If ever there was a true David and Goliath story in American business, this was it. A scrappy investigative reporter, a woman no less, took aim at John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s richest and one of its most powerful men. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was the greatest of the monopolistic trusts of the late 19th century, a company that crushed its competitors, pressured the railroads to give it special rates, and generally strode like a colossus across American business life. When other oil companies or even ambitious state prosecutors whined, Rockefeller simply brushed them off. But Ida Tarbell, armed only with her pen and dogged persistence, somehow nosed her way inside his company, penetrating its code of silence and exposing the ruthless and at times illegal methods it had used to dominate the oil industry. Her 1904 exposé, disarmingly entitled The History of the Standard Oil Company, laid the groundwork for the first serious challenge to Rockefeller’s hegemony and for the Supreme Court’s epochal 1911 decision breaking the company up.
In Taking on the Trust: How an Investigative Journalist Brought Down Standard Oil, Steve Weinberg, himself an investigative journalist, recounts this great story as a tale of intertwined destinies. Both hero and villain were shaped by the wilds of Western Pennsylvania—and the rush to capitalize on the black gold that seemed to ooze from every pore in the landscape in the late 19th century. Eighteen years older than his future nemesis, Rockefeller was the son of a ne’er-do-well father who moved from job to job and town to town, selling the latest patent medicine and secretly marrying his housekeeper-mistress without ever divorcing Rockefeller’s mother. Rockefeller left high school shortly before graduation to help support his family, working with a firm that arranged deliveries of commodities and eventually starting his own firm. When the oil rush began, Rockefeller jumped in, and by the late 1860s he had made it his exclusive focus. He soon started buying up refineries, offering his competitors a choice of cash or stock in his growing company.
Tarbell’s family didn’t exactly come from the other side of the tracks, but they ended up there. Tarbell’s father moved by himself to Iowa hoping to make a better life for his family, but his plans were thrown into turmoil by the 1857 depression. When oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, he hustled back. Recognizing that the oil would need to be transported, he started a business that made wooden barrels for Pennsylvania crude. Although he prospered at first, the advent of steel barrels diminished his market, so he shifted to buying and leasing oil wells. It was this business that brought him into conflict with Rockefeller. Tarbell’s father refused to sell to Standard Oil, siding with the ragtag band of independents who protested Rockefeller’s arm-twisting methods. As Tarbell recalled many years later, her once light-hearted father turned increasingly sullen and depressed. He “no longer played his jew’s harp,” she wrote, “nor sang to my little sister on the arm of his chair the verses we had been brought up on.”
One the most complicated features of Rockefeller’s very complicated character was his deep, lifelong, Baptist faith. The same man who could be utterly ruthless in his business relationships spent a portion of each day on his knees, devotedly attended church and kept the Sabbath, and gave generously to Christian causes. According to Weinberg, Rockefeller believed that his business success was an earthly reward for his faith, and that he knew what was best for his industry. Although Weinberg occasionally drifts into caricature—as when he repeatedly and anachronistically applies the 20th-century term “fundamentalist” to Rockefeller’s 19th-century youth and early manhood—there is no question that Rockefeller’s deep faith stood in awkward tension with his business ethics.
Tarbell too was surrounded by religion, but her relationship to the Christian faith of her family was far more ambivalent. She developed a fascination with biology during her college years at Allegheny College, which raised questions for her about the creation accounts she had heard in church. After teaching high school for two years in Poland, Ohio, Tarbell started writing small articles for The Chautauquan, the magazine published by the Chautauqua Assembly, a center of Christian learning in New York state that regularly featured talks by evangelical luminaries. (Although Weinberg does not mention this, a few years later Chautauqua would be a regular stomping ground for William Jennings Bryan). At Chautauqua, Tarbell worked closely with the magazine’s editor, a Methodist minister named Theodore Flood, but she later abruptly quit following a mysterious falling out with Flood so painful that even her closest friends never learned the details. Something “unspeakable” happened, Weinberg says, speculating that it “was probably of a sexual nature.” This can’t have helped her wavering faith, and she seems to have been an agnostic for the rest of her life.
After The Chautauquan, Tarbell sailed to France to research Madame Roland, a French noblewoman from the Revolutionary period whom Ida had become fascinated with. Weinberg speculates briefly about whether Tarbell, who never married, had romantic attachments to men, women, or both in Paris, but he focuses on her development as a writer. Her first big break came when Scribner’s accepted one of her short stories, and she started writing articles for McClure’s, the famous progressive era magazine with which her name will forever be associated. She later wrote gushing but painstakingly researched biographies of Napoleon and Lincoln that were first serialized in McClure’s, then published as books, and made her famous. But she never stopped thinking about Rockefeller. In a letter to her parents, she described the buildings she saw from her ship along the coastline of Belgium as looking “exactly like Standard Oil tanks.” She “grew pale to think of that combination swallowing Belgium too.”
Weinberg is at his best chronicling Tarbell’s innovative efforts to uncover new information about her subjects: setting up shop in the Washington, D.C.-area house of a man who had assembled a trove of Napoleon memorabilia; drinking tea with Lincoln’s son Robert; persuading a Rockefeller associate to talk about the internal workings of Standard Oil. Her exposé on Standard Oil, Weinberg points out, reflected a shift in McClure’s and other magazines toward the aggressive style that Teddy Roosevelt, who was initially a critic, dubbed “muckrake” journalism.
Weinberg doesn’t delve quite as deeply into Rockefeller and Standard Oil. He never really explains, for instance, just what a corporate trust was. The trust was a clever legal maneuver perfected by Rockefeller’s lawyers to circumvent state law restrictions on the multistate Standard Oil behemoth. Because states could only regulate business within their borders, and corporations were not permitted to own stock in other corporations for much of the 19th century, Rockefeller could not set up Standard Oil as a single giant corporation. His lawyers solved this problem by creating a separate corporation in each state. Voting control in each corporation was then transferred to a separate entity, the trust, whose trustees were Rockefeller and his associates. Rockefeller converted the trust to a New Jersey corporation after New Jersey (which was the Delaware of this era) kindly changed its corporate laws to make them more hospitable to the Gilded Age monopolies.
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was a true monopoly. It put the squeeze on competitors, threatening to destroy them unless they sold out. It negotiated for rebates from the railroads, which wasn’t by itself problematic, but it “brazenly also received a separate, secretly negotiated, unpublicized rebate from the railroads for every barrel of competitors’ barrels they carried.” When it became clear that oil pipelines were a cheaper way to transport oil than the rails, Rockefeller took control of the pipelines and cut off his competitors’ access.
Although Weinberg doesn’t actually get to Tarbell’s confrontation with Standard Oil until late in the book, his account of her quest is electrifying. So persuasive were her findings that when the government finally took on Standard Oil, starting with a federal antitrust action filed by the U.S. Attorney in St. Louis in 1906, it used Tarbell’s book as a roadmap, relying on many of the incidents she had uncovered. Nearly five years and 12,000 pages of documentation later, the Supreme Court lowered the boom, holding that Standard Oil had violated the antitrust laws and must be broken up. The decision hardly left Rockefeller impoverished (selling his stock actually may have made him richer), and the separate oil companies that emerged from Standard Oil avoided competing with one another for many years. But Tarbell’s work transformed Rockefeller’s public reputation. And the breakup of Standard Oil is still seen as one of the signal achievements of American antitrust law.
Do investigative reporters like Tarbell still exist? The answer, happily, is yes. A gutsy, skeptical story in Fortune magazine by reporter Bethany McLean was the first hint that Enron was not the upstanding company it purported to be. The spreadsheets of finance scholars further confirm that reporters still follow the lead of their patron saint. In a recent analysis of how corporate fraud comes to light, Alexander Dyck, Adair Morse, and Luigi Zingales found that, even in a corporate environment now policed by plaintiffs’ lawyers, whistle blowers, and government regulators, journalists are the first ones to detect corporate fraud 14 percent of the time.
The oil companies haven’t disappeared either, and as they rake in near-record profits during the current economic crisis ($10.9 billion for Exxon Mobil, the successor to Standard Oil of New Jersey, in the first quarter of 2008 alone), they are being attacked from all sides. The most popular response, imposing a tax on “excess” profits, would make things worse, not better: developing nations sometimes try this kind of strategy, and it usually encourages companies to disguise how much they earn. Ironically enough, back in his own era, Rockefeller might have taken matters into his own hands, cutting the price of his oil for the benefit of his hurting customers, much as J.P. Morgan personally steadied the markets by providing liquidity during a financial crisis in 1907. But now that we no longer have devout monopolists atop American business, the only realistic solution to our oil woes may be to invite the oil companies to keep charging as much as the market will bear, in the hope it will force the rest of us to finally get serious about using less oil.
David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author most recently of Icarus in the Boardroom: The Fundamental Flaws in Corporate America and Where They Came From (Oxford Univ. Press).
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