Ida Tarbell

Ida Tarbell was a pioneering American journalist, lecturer, and chronicler of American industry best known for her classic The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), which is widely seen as leading to the 1911 Supreme Court ruling that broke up Standard Oil. She was among a group of so-called muckrakers who helped establish the field of investigative journalism.

Early years

Ida Tarbell’s professional life was profoundly shaped by her childhood in the oil fields of northwestern Pennsylvania. Born in 1857 to Franklin Sumner Tarbell and Esther Ann McCullough, Ida spent her first three years with her family in a log cabin. In 1860 her father got into the oil business, earning enough to move his family to the town of Titusville. Over the years of Ida’s childhood, Franklin Tarbell organized with other independent oil producers, but ultimately his business fell prey to the dominance and monopolistic practices of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Tarbell was a teenager at the time, and she would later write of the impact on her father and other small oil producers: “A big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.” Years later she would shape the future of a company that had shaped her family’s fortunes.

Always curious, young Ida was interested in science, specifically geology. Since a career in science was not open to women in the late 19th century, after she graduated from Allegheny College in 1880 with a degree in biology, she briefly became a teacher. Upon realizing that she hated teaching, she abandoned it and pivoted to writing and editing for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (1883–91). Writing was her vocation, and she moved to Paris with the money she had saved to study at the Sorbonne, penning freelance articles for American magazines.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

It was while freelancing for McClure’s Magazine that she caught the attention of the magazine’s founder, S.S. McClure. He hired her in 1894, and she returned to the United States.

A writer’s life

Some of her earliest work for McClure’s was an 1894 biographical series on Napoleon Bonaparte that painted him as human as well as a world-changing leader. She followed up with a series that chronicled the early life of Abraham Lincoln. Tarbell would continue to write about Lincoln throughout her life, perhaps because of the early memory she had of her father hearing about the 1865 assassination, which she recounted in her autobiography:

It was the spring of 1865. Father was coming up the hill, mother and I were watching for him. Usually he walked with a brisk step, head up, but now his step was slow, his head dropped. Mother ran to meet him crying, “Frank, Frank, what is it?” I did not hear the answer; but I shall always see my mother turning at his words, burying her face in her apron, running into her room sobbing as if her heart would break. And then the house was shut up, and crape was put on all the doors, and I was told that Lincoln was dead.

Tarbell’s Lincoln series was so popular that it doubled the circulation of the nascent McClure’s Magazine. But her most ambitious work was yet to come.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Taking on Standard Oil

McClure’s Magazine had been founded with the then-innovative idea of setting journalists on a topic and seeing what they uncovered, which is how Tarbell found herself investigating the world of Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century.

Tarbell, for her part, was by some accounts initially skeptical of the assignment. She wasn’t convinced anyone would want to read about the world that had been her childhood. Yet as she embarked on four years of meticulous research, interviews, and examination of records, an undeniable theme emerged: John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company had engaged in monopolistic and corrupt practices to dominate the oil industry in the United States.

Over the course of two years, from November 1902 to October 1904, Tarbell published 19 articles in McClure’s, under the title The History of the Standard Oil Company. It would become a landmark example of investigative journalism. But even as she chronicled the corruption and wrongdoing that had taken a deeply personal toll, she acknowledged the business acumen and brilliance of Rockefeller, noting that he could have achieved greatness without skirting the law. “They had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me,” she wrote. She incurred the wrath of Rockefeller, who called her “Miss Tarbarrel” and “that poisonous woman.” She also drew the attention of U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1906 dubbed Tarbell and other investigative journalists of the time, including Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair, “muckrakers” for what he considered to be their tendency to focus on the negatives in society while ignoring broader national initiatives, many of which Roosevelt had led.

In 1904 Tarbell’s work was published as a book. It led to the 1906 U.S. government suit against Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act; in 1911 Standard Oil was ordered to divest itself of its major holdings—33 companies in all. In 1999 Tarbell’s serialization was ranked fifth on a list of the 100 most influential works of journalism of the 20th century.

Life after Standard Oil

In 1906 Tarbell and fellow muckraker Steffens founded their own publication, American Magazine, which she wrote for until 1915. She went on to write against high protective tariffs and to continue her affection for biography by writing about Benito Mussolini in 1926–27.

Despite being a groundbreaker as a woman journalist, Tarbell refused to become an activist in the movement for suffrage. She worked as an adviser to Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding. Despite her opposition to suffrage, her obituary in The New York Times notes that she voted for Franklin Roosevelt twice (she opposed his seeking a third term and voted for Wendell Willkie in 1940). She published her autobiography, All in the Day’s Work, in 1939.

Learn more about muckraking journalists

Who were the muckrakers?

Lincoln Steffens: A relentless searcher after truth

Ida B. Wells: She defined courage

Upton Sinclair: He took us into The Jungle