Ida Tarbell

Oil got into everything at Rouseville — the sand, the puddles, the nightmares. Franklin Tarbell built wooden storage tanks beside 25 wells, and his daughter watched a well fire kill 18 men and sneaked in to look at three women laid out after a kitchen explosion. She had bad dreams for the rest of her life. She went to Allegheny College in 1876 to study biology, the only woman in a class of 41, and spent hours with the college microscope on a mudpuppy then thought to be a missing link. Two years as headmistress at Poland Union Seminary wore her out. Then The Chautauquan, and in 1891, at 34, a shared apartment on the Rue du Sommerard and Sorbonne lectures on how French historians handle evidence.

S. S. McClure tracked her to Paris, borrowed 40 dollars off her, and hired her. Serials on Napoleon and Lincoln doubled his circulation past 100,000 before she opened a single Standard Oil ledger. Her father warned her that Rockefeller would destroy the magazine, and one of his banks duly leaned on it. The 19 installments that began in November 1902 and the antitrust ruling that followed are BriefHistory's ground. This page is about the woman doing the filing.

The method had a price and a blind spot. Mark Twain introduced her to Henry H. Rogers, a Standard Oil vice president, and Rogers sat for detailed interviews at company headquarters in early 1902 — normally guarded, he was apparently under the impression the piece would be complimentary, and he kept talking even after the first installments ran. Then there is the rest of the record. From 1909 she wrote that a woman's true role was wife, mother and homemaker, described the suffrage campaign as a misguided war on men, and spoke for anti-suffrage organizations. Former allies were dismayed. In the 1920s she wrote a flattering series on Benito Mussolini for McCall's that compared him to Napoleon.

Pneumonia killed her at Bridgeport Hospital on January 6, 1944, at 86, with a book called Life After Eighty unfinished. What survived was a method rather than a politics. Reporting built out of paper — records first, accusation afterward — became the ordinary way the trade works, absorbed so thoroughly that it stopped looking like an invention. The suffrage writing sits badly beside it, and her biographer Emily Arnold McCully argues it cost her more standing than anything else she did. She had reversed herself by 1924, telling Good Housekeeping that 20 million women did vote and should vote. Her Easton house became a National Historic Landmark in 1993.

Ida Tarbell's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Short Life of Napoleon Bonaparte book
  The McClure's serial that quadrupled the magazine's readership 1895
• Madame Roland: A Biographical Study book
  The Paris project. Researching it destroyed her faith in revolution 1896
• The Life of Abraham Lincoln book
  Two volumes, built on interviews with people who had known him 1900
• The History of the Standard Oil Company book
  Collected from the McClure's series. A bestseller 1904
• The Business of Being a Woman book
  Her argument that women belonged at home. Poorly received 1912
• All in a Day's Work book
  The autobiography, finished at 82 1939

• 1872 aged ~15 The South Improvement Company scheme wrecks her father's refining business Franklin Tarbell marched against it and tipped over Standard Oil rail tankers.
• 1876 aged ~19 Enters Allegheny College as the only woman in a class of 41 She studied biology and worked on a mudpuppy under the college microscope.
• August 1880 aged 22 Becomes headmistress at Poland Union Seminary in Ohio She taught geology, botany, geometry, trigonometry, Greek, Latin, French and German, and lasted two years.
• 1891 aged ~34 Moves to Paris at 34 to write for herself She sold pieces to American papers and sat in on Sorbonne lectures on historical method.
• 1894 aged ~37 Joins the staff of McClure's Magazine at 3,000 dollars a year
• November 1902 aged 44 The first installment of the Standard Oil history runs in McClure's She had located the last surviving copy of an 1873 book Standard Oil had tried to destroy.
• 1906 aged ~49 Leaves McClure's, co-founds The American Magazine and buys a Connecticut farm
• 1912 aged ~55 Publishes The Business of Being a Woman and infuriates her readers The article Making a Man of Herself ran in The American Magazine the same year.
• January 6, 1944 aged 86 Dies of pneumonia at Bridgeport Hospital at 86 She had been in hospital since December and was at work on a book called Life After Eighty.

• John D. Rockefeller 1839–1937
  Established the Rockefeller Foundation and funded medical research, education, and public health initiatives. investigated
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. named the muckrakers
• Mark Twain 1835–1910
  Author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often called the father of American literature. introduced her to her best Standard Oil source
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. her subject before Standard Oil
• Alice Paul 1885–1977
  Strategist of the final campaign for women's suffrage and author of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. campaigned for the vote she argued against