Review: Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller by Steve Weinberg
(Contrary Magazine Autumn 2008)
A Reporter Reviews a David's Coverage of a Goliath
What we may not remember in a world saturated with a media hell-bent on outing every
celebrity’s secret (Goodbye, John Edwards) is that serious investigative reporting about the
money and influence of the privileged and powerful has an American Eve. Her name was Ida M.
Tarbell, and she invented muckraking, a form of reportage marked by moral outrage, stringent
research, and reformist zeal. Tarbell, who died in 1944 at 86, had one of the most successful
careers in magazine journalism. She was the sort of writer for whom Pulitzer prizes were made
to honor. As writer and editor, she blazed the trail for those rare authentic journalists, crusaders
like Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens in her time and Seymour Hersh, Robert Caro, and
Jane Mayer in our own.
Tarbell’s ethical opposite—and her sparing partner—was John D. Rockefeller, the richest of the
industrial barons. In the Pennsylvania oil boom of the 1860s, Rockefeller began by making a
critical decision: he would forego drilling for oil and put his usurious wherewithal in refining and
delivering oil, gas, and kerosene. He monopolized his products’ availability; he shipped and
hoarded fuel as he saw fit; he manipulated prices; he took kickbacks; he eliminated middlemen;
and he colluded with the railroads, his means of delivery, to insure preferential treatment. It was
no accident that his tactics quickened the country’s industrialization.
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Review: Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller by Steve Weinberg
The rest of the story is fairly well-known. With Standard Oil, based in Cleveland, Ohio,
Rockefeller undercut the costs of rival refineries until they sold out—to Standard Oil—and, voilá,
the refinery business had been entrusted to him. Tarbell’s reporting on Rockfeller’s predation
led to federal antitrust legislation and the landmark evisceration of Standard Oil into thirty-three
smaller companies. The expos
é
ended the era of trusts (Rockfeller’s was not the only one), but, unintentionally, showed
management and their investors how to profit from centralization, despite the law. When
conglomerates break apart—in our time, we think of AT&T and the attempt to split
Microsoft—the fines they face are minuscule in comparison to what can be earned with
divestiture.
In each subsidiary, Rockefeller received commensurate amounts of stock, which, in turn, grew
quickly as investors took advantage of the new, leaner companies. Paradoxically, the demise of
his trust became a huge boon. Carving up Standard Oil quintupled his net worth, "making him,"
the author states, "almost certainly the first billionaire in America’s existence," perhaps in
human history.
Weinberg’s strongest suit is his parallel storytelling. He shows us how Tarbell became a
conscience-prone journalist and how Rockefeller steered his cartel across the seas of deception
and governmental noninterference. The subtitle, alas, is misleading—no doubt a publisher’s
sales’ ploy to engage conflict. The book enjoins the battle only in the final chapters, when, in
1902, McClure’s Magazine first serialized Tarbell’s nineteen-part article, "The History of the
Standard Oil Company," which later appeared in a two-volume set.
The opponents’ back stories are fascinating. Tarbell watched her father, an oilman himself, get
squeezed between Standard Oil and wildcat producers. Pinched, he lost his joy in life, which
radicalized his daughter to hate and go after privilege. Rockefeller watched his ne-er-do-well
father drink himself into stupor, so at a young age, he took over the family’s welfare. Later,
Rockefeller used his Christian charity as a screen to avoid government investigation and
suspicions about his character. Tarbell used her affinity for Darwinian psychology to plumb the
"Cleveland ogre." She slipped only once when, after her expose, she wrote a "mean-spirited
profile" of the oil tyrant that turned part of the focus away from the magnate and onto the
messenger.
"If the maxim is true," Weinberg writes, "that a biography reveals as much about the biographer
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Review: Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller by Steve Weinberg
as it does about the subject, then the character sketch of Rockefeller affords the reader a look
into Tarbell’s psyche with every paragraph. For instance, Tarbell wrestled with traditional
religion versus secular belief most of her life, so it is interesting how she presents the details of
Rockefeller’s charitable contributions, then turns his philanthropy against him."
Weinberg quotes from Tarbell’s screed against Rockefeller’s piety as the worst of his bad traits:
"The principles of the religion he professes are so antagonistic to the principles of the business
he practices that the very world which emulates him has been turned into hypocrites and cynics
under his tutelage." The thing Tarbell hated above all was that Rockefeller’s tactics were seen
as inescapable to the prosperity of the nation. Greed rationalized into good.
Weinberg, known for his own muckraking, his books on investigating reporting, and his teaching
at the famed University of Missouri journalism school, presents all this material with matchless
evenhandedness. This is a fine book in which our sympathy for David over Goliath is elicited not
from the author’s bias but from the factual reporting of the people and the events themselves.
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