Ida M. Tarbell, in her office at McClure’s, 1904.
ROOSEVELT’S FLAGGING HOPES OF CONFRONTING the trusts, purging corrupt political machines, and checking abuses by both capital and labor were rekindled by the January 1903 publication of McClure’s magazine. In this celebrated issue, the “groundbreaking trio” of Tarbell, Steffens, and Baker produced three exhaustive, hard-hitting investigative pieces that ushered in the distinctive new period of journalism that would later be christened “the muckraking era.” First off, Ida Tarbell revealed the predatory, illegal practices of Standard Oil; Lincoln Steffens then exposed the corrupt dealings of Minneapolis mayor Albert “Doc” Ames; and finally, Ray Baker described the complicity of union members manipulating and deceiving their own fellow workers.
The convergence of these three powerful exposés prompted S. S. McClure to attach an unusual editorial postscript to his January issue, exhorting readers to take action against corruption in every phase of industrial life. “Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken,” McClure accused, sparing no one in his sweeping denunciation:
Who is left to uphold it? The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in this country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some “error” or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one [Trinity Church in Manhattan], an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand. There is no one left; none but all of us.
“A lesser editor might have hesitated . . . to print three such contentious papers—arraignments of industry, labor, and government—all in one issue,” observes Peter Lyon, McClure’s biographer, but McClure was resolute. His exceptional sensitivity to the interests of the American public convinced him that people would not shrink from the truth, however dispiriting. He believed, as Steffens later observed, that “shameful facts, spread out in all their shame,” would “set fire to the American pride,” that when people fully realized the corrosive national affliction wrought by unchecked industrialism, they would seek remedies. Yet even the remarkably prescient McClure could not have predicted the extraordinary response his exposés would soon receive from readers across the country.
The January 1903 issue sold out within days, faster than any previous issue. The revelatory articles became a leading topic of conversation in cities and towns across the country. With such incriminating information in the hands of McClure’s vast middle-class audience, one historian observes, “for the first time considerable numbers of small businessmen and white-collar workers were joining factory hands and farmers in a restless questioning.” Elated, McClure considered the January issue “the greatest success we have ever had.” Editorials in one newspaper after another praised the quality of the research, the dramatic structure of the narratives, the careful documentation. “Of course, every magazine from time to time had published able articles dealing with some phase of wrong and suggesting some needed reform,” the New York World noted. “What Mr. McClure did was to make this work systematic and persistent, to describe realities with absolute frankness, to avoid preaching, and to let the facts produce their own impression upon the public conscience.”
In the months that followed, the circulation of McClure’s continued to climb as the three writers pursued their investigations. Tarbell’s Standard Oil series eventually stretched over a three-year period; Steffens’s studies of corrupt political machines in a dozen cities and states generated fourteen articles and two books; and Baker produced more than a dozen seminal articles on labor and capital. Baker later attributed the tremendous impact of these meticulously researched exposés to the fact that they finally verified years of “prophets crying in the wilderness, and political campaigns based upon charges of corruption and privilege which everyone believed or suspected had some basis of truth, but which were largely unsubstantiated.” The solid reputation of McClure’s and its gifted stable of writers assured millions of Americans they could trust what they were reading.
The success at McClure’s persuaded editors and publishers at a dozen leading magazines—including Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Everybody’s, Leslie’s, Pearson’s, and Hampton’s—to launch similar forays into investigative journalism. Like McClure, these publishers began to funnel substantial resources into the extensive research necessary for such in-depth studies, promoting a new breed of investigative reporter dedicated to extensive fact-finding and analysis. Their disclosures of the corrupt linkages between business, labor, and government educated and aroused the public, spearheading the Progressive movement that would define the early years of the twentieth century. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind, and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer,” historian Richard Hofstadter observed. “Before there could be action, there must be information and exhortation. Grievances had to be given specific objects, and these the muckraker supplied. It was muckraking that brought the diffuse malaise of the public into focus.”
YEARS OF PREPARATORY WORK AND investigation preceded the publication of McClure’s landmark January 1903 issue. As early as the spring of 1899, when few middle-class journals would broach the subject, McClure was already endeavoring to determine how the increasingly vital, complex issue of trusts might engage a wide audience. The English journalist Alfred Maurice Low suggested to McClure that if a single trust were traced from its origin through its “gradual rise and growth,” an examination of whether malfeasance, wage curtailment, or price inflation had abetted its development would prove “full of intense human interest.” McClure enthusiastically agreed. “The great feature is Trusts,” he told John Phillips, and the magazine that treats this “great question” will inevitably develop “a good circulation.” While Phillips embraced McClure’s idea, he insisted the project not be assigned to Low, a reputed sensationalist; better to trust one of their own staff, one trained to rely on substantiated fact rather than overwrought rhetoric.
The McClure team initially considered targeting the sugar or beef trusts, but neither seemed conducive to an extended series. McClure soon struck another approach to the pernicious problem. Several years earlier, after a short story in a small magazine by Frank Norris had attracted his interest, McClure had brought the struggling young author from California to New York, providing him a steady salary to read manuscripts in the mornings, leaving the afternoons free for his own writing. Norris shared McClure’s conviction that writers held a responsibility to the public—not simply to entertain but to address contemporary problems such as corporate avarice and economic injustice. “The Pulpit, the Press, and the Novel,” Norris argued, “these indisputably are the great moulders of public opinion and public morals to-day.”
One morning, Norris appeared in McClure’s office with an idea for a sprawling trilogy chronicling the struggle between wheat growers and the railroad trust. The first book, to be called The Octopus, would center on an actual incident in the San Joaquin Valley, where scores of local farmers, dispossessed by the Southern Pacific Railroad, had engaged in a violent altercation with railroad agents that left seven people dead. Both McClure and Phillips were attracted by the young novelist’s idea, for in this protracted, harrowing fight against one railroad, the larger struggle of the people versus the trusts would play out. McClure pledged to pay Norris’s salary while he returned to the west coast to muster all research materials necessary to begin the novel.
The dramatic saga of The Octopus interweaves the stories of a dozen or more men and their families. Struggling to draw a good harvest from the arid land, these hardworking people are compromised and oppressed at every turn by the maddening, predatory policies of the railroad: ruinous increases in highly inflated shipping rates for wheat and hops are announced; arbitrary routing decisions require urgently needed agricultural equipment to travel non-stop past the town and then return at extra cost; greed and peculation make a mockery of the state commission board, supposedly designed to administer fair rates. Meanwhile, the implacable railroad rolls on, leaving behind “the destruction of once happy homes, the driving of men to crime and of women and girls to starvation and ruin.” As the lives of the novel’s central group of characters are shattered, a powerful fuse is lit against “the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.”
Published two years later, Norris’s novel garnered spectacular reviews. “The Octopus is a work so distinctly great that it justly entitles the author to rank among the very first American novelists,” claimed The Arena. “It is a work that will not only stimulate thought: it will quicken the conscience and awaken the moral sensibilities of the reader, exerting much the same influence over the mind as that exerted by Patrick Henry.” Although the widely acclaimed and prodigiously gifted Norris would never complete his trilogy—a ruptured appendix ended his life at the age of thirty-two—The Octopus was an unmitigated success for both McClure and its young author.
Indeed, Sam McClure seemed to be moving from one triumph to another. The circulation of the magazine had topped 400,000, the syndicate was turning a profit, and his talented staff of writers, editors, and contributors was considered among the country’s very best. But even this catalogue of accomplishments could not satiate his restless ambition for long. “The string of triumphs had to be prolonged,” his biographer observes, “for only so would McClure get what he most needed: a steady supply of affection, admiration, and flattery.”
Just when all his enterprises were proceeding successfully, McClure overreached, committing his company to purchase the prestigious publishing house Harper & Brothers. Negotiated in a burst of manic energy, the deal would bring five additional magazines under McClure’s management (including Harper’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly), as well as a second syndicate service, a second book press, and a lecture bureau. Troubles mounted immediately: Frank Doubleday, angry at his marginalization, broke up the association of Doubleday & McClure. Additional responsibilities for McClure’s staff stole time and attention from the magazine at the heart of the empire. Most crucially, the capital needed to sustain the purchase was never properly in place. Reluctantly, and at enormous expense, McClure was forced to withdraw from the contract six months after it was signed.
The failed deal crushed McClure, precipitating a nervous breakdown in April 1900 that propelled him to Europe to undergo the celebrated “rest-cure” devised by an American physician, S. Weir Mitchell. Prescribed for a range of nervous disorders, the rest cure required that patients remain isolated for weeks or even months at a time, forbidden to read or write, rigidly adhering to a milk-only diet. Underlying this regimen was the assumption that “raw milk is a food the body easily turns into good blood,” which would restore positive energy when pumped through the body.
This extreme treatment was among the proliferating regimens developed in response to the stunning increase in nervous disorders diagnosed around the turn of the century. Commentators and clinicians cited a number of factors related to the stresses of modern civilization: the increased speed of communication facilitated by the telegraph and railroad; the “unmelodious” clamor of city life replacing the “rhythmical” sounds of nature; and the rise of the tabloid press that exploded “local horrors” into national news. These nervous diseases became an epidemic among “the ultracompetitive businessman and the socially active woman.”
While McClure had endured troubling mood swings for years, this depressive episode was the most disturbing, transforming even his love for his work into “the repulsion that a seasick man feels toward the food he most enjoys in health.” His manic drive had finally sapped him of his strength. “I had never thought of such a thing as economy of effort. When I had an idea, I pursued it; when I wanted anything, I went ahead and got it.” By crossing the ocean and committing himself to exclusive sanitarium in France and Switzerland, he hoped to recover the will and vitality that had sustained him since the penniless days of his youth.
Not surprisingly, the steady diet of milk and tedium did little to restore McClure. After six months in the famous spa towns of Aix-les-Bains and Divonne-les-Bains, he felt more enervated than when he left New York. “When I get rested I become very restless, but no place I plan to go interests me for many hours,” he admitted. “A walk of a few blocks tires me terribly. Riding in a cab tires me. I cannot see any of the beautiful things here,” he complained, lamenting that he had become “half hopeless & half comatose.” Although he tried to remain optimistic, observing that “perhaps my condition is normal & this is the way one gets over brain exhaustion,” he confessed to feeling doubtful about the state of his recovery. “I sometimes think that it is like taking off a leaky roof before putting on a new one, for a while the condition is worse than ever.”
In October, unable to tolerate the isolation, McClure persuaded a nurse to accompany him to Paris to secure the most recent edition of his magazine. Finding little of timely interest in its pages, he fired off a furious critique to Phillips, accusing him of attempting to destroy the magazine. No sooner was the letter posted than he tried to retrieve it. “I am simply heart-broken to have caused you such grief,” the contrite McClure told Phillips, assuring him, “You are the most wonderful friend & comrade a man ever had. Destroy the Paris letter. It was the expression of jangled nerves & a crazy brain. . . . In my mad scramble which in one way or another seems to have existed all my life, I have sacrificed much that is most important . . . I feel hopelessly sad to have caused you such terrible & useless pain. I really ought to have died some time ago . . . I wish you would remember the good things about me & forget all the bad.”
But in April 1901, exactly one year after leaving for Europe, McClure unaccountably returned to the office bursting with ideas for future articles. “The great issue,” he continued to believe, “was the phenomenon of the trusts.” He was now even more strongly convinced that “the way to handle the Trust question was, not by taking the matter up abstractly, but to take one Trust, and to give its history, its effects, and its tendencies.” If neither the sugar trust nor the beef trust would suffice, perhaps John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, “the Mother of Trusts,” would serve as the subject of their investigations. As “the creature largely of one man,” Standard Oil was perfectly suited to the biographical approach that had proved so successful with Napoleon and Lincoln. The story of the world’s wealthiest man would beguile the public into the more complicated exposition of his corporation and the hitherto esoteric question of the trusts. No one, McClure perceived, was better situated to engage that subject than Ida Tarbell, who “had lived for years in the heart of the oil region.”
Tarbell initially hesitated, though no subject so captured her imagination. As a child, she had witnessed the anguish the “big trust” had caused in its early development, and “the unfairness of the situation” had troubled her deeply. As a young woman, she had begun a novel focused on the period when “the bottom had dropped out” of the Allegheny oil region. She never completed the work, however, realizing that “there must be two sides to the question.” If she hoped to write a work of history rather than propaganda, she would now have to “comprehend the point of view of the other side.” She recognized the difficulties, even hazards, this undertaking would present, for Standard Oil officials were notoriously close-mouthed. Even in her hometown of Titusville, she found that men and women were unwilling to talk, fearing “the all-seeing eye and the all-powerful reach of the ruler of the oil industry.” In search of telling, intimate details like those at the core of her Lincoln series, she encountered only the same terse warning: “They will get you in the end.” Her own father tried to dissuade her. “Don’t do it, Ida,” he admonished; “they will ruin the magazine.” Finally she was tantalized by “the audacity of the thing”—just as when McClure had challenged her to complete the first installment of Napoleon’s life in one month’s time.
By early September 1901, Ida Tarbell had read everything from articles extolling the growth of trusts to Wealth Against Commonwealth, Henry Demarest Lloyd’s passionate diatribe against monopolies. Already she had outlined an extensive series that would detail the history of Standard Oil from its earliest days to the present. Phillips was enthusiastic, but only McClure, then in Switzerland, could approve a project of such magnitude. “Go over,” Phillips told Tarbell, “show the outline to Sam, get his decision.” McClure was thrilled to hear from Tarbell. “Come instantly,” he wrote back, suggesting that she stay for several weeks and travel with him to Lucerne and the Italian lakes; “I want a good time.” Hattie, too, welcomed Ida’s arrival, knowing her soothing influence upon McClure’s anxious temperament.
When Tarbell reached Lausanne, Switzerland, in early October, McClure was so overjoyed that he begged her to remain in Europe so they could spend the winter together in Greece. “You’ve never been there. We can discuss Standard Oil in Greece as well as here,” fancifully adding, “if it seems a good plan you can send for your documents and work in the Pantheon.” The image of the proper Miss Tarbell, seated at a desk cluttered with papers and documents in the middle of the ancient marble building, struck him as incongruous and hilarious.
Ida happily agreed to join Sam and Hattie. From their first meeting in Paris nearly a decade earlier, she had never stopped loving this brilliant, creative, hectic, exasperating man. In his expansive moods, no one was better company. While he could be irritable and demanding with others, he was invariably kind and loving toward Ida. “I lean on you as no other,” he confided to her. “In all great & noble qualities you are peerless to me.”
In mid-October, Sam, Hattie, and Ida set out together for Greece by way of the Italian lake region and the cities of Milan and Venice. As usual, the voluble McClure found interest in everything he saw, frequently jotting down notes for future articles. Before reaching Greece, he decided to stop at Salsomaggiore, an exclusive resort spa in northern Italy. There, enjoying relaxing treatments of mud and steam (and conversing with Cecil Rhodes, who had just returned from his exploits in South Africa), the editor and his writer came to an agreement on the shape of her project. So ebullient was McClure that he encouraged Ida to return to New York at once, postponing Greece for another time. Immediately, she set to work on what would become a twelve-part history of the Standard Oil Company—the magisterial series that would spur popular demand to dismantle the rapacious trusts and ensure her legacy as one of the most influential journalists of all time.
When McClure returned to the office a month later, he assembled the entire staff and bombarded them with suggestions for future articles. “It was always so when he came back from a trip,” Steffens recalled. His valise was stuffed with “clippings, papers, books, and letters,” ranging over the “world-stunning” subjects he wanted his staff to pursue. Some of these “history-making schemes” were brilliant, Steffens acknowledged, but “five out of seven” were foolish, requiring the staff to “unite and fight” against the “wild editor.” Only Ida Tarbell could sift through the ideas that tumbled from his mind with patience and respect. Time and again, she tactfully placated both Sam and the staffers, finding “a way to compromise and peace.” Unfortunately, Tarbell was in Titusville researching the early chapters of her story when McClure arrived this time, and the office meeting degenerated into a string of fiery confrontations.
Further fueling these tensions, McClure abruptly decided to switch Samuel Hopkins Adams from the syndicate to managing editor of the magazine; such staffing shifts had become a habit with McClure, but this change proved particularly unsettling. The move produced a violent protest from the art director, August Jaccaci, who charged that Adams was “absolutely incompetent to do this job.” The accusation ignited “an epic spat” between Jaccaci and McClure: “Fists were hammered down on desks. Unforgiveable words passed.” The manuscript reader Viola Roseboro left the room in tears. Mary Bisland, an editor on the syndicate, wrote a distressed letter to Tarbell, begging her to return before something terrible happened. Another tempest provoked yet another distressed letter to Tarbell. Her response provides insight into the peculiar dynamic at the heart of the revolutionary magazine and an acute and intimate assessment of its founder and animating force: “Things will come out all right,” Tarbell assured the staff. McClure “may stir up things and interfere with general comfort but he puts the health of life into the work at the same time.” More important, Tarbell urged them to remember that “the inimitable nature of McClure’s genius greatly outweighed the inconveniences resulting from his eccentricities.”
Never forget that it was he & nobody else who has created that place. You must learn to believe in him & use him if you are going to be happy there. He is a very extraordinary creature, you can’t put him into a machine and make him run smoothly with the other wheels and things. We don’t need him there. Able methodical people grow on every bush but genius comes once in a generation and if you ever get in its vicinity thank the Lord & stick. You probably will be laid up now and then in a sanatarium [sic] recovering from the effort to follow him but that’s a small matter if you really get into touch finally with that wonderful brain.
Above all, don’t worry. What you are going through now we’ve all been through steadily ever since I came into the office. If there was nothing in all this but the annoyance and uncertainty & confusion—that is if there were no results—then we might rebel, but there are always results—vital ones. The big things which the magazine has done always come about through these upheavals. . . . The great schemes, the daring moves in that business have always been Mr. McC’s. They will continue to be. His one hundredth idea is a stroke of genius. Be on hand to grasp that one hundredth idea!
FOR IDA TARBELL, MCCLURE’S DIRECTIVE to approach the trust issue through a narrative history of Standard Oil proved that “one hundredth idea”—a true stroke of genius. Her investigations were fortuitously timed. In an era of heightened, yet unfocused, public concern over increasing corporate consolidation, the growth of the first great industrial monopoly provided a dramatic blueprint for comprehending how “a particular industry passes from the control of the many to that of the few.”
Tarbell began her customary search for primary sources, a task facilitated by the fact that numerous state and federal authorities had been investigating Standard Oil since its founding. Defendants’ testimony in court, she noted, exhibited “exactly the quality of the personal reminiscences of actors in great events, with the additional value that they were given on the witness stand; and it was fair, therefore, to suppose that they were more cautious and exact in statement than are many writers of memoirs.” Traveling to Washington, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kansas, Tarbell patiently scoured so many thousands of pages of depositions and testimony that she almost lost her eyesight. She culled old files from defunct newspapers, transcribed single-spaced congressional reports, examined a large collection of pamphlets published during various controversies, and studied pages of statistics provided by the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Such vigorous inquiry soon revealed that critical memos and reports had vanished from the record. Informed that Standard had destroyed them, Tarbell refused to give up, convinced that if a document had been printed, it would eventually “turn up.” Usually, she was right. In the archives of the New York Public Library, she found the sole remaining report of an obscure thirty-year-old investigation; all the other copies had curiously disappeared. After reaching out to the lawyers and plaintiffs who had conducted the cases, she gradually found everything she needed. “Her sources of information,” McClure proudly noted, “were open to any student who had the industry and patience to study them.”
As the immense scope of her project became evident, Tarbell realized she would need an assistant in Cleveland, where Rockefeller had gotten his start and established the early headquarters of Standard Oil. She wanted someone who was not only clever and curious but who would also“get his fun in the chase” and “be trusted to keep his mouth shut.” In John M. Siddall she found the ideal comrade. “Short and plump, his eyes glowing with excitement,” the twenty-seven-year-old reporter manifested such exuberance during their first interview that she “had a sudden feeling of alarm lest he should burst out of his clothes.” Tarbell later reflected that she “never had the same feeling about any other individual except Theodore Roosevelt.” In the months that followed, she found the partnership “a continuous joy”; eventually the entire McClure’s staff looked forward to “Sid’s” lengthy letters, fascinated by the revealing statistics he compiled or the curious details he had unearthed of Rockefeller’s day-today existence in the city where he lived and worked, Cleveland. Their alliance, Tarbell’s biographer Kathleen Brady writes, “was as illustrious a meeting as that of Holmes and Watson. Only in this case, each was to be Sherlock and no leap of deduction, only clear evidence, was allowed.”
Such evidence could only be gathered through methodical, painstaking research. “Someone once asked me why I did not go first to the heads of the company for my information,” Tarbell explained to an interviewer. “This person did not know overmuch of humanity I think, else he would have realized instantly that the Standard Oil Company would have shut the door of their closet on their skeleton. But after one had discovered the skeleton and had scrutinized him at a very close range, why then shut the door? That is the reason I did not go to the magnates in the beginning.”
Although Tarbell never did secure an interview with the reclusive Rockefeller, she established a warm relationship with Henry H. Rogers, a Standard Oil partner who staunchly believed in the firm and wanted to present his perspective to the public. Learning of the impending series inMcClure’s, Rogers sent word to Sam McClure through their mutual friend, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), offering to meet with Tarbell at his home at 26 East 57th Street. “I was a bit scared at the idea,” Tarbell later acknowledged. Previous attempts to arrange personal meetings with company executives had either proven unsuccessful or rendered little beyond generic policy statements: “I had been met with that formulated chatter used by those who have accepted a creed, a situation, a system, to baffle the investigator trying to find what it all means.” Despite her prior frustrations, she was eager for another chance. “It was one thing to tackle the Standard Oil Company in documents . . . quite another thing to meet it face to face.”
Rogers immediately put her at ease. Sixty-two years old, with “a heavy shock of beautiful grey hair,” he struck Tarbell as “by all odds the handsomest and most distinguished figure in Wall Street.” Decades later, she could still recall his features: his “aquiline” nose, “blazing” eyes, and the white mustache partially obscuring his mouth, which she imagined to be “flexible, capable of both firm decision and of gay laughter.” As they began to converse, Tarbell discovered that Rogers had once lived close to her childhood home in a white house on a neighboring hillside. “Oh, I remember it,” Tarbell exclaimed; “the prettiest house in the world, I thought.”
They reached an amicable agreement that day to continue their conversation in a regular series of meetings: Tarbell would share with Rogers her evidence concerning the controversial aspects of Standard’s history; he, in turn, would offer “documents, figures, explanations, and justifications—anything and everything which would enlarge [her] understanding.” From the start, Tarbell made it clear that her own judgment would supersede his on all points. Their talks remained friendly; when the debate grew tense or unproductive, one or the other would simply change the subject. For Tarbell, the interchange proved invaluable, helping her construct work of “unimpeachable accuracy.”
The rigorous editing process at McClure’s and the constant support of her colleagues were both vital to the excellence of Tarbell’s finished work. Early on, when she was “deep into appalling heaps of documentary stuff,” Jaccaci wrote her in Titusville to assure her that the immense jumble of research “will clear up little by little and you will begin to see the possibilities of your story.” And throughout the process, McClure offered reassurance, reading her early letters from the field, counseling her not to “hurt your health or hurt the work by speed.” She should not feel compelled “to write on the monthly demand of a magazine,” he insisted, for “this work will turn out to be our great serial feature for next fall.” This regular exchange of letters sustained Tarbell while she was “separated so completely” from the office colleagues with whom she had shared daily meals and conversation.
By late May 1902, ten months after she began, Ida had completed a rough draft of the first three articles. She wrote to Phillips, then recovering from an illness at his summer home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. She hoped to send the articles and, if he was feeling well enough, plan a visit to discuss them. “They are in such shape that you can see the character of the material and the treatment I propose,” she explained. “I want very much to have your criticism and judgment. It is certainly a great deal more to me than anybody else’s.” Indeed, her deep respect for Phillips’s opinion led her to delay publication until she could answer his concerns.
Viola Roseboro marveled at Tarbell’s willingness to accept harsh criticism from both Phillips and McClure. Both expected to “be satisfied and thrilled; they pounded her and her stuff to make the best of it page by page,” Roseboro recalled. Tarbell absorbed the barrage and never flinched. She kept revising, cutting, organizing, and rewriting to meet their demands that she move the narrative forward and strip the text of inessential material. Finally, when she felt “moderately comfortable” with her opening articles, she decided to put the work aside for her regular summer vacation—hoping to return with clearer perspective and renewed intensity. “It has become a great bugbear to me,” she confessed to Siddall. “I dream of the octopus by night and think of nothing else by day, and I shall be glad to exchange it for the Alps.”
Tarbell’s first installment explores the birth of the oil industry in the region where she was raised. The “irrepressible energy” of the pioneers who settled “this little corner of Pennsylvania” transformed the landscape and created an entire commercial machine. Scores of small businesses flourished: refineries were necessary to distill the oil, storage tanks to hold it, barrels to carry it, and teamsters to haul it to shipping points on the river or the railroad. In twelve years, as hamlets became towns and towns became cities, the region metamorphosed “from wilderness to market-place.” The residents “boasted that the day would soon come when they would refine for the world.”
As Tarbell’s story unfolds, she describes how the enterprising individuals whose energy and independence brought such prosperity to the region finally proved no match for the regimented power of Standard Oil. Her narrative plainly documents how the ascendancy of the company was aided at every stage by discriminatory railroad rates and illegal tactics—bribery, fraud, criminal underselling, and intimidation. While Tarbell acknowledges John D. Rockefeller’s “genius for detail” and admires his rare strength “in energy, in intelligence, in dauntlessness,” she demonstrates compellingly that he would never have achieved his monopoly without special transportation privileges. At a time when Rockefeller and his partners in Cleveland held only one tenth of the refining business in the county, he certified to the railroads that he had control of the industry. Providing his organization cheaper rates than their competitors, he argued, was in their interests. “You will have but one party to deal with,” he inveigled. “Think of the profits!” And so, swayed by the prospect of avoiding rate wars and enduring the “wear and tear” of securing quotas, the railroad owners entered into clandestine contracts providing Rockefeller with substantial rebates from the published prices.
With this insider deal granting him rates far below those of competitors, and simultaneously kicking back “the extra hundred percent” that outsiders were now forced to pay, Tarbell described how Rockefeller “swooped down” on the independent oil men in Cleveland. “There is no chance for anyone outside,” he announced, “but we are going to give everybody a chance to come in. You are to turn over your refinery to my appraisers.” Resistors soon found they could not compete against the lower freight rates Standard enjoyed. Within three months, twenty-one of the twenty-six refiners in Cleveland had sold their assets to Standard.
Rockefeller next laid siege to the Oil Creek refiners. “They were there at the mouth of the wells,” noted Tarbell. “What might not this geographical advantage do in time?” In her suspenseful installment, “The Oil War of 1872,” Tarbell chronicles the defiant struggle of independents when they learned freight rates would suddenly double. More than 3,000 people gathered at the Opera House in Titusville to protest the ruinous rate inflation. It had long been understood that since “the railroad held its right of way from the people,” it must “be just to the people, treating them without discrimination,” regardless of the volume of business. The Creek oilmen formed a Petroleum Producers Union, demanding investigations by state and federal authorities, and instituted a series of lawsuits. Unlike Rockefeller they had neither the patience nor the capital for protracted litigation. In the end, “from hopelessness, from disgust, from ambition, from love of money,” the majority of the local oil producers “gave up the fight for principle” and succumbed to Standard Oil.
Nevertheless, a few intrepid independents refused to submit. “To the man who had begun with one still and had seen it grow by his own energy and intelligence to ten, who now sold 500 barrels a day where he once sold five, the refinery was the dearest spot on earth save his home,” Tarbell explained. Where persuasion and simple coercion failed, Rockefeller resorted to more iniquitous tactics. Tarbell uncovered a system of espionage by which Standard bribed railroad agents to access confidential shipping records, detailing “the quantity, quality, and selling price of independent shipments.”
Information in hand, Rockefeller knew exactly how much to undercut prices in a particular region to guarantee the elimination of small competitors. One woman testified that “her firm had a customer in New Orleans to whom they had been selling from 500 to 1,000 barrels a month, and that the Standard representative made a contract with him to pay him $10,000 a year for five years to stop handling the independent oil and take Standard oil!” If undercutting the refiners proved insufficient, retailers were directly threatened. Indeed, grocery stores selling oil refined by independents were themselves hounded and harassed to the point that their businesses failed. Of all the machinations that enabled Rockefeller to build his monopoly, Tarbell found these measures the most insufferable. “The unraveling of this espionage charge, the proofs of it,” she later said, “turned my stomach against the Standard in a way that the indefensible and robust fights over transportation had never done. There was a littleness about it that seemed utterly contemptible compared to the immense genius and ability that had gone into the organization.”
By 1887, Tarbell writes, Rockefeller “had completed one of the most perfect business organizations the world has ever seen, an organization which handled practically all of a great natural product.” With “competition practically out of the way, it set all its great energies to developing what it had secured.” Most important, Rockefeller now had the power to control prices. Rather than use this domination and the efficiencies of scale to reduce costs, Standard Oil sought to maximize profits. Wherever competition was extinguished, Tarbell maintained, the consumer paid more. Under investigative duress Standard would temporarily reduce prices, only to jack them up in the same area once the scrutiny ceased. “Human experience long ago taught us,” she warned, “that if we allow a man or a group of men autocratic powers in government or church, they use that power to oppress and defraud the public.”
Throughout her series, Tarbell acknowledged Standard Oil’s “legitimate greatness” and recognized the extraordinary business acumen of John D. Rockefeller: “Plants wisely located—The smallest detail in expense looked out for—Quick adaptability to new conditions as they arise—Economy introduced by the manufacture of supplies—Profit paid to nobody—Profitable extension of products and by-products—A general capacity for seeing big things and enough daring to lay hold of them.” Nevertheless, she concludes, while “these qualities alone would have made a great business . . . it would not have been the combination whose history we have traced.”
Tarbell’s final assessment of Rockefeller’s practices and unethical maneuvering is unsparing: He began his ascent by flouting the common law to secure favorable rates from the railroads, allowing him to drive his rivals out. “At the same time he worked with the railroads to prevent other people getting oil to manufacture, or if they got it he worked with the railroads to prevent the shipment of the product. If it reached a dealer, he did his utmost to bully or wheedle him to countermand his order. If he failed in that, he undersold until the dealer, losing on his purchase, was glad enough to buy thereafter of Mr. Rockefeller.” In the end, “every great campaign against rival interests which the Standard Oil Company has carried on has been inaugurated, not to save its life, but to build up and sustain a monopoly in the oil industry.”
In her closing paragraph, Tarbell issues a challenge: “And what are we going to do about it?” Echoing McClure’s celebrated editorial, she exhorts her readers, the American public, to take action. “For it is OUR business,” she insists, “we, the people of the United States, and nobody else, must cure whatever is wrong in the industrial situation, typified by this narrative of the growth of the Standard Oil Company.”
“YOU ARE TODAY, THE MOST famous woman in America,” McClure told the forty-five-year-old Tarbell six months after her sensational series appeared. “People universally speak of you with such a reverence that I am getting sort of afraid of you,” he bantered. For the accolades were imposing: A journalist for The Outlook proclaimed her “a Joan of Arc among moderns,” crusading “against trusts and monopolies.” Another journalist declared her “The New Woman,” a powerful and independent agent of social change. “At least one American takes rank with the leading biographers and historians of the old world,” the Lowell (Massachusetts) Sun remarked, and “women are proud to know that one is a woman, Miss Ida Minerva Tarbell.” The Los Angeles Times called her “the strongest intellectual force among the women of the United States,” while theWashington Times maintained that she had “proven herself to be one of the most commanding figures in American letters.”
Tarbell was invited to speak at numerous colleges, clubs, and law schools. Members of the Twentieth Century Club were reportedly enthralled to hear “the woman who talks like a man,” while a Missouri newspaperman described an audience enthralled by the tall, stately woman, “so feminine as to appear décolleté in order to make her assault more effective!” Yet, despite her immense professional achievement, influence, and acclaim, Ida Tarbell was the only person in her office not invited to the first annual publishers’ dinner. Newspapermen had met annually for several years, but this was the first such official assemblage of magazine publishers and editors together with writers and public officials. President Roosevelt served as the keynote speaker, and the men-only guest list included cabinet and Supreme Court members as well as prominent senators and congressmen. “It is the first time since I came into the office that the fact of petticoats has stood in my way,” Ida confessed to Ray Baker, “and I am half inclined to resent it.”
The emergence of humorous commentary surrounding “Miss Tarbell” and her exploits only served to underscore her growing popularity. The Washington Post facetiously suggested “that Mr. Rockefeller would be glad to pay the expense if some man should win Miss Ida Tarbell and take her on a leisurely tour of the world for a honeymoon.” The Chicago Daily Tribune noted that “Miss Ida Tarbell goes calmly on jabbing her biographical hatpin into Mr. Rockefeller.” Even on Broadway, the season’s biggest hit, The Lion and the Mouse, featured a thinly veiled Tarbell character as the mouse that frees the lion Rockefeller from “the net of avarice.” The play’s young female author enters the magnate’s household under the guise of writing a benign biography. In fact, she seeks documents that will clear her father of unjust corruption charges leveled by the Rockefeller character. Once inside, she successfully clears her father’s name, changes “Rockefeller’s disposition from sordid to benevolent,” and, in a final melodramatic twist, is wooed by the tycoon’s son!
The McClure’s series that had inspired this theatrical parable was read and discussed across the nation. Most important for Tarbell, the reaction from critics was overwhelmingly positive. They applauded her “accumulation of facts,” stunning “in their significance,” her “intimate style,” and her ability to tell a complex story “remarkable for being nearly all plot.” With each installment, she left the reader “in a state of lively suspense” as to what might follow. Above all, she was praised repeatedly for the fairness of her presentation. “She never rants,” one critic observed. “She never howls and waves her arms.”
Rockefeller’s defenders argued that by focusing her dramatic analysis on one personage, Tarbell ignored the conditions that made consolidation inevitable in scores of industries, including meatpacking, grain elevators, and railroads. Similarly, she failed to acknowledge that rebating was not confined to Standard Oil; it was, on the contrary, “an almost universal practice.” Although her work might be “excellent journalism and very good drama,” Gilbert Montague wrote in the Boston Evening Transcript, “Miss Tarbell does not seem to have guessed the larger bearings of the movement she describes. . . . She prefers to attribute the course of events to a single pervasive, mysterious personality.”
It was the “mysterious” Rockefeller, however, who made the series so wildly popular; the story of his life and the creation of his company provided a narrative spine, on which Tarbell could flesh out a more complex and vivid subject. In her portrait of Rockefeller, Tarbell stressed the duality of his nature, presenting “a quiet, modest church-going gentleman, devoted to Sunday school picnics, golf, and wheeling,” yet simultaneously “willing to strain every nerve to obtain special and illegal privileges from the railroads which were bound to ruin every man in the oil business not sharing them with him.” When she began her series, one newspaper observed, “Rockefeller was known only as a shrewd businessman who had built up an immense business, with a great name for generosity to educational institutions. Now there are very few sane men who would take Rockefeller’s millions if his tarnished reputation must go along with them.”
As her narrative progresses, Tarbell’s indignation at Rockefeller seems to grow, and her language sometimes slips into the same metaphors for soulless mechanical power that cheapened White’s portrait of Boss Platt. She describes his eyes “as expressionless as a wall,” notes the “downward” droop of “his mouth,” his “cruelest” and “most pathetic” feature, and the repellent puffiness of his cheeks. More than a touch of personal vindictiveness colors her representation of Rockefeller as she describes how his pursuit of money renders him no longer “a human man” but rather “a machine—a money machine—stripped by his overwhelming passion of greed of every quality which makes a man worthy of citizenship.”
Far more telling insight lies in her argument that “were Mr. Rockefeller the only one of his kind he would be curious, interesting, unpleasant, but in no way vital. . . . But Mr. Rockefeller is not the only one of his kind. He is simply the type preeminent in the public mind of the militant business man of the day.” In the end, she insists, there could be “no cure” for the problem of the trusts without “an increasing scorn of unfair play—an increasing sense that a thing won by breaking the rules of the game is not worth the winning. When the businessman who fights to secure special privileges, to crowd his competitor off the track by other than fair competitive methods, receives the same summary disdainful ostracism by his fellows that the doctor or lawyer who is ‘unprofessional,’ the athlete who abuses the rules, receives, we shall have gone a long way toward making commerce a fit pursuit for our young men.”
Though Rockefeller never directly responded to Tarbell’s attacks, his friends and associates vented their displeasure by denying McClure membership to the Ardsley Country Club, perched above the Hudson River twenty miles north of Manhattan. Although no protests had been lodged against McClure before the publication of Tarbell’s series, he suddenly found himself blackballed through the collusion of board members “closely allied to the Standard Oil interests,” including John D. Archbold, William Rockefeller, and Charles Schwab. Such persecution did nothing to subdue McClure’s enthusiasm for Tarbell’s writing. “Your monumental work on the Standard Oil will never be forgotten,” he assured her. In a special editorial, he touted her series as “one of the most remarkable pieces of work ever published in a magazine.” Since he fervently believed that it was “up to magazines to rouse public opinion,” he was inordinately proud of the fact that her series had mobilized popular sentiment against the trusts as no other writing had done before.
McClure once claimed “that the two things of which he is proudest are, first, that he was the founder of McClure’s Magazine; second, that he was the discoverer of Miss Tarbell.” Certainly, the peculiar and intimate partnership that they developed was vital to both. McClure may have been more visionary, more in tune with the public’s shifting interests, but Tarbell possessed a far sturdier temperament, a relentless work ethic, and the ability to mediate conflict. “You cannot imagine how we all love and reverence you,” McClure told her shortly after the launch of the Standard Oil series. “What you have been to me no words can tell.” For her part, Tarbell repeatedly proclaimed McClure’s manic bursts of energy “the most genuinely creative moments of our magazine life.” Nor did she ever forget that he was instrumental in every phase of her journey from obscure expatriate writer to foremost journalist in the nation.
AS MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE and Senate assembled in the winter of 1903, a newspaper in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, predicted that Ida Tarbell’s sensational exposure of Standard Oil had finally generated enough pressure to compel congressional action against monopolies. The Republican Party, another western paper editorialized, “must stand by the people or yield to the demands of the corporations.” While big business had been “a tower of strength” to the majority party for years, growing indignation demanded that some anti-trust action be taken—the “only question being as to how long the shrewd and cunning agents of the trust can manage to delay this outcome.” Indeed, the stalling commenced as soon as Congress convened.
Republican leaders in the Senate spread the word that there would be “no time for anti-trust legislation at this session.” The subject, they argued, was too complex for the short session that would end in early March: ill-considered legislation might lead to financial panic; much wiser to wait until the longer session the following year. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats called for radical proposals that stood little chance of passing constitutional muster.
“I pass my days in a state of exasperation,” Roosevelt told his son Kermit, “first, with the fools who do not want any of the things that ought to be done, and, second, with the equally obnoxious fools who insist upon so much that they cannot get anything.” Emboldened by public support, Roosevelt was determined to prevent the 1903 Congress from playing “the ancient and honorable bunko game” of letting legislation “fall between the two stools” of the House and Senate, with no time left in conference committee to harmonize their differences. “The party had promised antitrust legislation,” he maintained, “and it was the party’s duty to do something towards fulfilling its obligations.” Summoning the leaders of both branches together, he threatened to exercise the president’s constitutional power to call an extra session “on extraordinary occasions” unless his anti-trust proposals were brought to the floor before adjournment. “While I could not force anyone to vote for these bills,” he explained to a friend, “I felt I had a right to demand that there should be a vote upon them.”
The administration’s anti-trust program in 1903 was comprised of three elements: a measure to strengthen existing laws against discriminatory railroad rebates; a bill to expedite legal proceedings against suspected trusts; and of particular interest to the president, a revived proposal to create a cabinet-level Department of Commerce with regulatory powers over the large corporations.
The first measure, sponsored by Congressman Stephen Elkins of West Virginia, rode the crest of popular fury against what had become known as “Rockefeller’s rebates.” That single word, “rebate,” one editorial observed, dominated Tarbell’s chronicle of Standard Oil; every successful step Rockefeller took to “corner the oil interests of the country” could be traced to the secret freight rates he obtained from the railroads. For years, farmers and small businessmen had argued that current laws failed to protect them against discriminatory rebating practices. The Elkins bill was designed to remedy weaknesses in the existing regulations, such as the provision that made only railroad agents actually granting the rebates liable to prosecution: under the new bill, corporations would be held responsible for the acts of any of their officers or agents, and failure to follow published rates would subject both railroads and shippers to heavy fines. The courts would be granted increased powers to secure transaction records, demand testimony, and provide summary judgment.
Although secret opposition to the Elkins bill remained, the impact of Tarbell’s investigation, Roosevelt told a friend, meant that “no respectable railroad or respectable shipping business can openly object to the rebate bill.” By 1903, the railroads themselves actually favored ending cash rebates, which cost them millions of dollars each year in lost revenue. Furthermore, the most powerful corporations offered no objection; as The Washington Post noted, they had already “grown beyond any effects the enforcement of the legislation might have.” Even with the ban on secret rebates, there remained myriad ways the trusts could exact special concessions from the railroads. The Elkins bill swiftly passed both Houses, promising, in Roosevelt’s words, to throw “the highways of commerce open on equal terms to all who use them.” The legislation represented small but pragmatic advancement in pursuit of “equal rights for all; special privileges to none.”
Growing public sentiment against monopolies also fueled a bill to expedite prosecutions under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Initially, this proposed bill to grant anti-trust suits precedence on court calendars had met with what Roosevelt termed “violent opposition”; now, in the face of public rancor, it was “rather sullenly acquiesced in.” When the bill passed both Houses with little debate, William Allen White triumphantly declared that “the subconscious moral sense of the people has come to a distinct realization of the fact that crimes are as possible in what we call high finance as they are in lower quarters.”
While the trusts reluctantly yielded on the expedition bill, they brought the full force of their influence against the president’s proposed Department of Commerce and Labor. The idea of consolidating the various bureaus and offices overseeing immigration, lighthouses, shipping, fisheries, and the census provoked no outcry. When Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota introduced an amendment crafted by the administration to establish a Bureau of Corporations within the department, however, fierce opposition erupted. Invested with substantial powers to investigate the internal operations of corporations engaged in interstate commerce, the prospective bureau embodied Roosevelt’s conviction that publicity was “the first essential” to determine whether individual trusts were guilty of “unfair competition,” “unscrupulous promotion,” or “overcapitalization.” The amendment would provide the bureau with authority to compel testimony, and to subpoena books, papers, and reports. At his discretion, the president could use these findings to determine whether anti-trust laws were being violated and to induce Congress to pass additional regulatory measures to remedy the abuses uncovered.
Long accustomed to operating without effective oversight or federal regulation, corporate interests regarded the prospective Bureau of Corporations as the harbinger of a stifling socialism. “The Standard Oil Company has always regarded anti-trust laws, anti-rebate laws, and such things, as harmless, though, at times annoying,” the Wall Street Journal explained, “but publicity hurts. And the company will always, at all times, and in all ways, fight publicity.” Determined to kill the new bureau, officials of the trusts descended on Washington for private meetings with their loyal allies on Capitol Hill.
Roosevelt’s failure the previous year had taught him to carefully monitor every stage of the bill’s movement through Congress. Night after night, he convened meetings with leaders of the Senate and the House, impressing on the Speaker, the ranking committee members, and the majority leader that the Nelson amendment was essential to redeem the party’s pledge to take action on the trusts. These sessions required all the president’s finesse, the press reported, for there was “a disposition in some quarters” to resent his meddling in legislative affairs.
Realizing that he would benefit from the broadest possible consensus, Roosevelt sought to cultivate warm connections with a number of Democrats. Attending the wedding of Missouri’s Democratic senator Francis Cockrell’s daughter, the president “joked with the girls, shook hands with the matrons and exchanged ‘jollying’ remarks with the young and old men.” At the celebratory breakfast, he announced with sly wit that he could never reside in Missouri, however splendid that state might be: “I think so much of Sen. Cockrell and admire him so greatly that I don’t see how I could keep from voting for him, and as he is a Democrat you know that would never, never, do.”
“I have been worked until I could hardly stand,” the notoriously tireless Roosevelt grumbled to Kermit, “some days twelve hours and over absolutely without intermission.” But in fact, his days were not without respite—almost every afternoon he managed the diversion of some mode of exercise. Singlestick, a form of swordplay in which competitors wield wooden sticks, had become his latest obsession. General Leonard Wood, Roosevelt’s favorite opponent, bested the president on various occasions, leaving him with a swollen arm, a bruised forehead, and once, a deep cut on his right wrist that required him to shake left-handed at the next White House reception. A comic diagram in the Minneapolis Journal pinpointed the numerous injuries Roosevelt had sustained during sundry activities, humorously labeling him “The Most Wounded President in the Nation’s History.”
When multiplying bruises precluded more singlestick jousts, he rode a horse along snowy streets or split wood for exercise. If his exertions as a woods-man did “not suffice,” the Boston Traveler quipped, “he might try his hand at lopping off a few of the trust privileges.” And indeed, that formidable energy was funneled into a single objective—persuading Congress to pass his pet anti-trust bill.
Saturday, February 7, 1903, would prove critical in the struggle for the Bureau of Corporations. Roosevelt’s demeanor, as he discussed literature and international events with the French ambassador Jules Jusserand, revealed nothing of the ruse under way for that evening. As darkness descended, he called together members of the three press associations. Insisting that the source of the information must remain confidential, Roosevelt confided that he had secured proof that John D. Rockefeller was personally orchestrating an underhanded campaign to sabotage the Nelson amendment. A half-dozen senators, he claimed, had received telegrams bearing John D. Rockefeller’s signature, with “peremptory” instruction indicating that the corporation was “unalterably opposed” to the bill, and it “must be stopped.” The message, one paper reported, was clear: “We own the Republican party and it must do our bidding.”
The offending telegrams, Roosevelt assured the assembled journalists—without giving them the exact wording or showing the actual telegrams—had only redoubled his determination to establish the Bureau of Corporations. Unless Congress enacted a satisfactory bill by the March 4 adjournment, he would surely insist on the extra session previously threatened. As anticipated, word of Rockefeller’s imperious telegrams inspired headlines and editorials across the country and produced “a decided sensation” on Capitol Hill. One senator after another hastily denied receiving a Rockefeller telegram, “for fear,” one Wisconsin paper suggested, that “somebody might think they had intimate relations with the great octopus.”
Rockefeller’s purported tactic should have occasioned “no surprise,” one newspaper sardonically noted: “It is pretty much his senate, anyway. Most of the members of the once august body were elected on a pro-trust understanding, and Deacon John is simply insisting upon fulfillment of the bargain mutually entered into.” For years, he and his fellow industrialists had filled Mark Hanna’s coffers, the editorial concluded, and Rockefeller was now simply “claiming the privileges he paid for, nothing more.”
To combat the pending legislation, Standard Oil sent three of its top lawyers to the Arlington Hotel in Washington. There, they would combine with congressional allies to prepare an emasculating amendment if the bill could not be killed outright. “This is no more than is done every day by managers and attorneys of great business enterprises,” the Los Angeles Times acknowledged. Companies routinely sent representatives to the nation’s capital in an effort to shield themselves from unfavorable legislation. The appearance of the Standard attorneys amid the outrage sparked by Ida Tarbell’s exposé and the Rockefeller telegram scandal, however, seemed certain to “inflame the agitator element” in Congress and possibly spur even more radical legislation. “Grasping the whole situation at a glance,” Senator Aldrich “wheeled the trio of counsel promptly to right-about,” sending them back to New York the next morning.
JUBILANT, ROOSEVELT BOASTED THAT “FROM the standpoint of constructive states-manship,” he considered the Department of Commerce and Labor, with its Bureau of Corporations, “a much greater feat than any tariff law.” Well aware of the importance of sharing credit for the victory, he wrote a warm note to Speaker David Henderson, who had finally conceded that Republicans must take action against the trusts. “Taken as a whole,” Roosevelt told him, “no other Congress of recent years has to its credit a record of more substantial achievement for the public good than this over the lower house of which you presided. I congratulate you and it.” To head the new department, he chose his private secretary and trusted friend, George Cortelyou, and selected James Garfield, the son of the former president, for Commissioner of Corporations.
After failing for years both as governor and president to pass legislation regulating corporations, Roosevelt had finally succeeded because “a great many people had been thinking and talking” about the problem of the trusts, and “a certain consensus of opinion” had been reached. Ida Tarbell’s series had helped foment and articulate a conscious desire for reform in every village, township, and city. In John D. Rockefeller, she had furnished a human face for the bewilderingly intricate and multifaceted problem of the trusts—thereby giving the president an identifiable target that he brilliantly exploited to mobilize public sentiment behind his legislative program.
With the passage of the rebate bill and the expedition bill and the establishment of the Department of Commerce, Roosevelt was convinced that he had “gotten the trust legislation all right,” that Democrats could no longer wield the trust issue against his party. Although some charged that even these measures combined were “not sufficiently far-reaching,” even these critics acknowledged that Congress had exceeded expectations. Moreover, this trio of bills would provide the basis to determine what further action might be necessary.
Perhaps no forum better illustrated the progressive direction of public opinion than William Allen White’s scorecard for the 57th Congress. The country editor who had ridiculed calls for governmental intervention only a few years earlier now heralded Roosevelt’s three anti-trust measures as a major step toward rectifying laissez-faire economic policy. He predicted that “no single legislative act since the Missouri Compromise” would impact American business as much as the Department of Commerce and Labor. “Thousands of interests that have known no Federal regulation and control,” he wrote, “will be welded to the Government hereafter, and can only grow and develop under the hands of Congress and the President.” Some might fear that the country was taking “a step toward socialism,” he concluded, but “if so, well and good; the step will not be retracted.”