Thread by @doctorow

More than a century ago, Ida M Tarbell published her magisterial HISTORY OF THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY, a scorching two-volume piece of investigative journalism that led to the downfall of Standard Oil and the taming of John D Rockefeller.

gutenberg.org/files/60692/60…

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Tarbell was a self-taught, independent, uncredentialled journalist who covered the stories the mainstream press was unwilling to touch (remember that the next time someone tells you that we can solve disinformation by professionalizing journalists).

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She was raised in a Pennsylvania oil family and watched her father and all his friends get destroyed by Rockefeller's frauds. She was an activist, a Suffragist, a pioneer who demanded a scientific university education at a time when women were excluded from the sciences.

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She toured the country giving speeches about the oil trust, and was renowned for her gifts at turning complex, technical, boring topics into exciting and easily digested news that listeners related to their everyday lives.

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ROCKEFELLER FUCKING HATED HER. He called her "Ida Tarbarrel." It didn't matter. He was the most powerful man on Earth, perhaps in the history of the human race. She was the self-taught daughter of a ruined Pennsylvania oil-man. She won. He lost.

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Tarbell never claimed to be objective (remember that the next time someone tells you the answer to our woes is a nonpartisan press). She briefed for fairness and decency, and she saw no reason to consider whether cheating should be considered a legitimate path to glory.

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Here's a passage from the conclusion to Vol 2 of the HISTORY that literally made me cheer as I listened to the free Librovox recording of it while swimming laps on my lunch-break today:

librivox.org/the-history-of…

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Often people who admit the facts, who are willing to see Rockefeller has employed force and fraud to secure his ends, justify him by declaring, “It’s business.” That is, “it’s business” has to come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, special privileges.

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It is a common enough thing to hear men arguing that the ordinary laws of morality do not apply in business. Now, if the Standard Oil were the only concern in the country guilty of the practices which have given it monopolistic power, this story never would have been written.

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Were it alone in these methods, public scorn would long ago have made short work of the Standard Oil Company. But it is simply the most conspicuous type of what can be done by these practices.

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The methods it employs with such acumen, persistency, and secrecy are employed by all sorts of business men, from corner grocers up to bankers. If exposed, they are excused on the ground that this is business.

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If the point is pushed, frequently the defender of the practice falls back on the Christian doctrine of charity, and points that we are erring mortals and 2288must allow for each other’s weaknesses!

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—an excuse which, if carried to its legitimate conclusion, would leave our business men weeping on one another’s shoulders over human frailty, while they picked one another’s pockets.

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Me again.

FUCK YEAH IDA TARBELL.

I wrote a column about Tarbell's work yesterday. I seriously recommend reading the HISTORY. It's nothing short of genius, and a century later, it still SINGS.

doctorow.medium.com/illegitimate-g…

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