“A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.” — journalist Ida Tarbell

It’s a good day to think about unchecked power. Power needs people out there to check it. It’s a good day to acknowledge that the world – its money and resources – is dominated by a multi-national cadre of fat cats who don’t care about regular people, or the environment, or, hell, ethics and morals. One of the ways we CHECK these assholes is with the printed word. And so it’s also a good day to pay tribute to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, as embodied so ferociously by the woman often referred to as “the mother of muckraking journalism”, Ida Tarbell.

“Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.” – Ida Tarbell

“There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.” — Ida Tarbell

Ida Tarbell was the bane of John D. Rockefeller’s existence with her explosive series of scathing articles about Standard Oil’s unsavory and rapacious practices, published in 1902. Those articles brought down a monolith.

Theodore Roosevelt called out Tarbell by name as a “muckraker”, and of course she didn’t care for the name. It didn’t matter though because … Standard Oil left a lot of MUCK in its wake, and so damn right she was going to rake it up. In the journalistic free-for-all of her day, she was tireless and single-minded, rigorous in her research techniques (like digging into long-forgotten dusty archives). She is often referred to as a pioneer of investigative reporting, if not THE pioneer. In her era, journalism was wild and irresponsible, more interested in pumping up emotional frenzies (xenophobic, patriotic, whatever) in their readership than getting to the truth. Big Money tarnished everything. The newspapers were in the pocket of Big Money too. (As always, the past gives us lessons for our present moment, for our future). Tarbell resisted the pull of emotionalism, even though she despised Standard Oil. She was all about primary sources, and she painstakingly went through stacks and stacks account ledgers, line by line, entire rooms full of archives – something very few had the patience for. The truth would be in the numbers. She knew that. She wrote: “There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiment than figures.” “Going after” Standard Oil was David vs. Goliath. (Ron Chernow’s biography of John D. Rockefeller is fantastic, if you haven’t read it.)

Tarbell is withering in her attack on Standard Oil, and on John himself:

“And he calls his great organization a benefaction, and points to his church-going and charities as proof of his righteousness. This is supreme wrong-doing cloaked by religion. There is but one name for it — hypocrisy.”

When the magazine publishing her articles was under attack, threatened by litigation on all sides, Tarbell didn’t care. Her attitude was practically, “LET them have a go at me. I’d like to see them try.” Tarbell’s articles were eventually compiled in a book, and the book was so widely read and discussed it led to the Supreme Court’s decision to intervene, and crush the monopoly of Standard Oil.

She was one of the most important journalists of the 20th century.

And, lest we forget: she did all of this at a time when she, a woman, couldn’t vote.

I learned about her in a class I took in college (the best class I ever took, by the way). It was an entire class on the Industrial Revolution, taught by Maury Klein (look him up, he’s a bigwig in the field, especially in regards to the railroads). We had to read Tarbell’s articles, compiled under the title The History of the Standard Oil Company.

It’s an invigorating read. Her prose LEAPS and CRACKLES. She’s got the facts, but she’s also pissed. You can feel it.

“We must organize men and women for labor as if for war. Watch the perfection of the training and the movement of the masses that at this moment are meeting in unspeakable, infernal slaughter in Europe. See how the humblest is fitted to his task. With what ease great bodies wheel, turn, advance, retreat. Consider how, after standing men in line that they may be knocked to pieces, they promptly and scientifically collect such as have escaped, both friend and foe, and (oh, amazing and heart-breaking human logic!) under the safe sign of the cross, tenderly nurse them back to health. If this can be done for War, should we do less for Peace?”

Ida Tarbell was a courageous and pioneering women who didn’t let society dictate to her who she should be, did not ask for a seat at the Big Boys Table – because asking means you still think you need permission (i.e. and thinking you need permission is internalized patriarchy). You still hear stuff like: “Why don’t men let us do such and such?” LET us?? Who made them BOSSES of the world. Fuck THAT. Who are THEY to LET us do anything? All I ask is that men take their foot off my goddamn neck. Ida Tarbell barged into “the room where it happens” – uninvited – unwelcome – and didn’t sit down at the Big Boys Table, oh no, she walked in and kicked the table over.

“Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”

Ida Tarbell changed the course of the 20th century by going after a monster company, a many-tentacled behemoth which had insinuated itself into every layer of society. One woman went up against free-wheeling brutal capitalism. Her work continues to be relevant today. (Hello, Facebook. Hello, Disney. Hello, companies acting as mini-Nation-States.) But also she became the standard-bearer for a new kind of journalism, giving journalists jobs beyond purple prose, hearsay and rumor. She paved a pathway for others to follow. (As this post shows, her work is still taught in college classes.) Her articles led to the Anti-Trust laws, fought in the courts, with the sensational trials dominating the economics/politics/all-of-America in the early decades of the 20th century. I still believe in the Ideals of who we should be – and so often aren’t – and I love the people who fight for those Ideals. We need to fight. We can’t just accept the status quo, just because the opponent is rich and powerful. You can’t re-set history. What can be done about the here-and-now?

That was what Ida Tarbell cared about.
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“There was born in me a hatred of privilege, privilege of any sort. It was all pretty hazy, to be sure, but it still was well, at 15, to have one definite plan based on things seen and heard, ready for a future platform of social and economic justice if I should ever awake to my need of one.” – Ida Tarbell

 
 
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