How a female investigative journalist brought down the world’s greatest tycoon and broke up the Standard Oil monopoly.
Long before the rise of mega-corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft, Standard Oil controlled the oil industry with a monopolistic force unprecedented in American business history. Undaunted by the ruthless power of its owner, John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), a fearless and ambitious reporter named Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857–1944) confronted the company known simply as “The Trust.” Through her peerless fact gathering and devastating prose, Tarbell, a muckraking reporter at McClure’s magazine, pioneered the new practice of investigative journalism. Her shocking discoveries about Standard Oil and Rockefeller led, inexorably, to a dramatic confrontation during the opening decade of the twentieth century that culminated in the landmark 1911 Supreme Court antitrust decision breaking up the monopolies and forever altering the landscape of modern American industry. Based on extensive research in the Tarbell and Rockefeller archives, Taking on the Trust is a vivid and dramatic history of the Progressive Era with powerful resonance for the first decades of the twenty-first century.
The author of six books, Steve Weinberg has been a longtime board member of the National Book Critics Circle and currently teaches investigative journalism at the University of Missouri Journalism School. He lives in Columbia, Missouri.
Table of Contents
Preface ix Ida Tarbell: A Childhood Portrait in Oil 3 John D. Rockefeller: A Young Adult Portrait in Oil 21 Civil War: Dodging Bullets as the Oil Flows 38 Moving Up 64 Lost, and Found 84 Discovering the Power of the Printed Word 101 Far from Home, Close to Home 126 McClure's Magazine 150 Napoleon 168 Unearthing Skeletons 177 The Expose Mentality 190 Researching the Behemoth 208 Exposed 219 A Question of Character 229 Aftermath of an Expose 244 For the Rest of Their Lives 259 Bibliographic Essay and Select Bibliography 275 Acknowledgments 289 Index 291
