Ida M. Tarbell by Emily Arnold McCully

Author:Emily Arnold McCully
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Rockefeller, sketched by the artist Varian during Ida’s infiltration of the Sunday school.

Robber barons were accustomed to operating without regard for public opinion. Privately, Rockefeller expressed anger at “my lady friend” or “Miss Tarbarrel.” He and his wife and two of his daughters fell ill with one ailment or another while the articles were being published. His son John D. Rockefeller Jr. seemed to suffer most from the opprobrium that followed Ida’s exposé. He had a nervous breakdown and decamped to Europe for two years. When John D. Sr. published his autobiography in 1911, it was to justify everything Standard Oil had done. He chided his readers, “Do you think that this trade has been developed by anything but hard work?”

The Periodical Publishers Association held their annual dinner in the spring of 1904. President Roosevelt, Secretary Taft, the French and German ambassadors, a few senators, and the entire staff of McClure’s were there—all but Ida, their star. It was a stag party. “It is the first time since I came into the office that the fact of petticoats has stood in my way,” she wrote to Baker dryly, “and I am half inclined to resent it.”

As the magazine published damning piece after damning piece with no rebuttal from Rockefeller, Ida’s colleagues urged her to follow up with a character sketch, which appeared in 1905. In it, she summarized Rockefeller’s early life and origins, identifying the SIC episode as the point at which Rockefeller made the fateful choice between good and evil—and paid the price for it in lifelong paranoia and stomach troubles. Ida allowed herself searing descriptions, justified by the “menace” of the kind of business Rockefeller had founded. He had helped to arouse “the most universal and powerful passion in this country—the passion for money.” His business dealings, charitable works, and private life were all of a piece. She told her readers that a man with Rockefeller’s influence could not be permitted to “live in the dark.” His philanthropies, for example, were not simple good works; they gave him enormous influence over which aspects of American life would thrive.

Soberly and relentlessly, she totted up his sins and asked, “Why does he do it? Why does he want an income of $25,000,000 and more? . . . So far as the world knows, he is poor in his pleasures. . . . His bequests are small compared to his wealth. . . . Rockefeller is the victim of a money-passion which blinds him to every other consideration in life, which is stronger than his sense of justice, his humanity, his affections, his joy in life, which is the tyrannous, insatiable force of his being. ‘Money-mad, money-mad. Sane in every other way, but money-mad,’ was the late Senator [Mark] Hanna’s comment on Rockefeller. And the late Senator Hanna could not be accused of holding money in light regard.” She even found fault with the design and decor of Rockefeller’s houses. But he was deemed a praiseworthy husband and father and an admirable believer in everyday economies, compared to other tycoons.

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