Ida Tarbell born - November 5, 1857

On this day in 1857, investigative journalist and biographer Ida Tarbell was born in Pennsylvania.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hi everyone, I'm Eves. Welcome to This Day
in History Class, a show that will convince you that
history can be fascinating even when you expect it not
to be. Today is November. The day was November five,

(00:25):
eight fifty seven. Item A Nerva Tarbell was born in
Erie County, Pennsylvania. Tarbell was an investigative journalist, biographer, educator,
and lecturer. She exposed the corruption of big businesses and
contributed to the dissolution of the standard oil monopoly through
her journalism, and she's remembered as one of the foremost

(00:47):
so called muck breakers of the progressive era. Muck breaker
was the initially pejorative name given to reform minded journalists
who wrote about big business, exposing political and economic corruption.
Tarbell was born in a farmhouse and had tollow. Her father,
Franklin Sumner Tarbell, was a carpenter. Her mother esther, and

(01:08):
Tarbill was a teacher. Before she got married. Ida had
three younger siblings, one of whom died as a child.
When oil was discovered in Erie County and incited a
rush of business, Ida's father started up a shop making
wooden oil tanks. As Franklin grew his oil business, the
family moved to Rouseville, then Titus Bille in Pennsylvania, though

(01:30):
he was later forced out of business by Standard Oil.
Ida graduated from Allegheny College in eighteen eighty with a
Bachelor of Arts degree in biology. Once she graduated, she
began teaching at Poland Union Seminary in Ohio, but after
two years there she quit to pursue a career in writing.
She began working at The Chautauquan, a magazine about self improvement,

(01:52):
and eventually became its managing editor, but in she left
for Paris to study history at the Sorbonne. While in Paris,
Tarbell also wrote articles for US publications, but a notable
terrent in her writing career came when she met Samuel S. McClure,
who created the popular literary magazine McClure's. She began writing

(02:13):
for the magazine, and when she returned to the United States,
she joined the magazine staff as a writer and associate editor.
She wrote a series on Napoleon Bonaparte and a series
on Abraham Lincoln, both of which were later published as books,
and she and other writers at the magazine began to
tackle social issues like corporate trusts. One of Tarbill's most

(02:34):
noteworthy pieces of investigative journalism during the Progressive era, a
time of great social activism and political reform in the
United States, was the book The History of the Standard
Oil Company, published in nineteen o four. The history was
originally published as nineteen articles in McClure's. It exposed the
abuses of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly and contributed

(02:57):
to the company being prosecuted under anti trust laws. She
garnered a lot of attention and popularity from her journalism
about oil and monopolies, but in nineteen o six, she
and some of her colleagues left McClure's after a dispute
with McClure himself. They soon took over a publication called
The American Magazine. There, Tarbell continued her journalism, writing about

(03:20):
things like corporate crime, the tariff, and the history of
the women's movement. She was critical of the women's suffrage movement,
denouncing its militant parts and characterizing it as anti men.
She espoused her support of home and family and criticized
the movements in attention to those roles and values. Tarbell
spent time traveling to examine factory conditions, and she came

(03:44):
to admire For's mass production methods and treatment of workers.
In nineteen sixteen, President Woodrow Wilson offered her a spot
on the Federal Tariff Commission, but she refused. After American
Magazine was sold in nineteen fifteen, she worked as a
lecturer and if lance writer. She wrote books about business
and business leaders, including one on Owen D. Young, who

(04:06):
founded the Radio Corporation of America. She also wrote a
series on Mussolini, in which she offered him praise, and
she published an autobiography. Critics have noted that though Tarbell
was considered a muckraker, she often championed American capitalism and
took conservative stances. She died of pneumonia in Connecticut in ninety,

(04:27):
leaving behind a legacy of work that influenced many other
investigative journalists. I'm eas Jeff Coote, and hopefully you know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
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(04:49):
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