IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  Her friends had no trouble thinking of presents to buy her. One gave her an aristocratic black Orpington rooster. Tarbell admired the sight of him in her yard, but Trup and the hens hated the multicolored English bird. He died suddenly and Tarbell attributed his death to homesickness. Her mare Minerva was a faithful servant and friend for years, as was the Jersey cow that she named Esther Anne.

  The house was as tastefully furnished as Ida’s frequent purchases of American country antiques—then not highly valued—could make it, with rush mats on the floors and delicate floral wallpaper in most rooms.

  At her very own Twin Oaks, she felt close to life, especially when a new generation came to live there. Ida had given her niece Clara and Clara’s husband Tristram Tupper a little cottage on the property after Tupper returned from the war. Here Tupper, who later went to Hollywood to write for the movies, began his writing career. One day while her grand-niece Caroline was still tiny, Ida insisted Clara and Tris take the afternoon off while Aunt Ida babysat. The Tuppers returned three hours later to find Caroline barricaded with chairs and pillows on the horsehair davenport, wearing her triangular diaper backward. “The rear flank was dangerously exposed,” Clara recalled. “I never did tell Aunt Ida. Her pleasure was too great, her exhaustion too apparent, and her sense of accomplishment too satisfying.”20

  At this time, Tarbell was also preparing to take up work in which she had more expertise—she was going to update her story of the oil business. The drama of the independents was being relived by her nephew Scott who was determined to make a fortune in oil. With his wife and family, he tried his luck in Kentucky, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas. The discovery of Southwestern oil fields and rich reserves around the world had engendered new companies to challenge the Rockefeller empire at the same time that the automobile and the oil furnace ushered in the Oil Age. There was more money than ever to be made from petroleum and Ida Tarbell kept up with the competition over it, especially when the government got involved.

  In May 1921, the Harding administration transferred control of certain naval oil land reserves at Elk Hills and Buena Vista, California, and at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, from control of Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby to that of the Secretary of the Interior, Albert B. Fall. The following April, Fall leased Teapot Dome to Harry Sinclair, president of Sinclair Oil, who formed Mammoth Oil Company specifically to handle the leases. The lessee of Elk Hills was Edward Doheny, chairman of Pan American Petroleum. All this was done without competitive bidding. Fall would later tell a Senate committee that he wanted government lands tapped so that the oil could not be drawn off by those who were drilling on adjacent fields.

  In June, speaking freely at a dinner party given by Bert Boyden’s brother William, Tarbell launched into a discussion of the impropriety of Mammoth Oil’s taking over the drilling of public lands, and charged that Standard Oil of New Jersey held more than fifty-one percent of Sinclair Oil stock. One young guest, who proved to be the secretary of a Rockefeller associate, protested that the Standard did not control Sinclair stock—only its oil lands and pipe lines. He insisted that Standard Oil companies were not involved in Teapot Dome, only private individuals. He further told her that the Standard Oil companies were irritated that the Indiana operation had been allowed to “swallow” the Midwest and promised interesting developments as the Standard Oil companies fought things out.21

  In any event, Tarbell noted that the principals of the Mammoth Oil Company were Standard men. Besides Harry Sinclair, there were James E. O’Neil, president of Prairie Oil and Gas Company, purveyor of crude oil to Standard Oil of Indiana; Walter Teagle, president of Standard Oil of New York; Robert W. Stewart, chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana; James W. Van Dyke, president of Atlantic Refining Company; and Henry W. Blackmer, president of Midwest Refining Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of Indiana.

  Prairie and Atlantic were part of the Standard Oil monopoly cited by the Supreme Court in 1911. As far as Tarbell was concerned, this group had continued the old system of interlocking directorates, whereby the Standard Oil Company controlled and owned “competitors” by virtue of having key officers “invest” or assume directorships in rival companies. She continued to follow developments as best she could.

  In August 1923, popular President Warren G. Harding died. Within a few months, the grieving country learned that under his administration, officials had made vast private fortunes from their public duties. For his secret efforts on behalf of the oilmen, Secretary of Interior Fall had received over a quarter million dollars in Liberty Bonds from Sinclair, and an interest-free “loan” from Doheny for a hundred thousand dollars. This scandal broke in early 1924.

  When The New York Times asked her opinion, Tarbell summed it up this way: “Excessive amiability on the part of President Harding and stupidity on the part of Secretary [of the Navy] Denby who didn’t seem to know what he was signing. Mr. Fall seemed to know very well what he was about.”22 That was to be her only public contribution to the debate—a pity because she ran across tantalizing clues she never followed up.

  Senate investigations revealed that early in 1924 Sinclair had given Fall bonds from the holdings of an obscure firm called the Continental Trading Company Ltd. of Canada, whose officers, Tarbell would later note with glee, were all connected to Standard Oil—Henry W. Blackmer, James E. O’Neil, Robert W. Stewart, Harry Sinclair, and Colonel Albert Humphreys, who sold Continental oil which Continental then resold to Sinclair. In these transactions the investors made personal profits totaling three million dollars.

  All this was revealed later during protracted Senate investigations. Sinclair, Stewart, O’Neil, and Blackmer decamped for foreign shores and were repudiated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had assumed the leadership role his father had once held.

  As the Teapot Dome scandal unfolded, Tarbell had hopes of proving ongoing malfeasance by the Standard Oil Company, but one major effort went into protecting someone she believed in. This was a man she had known since her days on the Woman’s Defense Committee, a diffident man in his fiftieth year who had won the respect of the world for relieving the famine in Europe after the Great War. His name was Herbert Hoover.

  Few men in the world enjoyed as much esteem. An orphan, self-made millionaire, and accomplished engineer, Hoover seemed so noble to both political parties that in 1920, before Hoover declared himself a Republican, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote of Hoover: “He certainly is a wonder and I wish we could make him President of the United States. There could not be a better one.”23

  Tarbell shared this sentiment; but like most people she was never able to relax with the reticent Hoover, who was too shy to look a person in the eye and who spoke with awkward terseness.

  Hoover continued in public service and joined Warren Harding’s cabinet in 1920. In May 1922, when Tarbell was in Washington to interview Woodrow Wilson, she told Hoover, now Secretary of Commerce, that she was appalled that public naval oil lands were being transferred to private drillers. Hoover answered with a laugh: “I wrote the contract.” Tarbell told this to Phillips, who told a cartoonist for the New York World, who told his managing editor. In the midst of the Teapot Dome revelations in 1924, when Hoover was touted as a possible vice-presidential nominee, a World reporter came back to Tarbell and asked her to confirm the story. She told him she regarded the honorable Hoover as too great a national asset to be implicated in such a debacle.

  Her conscience troubled her, however, and she telephoned the managing editor of the World, William P. Beazell, a fellow graduate of Allegheny College. Tarbell told Beazell she would speak to Hoover, but that the story should not be published without notifying her. When Hoover’s name did not appear on the 1924 ticket, the World dropped the matter. Tarbell, still anxious, sought to warn Hoover and set up a meeting with him. At the appointed time—on Friday morning, September 5, 1924—she found Hoover at her apartment door. Guests usually signaled their arrival by whistling near her window, but the Sec
retary of Commerce reached her doorstep without such formal preliminaries. Hoover earnestly assured her he had no knowledge of Teapot Dome contracts before they were signed. He said that when she had mentioned oil contracts in Washington two years before, he had not realized she was talking about Teapot Dome. He thought she must be referring to the leases that he had been working on for the Honolulu Oil Company involving Buena Vista, California.

  Hoover maintained that the Teapot Dome contracts were drawn up under Fall’s orders by officials in the Interior and Navy departments, probably in consultation with the oilmen who were to profit by them. Hoover told her: “I can easily get statements from both departments saying that they were never submitted to the Department of Commerce.”24 Of course, such letters, which he did provide, are not conclusive proof that he was not unofficially asked for his opinion as a man who had recently written other oil leases.

  One wonders why Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce, negotiated a Honolulu oil lease that should have been the affair of the Department of the Interior. It may have been because Hoover had directed mining companies, and Honolulu operated its first claim under mining law. Tarbell, who dictated a seven-page memorandum of the talk, seems to have been willing to trust his word.

  These leases, as Hoover told Tarbell, had been a source of contention since the Wilson administration, when the Honolulu Company took a claim on Naval Reserve #2 in Buena Vista and developed it with great profit. When the lands were withdrawn for the use of the Navy, Wilson refused to give Honolulu a patent or right to the land. Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane complained to Hoover that this seemed unfair. Hoover told Tarbell that Wilson’s refusal had been politically motivated.25 When the Republicans were back in power in 1920, they attempted to right what they regarded as this injustice. The lease the administration drew up for them, apparently written by Hoover, was dated February 11, 1922.

  Tarbell dictated the following for her files after Hoover’s visit: “H says that when he came to office the Honolulu people came to him and he negotiated a lease—I suppose through the Departments of the Interior and the Navy—giving them a right to develop their territory on the basis of a royalty to the government of 35 to 40 per cent of the oil. He said he thought he had done a fine thing for the government as well as acting justly by the oil company. Says that this Honolulu claim will come up in the next investigation and that probably the fact that he negotiated the lease will be know[n], that it is the only lease he ever had anything to do with, and that is what he had in mind when he talked with me.…”26

  The Honolulu claim did not come up again, but the Honolulu Consolidated Oil Company had come before Senate investigators the previous October when the committee heard that Secretary Fall had authorized the lease of public oil lands to the Honolulu Company with the verbal approval of President Harding.27

  However Hoover downplayed his involvement with oil companies, Tarbell’s memorandum indicated that Hoover wanted one of his dealings known: “H says ‘There is one oil matter in which I took a part which nobody has noticed, which I should think is something you might like to work out.’ He said that in 1921 he had told oil men that there was danger of production falling below the country’s needs and he suggested they get into foreign fields in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia to preserve America’s supply.” Tarbell commented, “His opinion seems to be that if our supply gets very low the prices will rise enormously, and that then the companies like the Standard that control the big supplies will make such enormous profits that it will be necessary to do something drastic. It is an interesting view. It might force on the government the taking over of the oil land though he doesn’t say so.” She did not need to note that North American companies, especially Standard Oil of New Jersey, were already involved in Latin America. Her brother himself had worked down there.

  Tarbell described the end of their interview: “I say that I hope he doesn’t feel that I have troubled him unnecessarily. He says, ‘I think it was fine of you to tell me all this and I am very grateful.’ I told him that it all came up in the way of editorial talk and it was not mere gossip, or any intent to gossip, and that everybody, so far as I knew that knows anything of this was loath to say anything about it lest they might injure a man that they felt was of great value to the country.”28

  Hoover apparently satisfied Tarbell, but one discrepancy throws Hoover’s story into doubt. The Teapot Dome and California leases given to Sinclair and Doheny were a subject of wide controversy when Tarbell and Hoover discussed them in May 1922. On April 22, 1922, newspapers announced that Senator Miles Poindexter called for an investigation of the leases. On May 5, Tarbell talked to Hoover in Washington and told him she disapproved of the contracts. One would have to have had to be much further removed from public opinion than was the Secretary of Commerce to doubt that Tarbell meant Teapot Dome, Sinclair, and Doheny when she brought up naval oil contracts.

  In any event, at that point the contracts were merely questionable. They became a national disgrace after it was learned that Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall and the Republican Party coffers had profited directly from Sinclair and Doheny who held these leases. If Hoover was not perfectly candid with Tarbell—and it cannot be proved that he was not—he may simply have wanted to distance himself from the scandal.

  Hoover was, after all, recognized everywhere as a possible presidential candidate. By the time he talked to Tarbell he had already seen numerous political careers ruined by the exposé. The Republican Party had by then been discredited for accepting seventy-five thousand shares of stock from Sinclair Oil, the implication being that this gift was a payoff for past and future favors. As for the Democrats, their leading candidate, William McAdoo, son-in-law to former President Woodrow Wilson, was found to have done unrelated but profitable legal work for Edward Doheny, a prominent beneficiary of the Elk Hills-Teapot Dome leases. The Springfield Republican best summed up how the guilt by association damaged the Democratic front-runner. It nicknamed him “McAdieu.”29

  Until the Watergate disclosures of the 1970s, Teapot Dome was the country’s greatest scandal and it reeked with the corruption of the oil business. It was a story tailor-made for Tarbell, who was always avid for news of the business and who kept up with her old oil sources. Oddly enough, she never entered into the controversy. The closest she came to discussing it was a short article she wrote for The New Republic on November 14, 1923. She pointed out that finally, more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s paper dissolution of the Standard Oil Company, the divisions were starting to compete with each other. Possibly alerted by what she had heard at William Boyden’s dinner party, she wrote that the Midwestern arms of Standard Oil—Standard Oil of Indiana and the Prairie Oil and Gas Company, which both produced and refined oil—were trying to undersell the Easterners—Standard Oils of New York and New Jersey—which only refined. At last, she said, competition was rearing its head. Tarbell asked hopefully, “Is the Standard Oil Company crumbling within?”

  Despite the fact that she peppered away at Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller’s son sought her advice on a matter of importance to him. In the late 1910s, he hired a man named William Inglis to help his father evaluate both Tarbell’s and Lloyd’s books and to reply to their charges. Transcripts of these interviews show that the elder Rockefeller, still vigorous and alert, sidestepped all criticism. His son was at first satisfied. He wrote Inglis: “To be able to take the words out of her own mouth and prove the case against [Tarbell] is of the utmost value, and I am so glad that father is pursuing this study with you with his customary patience and thoroughness.”30

  In 1924, intending to prepare a book, John D., Jr., whom Tarbell met at the Industrial Conference in 1919, asked her to review his father’s comments, and brought them to her apartment on Gramercy Park. Tarbell read the material carefully and was assured that Rockefeller had merely sidestepped all charges and in no way exonerated himself. Apparently she convinced his son on this point, for he wrote to George Vincent, p
resident of the Rockefeller Foundation and son of that Bishop Vincent who co-founded the Chautauqua Institute: “Miss Tarbell has just read the biography manuscript and her suggestions are most valuable and quite in line with some of those which you had made. It seems clear that we should abandon any thought to the publication of the material in anything like its present incomplete and decidedly unbalanced form.”31

  Ida Tarbell was again captivated by the story of petroleum and planned a third volume of The History of the Standard Oil Company, a work that would again attack Rockefeller. She even obtained financial backing from Samuel McClure who had lost, and was regaining, control of his magazine. Her old chief offered her seven hundred fifty dollars plus two hundred fifty dollars’ worth of stock for each of some dozen planned articles, and Tarbell was ready to plunge in, to tell the story of the opening of the Southwestern oil fields, of Standard Oil’s international war with Dutch Shell for mastery of the world’s oil, and to delve into rumors that the real story behind Teapot Dome was Standard’s inside war for control of the business.

  In the meantime, interested people had long found it impossible to buy copies of The History of the Standard Oil Company. In frustration, a rising attorney in Louisiana named Huey Long, then beginning a career that would take him to the governorship and the annals of demagoguery, offered to tell her everything he knew about the Standard Oil Company and to pay her one hundred dollars if she would send the volumes to him. Many, Long among them, insisted that the Standard had bought up all the books to keep them away from the public. Whether or not this was true, it was certain that her books were caught in the break-up of the McClure group. The plates traveled to Moffat, Yard and Company, then went to Doubleday Page & Company, where Tarbell would not allow them to remain because that company had published a book Random Reminiscences of Men and Events under Rockefeller’s name. G. P. Putnam’s Sons offered to publish her promised history but finally Macmillan acquired the rights. Macmillan held off reissuing her first two volumes in anticipation of the updating she planned, but she never actually began the job. Thus was lost whatever Tarbell might have contributed to the episode of Teapot Dome.