Ida Tarbell
(1857-1944)

“Early in the second decade of the twentieth century, the pioneering journalist Ida M. Tarbell surprised her friends and colleagues when her name was listed as a member of the executive committee of the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage… Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Ida Minerva Tarbell was one of the leading “muckrakers” of the era… At the turn of the century, she began work on the articles that brought her fame: an exposé on the unfair business methods employed by John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company, including the secret schemes that had brought ruin to dozens of smaller competitors, such as the firm owned by her father, who had been a producer and refiner when the first oil fields began appearing in Erie County in the 1860s. Based on the evidence from a mountain of documents—some of which Rockefeller believed had been destroyed—and interviews with company executives and government officials, the devastating series ran in nineteen consecutive issues of McClure’s and then appeared in 1904 as a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company. Her report led to both the Supreme Court decision that dissolved Standard Oil’s monopoly in 1911 and the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914.”