The Ida Tarbell Standard Oil series that began in McClure’s Magazine in November 1902 is usually told as a New York story: a daring editor, a muckraking boom, a tycoon who would not answer back. Tarbell told it differently. For her it started in Western Pennsylvania in 1872, when she was fourteen and her father came home one night with a grim look on his face. He had just signed a pledge, along with scores of other oil producers, never to sell to the Cleveland company that had profited from a secret scheme. Thirty years later his daughter went looking for the documents.
A tank builder’s daughter
Ida Minerva Tarbell was born on November 5, 1857, in her maternal grandparents’ log house at Hatch Hollow in Erie County. Her father, Franklin Tarbell, was a teacher and joiner whose plan to farm in Iowa collapsed in the Panic of 1857. When Edwin Drake struck oil near Titusville in August 1859, Franklin reasoned that producers would need somewhere to put it. He perfected a wooden storage tank and began building them. In 1860 the family moved to Rouseville, in the Oil Creek valley about twelve miles south of Titusville, where the tank business thrived.
The boom was also a bust waiting to happen. Pithole, the instant town that rose and collapsed within a few years, had been good business for Franklin’s tank shops. When it emptied out around 1869, he bought the fashionable Bonta House hotel for $600, according to Tarbell’s autobiography, tore it down, hauled the iron brackets, windows and timber about ten miles to Titusville, and built the family’s new house from it. She was thirteen. She went on to Allegheny College in Meadville, where she was the only woman in her class, and graduated in 1880 after studying biology.
What happened in the Oil Region in 1872
This is the part Tarbell never got over, so it helps to separate what is documented from what she remembered.
The documented part runs like this. In early 1872, a group of refiners organized the South Improvement Company and negotiated secret freight contracts with the major railroads. Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company dates the company’s organization to January 2, 1872, and prints the Pennsylvania Railroad contract, dated January 18. Under it, members would pay lower freight rates than everyone else and would also receive a drawback, a payment on oil that outsiders shipped. The morning papers of February 26 reported that rates were rising for everyone except the members. Tarbell’s account says that within a day a crowd of about 3,000 packed the opera house in Titusville, carrying banners that read “Down with the conspirators” and “No compromise.”
The Oil Region organized fast. Producers formed a union, pledged to sell nothing to anyone tied to the scheme, and sent committees to the legislature and to Congress. By Tarbell’s count the blockade lasted about forty days. On March 28, she writes, the railroads annulled their contracts, and about the same time the Pennsylvania legislature repealed the company’s charter. A congressional committee called the scheme a “most gigantic and daring conspiracy.”
Here the account splits. Tarbell argued that the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland, the only real beneficiary, kept collecting rebates afterward and kept the same goal. Henry Flagler, a Standard Oil partner, told a congressional committee in 1888 that nobody connected with Standard ever had confidence in the scheme, though he and others had subscribed for stock that was never paid for. Its contracts, he said, were “held in escrow a few weeks and were destroyed or cancelled,” and that the company “never did a dollar’s worth of business.” Both statements can be true at once, and Tarbell prints Flagler’s testimony in her own appendix. They disagree about what the episode meant, not about whether it happened.
What is not a matter of record is what the girl heard at home. In her 1939 autobiography, All in the Day’s Work, Tarbell recalled her father saying the scheme was “as if somebody had tried to crowd me off the road,” and she wrote that from his talk she gathered “a conviction to which I still hold: that what had been undertaken was wrong.” That is a recollection, written about sixty-seven years later. It is also a plain statement of why the topic never let her go.
Pittsburgh’s part in the story
Pittsburgh was not a bystander. Tarbell’s list of stockholders includes refiners from Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and she names Pittsburgh refiner Charles Lockhart as a member of the South Improvement Company who later became a Standard Oil man. Freight rates in the contracts were set to Pittsburgh as one of the refining centers.
When the Oil Region rejected an open combination of refiners in May 1873, Tarbell notes that the plan was called the “Pittsburg Plan” because it had been worked out there. Then came the quieter part. She reports that Lockhart, Frew and Company sold to the Cleveland company in 1874, and that a new Standard Oil Company of Pittsburg was formed that fall with Lockhart as president. Between twenty-two and thirty refineries were running in the city when the buying began. Many Pittsburgh refiners, she writes, fought to stay independent. They tried bringing oil down by barge, but the pipelines would not load barges and the railroad would not accept oil that came that way. An independent pipeline had to cross a branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad to reach the city, and the railroad refused. For months, she says, the oil was hauled over the tracks by wagon and then piped again. One by one the refiners gave in. According to Tarbell, William Frew testified in 1879 that he could remember only one Pittsburgh refinery still running outside the company’s control.
That is Tarbell’s reading of sworn testimony, and her counts have not been cross-checked here against Pittsburgh-side records. But the outline matches the wider picture of a city where the Pennsylvania Railroad held the key to almost everything that moved.
Building the book
The McClure’s office had talked about doing a history of a typical trust, and Tarbell, who had spent years in Paris and then written on Napoleon and Lincoln for the magazine, volunteered the biggest one. Her preface says the work was announced in the fall of 1901. She had worked for about a year before the series was announced.
It was not an easy subject. “Even my father said, ‘Don’t do it, Ida, they will ruin the magazine,'” she recalled. People in the Oil Region told her the company would find a way to get her. The real obstacle was paper. She wrote that the Standard Oil Trust and its predecessors had been the subject of congressional, state and court investigations for thirty years, but copies were hard to find. She was told that the 1879 New York investigation by the Hepburn committee was gone, and found it only because Adelaide Hasse at the New York Public Library knew where a copy was. Hasse, she said, told her only one hundred copies were ever printed, and that it was “understood at the time” that railroad presidents had bought up as many as they could. That is rumor passed along by a librarian; what Tarbell actually relied on was the testimony itself. She hired a young Cleveland journalist, John Siddall, to track down more.
Then there was Henry H. Rogers. Through Mark Twain, who knew both Rogers and the magazine’s publisher, S. S. McClure, Standard’s most visible executive offered to talk. She went to his Manhattan home in early January 1902. By her telling, it started with Rouseville. “Tarbell’s Tank Shops,” he said. “I knew your father.” Rogers had once refined oil on Oil Creek, lived on the next hillside, and carried his family’s laundry up the path through the ravine between their houses. The two reached an arrangement: he would give her documents and explanations, but her judgment would decide. For two years she visited his office at 26 Broadway. She said he never read a draft before it ran, with one exception, and that he complained she was blunt. She also said he did not seem to mind that she was heading toward a conclusion that Standard was an enlarged South Improvement Company. She could not get an interview with Rockefeller. In October 1903, she and Siddall watched him at a Sunday school rally and church service in Cleveland. Her impression, which is only an impression, was that he looked afraid.
Reading it today
The series ran from November 1902 to October 1904, nineteen installments in all, and was published as a two-volume book in 1904 with the documents in the appendix. She said Rockefeller was reported to have answered a friend who suggested a reply: “Not a word. Not a word about that misguided woman.” That is secondhand, and it comes from her own memoir.
Tarbell was not neutral, and she never claimed to be. Her brother, William, was part of the independent Pure Oil Company, and her family had been on the losing side of the 1870s. But the book is not a simple hit piece. She wrote that she had no objection to Standard’s size or wealth or corporate form, only to how it was built. “They had never played fair,” she wrote, “and that ruined their greatness for me.” She disliked the label “muckraker.” And she publicly defended Rockefeller against critics who said his charitable giving was meant to quiet public anger, noting in the memoir that he had already given about thirty-five million dollars in the fifteen years before 1904.
How much the series changed the outcome is an argument, not a fact. Rogers died in May 1909, and the Supreme Court ordered Standard Oil’s dissolution two years later, in 1911. The federal suit had been filed in 1906 and rested on the Sherman Antitrust Act. Tarbell’s articles shaped what the public thought of Standard Oil while that case moved; historians weigh that influence differently.
What remains
In Titusville, the Tarbell House at 324 East Main Street has been restored to its approximate 1870 exterior and 1890 interior. The Oil Region Alliance runs the first floor as a house museum, and tours have been by appointment, so call ahead. Pennsylvania erected a state historical marker there in 1954. Allegheny College holds her correspondence and her Lincoln research, much of it digitized. Standard Oil-related papers are at the Drake Well Museum in Titusville. She is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Titusville; she died on January 6, 1944, in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
The book itself is the best place to start. The full text of the History of the Standard Oil Company is free online, appendix of documents included. Read Chapter Three, the 1872 uprising, and then Chapters Four and Five on the Pittsburgh refiners, and judge for yourself how much of 1872 she carried with her.
