of Commerce and Labor, which would include a Bureau of Corporations with broad powers to investigate the trusts. The new bureau was indispensable to his antitrust program, since the federal government was too small and thinly staffed to tackle the trusts on anything like an equal basis. In the 1890s, the entire Justice Department staff in Washington had only eighteen lawyers. To take on the industrial giants, Roosevelt needed more staff and, especially, more information.
As business interests fought the bureau, Roosevelt artfully manipulated the press to demonize his foes. In February 1903, he informed reporters that six senators had received telegrams from John D. Rockefeller urging defeat of the proposed bureau in these words: “We are opposed to the anti-trust legislation. Our counsel will see you. It must be stopped. John D. Rockefeller.” 22 This mighty revelation, as Roosevelt expected, caused a terrific commotion. Rockefeller’s name was now shorthand for corporate villainy so that his opposition to the bureau appeared conclusively to prove its need. As Teddy Roosevelt exclaimed jubilantly, “I got the bill through by publishing those telegrams and concentrating public attention on the bill.” 23
In truth, the telegrams were sent by Junior after prodding from Archbold. Shocked and embarrassed by the uproar, Junior resented Archbold for having dragged him into the ill-advised lobbying operation. That everybody believed his revered father had authored the telegrams only made it the more mortifying. “I came out of college something of an idealist,” he later reflected, “and I was immediately thrust into the tough give and take of the business world. I really wasn’t ready for it.” 24 No stranger to controversy, Rockefeller told his son to ignore his critics—“Let the world wag,” he said—but Junior kept brooding.25 He desperately wanted to rehabilitate the family name and live an irreproachable life, and here he was already wading hip-deep in Standard Oil muck. It was one of several events that finally convinced him that he was too squeamish for a business career.
Fiercely self-righteous, Teddy Roosevelt never forgot Standard Oil’s attempt to sabotage his new department, but he was a practical politician and recognized the value of winning Standard Oil support in his 1904 election campaign. Trying to mediate a truce between Standard Oil and the White House, Congressman Joseph C. Sibley told Archbold that the president thought the oil trust was hostile toward him, to which Archbold said facetiously, “I have always been an admirer of President Roosevelt and have read every book he ever wrote, and have them, in the best bindings, in my library.” Sibley relayed this flattering news to Roosevelt—minus, of course, the sarcasm. “The ‘book business’ fetched down the game at the very first shot,” Sibley reported back to Archbold. “You had better read, at least, the titles of those volumes to refresh your memory before you come over.”26 The rapprochement did not survive the 1904 election, for once the voting was over the president had an unpleasant surprise in store for Standard Oil.
In stalking Standard Oil, Teddy Roosevelt had no more potent ally than the press. In the spring of 1900, Rockefeller could still reassure a correspondent that favorable publicity about him overshadowed adverse coverage. “No man can succeed in any calling without provoking the jealousy and envy of some,” he observed. “The strong level-headed man will go straight forward and do his work, and history will rightly record.”27
Several trends gave birth to a newly assertive press. The gigantic trusts swelled the ranks of national advertisers, fattening the pages of many periodicals. Aided by new technologies, including linotype and photoengraving, glossy illustrated magazines streamed forth in such numbers that the era would be memorialized as the golden age of the American magazine. Paralleling this was the rise of mass-circulation newspapers, which catered to an expanding reading public. Competing in fierce circulation wars, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and other press barons plied readers with scandals and crusades. Nonetheless, the turn of the century marked more than the heyday of strident tabloids and yellow journalism, as sophisticated publications began to tackle complex stories, illustrating them lavishly and promoting them aggressively. For the first time in history, college graduates went to work on newspapers and magazines, bringing a new literary flair to a world once considered beneath the dignity of the educated elite.
Studded with star writers and editors, the most impressive periodical was McClure’s Magazine, which was started by Samuel S. McClure in 1893. In September 1901, the same month that Roosevelt ascended to the presidency, the magazine’s managing editor, Ida Minerva Tarbell, sailed to Europe to confer with McClure, then taking a rest from his strenuous life in Vevey, Switzerland. In her suitcase she carried an outline for a three-part series on the Standard Oil Company, though she wondered whether anyone would ever wade through a long, factual account of a business empire—a journalistic enterprise never assayed before.
The Standard Oil story was intertwined with Tarbell’s early life. Born in 1857 in a log cabin thirty miles from where Drake struck oil two years later, she was a true daughter of the Oil Regions. “I had grown up with oil derricks, oil tanks, pipe lines, refineries, oil exchanges,” she wrote in her memoirs.28 Her father, Franklin Tarbell, crafted vats from hemlock bark, a trade easily converted into barrel making after Drake’s discovery. The Tarbells lived beside his Rouseville barrel shop, and Ida as a child rolled luxuriously in the heaps of pine shavings. Down the hill from her house, across a ravine, lived an amiable young refiner named Henry H. Rogers, who later recalled seeing the young girl picking wildflowers on the slope.
Ida watched men with queer gleams in their eyes swarming through Rouseville en route to the miracle-turned-mirage of Pithole Creek. Franklin Tarbell set up a barrel shop there and cashed in on the boom before Pithole’s oil g
ave out. But Franklin’s prosperity was tenuous, based on an antiquated technology. Wooden barrels were soon replaced by iron tanks—the first of several times that Ida’s father was hurt by progress. He then sought his fortune as an independent oil producer and refiner, just as Rockefeller was consolidating the industry and snuffing out small operators.
In 1872, as an impressionable fifteen-year-old, Ida saw her paradise torn asunder by the South Improvement Company. As her father joined vigilantes who sabotaged the conspirators’ tanks, she thrilled to the talk of revolution. “On the instant the word became holy to me,” she later wrote. 29 The SIC darkened her sunlit world. The father who once sang, played the Jew’s harp, and told funny stories became a “silent and stern” man, breeding in his sensitive daughter a lifelong hatred of Standard Oil. 30 For her, Standard Oil symbolized the triumph of grasping men over decent folk, like her father, who played fair and square.
She remembered the Titusville of her teenage years as divided between the valiant majority who resisted the octopus and the small band of opportunists who defected to it. On the street, Franklin pointed out turncoats to his daughter. “In those days I looked with more contempt on the man who had gone over to the Standard than on the one who had been in jail,” she said.31 After a time, Franklin’s family would not speak to blackguards who had sold out to Rockefeller. It revolted Ida that the trust could turn proud, independent entrepreneurs into beaten men taking orders from distant bosses.
Although Tarbell had a more genteel upbringing than Rockefeller, with more books, magazines, and small luxuries, one is struck by the similarity of the Rockefellers’ Baptist and the Tarbells’ Methodist households. The straitlaced Franklin Tarbell forbade cards and dancing and supported many causes, including the temperance movement. Ida attended prayer meetings on Thursday nights and taught an infant class of the Sunday school. Shy and bookish, she tended, like Rockefeller, to arrive at brilliant solutions by slow persistence.
What set Tarbell apart from Rockefeller was her intellectual daring and fearless curiosity. As a teenager, despite her family’s fundamentalism, she tried to prove the truth of evolution. By the time she enrolled at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1876—she was the sole girl in the freshman class of this Methodist school—she loved to peer through microscopes and planned to become a biologist. What distinguished her as a journalist was how she united a scientific attention to detail with homegrown moral fervor. After graduation, Tarbell taught for two years at the Poland Union Seminary in Poland, Ohio, then got a job on the editorial staff of The Chautauquan, an offshoot of the summer adult-education movement, which originated as a Methodist camp meeting. The fiery, militant Christian spirit of the movement made Ida even more high-minded in her expectations.
Tall and attractive, with dark hair, large gray eyes, and high cheekbones, Tarbell had an erect carriage and innate dignity and never lacked suitors. Yet she decided never to marry and to remain self-sufficient. She steeled herself against any feelings that might compromise her ambitions or integrity, and she walked through life, perhaps a little self-consciously, in a shining moral armor.
In 1891, the thirty-four-year-old Tarbell moved to Paris with friends and set up Bohemian quarters on the Left Bank—an unusually courageous decision for a young American woman at the time. She was determined to write a biography of the Girondist Madame Roland while selling freelance articles to Pennsylvania and Ohio newspapers and attending classes at the Sorbonne. Hardworking and levelheaded, she mailed off two articles during her first week in Paris alone. Even though the prim Tarbell was taken aback when lascivious Frenchmen flirted with her, she adored her time in Paris. She interviewed eminent Parisians, ranging from Louis Pasteur to Emile Zola, for American newspapers and won many admirers for her clean, accurate reportage; she claimed that her writing had absorbed some of the beauty and clarity of the French language. Still, she struggled on the “ragged edge of bankruptcy” and was susceptible when McClure wooed her as an editor of his new magazine.
While she was still in Paris, two events occurred that would lend an emotional tinge to her Standard Oil series. One Sunday afternoon in June 1892, she found herself roaming the Paris streets, unable to shake off a sense of doom. Later that afternoon, she read in the Paris newspapers that Titusville and Oil City had been ravaged by flood and fire, with 150 people either drowned or burned to death. The next day, her brother, Will, sent a single-word cable— “Safe”—relieving her anxieties, but the event reinforced a guilty feeling that she had neglected her family. In 1893, one of her father’s oil partners shot himself in despair because of poor business, forcing Franklin Tarbell to mortgage his house to settle the debts he inherited. Ida’s sister was in the hospital at the time, and “here was I across the ocean writing picayune pieces at a fourth of a cent a word while they struggled there,” she later recalled. “I felt guilty, and the only way I had kept myself up to what I had undertaken was the hope that I could eventually make a substantial return.”32 While in Paris, Ida Tarbell laid hands on a copy of Wealth Against Commonwealth, where she rediscovered the author of her father’s woes: John D. Rockefeller.
Once in New York in 1894, Tarbell published two biographies in serial form that might have predisposed her to focus on a single figure at Standard Oil. Anticipating her portrait of Rockefeller, she presented Napoleon as a gifted megalomaniac, a great but flawed man lacking “that fine sense of proportion which holds the rights of others in the same solemn reverence which it demands for its own.”33 Lifted by this series, McClure’s circulation leaped from 24,500 in late 1894 to more than 100,000 in early 1895. Then followed Tarbell’s celebrated twenty-part series on Lincoln, which absorbed four years of her life (1895–1899) and boosted the magazine’s circulation to 300,000. She honed her investigative skills as she excavated dusty documents and forgotten courthouse records. In 1899, after being named managing editor of McClure’s, Tarbell took an apartment in Greenwich Village and befriended many literary notables, including Mark Twain, who would soon provide her with entrée to Henry H. “Hell Hound” Rogers. By this time, having sharpened her skills, she was set to publish one of the most influential pieces of journalism in American business history. The idea of writing about Standard Oil had fermented in her mind for many years before she worked for McClure’s. “Years ago, when I dreamed of some day writing fiction. . . . I had planned to write the great American novel, having the Standard Oil Company as a backbone!” 34
After receiving McClure’s blessing, Ida Tarbell launched the series in November 1902, feeding the American public rich monthly servings of Rockefeller’s past misdeeds. She went back to the early Cleveland days and laid out his whole career for careful inspection. All the depredations of a long career, everything Rockefeller had thought safely buried and forgotten, rose up before him in haunting and memorable detail. Before she was done, Ida Tarbell turned America’s most private man into its most public and hated figure.
The inspiration for publishing the anatomy of a major trust came from Samuel McClure, one of the most gifted windbags ever to occupy an editorial chair, who recruited writers with marathon speeches about his magazine’s greatness. High-strung, mercurial, seized by hourly brainstorms, McClure was described by Rudyard Kipling as a “cyclone in a frock coat.”35 Moving through life at breakneck speed, he seemed forever to be veering toward a nervous collapse. When McClure first materialized in Tarbell’s Paris apartment in 1892, he appeared distracted and breathless. “I’ve just ten minutes,” he told her, checking his watch, “must leave for Switzerland tonight to see [English physicist John] Tyndall.”36 Eager to sign up this startled young woman, the man with the tousled, sandy hair and electric blue eyes stayed for three hours. “Able methodical people grow on every bush but genius comes once in a generation and if you ever get in its vicinity thank the Lord & stick,” Tarbell once told a colleague apropos of McClure.37
That McClure hired a young, relatively inexperienced woman as his first full-time staff writer att
ests to his unorthodox style. He would collar every talented young writer in America—Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather—as well as more established figures, such as Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. O. Henry, Damon Runyon, and Booth Tarkington debuted in his pages. Yet it was perhaps in nonfiction that McClure left his most lasting imprint, for the best investigative reporters, from Lincoln Steffens to Ray Stannard Baker, gravitated to the magazine. Of his first office visit, Baker reminisced, “Even with S. S. McClure absent, I was in the most stimulating, yes intoxicating editorial atmosphere then existent in America—or anywhere else.”38 McClure watched over the creative chaos like a restless genie. “I can’t sit still,” he once told Lincoln Steffens. “That’s your job. I don’t see how you can do it.”39 Amid this swirling lunacy, Ida Tarbell sat in her high collar and shirtwaist dress, a model of calm sanity. As Lincoln Steffens recalled, she “would come to the office, smiling, like a tall, good-looking young mother to say, ‘Hush, children.’ ” 40
A man with a weakness for big, startling facts, McClure commissioned articles on new gadgets, scientific research, and futuristic technologies. This penchant for facts enabled him to spot Tarbell’s talent for enlivening a dry subject when she wrote an entertaining article about the paving of Parisian streets. Instead of the scandalmongering being offered by Pulitzer or Hearst, McClure wanted to analyze complex issues and explore them with scientific precision. Aiming at a comprehensive critique of American society, McClure concluded by 1901 that two great issues confronted the country: the growth of industrial trusts and political corruption. Before long, Lincoln Steffens was digging out municipal corruption in a series entitled “The Shame of the Cities” that started to run in October 1902. (In the February 24, 1905, issue, he skewered Senator Aldrich in a piece on Rhode Island corruption.) The choice of the proper trust to expose was a trickier issue. At first, Tarbell contemplated the steel trust and the sugar trust before the discovery of oil in California turned her attention to Standard Oil as the “most perfectly developed trust.”41 Since it had been investigated by various government bodies for three decades, it had left a rich documentary trail. At first projected for three issues, the Standard Oil series eventually stretched, by popular demand, to nineteen installments. It was inaugurated in November 1902 against an especially timely backdrop: An anthracite coal strike during the winter of 1902–1903 deprived the poor of coal, forcing them to heat their homes with oil, and the subsequent sharp rise in oil prices made energy an incendiary issue.