Back home, she knitted together more of the Standard Oil story. Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth told of a widow defrauded by Rockefeller. Tarbell thought the story delicious and applied to Lloyd for documentation. He wrote that court records had been stolen in his day but were since returned to Cleveland. She searched for them herself several weeks before turning up a copy.
The relationship between Tarbell and Lloyd assumed the character of a complicated dance. Each bowed before the icon of the subject and bobbed before the idol of professional courtesy. Lloyd, who now saw she was a formidable critic of the Standard, was probably curious to meet the woman he had warned western Pennsylvania about, and she probably wanted to see the suspicious Jeremiah of the Standard.
In late September 1902, she went to meet him at his estate in Seaconnet, Rhode Island. She found him to be a charming, silver-headed gentleman in his mid-fifties. As she outlined her series, he shared his research, including the case of the widow Backus, and recommended persons and lines of inquiry to be followed in Titusville. The two journalists were of one mind toward their prey: Rockefeller was a great man. They differed only in the degree of greatness they would accord him. Lloyd placed him among the five greatest of history, something Tarbell averred was a little strong.
Tarbell impressed him favorably, but her balanced presentation continued to concern him. For her part, Tarbell was charmed by Lloyd’s passionate commitment to social change. Despite his egalitarian philosophy, Lloyd had the advantage of a seaside estate, yet he was able to make her feel guilty for her love of fine silver and well-wrought goods. Tarbell was humble in her bread-and-butter note: “I cannot tell you what a good time I had and what an impulse you gave me. With my radical leanings I sometimes grow very restive in my practical and rather conservative—though I think entirely sincere—surroundings. It does me good to rub up against the people in the advance line where I believe most of us will be one day.”18
Tarbell’s rendering of the widow’s story was consistent with what Lloyd had reported, but less passionate. She depicted a successful businesswoman who allowed herself to be frightened, who clutched at Rockefeller and refused to see the seriousness of the contracts she was concluding. Siddall urged Tarbell to omit it, but she defended its inclusion, saying that it illustrated how Rockefeller could terrorize and eliminate successful refiners.
Lloyd approved of her article and wrote her: “When you get through with ‘Johnnie’ I don’t think there will be very much left of him except something resembling one of his own grease spots.”19
Tarbell worked at home in her study, sitting on a bentwood chair before a partners desk with baskets of material in messy heaps before her and framed photographs of Phillips and McClure overhead. In one day she would accomplish a great deal, only a little the next, but she worked continuously, constantly aware of approaching deadlines and the amount of work to be done. By having Siddall at work in Cleveland, new access to the oil regions, and the cooperation of government officials, Tarbell and McClure’s Magazine became a Hydra stinging the uncovered flesh of the country’s great monopoly.
Month after month for the next two years, Tarbell turned out The History of the Standard Oil Company. She gathered about her as many pertinent books, transcripts and clippings as possible, arranged them in order and wrote. When one envelope was emptied of notes, enlarged into a chapter and handed in, she reviewed her material and rearranged what she needed for the next installment. When some fact or verification eluded her, she mailed off a query to Siddall. One such inquiry related to the trustworthiness of one of Rockefeller’s many foes: “Can you find out for me the standing and character of Charles T. Morehouse, who was a manufacturer of lubricating oil in Cleveland up to 1877? I want to know if he was a thoroughly reliable person.”20 In 1879, Morehouse had told the New York Assembly how Rockefeller drove him out of business by choking off his supply of crude oil. It was for Tarbell’s purposes a piquant tale, but she wanted to make sure it was true.
Her editors were as scrupulous as she. Every McClure’s story was rewritten three times at the direction of the editors—a routine process that unhinged many writers, but not Tarbell. She picked up her pen, rewrote, and for good measure, sent this copy to Siddall who read each installment as many as thirty times before commenting in multi-paged, single-spaced critiques. She also submitted her work to economists. McClure paid John R. Commons—who later became a dean of both American labor historians and Wisconsin Progressivism—and John Bates Clark—who had studied for the ministry as well as becoming a social scientist—to assist her. Both were as concerned with ethics as with economics, which suited Tarbell perfectly.
Roseboro said of the editing process: “She had to fight her equals to say the least there, and she did it with Sam McClure and JSP demanding that they be satisfied and thrilled; they pounded her and her stuff to make the best of it page by page, and of course never [did] a big person [take as] much merciless help as she did.”21
In Roseboro’s opinion, this brought out Tarbell’s best, wrought a perfection she would not elsewhere allow herself, and moderated her tendency to preach. Phillips and McClure found that Tarbell was presenting a much greater story than they had bargained for. McClure originally envisioned a three-part series. Phillips, on reading her first manuscripts, increased it to six. Once publication began and reaction poured in, they expanded it further to twelve.
Once a day, morning or afternoon, she went up to the office. The atmosphere of the magazine was a tonic to be sipped in careful drafts. Enough would revive, an extra drop exhaust. Boyden was ever primed with the latest gossip about who said what to whom. Viola Roseboro usually wanted to tell Ida about new authors and describe them with a curse word or two. Then there were the new people. A clerk named Molly Best habitually arrived so disheveled that Boyden was forced to pin her clothing together to hide the considerable sum of cash she had sewn in her stocking.
There was also a new writer on the staff, a former teacher in her late twenties, who had lived in Virginia and Nebraska and acquired the worst accents of both. Only McClure and Roseboro liked her. The rest thought Willa Cather a disgruntled “yes-man,” according to Curtis Brady, one of several Brady brothers on the business staff. Cather wanted to meet Ida Tarbell, the woman writer who had made a name for herself, but Tarbell had no time. Ida “didn’t cotton to her, nor discount her either,” according to Roseboro. In later years, Tarbell expressed great admiration for Death Comes for the Archbishop and defended Cather’s way of guarding her privacy to protect her working hours.
Unlike Cather, Finley Peter Dunne was popular. He was not actually a staff member, but he was a presence at McClure’s. The syndicate distributed his essays after 1904 and paid Dunne a thousand dollars apiece for the privilege. Dunne wrote the famous Mr. Dooley stories which centered around barkeeper Martin Dooley, an Irishman who lacked education but possessed the ability to smell a rat.
The child of Irish immigrants, Finley Peter Dunne was, like most others at McClure’s, Midwestern. His hometown was Chicago, where he created Mr. Dooley. In 1898, when Dunne was thirty-one, Mr. Dooley began to comment on the coming conflict with Spain. As politicians grew more melodramatic and jingoistic, Mr. Dooley grew more cynical. When President McKinley considered buying Cuba, the Irishman commented to his friend Hennessy: “Ye cud never be a rale pathrite [patriot]. Ye have no stock ticker in ye’er house.” After Admiral Dewey sank the Spanish fleet at Manila, Martin Dooley claimed him as his cousin: “Dewey or Dooley, ’tis all th’ same,” said he. Dooley’s monologue painted Dewey as somewhat of a braggart. “I’ll bet ye, whin we come to find out about him, we’ll hear he’s ilicted himself king iv th’ F’lipine Islands. Dooley th’ Wanst [Dooley dialect for First].” Later Mr. Dooley disowned Dewey.
Dunne liked nothing better than to ridicule cant with his acid green pen. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge spoke of the nobility of beating back Spain’s decaying empire, to which Mr. Dooley replied, “Hands acrost th’ sea a
n’ into somewan’s pocket.” Dooley quoted Kipling—almost: “Take up th’ white man’s burden an’ hand it to th’ coons.”
Even Theodore Roosevelt had to acknowledge Mr. Dooley’s sagacity: “As you know, I am an Expansionist,” Roosevelt wrote Dunne, “but your delicious phrase about ‘take up the white man’s burden and put it on the coons,’ exactly hits off the weak spot in my own theory; though, mind you, I am by no means willing to give up the theory yet.”22
Dunne himself hated writing. Sad and serious, he procrastinated until the pressure built and escaped in a flash of brilliant wit. In his mid-thirties, Dunne had a workingman’s fleshiness, a dandy’s vest with watch fob, and slicked-down hair; and the pince-nez of a man who reads long hours into the night.
One final interesting specimen of McClure’s menagerie was a journalist named Lincoln Steffens. Originally from a moneyed San Francisco family, Stef had cultivated an artistic flair during his student days in Germany and France. He was short with a tufty beard and an upturned mustache and he kept his fine brown hair cropped high above his forehead.
Stef was hired because Ida Tarbell was too busy with the Standard to pinch-hit as managing editor. McClure’s offer was a lifeline to Stef. He was at a dead end both in a novel he was attempting and with his job as city editor of the Commercial Advertiser. His bosses felt he was used up, too worn out at thirty-five to be a journalist anymore. They were wrong. Muscular and alert, Stef was the antithesis of what was needed in a desk editor. McClure soon saw this and sent him out to report.
According to McClure’s autobiography, Ida Tarbell suggested that Stef visit Cleveland where Siddall could introduce him to Mayor Tom Johnson. She thought it might be a good idea to have an article on the admirable aspects of that city’s government. He visited that and other cities, but instead of finding what was admirable, he found evidence of widespread corruption. He produced “The Shame of the Cities” series that began to run in October 1902 as “Tweed Days in St. Louis.” Steffens was listed as co-author with a local newspaperman named Claude Wetmore.
McClure’s Magazine was now on the cusp of greatness, but Sam McClure in the days stretching beyond 1900 was less editor than menace. He would steam in from Europe with last- minute orders that upended months of work. Ellery Sedgwick, later editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote:
“There were despondent attempts at self-protection. Schemes were constantly made to circumvent [Sam McClure’s] activities. Since the office could not harbor a quiet desk, by collusion with the cashier, the staff would hire a secret room in some hotel and then until the hide-out was discovered, a systematic effort would be made to finish an article before the deadline. The device never served for long. All New York was within too easy reach, and there were occasions when staff articles could only be written in the precarious security of a Washington bedroom … it was miraculous how in the incandescent office the forces of attraction and repulsion were kept so nearly in balance; that with all the subterranean rumblings and occasional little spurts of flame, the explosion was so long in coming …”23
Steffens privately considered Tarbell the only dependable journalist there and the only good-humored person at McClure’s besides himself. “She was another fellow, a nice fellow—we didn’t have a feeling of man or woman in that office,” he recalled. “There was never any doubt of her copy. It was so reliable, always on time, the rest of us were all unreliable.”24
When the Standard Oil series debuted in November 1902, the time of Ida Tarbell’s forty-fifth birthday, the nation had a rueful example of how a millionaire’s business could affect their lives. A coal strike gripped the country. Pennsylvania’s National Guard had been ordered to the anthracite regions to quell riots, the mine operators refused a presidential request that work resume pending an investigation, and finally the matter was settled by arbitration.
William Randolph Hearst’s populist Journal at first covered the story in terms of “coal barons” and “strikers,” but as people began to read and talk about McClure’s series, Hearst peppered his headlines with the phrase COAL TRUST. Among stories of eloping princesses, fat ladies who sat on burglars, and society divorces, he trumpeted “Book Trust” and “Asphalt Trust” as well. “Trust” became the catchword that could be counted on to attract the reader’s eye. When J. P. Morgan formed International Harvester, it was reported under MORGAN FORMS ANOTHER TRUST. An account of Standard’s operation in Illinois proclaimed CHICAGO IN GRIP OF TRUST.
Standard Oil itself began to receive much more publicity. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World asked on Christmas Day of 1902: BILLION $ YANKEE TRUST IN EUROPE? referring to Rockefeller and others said to be interested in a GIGANTIC GAS DEAL. This followed a story headlined J. D. ROCKEFELLER’S $4,000,000 CHECK/HIS SHARE OF STANDARD OIL DIVIDEND FOR LAST QUARTER IN 1902.
In the second installment of “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” appearing in December 1902, Tarbell served notice that what Rockefeller had concealed was about to be revealed. She disclosed that the Standard’s original capitalization had been one million dollars, and she provided the names of those who had joined—John and William Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, Samuel Andrews, and Stephen V. Harkness—when Standard consolidated in 1870. Worse for Rockefeller, the articles declared him to be the force behind the South Improvement Company and raised the nasty issue of rebates: while a discount for quantity is considered reasonable in most business arrangements, such practice in this case was expressly forbidden by law.
The situation was as Ida’s father had described it to her so long before. Railroads had begun to develop when Ulysses Grant accorded rights of way and government aid to certain men on the condition that they would operate railroads as public utilities. They were to be open to all at equal rates with no consideration given to the volume of business. Many abused this rule, including Rockefeller. Tarbell uncovered testimony revealing how he first made a deal with the Lake Shore Railroad, which allowed his refineries in Cleveland to have a discount or rebate while those who had the advantage of being closer to the wells were to pay a higher freight. To further substantiate her charges, she listed the system of rebates reported by the House Committee on Manufactures when it investigated the Standard in 1888.
Even more than the rebate, news of Rockefeller’s attempt to destroy competitors through the discredited South Improvement Company was a great embarrassment to him. Tarbell told her readers that Rockefeller convinced independents in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to join in the South Improvement Company. Then together they moved against rivals in two centers—refiners at the Cleveland port and those in the oil regions.
Her source was that most valuable pamphlet, The History of the South Improvement Company, which listed Standard Oil as the biggest shareholder. With South Improvement as their shield, Rockefeller and his colleagues sought such advantageous treatment from railroads as to destroy competitors until they were unmasked and South Improvement was forced to disband. Tarbell’s bombshell was that the Standard still operated according to this outlawed plan. All this was served up with illustrations furnished by Siddall.
It is not difficult to imagine the secretive Rockefeller’s surprise when he saw photographs of himself and his associates displayed like mug shots in the pages of McClure’s Magazine. McClure’s mailbags swelled with praise of her and indignation at the Standard. Even an astrologer joined in. He foretold that 1903 and 1904 would be critical for the Standard in the legislature, predicting that its outlays would be increased and there would be an impediment to its “grasping the reins of power to control business and legislation in the United States.”25
In Titusville there was great excitement. Those who fought the Standard at last trusted Ida Tarbell. She observed: “I have been having a very interesting time here with the Standard work. It is very interesting to note now, that the thing is well under way, and I have not been kidnapped or sued for libel as some of my friends prophesied, people are willing to talk freely to me.”26
One
of these was Lewis Emery, who had known Ida Tarbell since she was a baby. Emery was a hero in the oil regions because he had thwarted Rockefeller’s control of railroads by building a pipeline to transport oil. He was one of the most successful independents, but he amused Tarbell by describing himself as Rockefeller’s helpless victim.
After Emery read her early installments in the pages of McClure’s, he wrote Lloyd: “I shared your misgivings relative to the motive prompting Miss Tarbell to write such a history: I have been watching her articles closely and have expressed to her personally my doubts as to her sincerity in writing a truthful history of the acts of the men composing that company …” But, Emery said, he had gone to see her in New York, and they spent several hours talking about her work. After looking over her future articles he decided to help. Emery told Lloyd: “I shall assist her as best I know how to prepare certain articles on the independent movement …” Emery closed by asking Lloyd to return photographs of refineries dismantled by the Standard, photos he had sent Lloyd and now wanted to pass to Tarbell.27
Lloyd, however, retained reservations. Tarbell had won his confidence; her publisher McClure had not. He found the advertisement for the series too even-handed and feared the magazine might still come out on the side of the Standard. Lloyd sent Emery his photos, with a worried letter to which Emery replied: “I have not the least doubt as to the honesty and good intentions of Miss Tarbell but you have opened my eyes to a certain extent relative to the publishers and the whole milk in the coconut.”28 Emery asked permission to send Lloyd’s letter to Tarbell, which Lloyd granted—provided there seemed to be no turn of phrase that implied criticism of her.
Happily for Tarbell, her purpose was not to win the wholehearted approval of these two. She secured their materials, which documented and elaborated the independents’ side of the story. Lloyd did not live to see “The History of the Standard Oil Company” completed. He died suddenly six months after this last correspondence with Emery.
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