When
Ida Tarbell set out to probe the operations of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard
Oil Trust, it seemed like David against Goliath all over again
Virginia Van der Veer
Hamilton
One wintry morning in 1902 a prim, resolute
spinster presented herself at 26 Broadway in New York City, bastion of the
powerful Standard Oil organization. Promptly she was ushered through a maze of
empty corridors to a reception room facing an open courtyard. As she waited,
she became aware that a man in a nearby window was observing her stealthily.
Over the next two years this
unlikely visitor paid many calls to one of the most awesome addresses in the
American financial world. Each time she saw only the clerks who guided her, a
secretary, and Henry H. Rogers, vice president of Standard Oil. But always she
noticed the same shadowy figure watching her from the window. Was John D.
Rockefeller, master of the oil industry, peeping at Ida Minerva Tarbell, lady
journalist?
If so, Ida’s turn to peep came one
Sunday in 1903 when she visited the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church in Cleveland.
Feeling a little guilty about it, she had invaded Rockefeller’s church for a
firsthand look at the man whose business practices she dared to castigate. Her
quarry soon appeared. At sixty-four Rockefeller exuded power, but Ida observed
that his big head had a wet look, his nose resembled a sharp thorn, and his
lips were thin slits. Constantly, uneasily, Rockefeller peered around the
familiar congregation, but if he recognized the stranger in its midst, he gave
no sign.
Although the nation’s richest man
and his most persistent critic never met, their confrontation in the pages of
McClure’s Magazine enthralled thousands of Americans. Safe within their
Victorian mansions, well-bred ladies shuddered at the audacity of one of their
sex who had the spunk to describe the legendary Rockefeller as cold, ruthless,
and unethical.
For eighteen installments—from
November, 1902, to April, 1904—Ida’s monumental “History of the Standard Oil
Company” fired the indignation of middle-aged and middle-class citizens caught
up in the rebellious mood of Progressivism. Politicians from statehouse
legislators to Teddy Roosevelt at the White House took note of the furor. Its
echoes eventually penetrated even the remote chambers of the Supreme Court.
Readers of McClure’s , turning
through their October, 1902, issue, were introduced to the sensational serial
by a full-page photograph of Ida. The magazine’s star writer wore a severe,
high-collared white dress adorned with tucks and embroidery, and her dark hair
was piled high on her head. She looked away from the camera with an air of cool
detachment. Miss Tarbell, McClure’s announced, had completed her long study of
“the most perfectly developed trust in existence.” Her account would begin the
following month.
S. S. McClure, impulsive and
mercurial, boasted that the founding of McClure’s and the discovery of Ida
Tarbell were his proudest achievements. In Paris in 1892 he had bounded up four
flights of steps to an apartment to meet the little-known American writer.
After pouring out his plans for McClure’s , S. S. borrowed forty dollars and
left. “I’ll never see that money,” Ida lamented, but to her relief the forty
dollars was promptly repaid. Two years later Ida, serious, purposeful, and
thirty-seven, joined the staff of McClure’s in New York.
S. S. soon had reason to
congratulate himself. Ida was an immediate hit with readers, who paid ten cents
a copy for his lively magazine. They liked her biography of Napoleon, produced
“on the gallop” in six weeks. They followed with avid interest her series on
Abraham Lincoln, written after four years of painstaking research in Kentucky,
Indiana, and Illinois.
As thousands of new subscribers
joined his circulation lists, McClure gave Ida most of the credit. The life of
Lincoln, he said, “told on our circulation as nothing ever had before.” By 1900
McClure’s was reaching 350,000 homes and was second in circulation only to its
bitter rival, Munsey’s . If McClure liked an idea, he bragged, then millions of
readers would like it, too. “There’s only one better editor than I am,” he
admitted, “and that’s Frank Munsey. If he likes a thing, then everybody will
like it.”
Alert to the mood of his readers,
McClure sensed their concern about social and political reform. Lincoln
Steffens, therefore, must check into corruption in the big cities. Ray Stannard
Baker must investigate labor unions and the coal strike then going on in the
anthracite fields of Pennsylvania (see “The Coal Kings Come to Judgment” in the
April, 1960, AMERICAN HERITAGE ). As for Ida, why not a study of one of the
monopolies that frightened small businessmen? Why not, in fact, the prototype
of them all? “Out with you!” S. S. commanded his talented staff. “Look, see,
report.”
“Don’t do it, Ida,” her father
pleaded. “They will ruin the magazine.” Others warned her of the “all-seeing
eye and the all-powerful reach” of Standard Oil. If McClure’s persisted,
friends predicted, “they’ll get you in the end.”
Standard Oil was well aware that a
popular journalist—and a female at that—was prying into its past. Executives of
the corporation asked no less a public figure than Mark Twain to inquire what
McClure’s planned to publish. “You will have to ask Miss Tarbell,” S. S.
replied. “Would Miss Tarbell see Mr. Rogers?” Twain inquired. When her
supporters heard that Ida was visiting 26 Broadway to get the company’s side of
its history, they were instantly suspicious. “You’ll become their apologist
before you get through,” many prophesied.
At their first meeting Ida and Henry
Rogers discovered that they had been neighbors years before in the booming oil
regions of Pennsylvania, where Ida’s father had made tanks and Rogers had been
an independent refiner. They even recalled the beauty of a wooded ravine
separating their houses. Although she decided that Henry Rogers was “as fine a
pirate as ever flew his flag in Wall Street,” Ida was not beguiled by nostalgic
memories. She alone, she told the Standard Oil executive, would be the judge of
what she wrote.
Diligent and methodical, Ida studied
musty records of the many lawsuits brought against Standard Oil in the thirty
years since its incorporation. Every pertinent document must be located:
“somewhere, some time,” Ida insisted, “a copy turns up.” Rogers once suggested
that Ida should meet Rockefeller himself, and somewhat apprehensively she
agreed. But their meeting was never arranged.
Seeking firsthand knowledge of
Standard’s methods, Ida interviewed other businessmen. Reluctant though they
might be, they usually responded to her firm, dignified manner. One eccentric
Cleveland millionaire received her with his hat on, his feet propped on his
desk, and his face buried in a newspaper. As Ida quietly began to ask
questions, he placed his feet on the floor, put down the newspaper, removed his
hat, and gave her his respectful attention.
Her first installment was a vivid
account of the brawling, gambling spirit of pioneer days in the Pennsylvania
oil country. In 1859, when they heard the exhilarating news that oil was
gushing out of a well near Titusville, thousands of adventurous Americans
poured into the area, and a whole series of boom towns—with names like Pit
Hole, Oil City, Petroleum Center, and Rouseville—hastily sprang up. “On every
rocky farm,” Ida wrote, “in every poor settlement of the region, was some man
whose ear was attuned to Fortune’s call, and who had the daring and the energy
to risk everything he possessed in an oil lease.” Saloons, brothels, and dance
halls catered to a drifting population of fortune seekers.
Recalling the atmosphere of her
youth, Ida praised the efforts of many citizens of this rough frontier to
create schools, churches, and a proper environment. Her own parents, Esther and
Franklin Tarbell, had shepherded their children into respectable middle-class
ways, highlighted by family picnics on Chautauqua Lake or an occasional trip to
Cleveland. Crusading suffragettes visited the Tarbell home, and young Ida fell
under the spell of their fervent talk. “I must be free,” she vowed, “and to be
free I must be a spinster.” At fourteen she prayed on her knees that God would
keep her from marriage.
To prepare for a career, Ida entered
Allegheny College at Meadville, the lone girl in a freshman class of forty
“hostile or indifferent” boys. After graduation she hoped to become a
biologist, but fate and S. S. McClure decided otherwise. Now, twenty-two years
later, this child of the oil regions who had elected spinsterhood and freedom
was challenging the ruler of the oil industry himself.
At the close of the first chapter
Ida offered her readers an enticing glimpse of the drama to come. Praising the
independent oil producers, who gambled their lives and money in an uncertain
new industry, she wrote:
Life ran swift and ruddy and joyous in these men. They were
still young, most of them under forty, and they looked forward with all the
eagerness of the young who have just learned their powers, to years of struggle
and development. … There was nothing too good for them, nothing they did not
hope and dare. But suddenly, at the very heyday of this confidence, a big hand
reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their
future.
The “big hand,” she revealed in her
next installment, was an enterprising young man with “remarkable commercial
vision, a genius for seeing the possibilities in material things.” As a boy of
thirteen John Rockefeller discovered that lending money at 7 per cent interest
was more profitable than his earlier job of digging potatoes: “It was a good
thing,” the boy reasoned, “to let the money be my slave.” This principle, Ida
told her readers, was the foundation of a great financial career.
During the Civil War, Rockefeller
chose to sell produce to the Union army rather than to serve in its ranks.
Before the war ended, the twenty-three-year-old merchant had foreseen greater
potential in refining a new product, oil, to light the homes and lubricate the
machines of America. Under his shrewd and frugal leadership his first refinery
prospered. There must be no waste, Rockefeller decreed. He found a market even
for the residuum that other refineries allowed to flow away into the ground.
“It hurt him to see it unused,” Ida wrote, “and no man had a heartier welcome
from the president of the Standard Oil Company than he who would show him how
to utilize any proportion of his residuum.” Rather than pay a barrelmaker,
Rockefeller set up his own barrel factory.
The youthful refiner got his
greatest joy from a good bargain. One of those whom Ida interviewed told her
that the only time he had ever seen Rockefeller enthusiastic was at the news
that his firm had bought a cargo of oil much below the market price. “He
bounded from his chair with a shout of joy,” the man recollected, “danced up
and down, hugged me, threw up his hat, acted so like a madman that I have never
forgotten it.”
On the basis of the large amount of
oil he shipped eastward, Rockefeller began to receive the railroad rebates that
Ida charged were the keystone of his future empire. She described how he and
other large refiners conspired to force railroads to grant them “drawbacks,”
additional rebates on the shipments of their competitors. Members of this
clandestine combination, known as the South Improvement Company, received a
rebate of $1.06 a barrel on crude oil shipped from Cleveland to New York, plus
a drawback of $1.06 on each barrel shipped by their rivals. When an independent
refiner paid eighty cents a barrel to ship crude oil from the Pennsylvania
fields to Cleveland, the South Improvement Company received a
forty-cent-per-barrel drawback on the shipment.
This advantage, Ida charged, was
used as a club over the heads of other refiners in Cleveland, forcing them to
“sell or perish.” His competitors wanted to keep their own businesses, Ida
said, but “Mr. Rockefeller was regretful but firm. It was useless to resist, he
told the hesitating; they would certainly be crushed if they did not accept his
offer.” When twenty-one of the twenty-six firms sold out to Rockefeller, he
controlled one fifth of the nation’s oil refining; “almost the entire
independent oil interests of Cleveland collapsed in three months’ time,” Ida
informed her readers. Privately an indignant Rockefeller denied Ida’s version.
Standard had been an angel of mercy to the Cleveland firms in distress, he told
friends. “They didn’t collapse,” he insisted. “They had collapsed before!
That’s the reason they were so glad to combine their interest with ours, or
take the money we offered.” However, Rockefeller, who had always met criticism
with lofty silence, refused to reply publicly to the articles in McClure’s.
“Not a word,” he insisted. “Not a word about that misguided woman!”
But the heir to Standard Oil, John
D. Rockefeller, Jr., was stung to a veiled defense of his father’s business
creation. In a speech entitled “Christianity and Business” he told members of
the Y.M.C.A. at his alma mater, Brown University: “The American Beauty rose can
be produced in its splendor and fragrance only by sacrificing the early buds
which grow up around it.” Critics of Standard Oil never let John D., Jr.,
forget this unfortunate metaphor. Recalling it several years later, a bishop
declared from the pulpit: “A rose by any other name will smell as sweet, but
the odor of that rose to me smacks strongly of crude petroleum.”
If the creation of a perfect rose
justified the sacrifice of other buds, could the same rationale be applied to
the Standard Oil Trust? Ida’s answer was a vehement No. The heroes of her
serial were the independent oil “farmers” and refiners whose livelihood was
threatened by Rockefeller’s growing consolidation. “They believed,” Ida wrote,
“in independent effort—every man for himself and fair play for all. They wanted
competition, loved open fight. They considered that all business should be done
openly; that the railways were bound as public carriers to give equal rates;
that any combination which favoured one firm or one locality at the expense of
another was unjust and illegal.”
The producers rose in united revolt
against the South Improvement Company and the man whom they believed to be its
Mephistopheles, refusing to sell oil until railroads agreed not to grant
rebates, drawbacks, or any other special privileges. Ida remembered vividly
that her own father, by then a producer himself, was one of those who had
pledged not to sell.
The South Improvement Company scheme
was defeated, but Rockefeller, Ida said, “had a mind which stopped by a wall,
burrows under or creeps around.” He next negotiated a new rebate arrangement
between Standard Oil and the New York Central Railroad. In a burst of indignant
prose Ida berated her protagonist:
There was no more faithful Baptist in Cleveland than he.
Every enterprise of that church he had supported liberally from his youth. He
gave to its poor. He visited its sick. He wept with its suffering. Moreover, he
gave unostentatiously to many outside charities of whose worthiness he was
satisfied. He was simple and frugal in his habits. He never went to the
theatre, never drank wine. He gave much time to the training of his children,
seeking to develop in them his own habits of economy and charity. Yet he was
willing to strain every nerve to obtain for himself special and unjust
privileges from the railroads which were bound to ruin every man in the oil
business not sharing them with him.
Rockefeller’s next tactic, Ida
explained, was to form a national Refiners’ Association to force oil producers
to sell their output to a united front of refiners. To offset the power of the
refiners, drillers organized a Producers’ Association. The producers realized
that overproduction was their curse. If they agreed to stop drilling new wells
for six months and shut down their pumps for thirty days, supplies of crude oil
would dwindle, and prices would rise. To the producers’ surprise, Rockefeller
and his fellow refiners offered them a contract for 200,000 barrels of oil at
$3.25 a barrel. They signed. But when 50,000 of the 200,000 barrels had been
shipped, the refiners’ association broke its contract, declaring that the
producers had failed to limit production and that plenty of oil was available
at $2.50 a barrel. Ida placed the blame on Rockefeller for “leading them into an
alliance, and at the psychological moment throwing up his contract.”
One producer told Ida what it had
been like to negotiate with Rockefeller, who during one meeting sat and rocked
with his hands covering his eyes.
I made a speech which I guess was pretty warlike. Well,
right in the middle of it, John Rockefeller stopped rocking and took down his
hands and looked at me. You never saw such eyes. He took me all in, saw just
how much fight he could expect from me, and I knew it, and then up went his
hands and back and forth went his chair.
Month by month Ida pressed her
indictment, picturing Rockefeller as a sinister conspirator obsessed with a
passion to control the entire oil industry for the “holy blue barrel,” as his
competitors called it, of Standard Oil. He arranged for Standard to receive
even more favorable rebates from major railroads. When independent operators
developed a revolutionary new means of transporting oil by pipelines, the canny
Rockefeller realized that this method was the shipping trend of the future. He
moved into the pipeline business, driving out rivals until he controlled the
entire pipeline system of the oil regions. He set up a nationwide network,
paying spies to report on rival shipments, deliberately underselling his
competitors, and then, having driven his rivals out of a territory, set any
price he pleased.
Summarizing Rockefeller’s goal, Ida
wrote:
Briefly stated, his argument was this: “Controlling all
refineries, I shall be the only shipper of oil. Being the only shipper, I can
obtain special rates of transportation which will drive out and keep out
competitors; controlling all refineries, I shall be the only buyer, and can
regulate the price of crude [oil] as I can the price of refined.”
The charge of spying, published in a
chapter titled “Cutting to Kill,” abruptly ended Ida’s harmonious interviews
with Henry Rogers. To substantiate her charges, McClure’s reproduced records
sent to Ida secretly by a young shipping clerk in a Standard plant. They were
undercover reports from railroad agents, listing oil shipments by rival
producers. On her next visit to 26 Broadway, Ida found Rogers “by no means
cordial.” When he asked where she got “that stuff,” she replied boldly: “You
know very well that I could not tell you where I got that stuff, but you know
very well that it is authentic.” It was their last interview.
Although the doors of Standard Oil
closed to Ida, she was invited to meet an even more unexpected source of
information. Frank Rockefeller summoned her secretly to Cleveland to hear his
grievances against his successful brother. To help finance a shipping business,
Frank had borrowed money from John D. and put up his Standard Oil stock as
collateral. During the Panic of ’93, when Frank was unable to meet his
obligations, John D. foreclosed and took over the stock. Frank, observed Ida,
was more frivolous than his brother, more generous, “not a safe man to handle
money. … So it was a kind of obligation to the sacredness of money,” she wrote,
“that John Rockefeller had foreclosed on his own brother.”
After chastising Rockefeller for
many months, Ida produced an installment called “The Legitimate Greatness of
the Standard Oil Company” in which she freely acknowledged its leader’s
business efficiency. Rockefeller’s passion for detail and for plowing profits
back into the company, she said, had resulted in a masterpiece of organization.
Even the dust on the floors of his tin factories was sifted to save filings and
bits of solder.
While granting Rockefeller his due,
Ida could not forgive practices she considered illegitimate and debasing to
business morality. His success, she feared, would tempt thousands of others to
“Commercial Machiavellianism.” In the wake of his growing monopoly, Ida said,
Rockefeller left a trail of devastated small businesses:
Why one should love an oil refinery the outsider may not
see, but to the man who had begun with one still and had seen it grow by his
own energy and intelligence to ten, who now sold 500 barrels a day where he
once sold five, the refinery was the dearest spot on earth save his home. … To
ask such a man to give up his refinery was to ask him to give up the thing
which, after his family, meant most in life to him.
But faced with the growing power of
Standard Oil, the independents did give up. Describing one who sold out, Ida
wrote that “he realized that something … was at work in the oil
business—something resistless, silent, perfect in its might—and he sold out to
that something.” Along Oil Creek, she said, “the little refineries which for years
had faced every difficulty with stout hearts collapsed. ‘Sold out,’
‘dismantled,’ ‘shut down,’ is the melancholy record.”
As dramatic proof of the fierceness
of the conflict Ida devoted an entire installment to “The Buffalo Case,” in
which managers of a Standard affiliate in New York were convicted of conspiring
to blow up a rival refinery to force it out of business. In another chapter she
shocked her public by repeating the tale of Widow Backus, who declared in an
affidavit that Rockefeller had fleeced her of a fair price when she sold her
husband’s refinery to Standard Oil. Ida said of the widow:
She had seen every effort to preserve an independent
business thwarted. Rightly or wrongly, she had come to believe that a refusal
to sell meant a fight with Mr. Rockefeller, that a fight meant ultimately
defeat, and she gave up her business to avoid ruin.
Historians later criticized Ida for
repeating the widow’s tale, which was of questionable accuracy, but true or
exaggerated, it made a sensational installment. Victorian ladies of comfortable
means could identify with the plight of Widow Backus.
Acknowledged as “Lord of the Oil
Regions” by 1879, Rockefeller controlled 90 per cent of the oil business of the
nation, dominating refining, transporting, and marketing. The entire pipeline
system of the Pennsylvania fields belonged to Standard. Rockefeller had
achieved his goal, Ida wrote, “because he had the essential element to all
great achievement, a steadfastness to purpose once conceived which nothing can
crush.”
To handle the affairs of his giant
monopoly, Rockefeller created a new type of business organization, the trust,
whereby he and eight other trustees managed the entire structure. But public
resentment against the monopoly began to be reflected in a rash of legal suits.
Ida reminded her readers of the 1892 ruling by the supreme court of Ohio that
had resulted in dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust. It was replaced by the
Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, which functioned as a holding company for
the Rockefeller interests.
After eighteen chapters and almost
four years of research and writing Ida and McClure’s rested their case against
John D. Rockefeller. Summing it all up, Ida told her faithful readers that they
were paying more for oil under monopoly conditions than they would pay under
free competition. Business opportunity in the oil industry, she said, was now
limited to a few hundred men.
But there was a more serious side to
it, she concluded. The ethical cost of all this should be a deep concern.
“Canonize ‘business success,’ and men who make a success like that of the
Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!” Defenders of Rockefeller might
justify his methods by saying, “It’s business” or “All humans are erring
mortals,” but Ida would not accept a moral code that “would leave our business
men weeping on one another’s shoulders over human frailty, while they picked
one another’s pockets.”
In a last plea to her readers she
urged them to ostracize monopolists who used unethical practices as they would
ostracize unethical doctors, lawyers, or athletes, for “a thing won by breaking
the rules of the game,” she moralized, “is not worth the winning.”
As her public exploded with wrath,
McClure’s was deluged with angry letters. Ida, readers said, was a modern Joan
of Arc and “the Terror of the Trusts.” Her study reminded one man of “the
clarion notes of the old prophets of Israel.” Another called it “the Uncle
Tom’s Cabin of today.” A letter addressed to “Ida M. Tarbell, Rockefeller
Station, Hades,” reached her promptly.
McClure’s, packed with articles by
Steffens and Baker as well as with Ida’s literary dynamite, thrived on its
crusading zeal. But Ida was even more of a celebrity than her colleagues, and
they joined in the general admiration for her work. “Ida Tarbell was the best
of us,” Baker admitted. In a western city a newspaper hailed the arrival of
William Allen White and Ida with the headline “Celebrated Writers Here.” S. S.
wrote his protegee: “You are today the most generally famous woman in America.”
Ida’s “History” evoked even more
praise when it was published as a two-volume book in 1904. “Miss Tarbell,” said
the Cleveland Leader , “has done more to dethrone Rockefeller in public esteem
than all the preachers in the land.” The New York News declared that
“Rockefeller’s very conscience is exposed by her search for truth.” The Norfolk
Dispatch and the Washington News proclaimed Ida “a great woman historian” and
“probably the most talented woman writer of history that this country has
produced.”
Standard, however, was not without
its defenders. In Pennsylvania the Oil City Derrick , subsidized by the
company, headlined its review: “Hysterical Woman Versus Historical Facts.” A
Harvard economist, Gilbert Montague, who wrote a sympathetic history of
Standard’s operations, termed Ida “a mere gatherer of folklore.” The popular
essayist Elbert Hubbard said Standard Oil was an example of “survival of the
fittest” and called Ida a “literary bushwhacker” who “shot from cover and …
shot to kill.” The nickname Miss Tarbarrel was coined by Standard supporters.
Even Rockefeller himself, not a notably humorous man, adopted the pun with
glee.
While interest in Ida’s history was
at its height, new oil discoveries by wildcatters drilling deep in the Kansas
plains caused a fresh boom. Standard Oil moved quickly into the new fields,
threading its pipelines across prairie and farmland. But McClure’s had reached
even the remote farmers of Kansas. Populists, women’s clubs, and independent
oilmen vowed to keep Standard out of their fields even if they had to set up a
state-owned refinery in the penitentiary. At the urging of the oilmen Ida
visited the new arena. To her dismay she was received as a prophet and
serenaded by oil boomers. “But here I was,” she wrote later, “fifty, fagged,
wanting to be let alone while I collected trustworthy information for my
articles—dragged to the front as an apostle.”
The news from Kansas, added to the
cumulative effect of the Tarbell series, helped stir Congress to action. In
February, 1905, it authorized the Bureau of Corporations to investigate the low
price of crude oil, particularly in Kansas. Could the wide margin between the
prices of crude and refined, a Kansas congressman asked, be attributed to the
operations of a trust or conspiracy?
Enthusiastically the Bureau of
Corporations dug into its assignment. In the first of three lengthy reports to
Congress, it concluded that Standard “habitually” received and was still
receiving secret rebates and other “unjust and illegal discriminations” from
railroads. The second report charged that Standard controlled the only major
pipeline serving the oil industry and that it fought would-be competitors with
lawsuits, right-of-way disputes, aid to railroads, and price wars. The final
report accused Standard of keeping oil prices artificially high at the expense
of the American consumer. Commissioner Herbert Knox Smith called for
prosecution of Standard under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The bureau’s findings were not news
to Ida’s readers. One cartoonist pictured President Roosevelt receiving the
reports on a slate bearing these words: “Standard Oil is just as naughty as Ida
said it was.” In the background of the cartoon was Henry Rogers, muttering to
Rockefeller: “And I had my fingers crossed too.”
But Roosevelt, who had originally
encouraged federal legal action against Standard, became exasperated at the
public vogue for the literature of exposure as other magazines and writers
rushed to copy McClure’s successful formula. Shortly after the appearance of an
article in Cosmopolitan titled “The Treason of the Senate” an angry Roosevelt
applied the term “muckrakers” to responsible and irresponsible journalists
alike. Pondering the President’s attack years later, Ida decided that Teddy
preferred to conduct trust busting on his own and resented writers “stealing
his thunder.”
Meanwhile, Standard’s troubles were
multiplying. Three antitrust suits were brought against the corporation in
state courts in 1904, four in 1905, and fourteen in 1906. Many resulted in
fines or the temporary ouster of Standard from a state. The most sensational
fine, $29,240,000 for 1,462 violations of the Elkins Act forbidding acceptance
of rebates, was handed down by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in August, 1907.
Although this decision was later reversed, the “Big Fine” made Judge Landis
famous and added drama to the controversy.
Once when Ida was searching for
material in Indiana and Ohio, an order went out from Standard headquarters:
“Simply ignore her entirely.” But in the face of such mounting hostility even
Standard Oil could not play the sphinx forever. The company began to give out
information on its operations and employed Ivy Ledbetter Lee, an early public
relations counsel, to place advertisements and friendly stories in newspapers
and magazines. It ordered five thousand copies of Montague’s book and
distributed them to employees, ministers, libraries, teachers, and prominent
citizens.
Rockefeller’s own image was under
such attack that a group of Congregational ministers balked at accepting his
gift of $100,000 to their board of missions, calling it “tainted money.” Later,
to their embarrassment, they found that some of their colleagues had actually
requested the gift. But the term “tainted money” briefly captured many a headline.
Undeterred, Rockefeller intensified his long habit of philanthropy. Two months
after the final chapter of the Standard Oil history appeared in McClure’s , he
announced gifts of one million dollars to Yale University and ten times that
amount to the General Education Board, a philanthropy in aid of higher
education that he had helped to establish two years before. No one objected.
Such sums, the New York Sun commented dryly, “deodorize themselves.” When it
was charged that Rockefeller was using philanthropy to silence criticism, Ida
came to his defense, reminding critics that Rockefeller had been a steady giver
to church and charity since boyhood. If his gifts were larger now, she pointed
out, it was because his income was greater and perhaps because he sought to
call public attention to the benefits reaped from Standard Oil.
John D. proved his own most
effective advocate. In 1909 he published a slim book titled Random Reminiscences of Men and Events.
Although he did not mention Ida or other critics by name, it was obvious the
outcry was on Rockefeller’s mind. “Just how far one is justified … in defending
himself from attacks is a moot point,” he wrote. Random Reminiscences, an informal account of the early career,
principles, and recreations of the nation’s richest man, also contained useful
hints on how to give money away wisely. This little book, one Rockefeller
biographer has said, “did more to make Rockefeller a human figure than tons of
Sunday supplement articles.”
Random Reminiscences,
however, did not persuade the federal government to call off a suit charging
Standard Oil with violation of the Sherman act. The case dragged through three
and a half years of litigation. In 1909 a federal circuit court sustained the
government’s position, but Standard appealed to the Supreme Court. Many an
editor invited Ida to analyze the testimony. “I could have made a good killing
out of that long investigation …” she recalled later. “But I had no stomach for
it.” Weary of all the controversy, she wished only “to escape into the safe
retreat of a library where I could study people long dead.”
Finally, on May 15, 1911, the
decision was handed down. The highest court in the land declared Standard Oil
of New Jersey to be a monopoly in restraint of trade, based on unfair
practices. Charging that Standard’s object was “to drive others from the field
and exclude them from their right to trade,” the court ordered the holding
company dissolved. The justices, in effect, agreed with Ida.
“The History of the Standard Oil
Company” was probably the most sensational serial ever to appear in an American
magazine. Allan Nevins, in his biography of Rockefeller, called it “the most
spectacular success of the muckraking school of journalism, and its most
enduring achievement.” As a historian Ida Tarbell had her flaws. She was
untrained in economics. She yearned to turn back the clock to an era of
individualism in business. She was obviously partial to independent oilmen,
even though she scolded them for lacking the patience and fortitude to organize
effectively against Rockefeller. In her indignation she sometimes exaggerated
the iniquity of her archvillain.
But at a time when strong men
quailed before the Rockefeller reputation, this daughter of the oil regions,
fortified by her sense of righteous morality, boldly voiced their feelings.
Although small operators lost their struggle for existence, Ida carried the day
in the contest for public opinion. A modern-day historian of the muckraking
era, David M. Chalmers, believes the image she fashioned of Rockefeller as a
“cunning, “ruthless Shylock” has not been successfully erased by a half century
of Rockefeller family philanthropy. Forty years after her serial appeared, Time
magazine credited the McClure’s articles with bringing in a “gusher of public
resentment that flowed all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court.”
Was Ida’s study an accurate work of
historical research, or was it a subjective attack on practices of which she
disapproved? Modern business historians, looking back on the “History” with the
hindsight of a later era, generally substantiate her charges that Standard Oil
built its monopoly upon special favors from railroads, mastery of the pipeline
system, and sharp marketing practices, all of which helped force small
independents out of the fields and refineries.
But Ida raised a larger question:
Was it better for the American oil industry to have free, albeit cutthroat,
competition, or to fall under the dominance of a monopoly with the power to
maintain orderly production and a profitable, if higher, price structure? It is
this aspect of her account that still arouses controversy. Social historians
tend to be on Ida’s side, business historians to defend Rockefeller; both
schools agree, however, that Ida was a pioneer business historian and that,
although she worked with the crude research tools of the early 1900’s and
became a special pleader for her own moralistic ideas of business ethics, she
presented a remarkably clear and truthful picture of the rise of Standard Oil.
Though John D. Rockefeller never met
the stern spinster who judged his business morality so harshly, she and
Rockefeller’s son, John D., Jr., did meet at a conference called by President
Wilson after World War I. The younger Rockefeller, who had once compared Standard
Oil to an American Beauty rose, had become disenchanted and had made “one of
the most important decisions of my life.” Resigning his directorships in
Standard Oil and U. S. Steel, he announced in 1910 that he would devote his
life to giving away the immense sums of money that flowed from his father’s
business creation.
When John D., Jr., realized he was
to meet Ida, he sought the advice of William Allen White. The famous Kansas
editor knew the younger Rockefeller as a gentle and kindhearted person for whom
Ida’s book had been “an unpleasant fact which gave him something more than
pause.” He advised Rockefeller to meet Miss Tarbell casually and naturally; as
two sensitive people they would bridge the awkward situation. After the meeting
White saw John D., Jr., hurrying into the street to hail a cab for Miss
Tarbell. Later he was amused to see them, placed together by some inspired host
at a formal dinner, “chatting amiably … each trying to outdo the other in
politeness.”
Although Ida wrote many other books
and articles, none of her later works had the impact of the Standard Oil
history. In 1922 she tried to revive her interest and write a third volume on
Standard. But the fire and the burning indignation that had caught a nation’s
attention were gone. “Repeating yourself,” she decided, “is a doubtful
practice.”
In 1937, as Ida at eighty was
writing her autobiography, John D. Rockefeller died at the age of ninety-seven.
The lady who had been his nemesis lived seven more years, enjoying the
tranquillity of her Connecticut farm, where she made jelly and raised peonies,
lettuce, and potatoes. An interviewer who sought her out in this retreat found
her characteristically self-effacing: “The proof that I am able to do anything
so worthwhile as raise a potato never fails to thrill me,” said the Terror of
the Trusts.
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