Books

Three times in American history has a book been powerful enough to change public opinion and shape events: Tom Paine's Common Sense, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ida M. Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company.

Separate biographies have been written about Tarbell and Rockefeller, but Steve Weinberg's Taking on the Trust is the first to link biographically and historically The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller.

Tarbell was born in Pennsylvania in 1857 and grew up surrounded by America's first oil boom and bust. There, over the next half-century, a single man took control of one of America's chief industries.

John D. Rockefeller of Cleveland, who never in his life dirtied his hands at an oil well, foresaw that he who controlled the refining of oil would control its distribution and sales.

A superb planner and a devout Baptist who gave abundantly to charities, Rockefeller was relentless, rapacious and hated competition on principle. First he squeezed out the independent refiners, then took control of the pipelines, then used the volume of his rail shipments to squeeze rebates out of the railroads – and even a rebate on his competitors' shipments.

All this was conducted outside the public eye. In 1901, when the average American income was $10 a week, Rockefeller was taking home $3 million from Standard Oil each year. And this was before the age of the automobile.

In November 1902, McClure's Magazine began serializing Ida Tarbell's carefully researched history of "the processes" by which an industry "passes from the control of the many to that of the few."

Combing through public records and documents, relying only on verifiable fact, employing, and in fact inventing, what we now call investigative journalism, Tarbell revealed how Standard Oil grew upon "special privileges obtained by persistent secret effort in opposition to the spirit of the law."

Tarbell revealed how the company kept an espionage force to spy on competitors and practiced "predatory competition," singling out and underpricing independents until their businesses collapsed. Her exposé led directly to the breakup of history's greatest "trust," a word that survives today, Mr. Weinberg points out, only as "antitrust."

Mr. Weinberg, author of several books on journalistic history and practice and a regular contributor to these pages, highlights the exacting standards that made Tarbell's reporting so effective.

"Above all," he says, in a phrase that seems as fresh as this morning's newspaper, "she insisted on accuracy."

Author and reviewer David Walton lives and teaches in Pittsburgh.

The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell

and John D. Rockefeller

Steve Weinberg

(Norton, $29.95)

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