BOOK REVIEW: Brian Trench reviews The History of the Standard Oil Company (briefer version)by Ida M. Tarbell; Dover Publications; £14 (€16)
WITH RELATIONS between government and financial corporations very much in focus, the publication of this book on the attempted regulation of a major industrial corporation is timely.
Through the story of a journalist and a tycoon, Steve Weinberg calls up several histories, notably that of the anti-trust movement that emerged in the United States almost simultaneously with the large diversified corporations of which John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil was perhaps the best-known.
State legislatures, attorneys general, grand juries and federal agencies like the Interstate Commerce Commission sought to enforce rules of fair competition on these trusts. During the last decades of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, there was, in Weinberg's words, a "contest for the soul of capitalism".
In this contest, Rockefeller symbolised the potential for abuse, "depending on the perspective", of corporate power. He rode on the back of the rapid technological and industrial development of the latter half of the 19th century, establishing himself in Cleveland as oil refiner in the 1860s, taking oil from the new Pennsylvania fields and supplying oil products for lighting.
Rockefeller had left school early and was forced to grow up quickly due to his father's desertion of the family. He committed himself to hard work as the secular counterpart to his devout Baptist observance. He lived abstemiously and out of public view and from the mid-1860s was a significant donor to philanthropic causes.
By the early 1870s his company, now Standard Oil, owned 21 of Cleveland's 26 refineries and much of the associated pipeline network. As Standard continued its acquisitions it became the subject of congressional and grand jury hearings, accused, among many other things, of using its power to secure preferential railway freight rates and of intimidating competitors to sell their businesses.
This was the industrial and political environment in which Ida Tarbell grew up in north-west Pennsylvania. She was surrounded by the evidence of the oil industry's environmental and social impacts - the greasy haze lying over towns, the debris left lying around the oil wells, the floods caused by uncontrolled reshaping of the landscape, the sometimes fatal oil-well fires.
Her family was also part of that industry. Franklin Tarbell, her father, developed tank manufacture designs and production for the oil industry a nd later became an independent oil producer. Standard Oil was a customer and later a prospective owner, so Rockefeller was quite literally a household name for the Tarbells.
Weinberg weaves the Rockefeller and Tarbell stories together in a way that makes it seem inevitable that they would tangle with one another. But it took several decades for this to happen.
Ida Tarbell entered journalism as a result of her involvement in Methodist church organisations. She worked for eight years with a Methodist journal, writing on social and scientific subjects, often with moral purpose but always with firm dedication to getting the details of her story right.
Living in Paris for three years, she wrote essays, reports and short stories for a range of US publications. An 1893 profile of Louis Pasteur ran to 13 pages in McClure's Magazine. This was the creation of an Antrim immigrant, Samuel McClure, who, from inauspicious beginnings in the farmlands of the midwest, managed to establish himself as a New York publisher. He brought Tarbell back from Paris and assigned her to long-term biographical features, first on Napoleon, then on Lincoln. These serialised features boosted the magazine's sales massively and brought further returns when published in book form.
Steve Weinberg, a journalism educator and investigative journalist, originally intended to publish a biography of Tarbell but - probably due to an editor's intervention - shifted focus to the "battle" and to how Standard Oil was "brought down". This book's multi-part title is a pastiche of the kind of headlines and book titles used in the period he is reporting, but it also raises expectations that are not fully met.
The account of Tarbell's investigation of Standard Oil amounts to two chapters. Precisely because it is so fascinating, it deserved more. Tarbell and an assistant worked through the records of 25 years of hearings and court actions concerning Standard Oil, but also secured the co-operation of some company sources.
McClure started publishing Tarbell's work on Rockefeller and Standard in 1902 while she was still researching further features. The magazine's sales soared; the 1904 book was a best-seller. (It was also listed by the New York Times in recent years as fifth in a Top 100 American journalism works.)
However, it is not clear that there was an "epic battle", as Rockefeller did not respond to the articles, and he and Tarbell never met directly. Nor is it clear that Standard Oil was brought down by Tarbell's efforts.
Her exposé appears to have been a significant contribution towards the Supreme Court decision of 1911 requiring that Standard be divided into several parts. But the decision was widely anticipated, including by Standard. One of its component parts eventually became Exxon, another became Mobil. A decade after the Supreme Court decision Tarbell wrote: "The price we pay for gasoline is the price fixed by the Standard Oil Company."
Despite these qualifications about the book's presentation it tells a gripping story, with strong characters, intriguing detail and, "fittingly for Tarbell as subject", a moral purpose. This is to encourage more independent, critical journalism about the institutions of business.
In these days of multi-billion bail-outs of "bad banks" (as well as "good banks"), of multi-million corporate image-making and of huge concentrations of power, Ida Tarbell's example of dogged, detailed investigation in the public interest is one to be followed. Other papers please copy the Tarbell model.
• Brian Trench is a senior lecturer at Dublin City University
