Inspirational Quotes by Ida Tarbell (American Investigative Journalist)

Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857–1944) was an American investigative journalist, lecturer, and chronicler of American industry. She exposed the monopolization of the oil industry by the Rockefeller family.

Born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, Tarbell was educated at Allegheny College and became associate editor of The Chautauquan (1883–91.) She then studied in Paris at the Sorbonne (1891–94) and joined McClure’s Magazine (1894–1906.)

Tarbell’s exposé of John D Rockefeller’s fortune-building methods, History of the Standard Oil Company (1904,) originally written as a series of 19 articles for McClure’s, is one of the most detailed accounts of the rise of unfair business practices. The book was compiled from numerous interviews of Rockefeller’s constituents and supported by thousands of pages of documents.

Tarbell became the catalyst leading to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1911 decision to break up the Standard Oil monopoly. Her work established a trend to scrutiny and crusading in liberal journals of the day—President Theodore Roosevelt labeled this method of journalism as muckraking in 1906.

Tarbell also wrote biographies of Napoleon, Madame Roland, and Abraham Lincoln. She joined Lincoln Steffens and other McClure’s writers in running the American magazine (1906–15,) campaigning against corruption and big business interests.

Tarbell’s feminist writing includes The Business of Being a Woman (1912) and The Ways of Women (1915,) and her history, The Nationalizing of Business (1936,) was a standard work on American post-Civil War economic growth for 20 years. Her last book was an autobiography, All in the Day’s Work (1939.)

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