IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  The oil producers were aghast to confront this monstrous thing, which today is easily recognizable as a modern corporation. As for being able to engage in any operation save banking, John D. Rockefeller made up for that omission by securing control of the National City Bank of New York. The Pennsylvania Legislature never published this 1870 charter, disclosed who proposed it, or recorded its vote, according to Tarbell who searched for these pieces of information.

  While engaged in the affair of the impounded pamphlet, Tarbell realized that she would need an assistant. In her Lincoln work, she had employed a researcher who did only what she directed. What she wanted now was someone with enthusiasm, someone who would enjoy the chase for its own sake. She wanted a reporter, one of the new sort who had gone to college and who had energy, discretion, and polish. To find this prize, she wrote to newspaper editors in Cleveland asking for the name of someone who might track down a small bit of information. To each young man—the idea of a similarly qualified young woman seemed not to occur to her—she imposed a challenge. Could he find pictures of some of the principals of the Standard Oil Company and some refineries? She would prefer he set about it at once and that McClure’s not be mentioned.

  Five days later she received an impressive reply: “My understanding is that I have a two-fold duty: first, to follow specific instructions, and second, to make suggestions … in the meantime, I shall consult with my brother who is an attorney for Mr. Frank Rockefeller [John’s brother] and for an independent oil company. He knows a good deal about prominent figures in the history of the oil business in this city. In the campaign for photographs I shall probably call upon my friend, Mr. Newman, staff photographer for The Plain Dealer.“7 Thus John McAlpin Siddall, young associate editor of The Chautauquan which had moved to Cleveland after Flood’s retirement, got the job.

  In the process of investigative reporting, theirs was as illustrious a meeting as that of Holmes and Watson. Only in this case, each was to be Sherlock and no leap of deduction, only clear evidence, was allowed. Ida followed up her telegrams with a letter to Siddall disclosing their actual undertaking: “Perhaps I should say that the work we have in mind is a narrative history of the Standard Oil Company. I am to do it, and shall go about it as I would any other piece of historical work in which I had to draw almost entirely from original sources. It is in no sense a piece of economic work, nor is it intended to be controversial, but a straightforward narrative, as picturesque and dramatic as I can make it, of the great monopoly. We hope it will be something that you will be glad to have been associated with.”8

  To his surprise, Siddall soon found that neither his brother, so happily placed, nor other insiders were willing to assist him. He told Tarbell he doubted he’d be able to help her, but she only added to the list of portraits she required. Siddall, still discouraged, sent in a letter of resignation. Boyden intercepted the envelope while Tarbell was away: he wrote to Siddall that they were disappointed, but could he recommend someone else? Siddall reconsidered, stayed, and allowed Ida to misspell his name for the first year of their correspondence.

  He was a young man of twenty-seven, short and plump with an air of excitement and energy. Never having enough to do at work, he led a Lincoln’s Boys Club that had adopted as its Bible Tarbell’s Life of Lincoln. He also served on reform mayor Tom Johnson’s Board of Education.

  For Tarbell, Siddall ferreted through photographers’ files and volunteered to sort through the stock of deceased photographers who had left boxes of negatives and prints. Onetime Rockefeller neighbors lent him prints, but only for a few days lest they be missed. These he had copied for McClure’s and for himself so that he could go about the painstaking process of identifying the man in the high hat or the unbuckled spat standing to the left or right of the great John D. Many tableaux were a quarter century old, taken while Rockefeller personally handled most of the deals that were to make his fortune.

  Siddall persuaded a former Oberlin classmate to convince a Cleveland photographer to sell him ten pictures of John D. Rockefeller for fifty dollars each. There was JDR holding his granddaughter, others of his wife, children, father, and even an uncle, taken for family albums and personal souvenirs, and now to be used to illustrate an exposé of his misdeeds. Having taken advantage of the photographer’s naïveté, Siddall sought to protect him by having a McClure’s retoucher erase the background.

  Some rumored photos, like prize fish, got away. These included The Great Man on skates and another of him standing next to the hind end of a racehorse he purportedly owned.

  After a few telegrams went astray, Tarbell and Siddall communicated only by letter, with Sid at one point suggesting they write in cipher. Sometimes Ida would be on the trail of something so important she could only hint at it through the mails. “I had the other day my first important interview here with their people. I would give a great deal to talk it over with you, knowing your interest. It was in every way amazing to me. Of course, I cannot write it out.”9

  She had planned to confront Standard Oil sources only after she had unearthed documentation they might otherwise conceal. She explained to a reporter:

  “Someone once asked me why I did not go first to the heads of the Company for my information. This person did not know overmuch of humanity I think, else he would have realized instantly that the Standard Oil Company would have shut the door of their closet on their skeleton. But after one had discovered the skeleton and had scrutinized him at a very close range, why then shut the door? That is the reason I did not go to the magnates in the beginning.”10

  She approached Standard Oil when she was ready by venturing into the den of Henry Rogers, one of the Standard’s more flamboyant partners, at his home on West Fifty-seventh Street. Rogers had been an early wildcatter, an independent who battled all attempts at take-over until he saw that prosperity lay in joining forces with Rockefeller. Rogers himself had at first led New York refiners against Rockefeller and the South Improvement Company but his boss, Charles Pratt, decided that joining them was the only way to stay in business. Thus Rockefeller acquired the services and capital of two of his ablest foes.

  If Frank Vanderlip thought he should warn Ida off on behalf of the Standard, Rogers decided it would be wiser to invite her in. He cared about how people regarded the firm and about what a later generation would call corporate image. While reading his newspaper, Rogers saw McClure’s advertisement of her forthcoming series. He thought it important that she verify her work with him and asked a mutual acquaintance, Mark Twain, to arrange it.

  Their first encounter, lasting two hours, served to introduce magnate and journalist to each other. Rogers, who had gotten his start in Rouseville, remembered Tarbell’s Tank Shops and Franklin Tarbell. Ida learned that his had been the white house that she had regarded as the only beautiful thing in Rouseville. Together they reconstructed the town and the narrow ravine that ran between their hillsides.

  When they met, Rogers had just turned sixty-two. Tall and muscular, with a mane of gray hair, he retained a trace of the roustabout despite his grooming and his air of command. As they went over rebates and pipelines, and the independents’ struggles and failures, Rogers extolled Standard’s achievements, its efficiency and productivity. Ida found herself observing his heavy eyebrows and wondering what the mouth was like behind the drooping white mustache: “I fancy [the mouth] must have been flexible, capable of both firm decision and of gay laughter,”11 she speculated.

  They made a pact—she would bring each case history to him and he would give her documents, figures and justifications. She stressed, however, that she alone would decide how all material was to be used. Future meetings, over two years, often took her to the headquarters of Standard Oil at 26 Broadway. Its atmosphere was Spartan, purposeful, with an efficiency that impressed those used to Victorian geegaws and ornamentation. The air clicked with telegraphic instruments, elevators appeared with a marvelous brisk silence, and within the building a telegraph key conveyed the instruct
ions of John D. Rockefeller from his Cleveland home. His retirement was active and Rockefeller employed a worldwide work force twice as large as the U.S. Army.

  Tarbell was ushered in one door and out another, for company policy decreed that visitors were not to encounter each other. Occasionally she glimpsed the fabled Miss Harrison, Rogers’s private secretary, a woman reputed to earn the staggering amount of ten thousand dollars per annum. Ida was struck by the brusqueness of the efficient businesswoman, but she was amused by the attractive, self-important young male clerks piloting her to Rogers’s office by varied routes. One thing mystified her. Each time she went there, the same man was stationed at a window, apparently to spy on her. The whole episode delighted Sam McClure. Back at the magazine office, he amused himself by trying to compute the amount of money Rogers contributed to the exposé by giving them so much of his time.

  Rogers was always willing to talk to Tarbell, but not necessarily to address her points. Whether or not he intended to deceive, he did have his own interpretation of events. When she confronted him with false testimony he had given under oath, he waved it away saying, “They had no business prying into my private affairs.” Both magnate and journalist tried to keep tempers in check. The time Tarbell exploded that one of Rogers’s colleagues was a liar and hypocrite, he looked out the window and remarked that it would probably rain. Another time he was so irritated that he labeled her remarks un-Christian and advised her to attend church more often.

  Rogers promised she would interview John D. Rockefeller, but the best he came up with was Henry Flagler, an early partner who, like Rockefeller, had been a clerk and grocery purveyor in Cleveland. In his youth, Flagler was referred to as “the silent, handsome man,” but in later years he revealed the aggressive qualities behind that exterior. In about 1870, near the age of forty, Flagler had discovered Florida, established the Florida East Coast Railway, and experienced a permutation of his personal life. He lost interest in his wife and decided she was demented. Flagler confined her to her home, then obtained a divorce under a Florida law he had proposed. By the time Tarbell met him, he was married to a much younger woman and had developed a chain of resorts—including Miami and Palm Beach—to woo passengers to his railroad.

  The rambunctious Flagler was at first forthcoming: “John D. Rockefeller would do me out of a dollar today,” he shouted, banging a fist on the table. “This is, if he could do it honestly, Miss Tarbell, if he could do it honestly.” With that, his talk turned circumspect and he observed that his old friend, like the Lord in His day, was sadly misunderstood.12

  What became apparent to Ida was that besides conferring wealth upon his colleagues, Rockefeller inspired intense animosity in them. Rogers told her how he had owned stock in the seventy companies the Standard acquired before 1880, but since transactions were secret, his heirs could not have inherited the company’s stock if he had died. Only the organization of the trust under a state law protected for his family what he had acquired.

  Along with greater opportunities for profits, Rogers found under the Standard umbrella great opprobrium. In 1885, he was indicted for conspiracy in the matter of how the Standard took over the Vacuum Oil Works of Rochester. He hoped Tarbell would investigate this story thoroughly and vindicate him in his children’s eyes. Rogers contended that the Vacuum had been formed solely to trap the Standard into buying it and that judges and lawyers had colluded against the company. When Ida grew alarmed at his paranoia, Rogers thought he had intimidated her into joining his side. He produced a letter thanking her for agreeing to make her story correspond with his understanding. But she explained that he could certainly correct misquotations, if any, in her article, yet he could not reinterpret the facts.

  Determined to be impartial, she submitted the case to a lawyer for review and ultimately wrote that Rogers and his co-defendants had not deserved to be indicted, as a judge had ruled on appeal.

  Reading this article, which was published in McClure’s, Mark Twain was tickled. He joshed in a letter to Rogers that Tarbell had deprived him of rank as a conspirator. She had plainly been bought, Twain said. But by that time, Rogers had realized that he had to take Ida seriously and decided it would be wiser to end his association with her.

  In February 1902, Tarbell spent a week in Washington with the heads of the Industrial Commission, a congressional committee that monitored business practice. They gave her carte blanche to examine their files. On five-by-eight-inch scraps of paper she made notes of what struck her:

  “How can I find out just what they manufactured? (Specific) Honorable W. Harkness—who is he? Still alive?”

  To Siddall she wrote: “The task confronting me is such a monstrous one that I am staggering a bit under it.”13 Once back in New York, she sent Martin Knapp, chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission, a copy of her Life of Lincoln. That apparently expedited matters because Knapp responded with the schedule of petroleum tariff rates that were beneficial to Standard Oil. He also referred her to specific testimony before the Industrial Commission and to an article on railway discriminations. He advised her to pay particular attention to the location of Standard plants versus those of the independents. Independents had the advantage of being at the site of the wells, but railroads manipulated rates to eliminate their edge. Knapp closed by saying he preferred that she not mention his name.14

  Whatever Tarbell could pry loose by charm, she reviewed and cross-referenced. The Industrial Commission had published in 1900 a digest of evidence on rebates, and quoted Rockefeller as saying that the Standard had refunded illegal rebates before a suit was brought. She checked the records of a circuit court in the Southern District of Ohio and found that Rockefeller was correct, but only technically. He had made refunds just twelve days before the judge looked into the case.

  In the first several months of 1902, Tarbell concluded drafts of the first three articles of her series. She opened with the discovery of oil and mentioned one entrepreneur: “A young Iowa school teacher and farmer, visiting at his home in Erie County, saw his chance to invent a receptacle which would hold oil in quantities …” She told how he worked himself and his men night and day. That man was her father.

  Her second installment dealt with the formation of the Standard, and the third with the oil war of 1872 where independents defeated the South Improvement Company. She wrote to Phillips, who was vacationing with his family in Duxbury, Massachusetts, that she wanted to show him her work as his judgment and criticism meant more than anyone else’s. Phillips’s comments were sufficiently critical that he postponed her articles. Just before her European vacation, she wrote Siddall a letter which showed that the investigation was wearing her down: “I have three articles finished, practically, and as we shall not begin now before November, probably, I am going off on Thursday, feeling moderately comfortable. At all events, I know that it will be a good thing for the work for me to drop it entirely for a while. It has become a great bugbear to me. I dream of the octopus by night and think of nothing else by day, and I shall be glad to exchange it for the Alps.”15

  What she found on the other side of the Atlantic was the McClure’s staff at play and her sister Sarah who was still painting abroad. The sisters went to Reims and Geneva to see Charles Borgeaud. Then Ida went off with the McClure party to Feisch, stopping a few days at Interlaken where she looked after a poet in the group named Edith Wyatt who had injured her foot in a fall from a bicycle.

  Tarbell capped her European holiday by researching animals in Paris, Berlin, and Leipzig. On a whim McClure had ordered her to Germany to gather material for a prospective animal magazine. She spent several weeks interviewing trainers, tracking hunters and keepers, and visiting zoos, all to compile articles for a project that McClure never mentioned again.

  But with all the distractions, the octopus would not leave her in peace. After an ecstatic Sunday spent in the Cologne Cathedral listening to organ music and basking in the light of stained-glass windows, she wrote Boyden:

&nb
sp; “This is the first day since I left New York when I have been alone! It is practically my first opportunity to remember that I am down for a series of articles on the Standard Oil Co.! … I left Paris and my charges last night and I was hardly in my sleeper before I began [to] think of that terrible Introduction. My plan is to have it ready when I reach New York. That and the first article. I shall sail with Mr. McC on the “Graf Waldersee” and I want to persuade him to let us go ahead [with publication] in Nov. I may not succeed but I’ll do my best. I have been busily enough at work now for ten days but it has been other matters. You know how the Gen’l absorbs me … I am actually on my way to Berlin and Leipsic [sic] to get on track of what they are doing there—as well as to see Mr. [Andrew D.] White whom I may miss—He’s off north and was not sure of getting back but I hope to catch him.”16

  In the meantime, she had requested Andrew D. White, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, to write her in Hamburg care of the Pure Oil Company, her brother’s organization. Quite possibly, Tarbell wanted to monitor the Standard’s efforts to take over the market for oil in Germany, a market her brother was trying to develop for the Pure Oil Company. Tarbell probably used the opportunity to trace the story of a Herr Poth, the independents’ foreign agent. Poth had sworn an oath of loyalty to them and successfully pleaded their case before German officials, but then had been tricked into selling to the Standard just before his death. In Berlin and Hamburg, she could have verified the story with Poth’s family and with concerned Germans.

  She never did see the ambassador. She wrote him from her ship: “I called at the Embassy in Berlin and your people were very courteous and helpful in securing me the prompt attention in a matter I was interested in.”17

  Their failure to meet may have been convenient for both. White did not appear to put the weight of the U.S. government behind her investigation and Tarbell did not have to make editorial promises. For some time, they had been discussing publication of his articles, some of which, including an interview with Tolstoy, had already appeared in McClure’s.