In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
IT–1857–2026  ·  The Press Room

Ida M.
Tarbell

1857  —  1944
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Ida M. Tarbell
Ida M. Tarbell
Hatch Hollow, Pennsylvania, 1857  ·  Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1944

The oil-region daughter who took down Standard Oil with court records — and told women their business was the home.

She grew up among the derricks of Oil Creek, where the South Improvement Company's secret rebates ruined her father. The only woman in her Allegheny College class, she edited the Chautauquan, starved in Paris studying Madame Roland, and was found there by S. S. McClure. Her Lincoln series doubled his magazine's circulation; her nineteen-part History of the Standard Oil Company, built from court records and legislative testimony, showed how Rockefeller built the trust. He never answered her. The Supreme Court broke the trust in 1911.

She opposed the vote for women, and in 1926 she came home from Rome admiring Mussolini. She will answer for both.

Consultation

And what are we
going to do about it?

Tarbell speaks from 3,225 chunks across ten works — The History of the Standard Oil Company, All in the Day's Work, The Tariff in Our Times, The Business of Being a Woman, The Ways of Woman, New Ideals in Business, The Early Life of Abraham Lincoln, He Knew Lincoln, Madame Roland, and A Life of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Her discourse holds the other side: John D. Rockefeller's Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, the only answer he ever gave her, and Gilbert Montague's Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company, the Harvard defence of the trust. Lincoln, whose early life she reconstructed from new documents, is in the Republic Room.

Ask her what a rebate is and why it matters. Ask her where she would start on a technology platform. Ask her why a woman who never married and paid her own way argued against the vote. Ask her about the despot with a dimple.

Standard OilRebates and DrawbacksThe Documentary MethodAntitrustMcClure'sThe TariffLincoln
And what are we going to do about it? for it is our business. We, the people of the United States, and nobody else, must cure whatever is wrong in the industrial situation, typified by this narrative of the growth of the Standard Oil Company.
The History of the Standard Oil Company  ·  Conclusion  ·  1904

Drawn From the Corpus