Who was Ida Tarbell?
She was one of the most influential of the American ‘muck raking’ journalists of the early 20th century. Ida was the daughter of one of the many independant oil men who had been ruined by John D. Rockefeller’s monopolistic Standard Oil company.She was the only woman in the 1880 graduating class of Allegheny College. She began a carreer in journalism about two years later. She wrote “The History of the Standard Oil Company” a nineteen-part series, published between November 1902 and October 1904 in McClures Magazene. The articles exposed Rockefeller’s unethical tactic and portrayed the plight of independent oil workers. She acknowledged Rockefeller’s brilliance and the flawlessness of his business structure. She did not condemn capitalism itself, but “the open disregard of decent ethical business practices by capitalists.” The articles were extremly popular with readers and played a major role in the Governments breakup of Standard Oil into ‘independant’ companies, known as the Seven Si
