Ida M. Tarbell vs. John D. Rockefeller, Part 2

Tarbell saw her family and community clash with Standard Oil when she was growing up. This second part covers her work for McClure’s Magazine and the most important journalistic work of her life – “The History of the Standard Oil Company.” 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is
part two of our episode on Ida tar Bell versus
John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. If you somehow came

(00:25):
to this episode without already hearing part one, I do
strongly recommend listening to Part one first lays a lot
of groundwork for this There are some things in it,
specifically that we will refer back to in this one. Uh.
Last time, we talked about Ida tar Bell's upbringing in
northwest Pennsylvania during the Pennsylvania Oil Rush and how her

(00:47):
family and her community clashed with Standard Oil during that time.
Then we talked about her education and the years that
she lived in France, and today we will get to
her work for McClure magazine and the most important journalistic
work of her life, which was the history of the
Standard Oil Company. When Ida Tarbell returned to the United

(01:09):
States from France in eight the country was still reeling
from yet another financial crisis, this time the Panic of EIGHTEE,
in which the failure of large employers sparked a stock
market crash in Pennsylvania. The Tarbell family was struggling, and
one of Franklin Tarbell's business partners had taken his own life.

(01:31):
After spending some time reuniting with them in Titusville, Ida
moved to New York to work for Samuel Sidney McClure
at McClure's magazine. Although Tarbell's most well known and most
influential work at McClure's was the history of the Standard
Oil Company, when she started working for the magazine, it
wasn't really focused on that kind of investigative reporting that

(01:52):
it would later become famous for. Tarbell's first big project
at McClure's was a biography Napoleon Bonaparte. This assignment came
about because wealthy collector Gardner Green Hubbard had agreed to
allow S. S. McClure to print previously unpublished portraits of
Napoleon that he owned, but only if there was accurate,

(02:16):
balanced texts to go along with them. This was a
tricky proposition because the relationship between the US and France
during the Napoleonic era had been complicated, and people tended
to have a variety of very strong opinions about the
man At first, McClure had assigned the article to a
British writer who turned in a draft it was heavily

(02:38):
anti Napoleon. When McClure assigned it to Tarbell, she was
both excited and anxious. This was an opportunity to build
on her previous research on Madame Roland, but at the
same time, she had just left Paris, where she would
have had access to primary sources that just were not
available in the US. Tarbell took the assignment, though travel

(03:00):
linked to Washington, d C. To conduct research. There. She
boarded with Hubbard since he was wealthy, Her lodgings there
were extremely comfortable. She also started making government and business
connections in addition to doing her research work. She approached
Napoleon much as she had Madame ral Dan, allowing the
research to lead her wherever it might, even if that

(03:22):
wasn't where she expected or hoped. The final result was
an eight part biography that was enormously successful for the
magazine that was credited with increasing circulation from twenty four
thousand to a hundred thousand subscribers. The collected articles were
then published as a book that went into multiple printings.

(03:43):
Her next assignment was a biography of Abraham Lincoln. At
this point, Lincoln's assassination was about thirty years in the past,
and there was a general sense that there kind of
wasn't much left to say about him. Turbell also wasn't
sure she really wanted this assignment, because she was afraid
that if she shifted away from French history, she might
never get back to it. In the end, she went

(04:05):
to Illinois, interviewing relatives and people who had known Lincoln,
including some who had never been interviewed before. She combed
through primary sources, printing some of those sources as part
of her series. Like her series on Napoleon, the Abraham
Lincoln series was generally well received, but she did face
some criticism that she had glossed over or minimized Lincoln's

(04:28):
various faults and missteps. The series was incredibly popular, though,
and it was credited with boosting the magazine's circulation again,
this time by another two hundred thousand readers. As with
her Napoleon series, in nineteen hundred, this was printed as
a book. It was titled The Life of Abraham Lincoln,
drawn from original sources and containing many speeches, letters, and telegrams.

(04:53):
Hitherto unpublished and illustrated, with many reproductions from original paintings, photographs,
at cetera. By this point, the US had entered the
period of social activism and reform that has become known
as the Progressive Era. This has come up on the
show in a number of previous episodes, but basically, Progressive
era reformers hoped to counteract the negative impacts of industrialization

(05:17):
and urbanization using social programs, laws, activism, and other efforts
to just try to make the country a cleaner, safer, healthier,
and generally better place. While Progressive era reformers campaign for
things like voting rights for women and education for children,
not all of their efforts are viewed in a positive

(05:37):
light today. The Progressive Era also included things like prohibition,
which of course failed spectacularly, and the eugenics movement. One
of the Progressive era's traits was a focus on exposing
and dealing with exploitation and corruption, and to that end,
around nine s s. McClure started focusing McClure's magazine more

(05:59):
on social issues, unless on the kinds of profiles and
biographies that Tarbell had been writing. While those had been
very popular with readers. They just didn't really expose or
offer insight into the issues of the day, at least
not in a very direct, straightforward way. And to be clear,

(06:20):
this was not just about the moral efforts of progressive
era reformers. It was also about selling magazines. McClure understood
that a well written narrative that exposed the immoral and
unethical deeds of the rich and powerful could make for
an incredibly compelling story. So McClure's magazine turned to a

(06:41):
type of reporting that would become known as muck raking.
This term comes from a nineteen o six speech by
President Theodore Roosevelt, so to be clear, that term was
coined after the publication of Tarbell's work on standard oil,
which we haven't really gotten to yet. But Roosevelt would
go on to say, quote in Bunyan's pill Rims Progress,
you may recall the description of the man with the

(07:03):
muck rake, the man who could look no way but downward,
with the muck rake in his hands, who was offered
a celestial crown for his muck rake, but who would
neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered,
but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.
The term muckraker became a disparaging term that was applied

(07:24):
broadly to journalists who were focused on exposing corruption and wrongdoing,
but Roosevelt's speech was actually a little more nuanced than that.
In it, he praised journalists who were educating the public
or who were exposing actual misdeeds, while criticizing the ones
that were, in his opinion, sewing discord and division or

(07:46):
sensationalizing their subject matter. In the same speech, he also said,
quote the men with the muckrake are often indispensable to
the well being of society, but only if they know
when to stop up raking the muck. Later on, Roosevelt
said that he had really been more focused on publications
of people like William Randolph Hurst, which had a reputation

(08:10):
for being a lot more sensationalized. The staff at McClure's
embarked on some smaller investigations as they considered where they
should focus for something bigger. They were looking specifically at trusts.
In the nineteenth and twentieth century, people used the word
trust in a general way to describe big, interconnected businesses

(08:30):
whose practices put other businesses who were not part of
the trust at a disadvantage, especially if those business practices
seemed unethical or unfair. But from a legal sense, it
meant that the businesses were united under the same board
of trustees, with those trustees managing and profiting from all
the affiliated businesses. McClure's wanted to investigate a trust that

(08:55):
would yield a really compelling and readable story, and they
can uttered and discarded several ideas. One was a coalition
of meat packing businesses in and around Chicago that had
become known as the Beef Trust. But a key figure
in the Beef Trust was Philip Armor, who had died
in January of nineteen o one. McClure thought the story

(09:18):
would not be as interesting or impactful if one of
the key players was dead. One of Tarbell's colleagues that
McClure's also wrote a shorter investigation into JP Morgan and
the steel industry that ran in McClure's In November of
nineteen o one, the team finally decided on Standard Oil.
The Standard Oil Trust had been established on January second

(09:41):
two with nine trustees that included John D. Rockefeller and
his brother William, along with Henry Flagler. These nine trustees
elected all the directors and officers of the roughly forty
businesses that were part of the trust, essentially controlling the
entire enterprise, and enterprise had a near monopoly on producing, refining, marketing,

(10:04):
and transporting oil. This trust had already faced a lot
of criticism, including being forced to break up and re
establish itself in New Jersey after facing legal action in Ohio.
In at this point, Ida Tarbell's family was really struggling.
The Pennsylvania oil industry was being eclipsed by oil fields

(10:26):
and other states, including Texas and California. The invention of
the electric light had reduced the demand for oil. At
this point, they didn't know it. This was a temporary
drop in demand, but it made it a lot harder
to turn a profit. That made it even harder for
independent oil businesses to compete with Standard Oil's monopoly. Franklin

(10:48):
Tarbell had mortgaged the family home, and a lot of
other people in their community were in the same position.
Tarbell's co workers knew about all of this, and they
saw her family history with the story as an asset,
making Tarbell uniquely suited to investigate and write about Standard Oil.
She agreed to take on the story, working out the

(11:09):
details with McClure in Europe while he vacationed there. Their
plan was for about one total pages totally about twenty
five thousand words, to be published across multiple issues of
the magazine. She ended up with a nineteen part series.
When it was published as a book, it took two volumes,
each of them more than four hundred pages long. We're

(11:33):
going to talk about this a little bit more after
we first paused for a little sponsor break. When Ida
Tarbell started researching the Standard Oil Company in nineteen o one,
it was a story that, as we have laid out,

(11:54):
had a personal importance to her and to her family,
going back to her early childhood. She also had a
working knowledge of various aspects of the oil business thanks
to things she had learned from her father. But her
father did not want her to do this story. He
thought that John D. Rockefeller would destroy her and would
destroy McClure's magazine, just like Standard Oil had destroyed the

(12:19):
lives and businesses of so many people. The Tarbell's personally knew.
Rockefeller himself was now in his sixties and he had
largely retired from day to day business operations, but he
was still the company's biggest stockholder and was one of
the richest and most powerful people in the United States.
Turmel's research involved going through decades of court records. We

(12:42):
noted back in Part one that critics had questioned whether
Standard Oil's business practices were legal almost from the very beginning,
as Rockefeller's business partner, Henry M. Flagg Laire worked at
a deal with Lake Shoreline in which the railroad reduced
its shipping prices in exchange for Flagler promising the ship
at least sixty car loads of oil products per day.

(13:03):
Since that time, various states had passed antitrust legislation. The
Interstate Commerce Commission had been established in eighteen eighty seven
to regulate the railroad industry after years of complaints about
railroad rates, including railroads charging higher rates for smaller businesses.
So various state legislatures had investigated Standard Oil. The company

(13:26):
had appeared before congressional committees in eighteen seventy two and
eighteen seventy six. There was also that legal action in
Ohio that had led Standard Oil to break up and
moved to New Jersey and put itself back together again.
Standard Oil had also been involved in investigations into the
railroads that was associated with and their business practices. And

(13:48):
then outside of the courts, there were things like articles
of incorporation and internal documents and pamphlets and previous news reporting.
There was just a wealth of material to go through
on top of all of that. On July two nine,
President Benjamin Harrison had signed the Sherman Antitrust Act or quote,

(14:10):
an Act to protect Trade and commerce against unlawful restraints
and monopolies into law. Trusts were deeply unpopular at this point,
and the law passed through Congress almost unanimously. The only
person who voted against it was Senator Rufus Blodgett, who
was a railroad executive. The Sherman Antitrust Act outlawed trusts, monopolies,

(14:33):
and other business activities that restricted interstate trade or trade
with foreign powers. Parts of this law were vague, though,
and the punishments that it outlined really weren't a big
deterrent for people who had already become really wealthy through
this kind of activities, such as the Rockefellers. If you
had millions of dollars of five thousand dollar fine was

(14:55):
just not something that would make you change your business practices.
In the Supreme Court had also found that American Sugar
Refining Company had not violated the Sherman Antitrust Act even
though it controlled nearly all of the sugar refining in
the United States. So that decision made this law harder

(15:15):
to enforce. Even though the federal government wasn't really enforcing
the Sherman Antitrust Act on paper, it made a lot
of standard oils activities that we've already described illegal. And
then when Theodore Roosevelt became president in nineteen o one,
after the assassination of William McKinley, he did make it
a priority. He thought trusts were restricting business and eroding

(15:39):
public trust. And that was just about the time that
Ida Tarbell started researching standard oil for McClure's Tarbell and
her research assistant, John Said all poured over years and
years of legal documents, court filings, and other primary source
documentation of standard oils activities along the way, and during

(16:00):
the writing and editing process, they and S. S. McClure
refined a process that would include practices that are standard
in the field of investigative journalism today. Things like doing
in depth research through primary source documents, and protecting the
identities of people who acted as sources, and allowing subjects
of reported pieces to correct and accuracies, but otherwise not

(16:25):
to change or influence the writing in any way. And
even though this story was so deeply personal to Tarbel,
something that had made her frustrated and angry and upset
at various points in her life, she also tried to
put her personal feelings aside and instead to follow the
story wherever the facts took her. In her words, quote,
I've tried to lead neither to one side nor the

(16:48):
other in my Standard Oil articles, but merely to tell
the truth corroborated by court documents and pamphlets issued at
various times. After extensive research and leg work, Tarbell sought
out interviews with people at Standard Oil. Henry H. Rogers
had once been an independent oil producer who had lived

(17:09):
not far from the Tarbell's, but he'd gone on to
work with John D. Rockefeller for twenty five years. He
had become Standard Oil's highest ranked executive, and after hearing
about Tarbell's investigation, he had contacted his friend Samuel Clemens,
also known as Mark Twain, to suggest that he would
like the chance for the writer to get their facts straight.

(17:32):
So Clemmens got in touch with McClure's art director, who
he knew, and after some back and forth, he ultimately
relayed a message back to Rogers that Tarbell had agreed
to speak with him. Rogers was generally really candid with her.
He said some things to her that seemed kind of surprising,
but he was also furious when he learned that she

(17:52):
had gotten her hands on some internal documents that outlined
how Standard Oil had colluded with the railroads to intend
lely drive competitors out of business. In the end, Ida M.
Tarbell wrote a series that outlined the general history of
the Pennsylvania oil industry, the creation of Southern Improvement Company,

(18:12):
other efforts to fix railroad rates in Standard Oil's favor
and control the oil output from Pennsylvania, the establishment of
the Trust, and various decisions along the way that undermined
the principles of free trade to give the Trust an
unfair business advantage. There were details that people knew already
but had not necessarily connected the dots on, as well

(18:35):
as places where she filled in the gaps or found
documentation that had not been unearthed before. She laid out
a pattern of intimidation, predatory, competition, bribery, corporate espionage, secret dealings, payoffs,
and collusion, and it connected to oil production, refining, railroads, pipelines,

(18:56):
and marketing. Tarbell and said, all We're still doing research
as this series was being published, and they kept on
earthing new information, including that Rockefeller's father was still alive,
which came to light in nineteen o three when Tarbell
printed her biographical profile of Rockefeller after her main reporting

(19:16):
was complete. She disclosed his father's masquerading as a deaf
mute peddler and allegations that he was a horse thief.
After Tarbell finished that nineteen part series, as Tracy just mentioned,
she wrote a two part biographical profile of Rockefeller and
that ran in July and August of nineteen o five.

(19:37):
And while she covered his devout religious beliefs, his church attendance,
and his philanthropy, and noted that he had a brilliant
business sense and ability to strategize, her critical tone was
not as restrained as it had been for the rest
of the report. In the second part, she calls him
a quote money maniacs secretly patiently eternally plotting how he

(19:58):
may add to his wealth. There is also a lengthy
and unflattering description of his appearance, including the loss of
all his hair from alopecia, describing him as looking like
a living mummy. As another example, in this biographical profile,
Tarbell ruminates on weather charities are right to accept Rockefeller's money,

(20:19):
considering how he got it and whether they're doing so
is hypocritical, before rhetorically asking does all this pay? And
she continues quote, there is no sharking the answer. It
does not pay. Our national life is on every side
distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner. For the kind of influence he

(20:39):
exercises from him, we have received no impulse to public duty,
only lessons in evading it for private greed. No stimulus
to noble ideals, only a lesson in the further deification
of gold. No example of enlarged and noble living, only
one of concealment and of a Jian. No impulse to

(21:02):
free thinking, only a lesson in obscuring vital ethical issues
by dressing them in the garbs of piety and generosity.
In a article on the muckrakers that was published in
Media History, monographs. Tim B. Klein calls this profile un
characteristically mean. Rockefeller offered almost no public commentary on any

(21:25):
of this or on Tarbell, although he was known to
call her miss tar Beryl went among his friends. Ida
Tarbell's History of Standard Oil was an incredibly popular and
widely read piece of writing. One of S. S. McClure's
practices at his magazine had also been to make his
writers known as writers. He published their bylines, which wasn't

(21:49):
something that came into practice until the late nineteenth century,
and he also marketed them individually as much as he
marketed the magazine as a whole. So, along with her
earlier works that we've talked about, the history of the
Standard Oil Company made Ida tar Bell famous as well.
But at the same time there were people who were
critical of her approach to the story, sticking only to

(22:11):
what she could substantiate with facts. Apart from that two
part profile of Rockefeller himself, she mostly used straightforward and
moderate language. She didn't pull punches, though early on she
described the approach of discriminatory freight pricing in Pennsylvania this
way quote an evil in their business which they were
only beginning to grasp fully. In eighteen seventy one was

(22:34):
the unholy system of freight discrimination which the railroads were practicing.
So she could be pretty direct about things that she
could back up, but she also offered praise where she
thought it was due. She called the Standard Oil trust
quote the most perfectly developed trust in existence. Or here

(22:54):
is how she described John D. Rockefeller in the wake
of the oil war of eighteen seventy two. Quote. If
Mr Rockefeller had been an ordinary man, the outburst of
popular contempt and suspicion which suddenly poured on his head
would have thwarted and crushed him. But he was no
ordinary man. He had the powerful imagination to see what

(23:14):
might be done with the oil business if it could
be centered in his hands, the intelligence to analyze the
problem into its elements and to find the key to control.
He had the essential element of all great achievement, a
steadfastness to a purpose once conceived, which nothing can crush.
Henry D. Lloyd, who had written a piece about Standard

(23:35):
Oil that was way more scathing about a decade before,
claimed that Tarbell had been duped, and Samuel Clemens joked
that Rockefeller must have bought her off. The story of
Tarbell's work on this became its own sensation. On November,
just a couple of months after the last part of
the series was published, The Lion and the Mouse opened

(23:59):
on Broadway. This fictionalized, romanticized story about a young woman
going up against a huge company had a love story
and a happy ending, but it was clearly rooted in
Tarbell's investigation of Standard Oil. That play ran for six
d eighty six consecutive appearances on Broadway, making it the
longest continuously running show on Broadway at the time, followed

(24:23):
by a touring production, a novelization, and in a feature film.
On November nine, six, prompted in part by material that
Ida Tarbell had unearthed in her reporting and the fewer
that had followed, the federal government charged the Standard Oil
Company of New Jersey and its affiliates with violating the

(24:43):
Sherman Antitrust Act. Although Standard Oil argued that all of
its associated businesses were not a monopoly because they competed
with each other, it was found to be in violation
of the Act. And we will talk more about the
later career of Ida Tarbell at Can we pause for
a sponsor break? In addition to the federal charges being

(25:13):
filed against Standard Oil. In nineteen oh six, Id Tarbell
left McClure's. Tarbell and several others at the magazine had
become frustrated with S. S. McClure's shifting priorities and politics,
among other things. He wanted to move away from muckraking
and into literature, so the people who left McClures moved
on to the American magazine. Tarbell kept investigating issues that

(25:37):
were related to business in the US, starting with tariffs.
She published The Tariff in Our Times in nineteen eleven,
which chronicled fifty years of a practice that she described
as a quote defeat of the popular will. As Tarbell
was researching tariffs, Standard Oil was facing legal action. On
November twentie, nineteen o nine, a federal Circuit court unanimously

(26:00):
ruled that Standard Oil had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act
and ordered that the company be dissolved. Standard Oil appealed,
and in nineteen eleven, the U. S. Supreme Court upheld
the verdict. The Supreme Court's ruling established the idea of
the quote rule of reason, meaning that the federal government
could only break up trusts that created an unfair restriction

(26:21):
of trade, not all trusts across the board. Justice John
Marshall Harlan concurred with the ruling in general, but dissented
with the establishment of this standard, arguing that it created
a restriction that had not been part of the law
as it was passed. As a consequence of the Supreme
Court decisions upholding that earlier ruling, Standard Oil was broken

(26:43):
up into thirty four separate companies. Some of these still
exist today, although with various names. A lot of them
that were separate merged in the intervening years various changes
in branding. Ones that still exist today include chevron X
on Mobile and BP. And if you're thinking, wait, doesn't

(27:03):
BP stand for British Petroleum, Yes, it does. BP acquired
a majority stake in Standard Oil successor Standard Oil of
Ohio in the nineties seventies. None of Standard Oil's executives
really faced any sort of justice for the business practices
that had led to Standard Oil being forcibly broken up

(27:24):
by the federal government, and that breakup made John D.
Rockefeller and various other stockholders and trustees incredibly rich, much
richer than they had been before the breakup. The ruling
allowed Standard Oil stockholders to receive shares from each of
the newly created businesses, so even though these were ostensibly

(27:44):
separate companies, the stock was still held by the same
people as before. The breakup of Standard Oil also happened
just before Henry Ford started using an assembly line for
car manufacturer, and that made cars far more available, which then,
of course, drove up the demand for oil enormously. Together,

(28:07):
this probably made Rockefeller the first billionaire in the United States.
As a side note, when he was a child living
in poverty, he had told a friend that one day
he would be worth a hundred thousand dollars. He barely
made it. In nineteen fourteen, the Federal Trade Commission was
established and other laws were passed in the US to

(28:29):
try to protect free trade. In nineteen sixteen, President Woodrow
Wilson offered Tarbell a position on the Federal Tariff Commission.
He had said of her quote, she has written more
good sense, good plain common sense about the tariff than
any man I know of. But by that point she
had moved on from tariffs since she wasn't really interested,
so she turned the offer down. Some of Tarbell's later

(28:52):
work shows that she wasn't particularly anti capitalist or against
big business. She was just against business passes that seemed
unfair and exploitive. She wrote favorably about the idea of
scientific management, also known as tailorism, which was meant to
analyze people's workflows and make them as efficient as possible.

(29:13):
Labor activists had really criticized this practice, describing it as
reducing workers to automatons who were expected to crank out
cheaper goods at a lower quality and to do it faster,
rather than being treated as human beings with the capability
for their own analysis and thought. Tarbell also wrote profiles
of United States Steel Corporation CEO Albert H. Gary and O. N. D.

(29:38):
Young of GE that were far more positive than her
work on Rockefeller. She said the difference in their tone
and scope was because she hadn't found their businesses to
be home to the kind of corruption that she had
seen at Standard Oil. In spite of her commitment to
never marry or become a mother and breaking a path
that was not open to most women when she lived,

(29:59):
Tarbell didn't really support the women's suffrage movement or the
women's rights movement. Some of this was evident in the
Peace about Women Inventors that we read from in part one.
She felt that in a lot of ways, suffrages talked
about women in a way that made them into victims
and undermined their abilities. She also thought that the movement
and many other movements were ultimately coercive, whether they involved

(30:24):
protests or changes to the law. As she said in
a letter to J. S. Phillips quote, part of what
seems to me the most dangerous fallacy of our times,
and that is that we could be saved morally, economically,
socially by laws and systems. Tarbell also thought women were
best suited to being wives and mothers. Later on in

(30:46):
her life, she said she had regretted not having children.
Her later works involving these themes include The Business of
Being a Woman in nineteen twelve and The Ways of
Women in nineteen fifteen. Tarbell stopped writing for America Magazine
in nineteen fifteen, although she continued to do freelance work.
This included going to France to report on the Paris

(31:07):
Peace Conference at the end of World War One in
nineteen nineteen. In nineteen twenty two, The New York Times
included her on its list of the twelve Greatest Living
American Women. In nineteen twenty six, Tarbell traveled to Italy
to interview fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who had risen to
power four years before. That was an assignment she took
because it was lucrative enough she didn't think she could

(31:30):
afford to turn it down. Tarbell criticized Mussolini's totalitarianism while
also praising reforms he had brought to Italy. Many of
Mussolini's most infamous deeds and his alliance with Adolf Hitler
had not happened yet when Tarbell did this work, but
even with that in mind, this drew criticism from people
who thought she was way too soft on him. Tarbell's

(31:53):
last works included The Nationalizing of Business eighteen seventy eight
to ninety eight, which came out in nineteen thirty six,
and her autobiography All in the Day's Work, which came
out in nineteen thirty nine. In that autobiography, she said
of Standard Oil quote, they had never played fair and
that ruined their greatness for me. John D. Rockefeller died

(32:15):
of a heart attack on May nine, thirty seven. His
estimated net worth at that time was nine hundred million
dollars at various points during his life. His actions in
the oil industry and written work by people like Ida
Tarbell had made him deeply reviled, but by the time
of his death his image had been at least partly rehabilitated,

(32:36):
thanks in large part to the public relations work of
Ivy lad Betterly, which may be a subject for another podcast.
Ida's Harbell died a little less than seven years later,
on January six, nineteen forty four, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She
had developed Parkinson's in the later years of her life,
and her cause of death was pneumonia. Obituaries of John D.

(32:58):
Rockefeller had frequently mentioned Ida M. Tarbell, and then he
was frequently mentioned in hers. Her history of the Standard
Oil Company continues to be held up as a foundational
work in the early years of investigative journalism. Rockefeller biographer
Alan Nevins called it quote the best piece of business

(33:18):
history that America had yet produced. I just have a
lot of feelings. Do you have a lot of listener mail?
I do have a lot of listener mail. Uh. This
listener mail is from Andy and Andy Rope to say Hello,
Tracey and Holly, I'm a longtime listener of your show,
and I'm incredibly thankful for the hours of unique insights, entertainment,

(33:41):
and companionship you've given me over the years. I live
in Washington, d C. With my husband and our two dogs,
and your podcast has helped me emotionally navigate the various
ups and downs in the last few years. We even
saw your live show about and Royal in I'm writing today, however,
about the sunken city of thoughnest herak Leon, which you

(34:01):
covered in the most recent episode of Unearthed. In fall,
my family went to an exhibit about the city at
the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I had intended to
write you both last year, but life got in the way.
The exhibition was gorgeous, informative, and almost pilgrimage like. The
curators paid particular attention to ancient Egyptian religious practices, including

(34:23):
a candlelit shrine to Osyrus. The exhibit focused on how
even by the fourth century BC, Greeks, Romans, and other
ancient peoples were already interpreting and reinterpreting Egyptian religious beliefs
to meet their spiritual, social, and political needs. That reminded
me that past podcast subjects like Madam Helena Blovatsky and

(34:43):
Alistair Crowley were part of a long tradition of people
who found spiritual solace and ancient Egyptian religion, albeit largely
void of its original context and meaning. One October, it
might be fun to do an episode on Egyptian religion
in its fornic text and then explore how other people
have adapted it. Roman worship of Isis, medieval hermetics, early

(35:06):
modern resicructionism, nineteenth century Egyptian revival, synagogue architecture, etcetera. I
also wanted to share our favorite part of the Thoughtest
heracleon exhibits. During the pandemic. My husband and I had
grown pretty elaborate lockdown beards, so we were tickled when
we encountered so many heavily bearded gods at the exhibit.

(35:29):
While it is well known that the Greeks considered the
Egyptians animal headed deities to be absurd, the curators made
it clear that the Egyptians viewed the unkempt, scruffy Greek
gods to be just as silly. Anyway, we decided to
lean into the beards for a Halloween costumes last year,
and I think they looked pretty fantastic. Below our our

(35:50):
takes on the syncretic deities Sarapist, my husband and Zeus
am on me. Andy ends by thanking us for all
our hard work. Thank you Andy for these pictures. They
are fabulous. I love it. Those are indeed some amazing
beards and some amazing interpretations of these deities. So thank

(36:14):
you so much for sending this email. This email in
these pictures, I did not know anything about that exhibit.
I spent a little time poking around the website to
get a sense of what it was all about. It
seems amazing. If you would like to write to us
about this or any other podcasts were at history Podcasts
at i heart radio dot com, and we're also all

(36:35):
over social media at miss in History, which is where
you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you
can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio
app or wherever you want to get your podcasts. Stuff
you missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit

(36:58):
the i heart Radio app, podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. H