Ida Tarbell And The Cleveland Massacre

Born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, the muckraker Ida Tarbell took down Standard Oil, one of the first and largest international companies and basically all monopolistic companies along with it. Before Tarbell took down Standard Oil, Tarbell had to go through many hardships because there were not many available positions for her. One of her jobs paid only 500 dollars a year (Thompson) and her father, Frank Tarbell, was once in the oil business but was beaten down by Standard Oil. Later on, Tarbell wrote articles and managed to gain the attention of S.S. McClure, the owner of McClure’s Magazine which was a popular magazine of the time. Tarbell later managed to join the magazine and she made it famous. One of her works included The History of

Standard Oil which later was published as a book. The reforming that Tarbell conducted took place in either her house when she was writing her articles, or anywhere she can get information from. Between 1902 and 1904, Tarbell was writing articles and even interviewing senior officers of Standard Oil just to expose John D. Rockefeller and his illegal activities to the public. In the end, Ida Tarbell managed to take down the wealthiest business in American history by talking to businessmen, reporting corruption, and publishing her book, The History of Standard Oil.
Ida Tarbell chose her path as a reporter, but the event that made her want to take down Standard Oil was the Cleveland Massacre.

The Cleveland massacre was the beginning of Rockefeller’s career and an end to many of the small oil refineries in Cleveland, Ohio. Frank Tarbell was one of those people. For 2 years, Tarbell searched for illegal activities that Rockefeller had committed and one of the major ways that Tarbell gained information from was interviewing businessmen and even senior officers of Standard Oil. At first, only a small amount of businessmen would talk because they were afraid of Rockefeller and his massive company. One man had even told Tarbell that Rockefeller was going to destroy McClure’s Magazine if she kept investigating Standard Oil (Ida Tarbell, 1857-1944: She Used Her Reporting Skills Against One of the Most Powerful Companies in the World). Soon she found evidence of the illegal methods that Rockefeller used to take over the oil industry. After she wrote an article about the illegal methods, many people began assisting her in exposing Standard Oil. With the help of Mark Twain, Tarbell was able to interview the most powerful senior executive of Standard Oil, Henry H. Rogers. During this interview with Henry H. Rogers, who was surprisingly open, Tarbell confirmed the information that she learned from other businessmen and published it in McClure’s Magazine. For over the next two years, Rogers and Tarbell held long interviews regularly and Tarbell was

able to collect healthy amounts of the illegal methods Standard Oil used to become one of the richest companies in the world.
During Ida Tarbell’s years in McClure’s Magazine, she published many popular articles such as The Life Of Abraham Lincoln, but her most popular article was the 19 article-series about the illegal methods that Rockefeller used to enlarge his company.

In these articles, Tarbell showed the readers how Rockefeller conducted these illegal methods through quotes and even interviews with Henry H. Rogers, the most powerful senior executive of Standard Oil. In this series, Tarbell wrote about how Rockefeller made secret agreements with the South Improvement Company (Ida Tarbell, 1857-1944: She Used Her Reporting Skills Against One of the Most Powerful Companies in the World) and how Rockefeller took someone else’s idea to make pipelines for the oil to travel through. Tarbell also wrote about how Rockefeller threatened the small oil producers to sell their businesses to them. Later Ida Tarbell managed to get anti-trust laws to eliminate monopolistic companies and let other smaller companies have a chance at

succeeding.
Ida Tarbell’s most famous book, The History of Standard Oil, was sold and read by the millions. Tarbell’s book even made fifth place in a list of 1999’s top 100 books of journalism (The Woman Who Took on the Tycoon). In the book, Tarbell mentioned the how Rockefeller used illegal methods and since her opinion became very powerful due to her popularity among journalists, many people turned against Standard Oil because of all the negative facts that Tarbell exposed about Standard Oil and Rockefeller. Tarbell’s opinion became the public’s opinion for Standard Oil. Later on with the help of the people, Tarbell managed to do the impossible because of her popularity amongst journalists and her books.
Despite the collapse of the richest company in U.S, and possibly the richest company in the world, Ida Tarbell set the standards for investigative journalism for ages to come. But when Standard Oil fell, smaller companies were given a chance to strike gold in the oil business because 90% (The Woman Who Took on the Tycoon) of the oil industry was freed of the grasp of Rockefeller.