Thread by @DenbrotS

#IDedicateThisWeekTo Ida Tarbell an American writer, investigative journalist, biographer and lecturer. She was one of the leading muckrakers of the progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and pioneered investigative journalism.

Ida Tarbell/2
Born in PA at the onset of the oil boom, Tarbell is best known The History of the Standard Oil Company...This one masterpiece of investigative journalism would bring about the dissolution of Standard Oil as a monopoly and lead to the Clayton Antitrust Act.

Ida Turnbull/3
“Her book would also lead to the Hepburn Act in 1906 to oversee the railroads, the 1910 Mann-Elkins Act which gave the Interstate Commerce Commission power over oil rates, and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1914.”

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

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

If it has taught us anything, it is that our present law-makers, as a body, are ignorant, corrupt and unprincipled; that the majority of them are, directly or indirectly, under the control of the very monopolies against whose acts we have been seeking relief. .

Ida Turnbull