CHAPTER 22
The relief that washed through Standard Oil after William McKinley’s 1896 election had proved short-lived. Despite a sudden upsurge of prosperity, the electorate remained wary of the new monopolies and the muscular arrivistes who had created them. The crusade to curtail the trusts was very much alive, if temporarily shunted to the state level. Once again, the first salvo against Standard Oil was fired in Ohio. The state attorney general, Frank Monnett—successor to the crusading David K. Watson—was the son of a Methodist preacher, a former railroad attorney, and a hardworking public servant. In 1897, he received a visit from the maverick refiner George Rice, who persuaded him that Standard Oil had never complied with the 1892 decision to sever Ohio Standard from the trust. To check up on his adversaries, Rice had bought six shares of Standard Oil trust certificates. When he tried to redeem them for fractional shares in the twenty constituent companies spun off by the 1892 decision, the liquidating trustees—including Rockefeller—procrastinated for four years. Now, five years after the verdict, $27 million in trust certificates remained unredeemed. On November 9, 1897, Monnett charged that Standard of Ohio had never seriously planned to leave the trust and was in contempt of court. It had all been a charade to pacify trustbusters.
Rockefeller’s retirement began to assume the inexorable nature of a Greek tragedy: Just as he sought to extricate himself from the trust, its legal troubles deepened. Conditioned by a long history of Standard Oil mendacity, both press and public mocked his so-called retirement as a tawdry ruse to evade testimony. It defied the common conception of villainy to think that such a man could simply walk away from his creation.
To expedite the case, Monnett had a master commissioner interrogate witnesses in New York. On October 11, 1898, Rockefeller was summoned to testify at the New Amsterdam Hotel, the prosecution hoping to prod him into an admission that he had stalled in liquidating the trust. Through more than five hours of questioning, Rockefeller, as imperturbable as ever, spoke in such a low voice that people strained to hear him, and he conceded so little that the next day’s World ran the headline, “Rockefeller Imitates a Clam.” 1Standard lawyers spent much more time objecting to questions than Rockefeller did in answering them. Once again, he presented the past as a dense fog that he could scarcely penetrate. As the World dryly observed, “The virtue of forgetting, which is one of the most valuable virtues that a monopolist can have under cross-examination, is possessed by Mr. Rockefeller in its highest degree.”2
Rockefeller, as always, refused to believe that anybody could have a legitimate objection to Standard Oil. Once again, he fell back on his all-purpose explanation that the suits filed against him were just extortion rackets posing as public service. Later on, he said that Monnett’s motive was to “blackmail the Standard Oil Company” and that he was a “comrade in schemes with George Rice.”3 Rockefeller suppressed signs of irritation at the hearing, yet he seemed edgier than on earlier occasions. Reporters noted telltale nervous habits that called into question his surface composure—the way he kept shifting his weight, crossing and recrossing his legs, rubbing his nape, blowing out his cheeks, and biting his mustache.
At the end of his testimony, Rockefeller, discernibly relieved, did something very unusual for him: He bounded straight over to George Rice, extended his hand, and tried to engage him in conversation. He suddenly grew very chatty, as two newspapers reported:
“How are you, Mr. Rice? We are getting to be old men now, eh? Don’t you wish you had taken my advice years ago?”
“Perhaps it would have been better for me if I had,” said Rice, glaring at him. “You have ruined my business, as you said you would.”
“Pshaw! Pshaw!” replied Rockefeller, moving away.
“You did, you ruined me,” persisted Rice, chasing him. (Rice, a well-to-do businessman, perhaps overstated his case.)
“Pshaw! Pshaw!” said Rockefeller, donning his silk hat. “I would rather have given ten—”
“It’s no use your saying ‘pshaw,’ ” Rice interrupted. “You know damned well you did.”4
Rockefeller flashed a funereal smile, then disappeared from the room. It was one of the few times in his mysterious career that he ever confronted one of his nemeses. If Rockefeller’s style was to slip away from attacks, the Monnett investigation displayed the two-fisted style of his successor, John D. Archbold. On the stand, Archbold accused Rice of trying to extort $500,000 from Standard Oil for his refinery, and at the lunch recess, according to one newspaper, he marched up to Rice, jabbed a finger in his face, and said, “You are nothing but wind and weight.” “And you,” retorted Rice, “are nothing but money stolen from the people.” 5 The impetuous Archbold behaved as if public opinion were of no importance. He did not see that the day of reckoning for Standard Oil was fast approaching and that he would soon need all the friends he could get. In a preview of his brawling, arrogant style with authorities, Archbold got into a heated shouting match with a man named Flagg, one of Monnett’s assistants:
Ida Minerva Tarbell, seated before her rolltop desk at McClure’s Magazine in 1898. (Courtesy of the Drake Well Museum)
“You keep still or I’ll expose you right here,” Archbold shouted at him.
“You couldn’t if you tried,” said Flagg. “I’m not afraid of your millions.”
“Shut up or I will show you up,” cried Archbold.
“Is any one low lived compared with a Standard Oil magnate?”
“You know what you are.”
“You are a coward and a liar,” shouted Flagg.
“You are a stinking liar,” Archbold shot back. 6
What prompted this vehement exchange was the burning of company records at a Standard Oil facility in Cleveland. Monnett had charged Standard of Ohio with surreptitiously paying dividends to holders of trust certificates after 1892, which Rockefeller and other officials denied. To resolve the matter, the state supreme court ordered Standard of Ohio to produce its books in December 1898. Two weeks later, reports filtered out that sixteen boxes of books had been incinerated by Standard employees. Amid a national furor, Standard attorneys denied that the boxes contained the ledgers in question—“from time to time,” said Standard Oil’s attorney, Virgil Kline, the company destroyed “useless material which accumulates in its business”—but he refused to produce the pertinent ledgers.7 Monnett thought the books were torched to shield Rockefeller. As he told Henry Demarest Lloyd, “I am of the opinion that the books were burned at least in part. . . . They were obliged to either let the books contradict Mr. Rockefeller . . . or else take a defiant stand and conceal the books from the court.” 8
Among other damning accusations, Standard Oil was said to have hired the Malcolm Jennings Advertising Agency to promote its products in Ohio and Indiana newspapers in exchange for favorable news items. The most sensational charge trumpeted by Monnett involved an alleged attempt by Standard Oil to bribe him into dropping the case, much as had been alleged with David K. Watson. Monnett said that a nameless emissary had come to his Columbus office with an offer of $400,000. The money was to be left in a safety-deposit box in New York, with Monnett given the key. Standard attorneys hotly disputed this, demanding the name of their putative agent. When Monnett would not identify him, citing fears of reprisals, it cast doubt on the story. In a later statement, he named Feargus Charles Haskell and Frank Rockefeller as the culprits. Rockefeller’s papers, unfortunately, shed no light on the situation.
Before Monnett could inflict lasting damage upon Standard Oil, he became persona non grata in many sections of his own Republican Party. He especially incurred the wrath of U.S. senator Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio, who was on the Standard Oil payroll. (In 1900 alone, Archbold disbursed $44,500 in lobbying fees to the senator.) At a Washington meeting, Foraker gave Monnett a brief but unforgettable education in Ohio political realities. As Monnett re-created the discussion:
I at first discussed the impropriety and danger of [Foraker’s] representing these trusts, criminal and civil violators of his own State, as long as he as well as myself should be interested in the welfare of the people of Ohio. He told me that he never allowed his law practice to interfere with politics or his politics with law practice, and added that he was a judge of ethics of our profession. He then took up the cause of action against these companies and reminded me of the great power financially and politically of the Standard Oil crowd. After talking a short time, he asked me to have the proceedings delayed in order to accommodate him. I firmly declined to concede any time whatever and told him so. He recalled the great power of the Oil Trust to anyone opposed to it.9
True to Foraker’s warning, Monnett failed to win the Republican renomination for attorney general in 1899; disillusioned, he joined the Democratic Party two years later.
Even though the Ohio suit fizzled, it alerted the trust to the need for a permanent corporate structure that could weather legal challenges. Ever since 1892, Standard Oil had sustained a precarious arrangement in which seventeen leading shareholders, many of them the liquidating trustees, held a majority of the stock of twenty constituent companies. These oil-industry veterans were now graying—Archbold, in his early fifties, was among the youngest—and since they alone bound the Standard Oil units together, they feared that if they died, their heirs might squabble, sell the shares, or otherwise threaten the trust’s cohesion. It was time for a less-shaky corporate framework.
The trust had long struggled with the legal straitjacket that prevented companies from holding stock in out-of-state corporations. In 1898, heeding the clamor against the trusts, Congress created the U.S. Industrial Commission to study the American economy. Testifying before that body a year later, Rockefeller bemoaned this legal anachronism. “Our Federal form of government, making every corporation created by a State foreign to every other State, renders it necessary for persons doing business through corporate agency to organize corporations in some or many of the different States in which their business is located.”10 To rectify the problem, Rockefeller endorsed a federal incorporation law, even if a measure of government regulation came with it.
In the meantime, Standard Oil was aided by recent amendments to the New Jersey incorporation law. In June 1899, undergoing yet another change in form, Standard Oil became a full-fledged holding company under New Jersey law with the legal parent, Standard Oil of New Jersey, controlling stock in nineteen large and twenty-two small companies. Though he owned more than one-fourth of the shares, Rockefeller wanted to stay retired and avoid operational responsibility. Loath for him to relinquish his titular leadership amid legal troubles, his colleagues insisted that he remain honorary president. “I declined to have any official position in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in 1899,” Rockefeller later told Harold McCormick, “and urged my brother [William] to take this position, but as he declined and all the others were very urgent, I was called the President, and have been since, although the position is and has all the time been entirely nominal.” 11 Unbeknownst to the general public, Rockefeller never attended a meeting or drew a salary, and Archbold, the new vice president, ran the organization.
In many respects, Standard Oil attained its peak influence in the 1890s. It now marketed 84 percent of all petroleum products sold in America and pumped a third of its crude oil—the highest percentage it ever reached. After years of harrowing prophecies that the industry might vanish, the business outlook had never looked brighter, despite the growing use of electricity. Sales boomed in everything from oil stoves to parlor lamps to varnish, soaking up oil supplies and driving up prices. In 1903, the British navy outfitted some battleships to use fuel oil instead of coal, attracting the notice of the U.S. Navy. Paraffin wax had become a vital insulator in the burgeoning telephone and electrical industries. Most momentous of all, the automobile promised to consume that vile, useless by-product, gasoline, and Standard Oil cultivated the new carmakers. When Henry Ford rolled out his first vehicle, Charlie Ross, a Standard Oil salesman, stood by with a can of the trust’s Atlantic Red Oil. The number of registered automobiles in America leaped from eight hundred in 1898 to eight thousand in 1900. When the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk in 1903, their flight was powered by gasoline brought to the beach by Standard Oil salesmen. These new petroleum applications more than offset the dwindling kerosene business.
Though it had some scrappy competition at home from Pure Oil, Standard Oil’s monopoly seemed secure in the 1890s. But developments at home and abroad soon imperiled its power even before Teddy Roosevelt’s trustbusters entered the scene. In the late 1890s, Russia temporarily surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest crude-oil producer, capturing 35 percent of the world market. The trust’s global monopoly was sharply eroding on other fronts: The new Burmah Oil sold oil actively in Indian markets, Royal Dutch expanded its drilling in Sumatra, and Shell Transport and Trading stepped up its East Asian activities. In October 1901, Sir Marcus Samuel of Shell held secret talks at 26 Broadway. Archbold reported to Rockefeller, “This company [Shell] represents by all means the most important distributing Agency for Refined Oil throughout the World, outside of our own interests. He is here undoubtedly to take up with us the question of some sort of an alliance, preferable on his part of the sale to us of a large interest in their Company.” 12 Two months later, afraid of ceding too much power to Archbold, Samuel signed an agreement instead with Henri Deterding of Royal Dutch, creating a major new alliance along with the French Rothschilds. Archbold responded to this new threat with unrelenting price wars.
The home situation had grown no less treacherous. In 1900, the Waters-Pierce Company, Standard Oil’s rogue marketing subsidiary, was ousted from Texas for violating the state’s antitrust law. It had cornered 90 percent of the oil market, winning universal infamy for its cutthroat sales practices. This legal setback mattered greatly, for it evicted the trust from the state on the eve of a revolution. In 1901, drillers in Beaumont, Texas, made a major find in a dreary mound called Spindletop, which spouted oil with such explosive force that it spewed tens of thousands of barrels into the air for days before it was capped. The Texas oil boom, which spawned five hundred new companies during its first year alone, redrew the industry map. By 1905, Texas accounted for more than a quarter of the crude oil being pumped in America. Popular antagonism toward Standard Oil in Texas prevented the trust from moving aggressively to exterminate these new competitors, though the trust did have several refining affiliates there. When the Mellons, who had financed Spindletop, offered to sell it to Standard Oil, they were bluntly informed by one director, “We’re out. After the way Mr. Rockefeller has been treated by the state of Texas, he’ll never put another dime in Texas.”13 Standard had to sit back and suffer the emergence of a host of competing producers, including Gulf Oil and the Texas Company, later called Texaco.
So while reformers noisily denounced the omnipotence of Standard Oil, its monopoly was swiftly crumbling at home and overseas. With additional oil strikes in California, Indian Territory (later Oklahoma), Kansas, and Illinois in the early 1900s, the industry became too vast and far-flung for even Standard Oil to control. It might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the antitrust cases brought against the trust in the early 1900s were not just belated but were fast becoming superfluous.
After a young anarchist assassinated William McKinley in Buffalo in September 1901, the country was swept by widespread trepidation that the shooting had formed part of a broader conspiracy. In Chicago, a traveling salesman captivated reporters with tales of a conversation that he had overheard at a local train depot where J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were mentioned as potential assassination targets. A heavily armed contingent of guards ringed Rockefeller’s residence and he remained incommunicado.
As it turned out, the gravest threat to the titan’s welfare emanated not from shadowy, gun-toting subversives but from the new White House occupant, forty-three-year-old Theodore Roosevelt. So long as McKinley was in the White House, Rockefeller had implicit faith that his business interests would be safeguarded. “America is truly to be congratulated upon Mr. McKinley’s election,” he had written in November 1900. “With financial interests on a sound basis, the next four years ought to accomplish much for the general welfare of the American people.”14 In Roosevelt, however, whom he credited as the “shrewdest of politicians,” Rockefeller knew he had a formidable rival.15
In a political world degraded by corrupt bosses and ward heelers, Teddy Roosevelt was that rara avis: a cultivated, well-to-do man. Descended from Dutch settlers who had emigrated to New Amsterdam before 1648 and later made a fortune in Manhattan real estate, Roosevelt, like many of his social peers, was scandalized by the sordid ethics of the new industrial class. As a New York state assemblyman in 1883, this aristocratic renegade reviled Jay Gould and his ilk as members of “the wealthy criminal class,” the first of many such rhetorical blasts.16 In 1886, Rockefeller contributed one thousand dollars to Roosevelt’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign only because he feared even more the single-tax policy espoused by one of his opponents, Henry George. Running for New York governor in 1898, Roosevelt accepted contributions from Henry Flagler and a number of Wall Street executives, whom he promptly double-crossed by enacting a tax on corporate franchises and supporting factory regulation. A militant preacher against class divisions, he warned that politicians ignored popular discontent about the trusts at their peril. If they stuck to laissez-faire neglect, he predicted, “then the multitudes will follow the crank who advocates an absurd policy, but who does advocate something.”17 A dyspeptic Henry Flagler spluttered: “I have no command of the English language that enables me to express my feelings regarding Mr. Roosevelt.”18 New York businessmen were so eager to get rid of Roosevelt that they eased him out of the governorship and into the vice presidential slot on the McKinley ticket in 1900. Roosevelt always believed that Standard Oil had formed part of the effort to export him from state politics.
By 1901, virtually all American industrialists were converts to the doctrine of cooperation preached by Rockefeller and feared Teddy Roosevelt’s reputation as a trustbuster, even if that anxiety was somewhat overblown. Like Rockefeller, the new president favored industrial consolidation to exploit economies of scale. Scoffing at calls by William Jennings Bryan and Robert La Follette to dismantle the trusts, he contended that any such course would thwart the economy’s natural tendency. “Much of the legislation not only proposed but enacted against trusts is not one whit more intelligent than the medieval bull against the comet, and has not been one particle more effective.”19 Roosevelt distinguished between bad trusts, which gouged consumers, and good trusts, which offered fair prices and good service. Instead of indiscriminate trust-busting, he concentrated on the worst offenders, and he singled out Standard Oil as emblematic of the abusive trusts.
When Roosevelt became president, Mark Hanna urged him to reassure skittish businessmen by avoiding provocative statements. With mischievous relish, the young president threw a dinner for J. P. Morgan, telling one cabinet member, “You see, it represents an effort on my part to become a conservative man in touch with the influential class and I think I deserve encouragement.”20 He sought the advice of Senator Aldrich and stayed on his best behavior around businessmen. In November 1901, after a friendly meeting with Roosevelt, an aide to Henry Flagler suggested that he meet with the president and patch up hard feelings between them. “I don’t believe there is a man in America who dreads such a thing as much as I do,” Flagler responded. “I am glad you saw him, for I am sure I don’t want to do it.”21 The statement captured the hubris that would soon be the downfall of Standard Oil, which treated the federal government as a meddlesome, inferior power.
Roosevelt trod a tightrope between radical reformers and trust kings. He had a clever way of delivering sharp, sudden blows against business, then following with conciliatory speeches. By nature, he was a political hybrid: Strident reformers brought out his conservatism while stand-pat businessmen brought out his crusading zeal. Much like Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, he introduced regulation in order to save the country from social unrest and forestall more extreme measures. He was accused of appropriating the policies of William Jennings Bryan, much as Franklin Roosevelt was later said to have undercut his left-wing critics by appropriating many of their policies.
In February 1902, as businessmen speculated about his true colors, Roosevelt showed that he had not mellowed. Without consulting Wall Street, he launched an antitrust suit against the Northern Securities Company, a holding company created by J. P. Morgan to consolidate railroads in the Pacific Northwest. Stunned businessmen sold stocks on the news. However aggrieved, J. P. Morgan did not declare open warfare on Roosevelt and later in the year helped him arbitrate an end to the anthracite coal strike. As Roosevelt turned the presidency into an honest broker between capital and labor, Morgan, unlike the more myopic Rockefeller, saw that Roosevelt stood ready to make concessions to cooperative businessmen.
In early 1903, Roosevelt supported the Elkins Act, which strengthened penalties for railroad rebates, and energetically promoted plans for a new Department of Commerce and Labor, which would include a Bureau of Corporations with broad powers to investigate the trusts. The new bureau was indispensable to his antitrust program, since the federal government was too small and thinly staffed to tackle the trusts on anything like an equal basis. In the 1890s, the entire Justice Department staff in Washington had only eighteen lawyers. To take on the industrial giants, Roosevelt needed more staff and, especially, more information.
As business interests fought the bureau, Roosevelt artfully manipulated the press to demonize his foes. In February 1903, he informed reporters that six senators had received telegrams from John D. Rockefeller urging defeat of the proposed bureau in these words: “We are opposed to the anti-trust legislation. Our counsel will see you. It must be stopped. John D. Rockefeller.” 22 This mighty revelation, as Roosevelt expected, caused a terrific commotion. Rockefeller’s name was now shorthand for corporate villainy so that his opposition to the bureau appeared conclusively to prove its need. As Teddy Roosevelt exclaimed jubilantly, “I got the bill through by publishing those telegrams and concentrating public attention on the bill.” 23
In truth, the telegrams were sent by Junior after prodding from Archbold. Shocked and embarrassed by the uproar, Junior resented Archbold for having dragged him into the ill-advised lobbying operation. That everybody believed his revered father had authored the telegrams only made it the more mortifying. “I came out of college something of an idealist,” he later reflected, “and I was immediately thrust into the tough give and take of the business world. I really wasn’t ready for it.” 24 No stranger to controversy, Rockefeller told his son to ignore his critics—“Let the world wag,” he said—but Junior kept brooding.25 He desperately wanted to rehabilitate the family name and live an irreproachable life, and here he was already wading hip-deep in Standard Oil muck. It was one of several events that finally convinced him that he was too squeamish for a business career.
Fiercely self-righteous, Teddy Roosevelt never forgot Standard Oil’s attempt to sabotage his new department, but he was a practical politician and recognized the value of winning Standard Oil support in his 1904 election campaign. Trying to mediate a truce between Standard Oil and the White House, Congressman Joseph C. Sibley told Archbold that the president thought the oil trust was hostile toward him, to which Archbold said facetiously, “I have always been an admirer of President Roosevelt and have read every book he ever wrote, and have them, in the best bindings, in my library.” Sibley relayed this flattering news to Roosevelt—minus, of course, the sarcasm. “The ‘book business’ fetched down the game at the very first shot,” Sibley reported back to Archbold. “You had better read, at least, the titles of those volumes to refresh your memory before you come over.”26 The rapprochement did not survive the 1904 election, for once the voting was over the president had an unpleasant surprise in store for Standard Oil.
In stalking Standard Oil, Teddy Roosevelt had no more potent ally than the press. In the spring of 1900, Rockefeller could still reassure a correspondent that favorable publicity about him overshadowed adverse coverage. “No man can succeed in any calling without provoking the jealousy and envy of some,” he observed. “The strong level-headed man will go straight forward and do his work, and history will rightly record.”27
Several trends gave birth to a newly assertive press. The gigantic trusts swelled the ranks of national advertisers, fattening the pages of many periodicals. Aided by new technologies, including linotype and photoengraving, glossy illustrated magazines streamed forth in such numbers that the era would be memorialized as the golden age of the American magazine. Paralleling this was the rise of mass-circulation newspapers, which catered to an expanding reading public. Competing in fierce circulation wars, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and other press barons plied readers with scandals and crusades. Nonetheless, the turn of the century marked more than the heyday of strident tabloids and yellow journalism, as sophisticated publications began to tackle complex stories, illustrating them lavishly and promoting them aggressively. For the first time in history, college graduates went to work on newspapers and magazines, bringing a new literary flair to a world once considered beneath the dignity of the educated elite.
Studded with star writers and editors, the most impressive periodical was McClure’s Magazine, which was started by Samuel S. McClure in 1893. In September 1901, the same month that Roosevelt ascended to the presidency, the magazine’s managing editor, Ida Minerva Tarbell, sailed to Europe to confer with McClure, then taking a rest from his strenuous life in Vevey, Switzerland. In her suitcase she carried an outline for a three-part series on the Standard Oil Company, though she wondered whether anyone would ever wade through a long, factual account of a business empire—a journalistic enterprise never assayed before.
The Standard Oil story was intertwined with Tarbell’s early life. Born in 1857 in a log cabin thirty miles from where Drake struck oil two years later, she was a true daughter of the Oil Regions. “I had grown up with oil derricks, oil tanks, pipe lines, refineries, oil exchanges,” she wrote in her memoirs.28 Her father, Franklin Tarbell, crafted vats from hemlock bark, a trade easily converted into barrel making after Drake’s discovery. The Tarbells lived beside his Rouseville barrel shop, and Ida as a child rolled luxuriously in the heaps of pine shavings. Down the hill from her house, across a ravine, lived an amiable young refiner named Henry H. Rogers, who later recalled seeing the young girl picking wildflowers on the slope.
Ida watched men with queer gleams in their eyes swarming through Rouseville en route to the miracle-turned-mirage of Pithole Creek. Franklin Tarbell set up a barrel shop there and cashed in on the boom before Pithole’s oil gave out. But Franklin’s prosperity was tenuous, based on an antiquated technology. Wooden barrels were soon replaced by iron tanks—the first of several times that Ida’s father was hurt by progress. He then sought his fortune as an independent oil producer and refiner, just as Rockefeller was consolidating the industry and snuffing out small operators.
In 1872, as an impressionable fifteen-year-old, Ida saw her paradise torn asunder by the South Improvement Company. As her father joined vigilantes who sabotaged the conspirators’ tanks, she thrilled to the talk of revolution. “On the instant the word became holy to me,” she later wrote. 29The SIC darkened her sunlit world. The father who once sang, played the Jew’s harp, and told funny stories became a “silent and stern” man, breeding in his sensitive daughter a lifelong hatred of Standard Oil. 30 For her, Standard Oil symbolized the triumph of grasping men over decent folk, like her father, who played fair and square.
She remembered the Titusville of her teenage years as divided between the valiant majority who resisted the octopus and the small band of opportunists who defected to it. On the street, Franklin pointed out turncoats to his daughter. “In those days I looked with more contempt on the man who had gone over to the Standard than on the one who had been in jail,” she said.31 After a time, Franklin’s family would not speak to blackguards who had sold out to Rockefeller. It revolted Ida that the trust could turn proud, independent entrepreneurs into beaten men taking orders from distant bosses.
Although Tarbell had a more genteel upbringing than Rockefeller, with more books, magazines, and small luxuries, one is struck by the similarity of the Rockefellers’ Baptist and the Tarbells’ Methodist households. The straitlaced Franklin Tarbell forbade cards and dancing and supported many causes, including the temperance movement. Ida attended prayer meetings on Thursday nights and taught an infant class of the Sunday school. Shy and bookish, she tended, like Rockefeller, to arrive at brilliant solutions by slow persistence.
What set Tarbell apart from Rockefeller was her intellectual daring and fearless curiosity. As a teenager, despite her family’s fundamentalism, she tried to prove the truth of evolution. By the time she enrolled at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1876—she was the sole girl in the freshman class of this Methodist school—she loved to peer through microscopes and planned to become a biologist. What distinguished her as a journalist was how she united a scientific attention to detail with homegrown moral fervor. After graduation, Tarbell taught for two years at the Poland Union Seminary in Poland, Ohio, then got a job on the editorial staff of The Chautauquan, an offshoot of the summer adult-education movement, which originated as a Methodist camp meeting. The fiery, militant Christian spirit of the movement made Ida even more high-minded in her expectations.
Tall and attractive, with dark hair, large gray eyes, and high cheekbones, Tarbell had an erect carriage and innate dignity and never lacked suitors. Yet she decided never to marry and to remain self-sufficient. She steeled herself against any feelings that might compromise her ambitions or integrity, and she walked through life, perhaps a little self-consciously, in a shining moral armor.
In 1891, the thirty-four-year-old Tarbell moved to Paris with friends and set up Bohemian quarters on the Left Bank—an unusually courageous decision for a young American woman at the time. She was determined to write a biography of the Girondist Madame Roland while selling freelance articles to Pennsylvania and Ohio newspapers and attending classes at the Sorbonne. Hardworking and levelheaded, she mailed off two articles during her first week in Paris alone. Even though the prim Tarbell was taken aback when lascivious Frenchmen flirted with her, she adored her time in Paris. She interviewed eminent Parisians, ranging from Louis Pasteur to Emile Zola, for American newspapers and won many admirers for her clean, accurate reportage; she claimed that her writing had absorbed some of the beauty and clarity of the French language. Still, she struggled on the “ragged edge of bankruptcy” and was susceptible when McClure wooed her as an editor of his new magazine.
While she was still in Paris, two events occurred that would lend an emotional tinge to her Standard Oil series. One Sunday afternoon in June 1892, she found herself roaming the Paris streets, unable to shake off a sense of doom. Later that afternoon, she read in the Paris newspapers that Titusville and Oil City had been ravaged by flood and fire, with 150 people either drowned or burned to death. The next day, her brother, Will, sent a single-word cable— “Safe”—relieving her anxieties, but the event reinforced a guilty feeling that she had neglected her family. In 1893, one of her father’s oil partners shot himself in despair because of poor business, forcing Franklin Tarbell to mortgage his house to settle the debts he inherited. Ida’s sister was in the hospital at the time, and “here was I across the ocean writing picayune pieces at a fourth of a cent a word while they struggled there,” she later recalled. “I felt guilty, and the only way I had kept myself up to what I had undertaken was the hope that I could eventually make a substantial return.”32While in Paris, Ida Tarbell laid hands on a copy of Wealth Against Commonwealth, where she rediscovered the author of her father’s woes: John D. Rockefeller.
Once in New York in 1894, Tarbell published two biographies in serial form that might have predisposed her to focus on a single figure at Standard Oil. Anticipating her portrait of Rockefeller, she presented Napoleon as a gifted megalomaniac, a great but flawed man lacking “that fine sense of proportion which holds the rights of others in the same solemn reverence which it demands for its own.”33 Lifted by this series, McClure’s circulation leaped from 24,500 in late 1894 to more than 100,000 in early 1895. Then followed Tarbell’s celebrated twenty-part series on Lincoln, which absorbed four years of her life (1895–1899) and boosted the magazine’s circulation to 300,000. She honed her investigative skills as she excavated dusty documents and forgotten courthouse records. In 1899, after being named managing editor of McClure’s, Tarbell took an apartment in Greenwich Village and befriended many literary notables, including Mark Twain, who would soon provide her with entrée to Henry H. “Hell Hound” Rogers. By this time, having sharpened her skills, she was set to publish one of the most influential pieces of journalism in American business history. The idea of writing about Standard Oil had fermented in her mind for many years before she worked for McClure’s. “Years ago, when I dreamed of some day writing fiction. . . . I had planned to write the great American novel, having the Standard Oil Company as a backbone!” 34
After receiving McClure’s blessing, Ida Tarbell launched the series in November 1902, feeding the American public rich monthly servings of Rockefeller’s past misdeeds. She went back to the early Cleveland days and laid out his whole career for careful inspection. All the depredations of a long career, everything Rockefeller had thought safely buried and forgotten, rose up before him in haunting and memorable detail. Before she was done, Ida Tarbell turned America’s most private man into its most public and hated figure.
The inspiration for publishing the anatomy of a major trust came from Samuel McClure, one of the most gifted windbags ever to occupy an editorial chair, who recruited writers with marathon speeches about his magazine’s greatness. High-strung, mercurial, seized by hourly brainstorms, McClure was described by Rudyard Kipling as a “cyclone in a frock coat.”35 Moving through life at breakneck speed, he seemed forever to be veering toward a nervous collapse. When McClure first materialized in Tarbell’s Paris apartment in 1892, he appeared distracted and breathless. “I’ve just ten minutes,” he told her, checking his watch, “must leave for Switzerland tonight to see [English physicist John] Tyndall.”36 Eager to sign up this startled young woman, the man with the tousled, sandy hair and electric blue eyes stayed for three hours. “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,” Tarbell once told a colleague apropos of McClure.37
That McClure hired a young, relatively inexperienced woman as his first full-time staff writer attests to his unorthodox style. He would collar every talented young writer in America—Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather—as well as more established figures, such as Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. O. Henry, Damon Runyon, and Booth Tarkington debuted in his pages. Yet it was perhaps in nonfiction that McClure left his most lasting imprint, for the best investigative reporters, from Lincoln Steffens to Ray Stannard Baker, gravitated to the magazine. Of his first office visit, Baker reminisced, “Even with S. S. McClure absent, I was in the most stimulating, yes intoxicating editorial atmosphere then existent in America—or anywhere else.”38 McClure watched over the creative chaos like a restless genie. “I can’t sit still,” he once told Lincoln Steffens. “That’s your job. I don’t see how you can do it.”39 Amid this swirling lunacy, Ida Tarbell sat in her high collar and shirtwaist dress, a model of calm sanity. As Lincoln Steffens recalled, she “would come to the office, smiling, like a tall, good-looking young mother to say, ‘Hush, children.’ ” 40
A man with a weakness for big, startling facts, McClure commissioned articles on new gadgets, scientific research, and futuristic technologies. This penchant for facts enabled him to spot Tarbell’s talent for enlivening a dry subject when she wrote an entertaining article about the paving of Parisian streets. Instead of the scandalmongering being offered by Pulitzer or Hearst, McClure wanted to analyze complex issues and explore them with scientific precision. Aiming at a comprehensive critique of American society, McClure concluded by 1901 that two great issues confronted the country: the growth of industrial trusts and political corruption. Before long, Lincoln Steffens was digging out municipal corruption in a series entitled “The Shame of the Cities” that started to run in October 1902. (In the February 24, 1905, issue, he skewered Senator Aldrich in a piece on Rhode Island corruption.) The choice of the proper trust to expose was a trickier issue. At first, Tarbell contemplated the steel trust and the sugar trust before the discovery of oil in California turned her attention to Standard Oil as the “most perfectly developed trust.”41 Since it had been investigated by various government bodies for three decades, it had left a rich documentary trail. At first projected for three issues, the Standard Oil series eventually stretched, by popular demand, to nineteen installments. It was inaugurated in November 1902 against an especially timely backdrop: An anthracite coal strike during the winter of 1902–1903 deprived the poor of coal, forcing them to heat their homes with oil, and the subsequent sharp rise in oil prices made energy an incendiary issue.
Although Tarbell pretended to apply her scalpel to Standard Oil with surgical objectivity, she was never neutral and not only because of her father. Her brother, William Walter Tarbell, had been a leading figure in forming the Pure Oil Company, the most serious domestic challenger to Standard Oil, and his letters to her were laced with anti-Standard venom. Complaining of the trust’s price manipulations in one letter, Will warned her, “Some of those fellows will get killed one of those days.”42 As Pure Oil’s treasurer in 1902, Will steered legions of Rockefeller enemies to his sister and even vetted her manuscripts. Far from cherishing her neutrality, Tarbell in the end adhered to the advice she had once received from Henry James: “Cherish your contempts.”43 Amazingly enough, nobody made an issue of Tarbell’s veritable partnership with her brother in exposing his chief competitor.
When Franklin Tarbell heard that his daughter was taking on the mighty Standard, he warned her that she was exposing herself to extreme danger. “Don’t do it, Ida—they will ruin the magazine,” he said and even broached the possibility they might maim or murder her—a far-fetched scenario but suggestive of the dread that the trust inspired.44 As her research began, she made a sentimental trip to Titusville, which rekindled her old animosity toward Standard Oil. Her father was slowly dying of stomach cancer while she was writing her series, and this might have further embittered her toward Rockefeller, however unfairly; Franklin Tarbell would die on March 1, 1905. Contrary to her father’s predictions, Ida inflicted far more damage on Standard Oil than she received in return. The closest she came to being threatened was at a Washington dinner party where Frank Vanderlip, a vice president of National City Bank, drew her into a side room to voice his strong displeasure with her project. Sensing a vague financial menace to McClure’s,she retorted, “Well, I am sorry, but of course that makes no difference to me.”45 In fact, what was most notable about Standard Oil’s response was its haughty, self-defeating silence.
Tarbell approached her work methodically, like a carpenter, but she soon reeled under the weight of documentary evidence. After a week spent combing through reports of the Industrial Commission in February 1902, she wrote despairingly, “The task confronting me is such a monstrous one that I am staggering a bit under it.”46 By June, having completed three installments, she confessed that the material had acquired an obsessive hold over her mind and even invaded her sleep. On the eve of a needed European vacation, she told her research assistant, “It has become a great bugbear to me. 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.”47
Upon her return from vacation, she met with Henry Demarest Lloyd at his seaside estate in Sakonnet, Rhode Island. He insisted that, despite the Interstate Commerce Commission, large shippers were still getting the same old freight rebates, although they carefully destroyed the evidence. He told her, barely containing his rage, that Rockefeller and his associates embodied “the most dangerous tendencies in modern life.” 48 At one point, when he learned that Ida Tarbell had met with Henry H. Rogers, Lloyd thought she might be in cahoots with the company and warned his Pennsylvania contacts to watch out for her. His doubts were instantly dispelled as the series got under way. “When you get through with ‘Johnnie,’ ” he applauded her in April 1903, “I don’t think there will be very much left of him except something resembling one of his own grease spots.” 49In the end, Lloyd handed over his abundant notes to her and urged George Rice, Lewis Emery, and other independents to talk with her. Having passed the torch, Henry Demarest Lloyd died in September 1903, before the series was finished.
Shortly before Tarbell began her research, Sam McClure tried to coax Mark Twain into editing a magazine, but Henry H. Rogers persuaded Twain to resist. As early as December 1901—almost a year before the series started to run— Rogers spotted an ad announcing McClure’s forthcoming series on Standard Oil and was startled that nobody at 26 Broadway had been contacted by the author. Concerned, he wrote to Twain, “It would naturally be supposed, that any person desiring to write a veritable history, would seek for information as near original sources as possible.”50 Fearing that Tarbell might be consorting with the enemy, Rogers suggested that Twain tell McClure that he should verify all statements with the trust before they were published. When Twain pressed for details about the series, McClure balked, saying, “You will have to ask Miss Tarbell.” To which Twain replied, “Would Miss Tarbell see Mr. Rogers?” 51 Tarbell had, of course, hoped to interview the top brass at Standard Oil, and when McClure burst into her office with the invitation, she was eager to seize the chance.
A veteran charmer, Hell Hound Rogers invited Tarbell for a two-hour chat at his home on East Fifty-seventh Street. She had never met a real captain of industry before and seemed entranced by his resemblance to Twain. “His big head with its high forehead was set off by a heavy shock of beautiful gray hair; his nose was aquiline, sensitive,” she wrote, still betraying admiration years later.52 Rogers seduced her with nostalgic recollections of the days when they were Rouseville neighbors. “That reminiscence of Henry H. Rogers is only one of several reasons I have for heartily liking as fine a pirate as ever flew his flag in Wall Street.”53
The upshot of the meeting was that Tarbell agreed to give Rogers a chance to react to any revelations she unearthed, and for two years she periodically visited him at 26 Broadway. These encounters had a quasi-clandestine aura, with the reporter whisked in one door and out another. In a spirit of guarded cooperation, Samuel Dodd assembled material for Tarbell, while Daniel O’Day passed along information on pipelines. Since Tarbell had spoken with Rogers for nearly a year before the series started, she held her breath when the first issue appeared in November 1902. “I rather expected him to cut me off when he realized that I was trying to prove that the Standard Oil Company was only an enlarged South Improvement Company.”54 To her astonishment, Rogers still received her and, while occasionally miffed by this or that article, he remained on friendly terms with her.
Rogers’s complaisance has always been a huge mystery, engendering two schools of thought. Tarbell cited Rogers’s self-interest. He and Archbold had been stung by accusations that they had conspired to blow up a Buffalo refinery that competed with Standard Oil. “That case is a sore point with Mr. Archbold and me,” he immediately told Tarbell. “I want you to go into it thoroughly.”55 Responding to his heightened sensitivity on this matter, she agreed to let him review anything she wrote about it. (Rogers’s strategy paid off as far as the Buffalo imbroglio was concerned.) In Tarbell’s view, Rogers was willing to see Standard Oil’s reputation sullied as long as his own was preserved.
Another school of thought hypothesized that Rogers was both deflecting attention from his own misdeeds and taking revenge against Rockefeller, who had disapproved of his stock-market speculations. This argument suggests that Rogers enjoyed Tarbell’s series as a rebuke to his colleague’s sanctimony. Rockefeller privately denounced Rogers as a traitor who had fed Tarbell false, garbled information to defame him.56 Many years later, after a confidential chat with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Allan Nevins recorded in a memo, “Junior thinks that [Rogers’s] part in the publication of Ida Tarbell’s book was far from unselfish; that he was secretly glad to see Rockefeller attacked, and supplied some of the material.”57 Tarbell’s own notes reveal that while Rogers often defended Rockefeller, he also kept the spotlight tightly focused on the founder and away from himself. Rogers did not terminate his meetings with Tarbell until February 1904, when she published a shocking account of railway agents spying on Standard Oil competitors—a practice that Rogers had strenuously denied. When she next arrived at 26 Broadway, he demanded, “Where did you get that stuff?” That tense, brief meeting ended their relationship.58
While stewing about Rogers, Rockefeller would have been equally shocked and wounded had he seen the acidulous comments made to Ida Tarbell by his old pal Henry M. Flagler, who portrayed the titan as petty and miserly. After their confidential talk, Tarbell recorded in her notes, “Mr. Flagler talked to me of J.D.R. Says he is the biggest little man and the littlest big man he ever knew. That he would give $100,000 one minute to charity and turn around and haggle over the price of a ton of coal. Says emphatically: ‘I have been in business with him 45 years and he would do me out of a dollar today—that is, if he could do it honestly.’ ”59 Though Flagler dispensed some pious claptrap about how “the Lord had prospered him,” Tarbell could not draw him into any serious, sustained discussion of Standard Oil history.60
From the start, sensing that Tarbell was full of malice toward Standard Oil, Archbold had refused to cooperate. As for Rockefeller, he was slow to fathom the magnitude of the gathering threat and had no notion that this magnificent journalist could wield her slingshot with such deadly accuracy. Having weathered thirty years of assaults in the courts and statehouses, he must have felt invulnerable. When associates clamored for a response to Tarbell, Rockefeller replied, “Gentlemen, we must not be entangled in controversies. If she is right we will not gain anything by answering, and if she is wrong time will vindicate us.”61 To sit through an extended grilling from Tarbell would have violated his lifelong approach to business. This was a tactical blunder, for in dodging Tarbell he inadvertently seemed to validate her portrait.
From the perspective of nearly a century later, Ida Tarbell’s series remains the most impressive thing ever written about Standard Oil—a tour de force of reportage that dissects the trust’s machinations with withering clarity. She laid down a clear chronology, provided a trenchant account of how the combine had evolved, and made the convoluted history of the oil industry comprehensible. In the dispassionate manner associated with McClure’s, she sliced open America’s most secretive business and showed all the hidden gears and wheels turning inside it. Yet however chaste and clearly reasoned her prose, it was always informed by indignation that throbbed just below the surface. It remains one of the great case studies of what a single journalist, armed with the facts, can do against seemingly invincible powers.
Tarbell is perhaps best appreciated in comparison with her predecessor, Henry Demarest Lloyd, who was sloppy with his facts, florid in his prose, and too quick to pontificate. A meticulous researcher, Tarbell wrote in a taut, spare language that conveyed a sense of precision and restraint—though she had more than her quota of strident moments. By writing in such a relatively cool style, she made her readers boil with anger. Instead of invoking political panaceas or sweeping ideological prescriptions, she appealed to the reader’s sense of common decency and fair play and was most effective where she showed something small and mean-spirited about the Standard Oil style of business.
Like Teddy Roosevelt, Tarbell did not condemn Standard Oil for its size but only for its abuses and did not argue for the automatic dismantling of all trusts; she pleaded only for the preservation of free competition in the marketplace. While she was by no means evenhanded, she was quick to acknowledge the genuine achievements of Rockefeller and his cohorts and even devoted one chapter to “The Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company.” “There was not a lazy bone in the organization, not an incompetent hand, nor a stupid head,” she wrote.62 It was the very fact that they could have succeeded without resorting to unethical acts that so exasperated her. As she said, “They had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me.”63
If Tarbell gave an oversimplified account of Standard Oil’s rise, her indictment was perhaps the more forceful for it. In the trust’s collusion with the railroads, the intricate system of rebates and drawbacks, she found her smoking gun, the irrefutable proof that Rockefeller’s empire was built by devious means. She was at pains to refute Rockefeller’s defense that everybody did it. “Everybody did not do it,” she protested indignantly. “In the nature of the offense everybody could not do it. The strong wrested from the railroads the privilege of preying upon the weak, and the railroads never dared give the privilege save under the promise of secrecy.”64 To the contention that rebates were still legal, Tarbell countered with the questionable theory that they violated the common law. She argued that Rockefeller had succeeded by imbuing subordinates with a ferocious desire to win at all costs, even if that meant trampling upon others. “Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair.”65 Tarbell rightly surmised that Standard Oil received secret kickbacks from the railroads on a more elaborate scale than its rivals did. This is abundantly borne out by Rockefeller’s private papers, which show that the practice was even more pervasive than Tarbell realized.
Beginning with the Cleveland Massacre of 1872, Tarbell showed that Rockefeller had taken over rival refineries in an orchestrated atmosphere of intimidation. She exposed the deceit of an organization that operated through a maze of secret subsidiaries in which the Standard Oil connection was kept secret from all but the highest-ranking employees. She sketched out many abuses of power by the Standard Oil pipelines, which used their monopoly position to keep refractory producers in line while favoring Standard’s own refineries. And she chronicled the terror tactics by which the trust’s marketing subsidiaries got retailers to stock their product exclusively. Like Lloyd, she also decried the trust’s threat to democracy and the subornation of state legislators, although she never guessed the depths of corruption revealed by Rockefeller’s papers.
Nevertheless, as Allan Nevins and other defenders of Rockefeller pointed out, Tarbell committed numerous errors, and her work must be cited with caution. To begin with, the SIC was initiated by the railroads, not Rockefeller, who doubted the plan’s efficacy. And for all its notoriety, the SIC did not cause the oil crisis of the early 1870s but was itself a response to the glut that forced almost everybody to operate at a loss. It is also true that, swayed by childhood memories, Tarbell ennobled the Oil Creek drillers, portraying them as exemplars of a superior morality. As she wrote: “They believed in independent effort—every man for himself and fair play for all. They wanted competition, loved open fight.”66 To support this statement, she had to overlook the baldly anticompetitive agreements proposed by the producers themselves. Far from being free-marketeers, they repeatedly tried to form their own cartel to restrict output and boost prices. And, as Rockefeller pointed out, they happily took rebates whenever they could. The world of the early oil industry was not, as Tarbell implied, a morality play of the evil Standard Oil versus the brave, noble independents of western Pennsylvania, but a harsh dog-eat-dog world.
Though billed as a history of Standard Oil, the Tarbell series presented Rockefeller as the protagonist and center of attention. Tarbell made Standard Oil and Rockefeller interchangeable, even when covering the period after Rockefeller retired. Sometimes it is hard to tell whether Rockefeller is a real person or a personification of the trust. Significantly, Tarbell chose for her epigraph the famous line from Emerson’s essay on self-reliance, “An Institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” When Henry Rogers questioned this approach, Tarbell noted the dramatic effect of focusing on one individual, writing in her notes after the meeting, “Illustrate it by Napoleon work and the effort to keep the attention centered on Napoleon, never mentioning anybody if I could help it.”67This great-man approach to history gave a human face to the gigantic, amorphous entity known as Standard Oil but also turned the full force of public fury on Rockefeller. It did not acknowledge the bureaucratic reality of Standard Oil, with its labyrinthine committee system, and stigmatized Rockefeller to the exclusion of his associates. So Flagler came off relatively unscathed, even though he had negotiated the secret freight contracts that bulk so large in the McClure’s exposé.
However pathbreaking in its time and richly deserving of its accolades, the Tarbell series does not, finally, stand up as an enduring piece of history. The more closely one examines it, the more it seems a superior screed masquerading as sober history. In the end, Tarbell could not conquer her nostalgia for the Titusville of her girlhood, that lost paradise of heroic friends and neighbors who went forth doughtily to do battle with the all-devouring Standard Oil dragon.
The most celebrated and widely quoted charge that Tarbell made against Rockefeller was the least deserved: that he had robbed Mrs. Fred M. Backus— forever known to history as “the Widow Backus”—blind when buying her Cleveland lubricating plant in 1878. If every melodrama needs a poor, lorn widow, cheated by a scheming cad, then Mrs. Backus perfectly fitted Tarbell’s portrait of Rockefeller. “If it were true,” Rockefeller later conceded, it “would represent a shocking instance of cruelty in crushing a defenceless woman. It is probable that its wide circulation and its acceptance as true by those who know nothing of the facts has awakened more hostility against the Standard Oil Company and against me personally than any charge which has been made.”68
The background of the story is simple. In his early Cleveland days, Rockefeller had befriended Fred M. Backus, who worked as a bookkeeper in his office and taught in the Sunday school of their church. In time, Backus married, had three children, and started a small lubricating company. In 1874, the forty-year-old Backus died, likely from consumption, and his widow inherited an obsolete plant that consisted of little more than a primitive cluster of sheds, stills, and tanks. Its hilltop site meant that raw materials had to be hauled up the slope at great expense, and then the lubricating oils had to be carted down the same steep path—not the most efficient of venues. Before it entered the lubricating business, Standard Oil had tolerated this marginal operation. When it branched out into lubricating oils and greases in the late 1870s, it absorbed three small lubricating companies, of which Backus Oil was probably the most backward. In fact, the Backus operation was so outmoded that Standard Oil eventually shut it down. This did not prevent the Widow Backus from stirring up a rabid national controversy about Rockefeller’s supposed theft of her priceless plant.
When Standard Oil first approached her about the purchase, she insisted upon dealing with Rockefeller who, for old time’s sake, agreed to meet her in her house. Appealing to her status as a widow and trusting to his gentlemanly honor, she pleaded for a fair price for her property. As she recalled, “he promised, with tears in his eyes, that he would stand by me in this transaction, and that I should not be wronged. . . . I thought that his feelings were such on the subject that I could trust him and that he would deal honourably by me.”69 Backus told a friend that Rockefeller suggested that they kneel together in prayer. Up until this point, her story tallied closely with Rockefeller’s, who said that he had been “moved by kindly consideration to an old employee.”70
While Backus wanted Rockefeller to conduct the negotiations for her plant, he knew nothing about lubricants and sent his associates instead. According to Backus, Rockefeller’s hirelings bilked her unmercifully. She valued her operation between $150,000 and $200,000, whereas the Standard Oil people refused to pay more than $79,000—$19,000 for the oil on hand, plus $60,000 for the factory and goodwill. (Out of regard for Backus, Rockefeller had had his appraisers bump up this last figure by $10,000.) Backus’s negotiator, Charles H. Marr, later swore that his client, in an estimated inventory of her assets, had written down $71,000 for plant and goodwill—not much more than Rockefeller finally paid. Yet she grew incensed over the purchase price and drafted a savage letter to Rockefeller, accusing him of double-dealing, to which he made the following reply:
In regard to the reference that you make as to my permitting the business of the Backus Oil Company to be taken from you, I say that in this, as in all else that you have written . . . you do me most grievous wrong. It was of but little moment to the interests represented by me whether the business of the Backus Oil Company was purchased or not. I believe that it was for your interest to make the sale, and am entirely candid in this statement, and beg to call your attention to the time, some two years ago, when you consulted Mr. Flagler and myself as to selling out your interests to Mr. Rose, at which time you were desirous of selling at considerably less price, and upon time, than you have now received in cash, and which sale you would have been glad to have closed if you could have obtained satisfactory security for the deferred payments.
He then pointed out that the $60,000 paid for the property was two or three times the cost of constructing equal or better facilities—a statement corroborated by a Mr. Maloney, superintendent of the Backus plant. “I believe that if you would reconsider what you have written in your letter . . . you must admit having done me great injustice, and I am satisfied to await upon [your] innate sense of right for such admission.”71 In closing, Rockefeller offered to restore her business in return for the money or give her stock in the company at the same price paid by Standard Oil. It was an eminently fair offer, and yet the histrionic Backus flung the letter in the fire.
Because Ida Tarbell insisted upon reviving this hoary story—Henry Demarest Lloyd had already wrung tears from readers with it—in 1905 Rockefeller’s attorneys leaked to the press a letter written by H. M. Backus, the widow’s brother-in-law. Having lived with his sister-in-law during the period in question, he was present the day Rockefeller paid his visit. As he told Rockefeller, “I know of the ten thousand dollars that was added to the purchase price of the property at your request, and I know that you paid 3 times the value of the property, and I know that all that ever saved our company from ruin was the sale of its property to you, and I simply want to easy my mind by doing justice to you by saying so.”72 It was exceedingly lucky for Backus that she bowed out of business, for Standard Oil built more modern lubricating plants, marketed 150 different lubricants, and drove prices far below the price at which she could have operated profitably. Had she stayed in business, she would have been bankrupt within a few years.
By investing her proceeds in Cleveland real estate instead, Backus, far from being reduced to filth and misery, became an extremely rich woman. According to Allan Nevins, she was worth approximately $300,000 at her death. 73 Nevertheless, the supposed theft of Backus Oil became an idée fixe, and she dredged up the story for anyone who cared to listen. The notion of Rockefeller gleefully ruining a poor widow was such a good story, with so fine a Dickensian ring, that gullible reporters gave it fresh circulation for many years.
If Tarbell perpetuated one myth about Rockefeller, she also had the honesty to debunk another: that Rockefeller had blown up a competing refinery in Buffalo. It was this allegation that so upset Henry Rogers that he cooperated with Tarbell to clear his name. Swallowed whole by Lloyd and constantly brandished by the World, the tale was a hardy perennial of the anti–Standard Oil literature.
Like the Backus case, the incident dated back to the period when Standard Oil entered the lubricating business in the late 1870s. The trust had coveted the Vacuum Oil Works in Rochester, New York, owned by a father-and-son team, Hiram and Charles Everest. One day, John Archbold shepherded Hiram Everest into Rockefeller’s office and asked him point-blank to name a price for his firm. When Everest obliged, Archbold threw back his head and roared with laughter, dismissing the figure as absurd. Taking a suaver approach, Rockefeller leaned forward, touched Everest on the knee, and said, “Mr. Everest, don’t you think you would be making a mistake to go into a fight with young, active men, who mean to develop the entire petroleum industry?” When Everest shot back that he was a fighter, Rockefeller just smiled.
Everest eventually realized he was dealing with an immovable force and sold a three-fourths interest in his firm to Henry Rogers, John Archbold, and Ambrose McGregor, acting as agents for Standard Oil. Because the Everests remained the managers, the Standard executives were involved only tangentially. In 1881, a trio of Vacuum employees—J. Scott Wilson, Charles B. Matthews, and Albert Miller—defected to start a rival refinery, the Buffalo Lubricating Oil Company. They brazenly planned to re-create their old firm by transferring technology, poaching clients, and copying processes patented by Vacuum. When the Everests learned of this, they threatened legal action. Albert Miller repented and sought help from Hiram Everest. Together, they consulted a Rochester lawyer, and at this meeting Everest allegedly floated the idea of Miller sabotaging the new plant: “Suppose he should arrange the machinery so it would bust up, or smash up, what would the consequences be?” 74 A tall edifice of speculation would be erected on this query.
According to a later conspiracy charge, on June 15, 1881, Miller ordered the fireman at the Buffalo plant to heat the still to such explosive temperatures that the heavy crude oil began to stir and boil. Pretty soon, the brickwork cracked, the safety valve blew off, and a large volume of gas hissed out—without kindling a fire. A week later, Miller met in New York with Hiram Everest and Henry Rogers, who packed him off to work at a California cannery. When the Everests filed patent-infringement suits against the Buffalo refinery, Charles Matthews, ringleader of the renegades, retaliated with his own civil suit, charging a conspiracy to blow up his Buffalo works and seeking $250,000 in damages. The three Standard Oil worthies on the Vacuum board—Rogers, Archbold, and McGregor—despite the distant nature of their involvement in Rochester, were indicted along with the Everests. Only vaguely aware of the brouhaha, never having met Miller, Rockefeller was roped into the case for publicity purposes and subpoenaed as a prosecution witness. The case always struck him as a petty irritant, distracting him from more pressing matters. Nothing in Rockefeller’s papers suggests that he regarded the suit as anything other than outright extortion.75
In May 1887, Rockefeller sat captive in a packed Buffalo courtroom for eight days. Resentful of being turned into a public spectacle, he felt he was being served up as a sideshow freak to “this curious class of wonder-worshippers, the class whom P. T. Barnum capitalized [on] and made his fortune out of.”76 When Rockefeller testified, he displayed, as always, total forgetfulness, but in this instance he really knew little about the case. At the end of eight days, the judge dropped charges against Rogers, Archbold, and McGregor. While Rogers hugged a bunch of pansies given by a well-wisher, Rockefeller, in a rare display of public fury, rose from his seat, jaw clenched, and said, “I have no congratulations to offer you, Rogers. What should be done with people who bring an action against men in this way—what?” Wheeling about, he shook his fist at Charles Matthews. Then, muttering “what an unheard-of-thing,” he strode briskly from the courtroom, his retinue in tow. In later years, he fulminated against Matthews as a “scheming, trouble-making blackmailer” who offered to sell his refinery to Standard Oil for $100,000 and only initiated his nuisance suit after being rebuffed.77
The Buffalo suit, in truth, had scant merit. The prosecution never established that an explosion had taken place or even that a high flame was necessarily hazardous when starting up the still. Though the Everests were convicted and fined $250 apiece, this small figure mirrored the jurors’ belief that the Everests did not conspire to blow up the refinery and were guilty only of luring away Albert Miller. If Henry Rogers cooperated with Ida Tarbell for the sake of vindication in the Buffalo case, he was amply rewarded. She stated categorically: “As a matter of fact, no refinery was burned in Buffalo, nor was it ever proved that Mr. Rogers knew anything of the attempts the Everests made to destroy Matthews’ business.”78 Yet the notion that Rockefeller enjoyed blowing up rival plants so tickled the popular fancy that it remained enshrined as a story much too good to retire, and it was duly revived, along with the musty canard about the Widow Backus, by Matthew Josephson in his 1934 book The Robber Barons.
By the third installment in January 1903, President Roosevelt himself was voraciously reading Tarbell’s articles and even sent her a flattering note. Her celebrity spread with each issue, and her level gaze stared out from countless newspaper profiles. “The way you are generally esteemed and reverenced pleases me tremendously,” McClure told her. “You are today the most generally famous woman in America.”79 That she had succeeded in a traditionally masculine field only added to her mystique.
Samuel McClure would let a series run as long as the public kept snatching up copies. As Tarbell summarized this policy, “No response—no more chapters. A healthy response—as many chapters as the material justified.”80 Hence, her series was open-ended and profited from the tremendous crescendo of attention, which drew more and more Rockefeller critics from the woodwork. The circulation of McClure’s had risen to 375,000 by the time Tarbell’s series was finished. Though the series was published as a two-volume book in November 1904, she then capped it with a scathing two-part character study of Rockefeller in McClure’s in July and August of 1905.
It does not detract from her achievement to state that she enjoyed the services of a first-rate research assistant, John M. Siddall. Short, pudgy, and bespectacled, the young Siddall was an experienced hand, having been a cub reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealerand secretary to the Cleveland Board of Education during Mayor Tom Johnson’s reform administration. Based in Cleveland, he not only supplied Tarbell with numberless facts but charged her imagination. “I tell you this John D. Rockefeller is the strangest, most silent, most mysterious, and most interesting figure in America,” he wrote to her. “The people of this country know nothing about him. A brilliant character study of him would make a tremendous trump card for McClure’s.”81 At first, Siddall thought Rockefeller cold and humorless but had to modify the caricature. “My informant states that John has a real delightful way of cultivating the speaking acquaintance of all sorts of people—rich and poor, black and white. That only illustrates again the marvelous complexity of Rockefeller’s character.”82
One of the first and most shocking revelations dug up by Tarbell and Siddall came from a teenage boy who had been assigned to burn records at a Standard Oil plant each month. He was about to incinerate some forms one night when he noticed the name of a former Sunday-school teacher who was an independent refiner and Standard Oil rival. Leafing through the documents sent for burning, he realized that they were secret records, obtained from the railroads, documenting the shipments of rival refiners. Tarbell knew Standard Oil was ruthless, but she was shocked by this outright criminal activity. “There was a littleness about it that seemed utterly contemptible compared to the immense genius and ability that had gone into the organization,” she said.83 At this point, she realized she was being snookered by Henry Rogers.
Tarbell and Siddall were willing to take their own moral shortcuts to expose Rockefeller. To spy on him, Siddall had a friend from the Plain Dealer impersonate a Sunday-school teacher to sneak into the annual church picnic at Forest Hill. At Siddall’s behest, an old Rockefeller friend, Hiram Brown, pumped the mogul on several matters, including his reaction to the McClure’s series. At the mention of Tarbell’s name, Rockefeller steadied himself with a long breath. “I tell you, Hiram, things have changed since you and I were boys. The world is full of socialists and anarchists. Whenever a man succeeds remarkably in any particular line of business, they jump on him and cry him down.”84 To secure photos, Siddall had a friend pose as an agent of some distant Rockefeller relatives to obtain snapshots of the magnate from Cleveland photo studios. “Now of course these pictures were got under false pretenses,” Siddall reminded Tarbell, “and we must protect our over-zealous friend.”85
Since Rockefeller banned Tarbell from his presence, Siddall searched for a way that she could obtain a firsthand glimpse. During summers at Forest Hill, Rockefeller appeared in public only for Sunday services at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. By the early 1900s, this event had taken on the air of a circus spectacle as hundreds of people massed outside the church to view him. As the Tarbell series swelled the gaping throngs, Rockefeller would gingerly approach his church bodyguard before the service and ask, “Are there any of our friends, the reporters, here?”86 Even though Pinkerton detectives mingled with the crowd, Rockefeller now felt anxious about public exposure. Sometimes, he confessed, he wanted to bolt from the service, but he feared that people would brand him a coward.87 At one Friday-evening prayer service, when a radical agitator sat opposite him all evening, his hand stuffed menacingly in his pocket, Rockefeller grew so rattled that he put away his planned speech on socialism.
It probably hurt his image that he appeared in public only at church, for it played to the stereotype of a hypocrite cloaking himself in sanctity. In fact, his motivation for churchgoing was quite simple: Aside from the spiritual pleasure of prayer, he was loath to give up contact with ordinary people, many of them old friends. The church retained many blue-collar members, enabling Rockefeller to chat amiably with a blacksmith or mechanic. Such everyday experiences increasingly eluded him as he withdrew behind the high gates of his estates.
On Sunday, June 14, 1903, John Siddall got a windfall beyond his most feverish hopes when Rockefeller not only appeared but delivered a short “Children’s Day” talk at the Sunday school. “If I had been able to foretell what happened yesterday I should have advised you to come from Titusville to spend Sunday in Cleveland,” Siddall told Tarbell.88 He described Rockefeller, in ministerial coat and silk hat, sitting before the pulpit and surveying the crowd apprehensively, as if fearful for his safety. “He bows his head and mutters his prayer, and sings the hymns, and nods his head, and claps his hands in a sort of a mechanical way. It’s all work to him—a part of his business. He thinks that after he has done this for an hour or two he has warded off the devil for another week.”89 Only months later did Siddall learn of the anonymous charity Rockefeller practiced each Sunday morning, handing out money in small envelopes to needy congregants. “Doesn’t this shake your belief in the theory of pure hypocrisy?” Siddall then asked Tarbell, noting the curiously compartmentalized nature of Rockefeller’s mind. “In one part is legitimate business, in another corrupt business, in another political depravity, in another—somewhere in his being— religious experience and life.”90 This was a richer, more accurate appraisal of Rockefeller than that contained in his earlier, reductive gibe.
In the early fall, Siddall found out that Rockefeller, before returning to New York, would deliver a short farewell address at the Sunday school, and he begged Ida Tarbell to attend. “I will see that we have seats where we will have a full view of the man,” he promised her. “You will get him in action.”91 They planned to squeeze between them an illustrator, George Varian, who would execute rapid sketches of Rockefeller. Tarbell felt “a little mean” about secretly ambushing Rockefeller in church, and she dreaded that they would be caught. To prevent this, she asked Siddall to pack the pew with three or four tall confederates who would shield Varian and his notebook.
When Tarbell and Siddall arrived at the Sunday-school room that morning, she wrinkled her nose at the shabby surroundings, “a dismal room with barbaric dark green paper with big gold designs, cheap stained-glass windows, awkward gas fixtures.”92 Suddenly, Siddall gave her a violent dig in the ribs. “There he is,” he breathed. The hairless figure in the doorway did not disappoint Tarbell. As she wrote, “There was an awful age in his face—the oldest man I had ever seen, I thought, but what power!”93 He slowly doffed his coat and hat, slid a black skullcap over his bald head, and sat flush against the wall, giving him an unobstructed view of the room—which Tarbell thought a security precaution. During his brief talk to the children, she was impressed by the clear strength of his voice. After the Sunday-school speech, the McClure’s contingent packed a church pew in the auditorium for the service. Self-conscious about being there, Tarbell was convinced that Rockefeller would pick her out of the crowd, but he apparently did not.
In her 1905 character study, Tarbell stressed Rockefeller’s fidgety behavior, the way he craned his neck and scanned the room, as if searching for assassins. “My two hours study of Mr. Rockefeller aroused a feeling I had not expected, which time has intensified. I was sorry for him. I know no companion so terrible as fear. Mr. Rockefeller, for all the conscious power written in face and voice and figure, was afraid, I told myself, afraid of his own kind.”94 It did not occur to her that she had contributed to that fear. This edgy behavior was vitally important for Tarbell because it suggested that Rockefeller had a guilt-ridden conscience, that God was torturing him, that he could not enjoy his ill-gotten wealth; the ordinary reader could find no more satisfying fantasy. “For what good this undoubted power of achievement, for what good this towering wealth, if one must be forever peering to see what is behind!”95 It certainly never occurred to Tarbell that Rockefeller might be searching the congregation for charity recipients.
Despite her fears, Tarbell and her associates evaded detection at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church that Sunday morning. It was the only time that Tarbell ever actually stood in Rockefeller’s presence. Ironically, he never knowingly set eyes on the woman who did more than any other person to transmogrify his image.
By the end of her nineteen-part series, Tarbell had come to regard Rockefeller as the embodiment of evil. She had largely maintained a clinical tone, despite many shrill digressions, but in the poisonous two-part character study of July and August 1905, she allowed her vengeful feelings to blossom. Throwing off any pose of objectivity, she found in Rockefeller “concentration, craftiness, cruelty, and something indefinably repulsive.” She described him as a “living mummy,” hideous and diseased, leprous and reptilian, his physiognomy blighted by moral degeneracy. The pious, churchgoing image that Rockefeller projected was only a “hypocritical facade brilliantly created by the predatory businessman.”
The disease which in the last three or four years has swept Mr. Rockefeller’s head bare of hair, stripped away even eyelashes and eyebrows, has revealed all the strength of his great head. . . . The big cheeks are puffy, bulging unpleasantly under the eyes, and the skin which covers them has a curiously unhealthy pallor. It is this puffiness, this unclean flesh, which repels, as the thin slit of a mouth terrifies. . . . Mr. Rockefeller may have made himself the richest man in the world, but he has paid. Nothing but paying ever ploughs such lines in a man’s face, ever sets his lips to such a melancholy angle.96
Rockefeller could brush off Tarbell’s critique of his business methods as biased, but he was deeply pained by the character study. He was furious that Tarbell converted his alopecia, which had produced so much suffering, into a sign of moral turpitude. He was no less upset by her charge that he was ill at ease in his church, for this struck at the heart of his lifelong faith. As he said later, he was not fearful in church “because there was no place where I felt more at home in a public assembly than in this old church, where I had been since a boy of fourteen years of age and my friends were all about me.”97 The patent cruelty of the character study steeled Rockefeller against Tarbell’s valid strictures about his business methods. For Rockefeller, this malice was the final proof he needed of Ida Tarbell’s bias against him.
As legions of Rockefeller enemies sought interviews with Tarbell, she was bound to encounter the most vituperative foe, his brother Frank. Refusing to forgive John after the Corrigan affair, Frank still popped up in the press from time to time to deliver flaming imprecations against John. During the McClure’s series, he was quoted by a Washington paper as saying that “the fear of kidnapping [had] become a mania” with his brother and that “armed men accompany him everywhere ready to repel any effort to capture him.”98 In fact, Frank had not set eyes on his brother in years and could only parrot gossip.
Tarbell was always coy about how she met Frank Rockefeller, but her papers tell a startling tale. Although Siddall’s brother had been one of Frank’s attorneys, this had not helped him to line up an interview. Then a breakthrough occurred in January 1904, when Siddall learned that the Tarbell series had won two unexpected admirers: Frank’s daughter and son-in-law, Helen and Walter Bowler. Using Mr. Bowler as a go-between, Frank stipulated his conditions for a tête-à-tête with Tarbell: “I want no member of my family to know of this interview. Nobody is ever to know of it. I shall see Miss Tarbell in my Garfield Building office. No one is to be present. No clerk is to know who Miss T is.”99
Following instructions, Tarbell even donned a disguise. It would be one of the most disturbing interviews of her long career. Though Frank seemed candid, he chewed tobacco and talked incontinently, spewing forth bile against his brother. At moments, his self-pitying harangues suggested a deranged man. Afterward, Tarbell jotted down impressions, including his off-the-record statements, for her files:
He seemed dimly conscious that it was unnatural and monstrous to talk to me, and yet to be so bitter that he could not restrain himself. He began to talk of his brother by referring to him as “that individual.” “I have nothing to do with that individual,” he said. “I never want to see him. I have not seen him but once for eight years, and that was by accident. He has ruined my life. Nearly drove my wife insane. Two years ago I had to put her in a sanitarium, where she stayed for nearly a year, and this entirely came of this man’s vindictive feeling of me.” He says, “I have read every one of your articles. Some of them I have read two or three times. I have never known of any literary subject which interested me so much, or interested the people with whom I came in contact so much.” 100
Unaware of the stormy history between the two brothers, Tarbell confessed that Frank was the last person she had expected to volunteer as a source. A brisk, businesslike journalist, she was appalled by the ugly emotions he betrayed, however much she welcomed his information. Predictably, Frank dragged out his self-serving version of the Corrigan case. He portrayed John as a sadist who took pleasure in lending people money then seizing their collateral and destroying them when they did not repay: “Cleveland could be paved with the mortgages that he has foreclosed on people who were in a tight place.”101 Though Tarbell came to believe that John D. had acted in an ethical manner with Corrigan, she quoted so freely from the original lawsuit against Rockefeller as to obscure that she was siding with him.
Aside from the Corrigan case, Frank contributed few facts and preferred to vent his spleen. He told Tarbell that John had only two ambitions, to be very rich and very old, and he even chastised Cettie, calling her a “narrow-minded, stingy and pious” woman, whose greatest goal was “to be known as a good Christian, and to impress the world with the piety and domestic harmony of the family.”102 According to Frank, Cettie was a crafty, avaricious hypocrite who ensured that John’s charities were widely publicized and tinged with the proper religious coloring. Touching up this gruesome portrait, Frank later told one of Tarbell’s assistants: “[John] has the delusion that God has appointed him to administer all the wealth in the world, and in his efforts to do this he has destroyed men right and left. I tell you that when you publish this story the people will arise and stone him out of the community. . . . He is a monster.”103
Frank had two other shockers for Tarbell. First, he told her that “the real reason that I have sent for you is that I want some day to write the life of my brother. I cannot write. You can do the kind of thing I want, and I want to know if you will do it using my material.”104 Tarbell did not quite picture herself as Frank Rockefeller’s ghostwriter. On the other hand, she did not wish to alienate him and mumbled something about helping him if her editorial work allowed the time. Then Frank came up with a remarkable finale to his ravings about his brother: “I know you think I am bitter and that it is unnatural, but this man has ruined my life. Why I have not killed him I do not understand. It must be that there is a God who prevented me doing such a thing, for there have been a hundred times when, if I had met him on the street, I know that I should have shot him.”105
Tarbell did not quote these background statements and preserved Frank’s anonymity. But such lunacy should have told her to exercise extreme care in dealing with the Corrigan case. Instead, in a lapse in judgment, she used Frank’s material in such a slipshod, misleading manner that Rockefeller justly accused her of slanting the story.
Perhaps the main reason that Frank did not blow out his brother’s brains was that he did not want to murder one of his main bankers. Unable to curb his speculative appetite, Frank took another emergency loan of $184,000 from William during the 1907 panic. What Frank did not know—but surely must have suspected—was that John had guaranteed half the loan, secured by eight hundred head of cattle and one hundred mules on Frank’s Kansas ranch. In fact, John D. carried this debt until Frank died, though a moment came in early 1912 when Frank again sounded off about his brother to reporters and John dispatched a lawyer to inform his ungrateful brother about the true source of the money that had so long sustained him.
For nearly three years, from November 1902 to August 1905, Ida Tarbell fired projectiles at Rockefeller and Standard Oil without taking fire in return. As one newspaper wondered aloud, “Is the Pen Mightier than the Money-Bag. . . . Is Ida M. Tarbell, weak woman, more potent than John D. Rockefeller millionaire?”106 As the Tarbell series demonstrated, the new media possessed a power that rivaled that of the business institutions they covered. Paradoxically, the more Tarbell invoked the malevolent power of Standard Oil, the more she proved the reverse. At moments, Tarbell herself was startled by the kid-glove treatment. She wrote to Siddall in February 1903, “It is very interesting to note now, that the thing is well under way, and I have not been kidnapped or sued for libel as some of my friends prophesied, people are willing to talk freely to me.” 107
From today’s perspective, when corporations have teams of publicists who swing into action at the first whiff of trouble, Standard Oil’s muted reaction appears to be a perplexing miscalculation. Tarbell got enough wrong that a modern public-relations expert could have dented her credibility and shaken Samuel McClure with the threat of a libel suit. Rockefeller could, for instance, have exposed the hoax of the Widow Backus story. In the spring of 1905, he contemplated a lawsuit against Tarbell for alleging that he had perjured himself by denying knowledge of a SouthernImprovement Company when his interrogator had garbled the name of the South Improvement Company. After Tarbell published her character study of Rockefeller, he authorized Virgil Kline to contest her treatment of the Corrigan case. Kline pointed out that Tarbell’s fallacious account was drawn largely from the original petition filed against Rockefeller, not the exculpatory testimony that followed in the case. “Mr. Kline says I used charges made in the petition instead of in the testimony,” Tarbell wrote, unfazed, in an internal memo at the time. “I did, and I see no reason why I should not have done so.” 108 Tough challenges from Rockefeller might have blunted Tarbell’s confidence and made readers question her sources.
The McClure’s series showed that the public-be-damned attitude that had served industrial barons well in the nineteenth century now made them easy prey for investigative journalists who fed a public famished for revelations of misconduct. The schizoid American worship of millionaires was shot through with envy and a desire to see these demigods punished and desecrated. So why did Rockefeller stick to his self-defeating silence? One side of him simply did not want to be bothered by libel suits. “Life is short,” he wrote to Parmalee Prentice, “and we have not time to heed the reports of foolish and unprincipled men.”109 He was also afraid that if he sued for libel, it would dignify the charges against him and only prolong the controversy. Strolling about Forest Hill one day, a friend suggested that he respond to the Tarbell slanders. At that moment, he spotted a worm crawling across their path. “If I step on that worm I will call attention to it,” he said. “If I ignore it, it will disappear.”110 In certain instances, he was muzzled from responding because of his involvement in ongoing court cases.
But the main reason for Rockefeller’s silence was that he couldn’t dispute just a few of Tarbell’s assertions without admitting the truth of many others, and a hard core of truth did lie behind the scattered errors. When Gates urged him to rebut Tarbell on the Backus affair and the SIC perjury charge, Rockefeller agreed he could do so but that “going further than the Backus and the South Improvement Company cases may involve the necessity of going thoroughly into the whole book”—and he did not wish to do that.111Two months later, Tarbell herself reached a similar conclusion in McClure’s: “His self-control has been masterful—he knows, nobody better, that to answer is to invite discussion, to answer is to call attention to the facts in the case.” 112
Rockefeller claimed that he had not even deigned to glance at McClure’s, a claim inadvertently refuted by Adella Prentiss Hughes, Cettie’s nurse and companion, who traveled with the Rockefellers on a western train trip in the spring of 1903. “He liked to have things read to him, and during these months I read aloud Ida Tarbell’s diatribes,” she recalled. “He listened musingly, with keen interest and no resentment.”113 He tossed out wisecracks about “his lady friend” or “Miss Tarbarrel” but would not be drawn into serious discussion about her. “Not a word,” he said. “Not a word about that misguided woman.”114 His office, however, kept him well apprised of her allegations as they appeared.
Nonetheless, it is true that Rockefeller never formally sat down and read her searing indictment. “I don’t think I ever read Ida Tarbell’s book: I may have skimmed it,” he said a decade later. “I wonder what it amounts to, anyway, in the minds of people who have no animus?” 115 When William O. Inglis began to interview Rockefeller in 1917 and read aloud portions of Tarbell’s work, it grew clear that Rockefeller had only a vague familiarity with the series. It was equally clear that beneath his pose of stoic fortitude he was still angry. His private comments about her were marked by a heavy sniggering and dry mockery that he never exhibited in public. “How clever she is, compared with poor Lloyd, who was always hysterical! She makes her picture clear and attractive, no matter how unjust she is. She really could write.”116 At the same time, he was convinced that this daughter of Oil Creek was “animated more with jealousy begotten by the inability of her father and her brother and some of her neighbors to do as well as the Standard Oil Company.”117 Far from making him repent and reconsider, the Tarbell series hardened his faith in his career. How dismayed Tarbell would have been to find Rockefeller writing to Archbold in July 1905: “I never appreciated more than at present the importance of our taking care of our business—holding it and increasing it in every part of the world.”118
Faced with Tarbell’s invective, Rockefeller was too proud to give the world the satisfaction of knowing that he was wounded. The press was rife with speculation about his reaction. “Mr. Rockefeller’s friends say that it is all cruel punishment for him, and that he writhes under these attacks,” reported one Detroit newspaper.119 A Philadelphia paper chimed in that “the richest man in the world sits by the hour at Forest Hill, his chin sunk on his breast. . . . He has lost interest in golf; he has become morose; never free in his conversation with his employees, he now speaks only when absolutely necessary, and then gives his directions tersely and absently.”120 These reports tell more about the popular thirst for revenge than about Rockefeller’s actual response. He was never tormented by guilt and went on playing golf.
Yet he was more vulnerable to criticism than he admitted. During this period, he grew closer to his son, who became his confidant just as Cettie’s maladies made it more difficult for her to discharge that function. Junior remembered, “He used to talk to me about the criticisms to which he was exposed, and I think it eased his mind to do so, because beneath his apparent insensitiveness, he was a sensitive man, but he always ended up by saying: ‘Well, John, we have to be patient. We have been successful and these people haven’t.’ ”121 Even John D. Rockefeller, Sr., required cathartic chats in time of trouble.
Having been filled to the brim with morality and religion, Rockefeller’s children must have been disoriented to see him exposed as a corporate criminal. How did they reconcile the rapacious Rockefeller splashed across McClure’s pages with the reverent father that they knew? As a rule, they fell back upon an implicit belief in father’s integrity, which was more a matter of religious faith than anything grounded in fact.
Senior might talk in general terms about Tarbell’s criticisms but refrained from specific rebuttals, an omission that especially tormented his son, who had taken his parents’ morality at face value. Junior had always been prey to tension-related symptoms, and they intensified with each new installment of McClure’s. By late 1904, gripped by migraine headaches and insomnia, he wavered on the edge of a breakdown. Under doctor’s orders, he, Abby, and their baby daughter Babs sailed to Cannes in December 1904 for what would extend into a yearlong absence from 26 Broadway. They toured the charming Languedoc country towns, drove through the maritime Alps, and ambled along the Promenade des Anglais. But Junior’s troubles were so intransigent that their projected one-month stay lengthened to six. Junior’s breakdown has been variously attributed to overwork, exhaustion, or an identity crisis, but he himself privately emphasized the toll of the Tarbell series, as well as two subsequent controversies: the tainted-money affair and his leadership of a Bible class.
While Tarbell’s articles were running, Rockefeller, his wife, his son, and two of his three daughters were afflicted by serious medical problems or nervous strain. In 1903, Rockefeller had such severe bronchial troubles that he took a rest cure near San Diego. That spring, Bessie suffered the stroke or heart ailment that left her sadly demented, and the following April Charles Strong took his wife off to Cannes, where she and Junior may have consulted the same nervous-strain specialists. In April 1904, Cettie had the attack that left her semiparalyzed and from which she took two years to recover. Finally, plunged into depression after the birth of her daughter Mathilde in April 1905, Edith fled to Europe. Understandably, the Rockefellers did not wish to broadcast their misfortunes to the world. The price that the series exacted on them, like so much else, was scrupulously hidden from both the public and posterity.
The most stinging personal blow to Rockefeller was not Tarbell’s exposé of his chicanery but her defamatory portrait of his father, published in the two-part character study. Rockefeller had never dropped the pretense that his father, like his mother, was a person of sterling virtue. Even in later years, he told one of his grandsons, “I had a rich inheritance in foundation building from both my father and mother, and I reverence them, and often long to see them even though it is so many years since they passed away.”122 Now readers across the country were introduced to the protean Doc Rockefeller, snake-oil salesman, ne’er-do-well, bigamist, and absentee father. Most mortifying of all to Rockefeller, Tarbell disinterred his oldest and deepest shame: Big Bill’s rape indictment in Moravia in the late 1840s.
By this point, Rockefeller seldom had dealings with his infirm, elderly father, who was increasingly crotchety, and routed urgent queries to him via brother Frank—to whom he was not speaking either. Tarbell had stumbled upon Doc Rockefeller’s existence in serendipitous fashion. One day in April 1903, J. M. Siddall was on the phone with Rockefeller’s brother-in-law, the genial William Rudd, when Rudd let slip that William Avery Rockefeller was still alive. Perhaps Rudd did not at first perceive the magnitude of this admission. “Oh yes, the old gentleman is living. He travels about from place to place in the west. The last I knew of him was in Dakota. We don’t know where he is now.”123
Sitting there agape, Siddall could scarcely believe his ears: Scoops did not come any bigger than this. The second he got off the phone, he pounded out a typewritten report to Tarbell.
I have always supposed that Mr. Rockefeller’s father died years and years ago, and I am startled almost beyond expression to learn, as I have through the telephone within the last five minutes, that the old man is living. . . . I never in my life was more surprised. . . . I am under the impression that I have been told over and over that the old man died some years ago, and I am sure from W. C. Rudd’s attitude toward me today that there is something secret and mysterious about the thing.124
In his hands Siddall now had a thread that would lead him and then other reporters into a vast investigative maze. Through his brother, Siddall sounded out Frank Rockefeller’s secretary, who offered a helpful hint: Doc Rockefeller lived in either North or South Dakota. “He doesn’t know where and says frankly—though confidentially—that he doesn’t dare ask Frank or any members of the family,” Siddall informed Tarbell.125 This only added to the mystery: Why had Rockefeller so thoroughly expunged his father from his life? Siddall next prodded a reporter from the ClevelandPlain Dealer to ask Dr. Biggar, very casually, whether on a recent trip west with Rockefeller they had detoured to visit Doc Rockefeller. At first Biggar walked straight into the trap. “No, we didn’t go through Dakota,” he began to blurt out, then, seeing his error, clammed up.126 Siddall and Tarbell scored their biggest coup with Rockefeller’s old friend Hiram Brown, whom Tarbell had met while researching her Lincoln book. During a meandering chat at Forest Hill, Brown sounded out Rockefeller about his father, which produced the following exchange, as recorded in Tarbell’s research files:
“Well, sir, the old gentleman is on his last legs I guess. He is absolutely senile. He is living on a farm near Cedar Valley, Cedar County, Iowa. He has lost all his powers. He is ninety-three years old, you know. They say the old gentleman is so deaf that he cannot hear a word. His nieces are taking good care of him. He is living on the farm because he owns it . . . because it is the place that is most pleasing to him.”
“Well, John, what a comical, funny old fellow he is,” Brown said.
“Yes,” John replied. “They say the old gentleman lies on the bed and swears all day. I haven’t seen him since he was here three years ago.”127 This last sentence alluded to the party that John had thrown at Forest Hill for Bill and his erstwhile cronies.
When Ida Tarbell interviewed Frank Rockefeller in 1904, he gave his own self-serving account of John and Bill’s final break. At age ninety, Bill had decided to bequeath his $87,000 in property equally among his four living children. According to Frank, John had wanted his one-quarter shareplus repayment of an outstanding $35,000 loan; Bill, irate, believed that the gift should cancel out the loan. As Tarbell paraphrased Frank’s narration in a memo, “The old man was so furious that now he will not come home. He says he will not live in the same state with his son.” 128 As Tarbell peeled away bits and pieces of Bill’s clandestine life, she did not know how abominably Bill and Frank had behaved over the years, how much they had borrowed from John, nor how erroneous their tirades against him were. Tarbell was never able to track down Doc Rockefeller or figure out the riddle of his double life, but her revelation that he was still alive somewhere created a national sensation.
Among the intrigued was Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, who had inveighed against Standard Oil as the most pitiless trust. Pulitzer served his readers an incongruous mix of scabrous stories and lofty crusades against corporate abuse. “Money is the great power of today,” he declared. “Men sell their souls for it. Women sell their bodies for it.”129 He wished to purge capitalism of its vulgar excesses so that a more enlightened capitalism might flourish, and he evinced a special animus toward Rockefeller, whom he christened “the father of trusts, the king of monopolists, the czar of the oil business,” a man who “relentlessly crushes all competitors.”130 Hence the story of Doc Rockefeller— uniting, as it did, the spice of family scandal with Standard Oil’s notoriety—was a godsend. Stirring the pot, Pulitzer offered eight thousand dollars to anyone who could provide information about Rockefeller’s father, a reward that set off a nationwide manhunt.
It is a credit to Bill’s matchless duplicity that teams of reporters were immediately stymied in this search. There was also a fair bit of luck involved. When McClure’s printed a picture of Rockefeller’s father to accompany the character sketch, many Freeport, Illinois, residents were shocked to see Dr. William Levingston staring out at them. Many traits that Tarbell attributed to Doc Rockefeller sounded oddly reminiscent of their queer local resident. The editor of the Freeport Daily Bulletin contacted McClure’s to inform them that they might have mistakenly printed a picture of Dr. William Levingston. Indignant at this insinuation—and totally oblivious of the revelation implicit in the Freeport editor’s query—McClure’s wrote back and assured the editor that the photo of Rockefeller’s father was indeed authentic. Amazingly enough, the national press corps never picked up on all the rumors buzzing around Freeport, Illinois.
An impatient Pulitzer dispatched one of his star reporters, J. W. Slaght, to Cleveland, hoping for a quick solution, but two weeks later Slaght slogged back to New York, weary and dispirited. In a despairing memo to Pulitzer, he stressed the inordinate effort required to track down Rockefeller’s father and hinted that it would be thankless drudgery. He hoped that the matter would end there. “In just about time enough for the report to have reached Mr. Pulitzer I was ordered to take up the search and stay on it until I found Mr. Rockefeller, regardless of time or expense,” Slaght revealed to William O. Inglis a decade later. “It seems that the story fascinated Mr. Pulitzer—the disappearance of the father of the richest man in the world, a thrilling mystery that would interest people everywhere.” 131
So thoroughly had Doc Rockefeller erased his tracks that Slaght had only one tenuous clue. During the reunion a few years earlier at Forest Hill, Big Bill had slyly told his buddies that he resided somewhere out West and shot “shirt-tail swans” in a nearby lake. Slaght consulted a naturalist who said that a wild goose nicknamed the “shirt-tail swan” abounded in parts of Alaska. Setting forth with this sketchy information and a photo of Doc Rockefeller, the miserable Slaght trekked through Alaska, tramping from lake to lake. Once he had exhausted this terrain, he heard that Bill had been sighted in Indiana and was off on another wild-goose chase. For a time, he peddled razors door-to-door, trying to pry information loose from suspicious German farmers. “I’ll bet I shaved myself ten or fifteen times a day, till my face was sore, selling the blamed razors.” 132 Even clean shaven, Slaght again came up empty-handed.
Desperate, he turned to Frank Rockefeller, the only person in direct communication with the phantom. Bribing Frank’s secretary with candy and theater tickets, Slaght gained access to Frank, who was no less protective of his father than John was. He was quite upset by Slaght’s quest and offered a straightforward deal: If Slaght called off the search, Frank would repay him with sensational findings about his brother. To enhance the deal’s allure, Frank exhumed from his drawer an impressive manuscript, thick as a telephone directory.
After a flurry of calls to New York, the World editors agreed to terminate their search for Doc Rockefeller for sixty days if they could, in return, publish Frank’s philippic against John. Having never dealt with Frank, Slaght naively trusted him. But when the time expired, Frank would not return his calls, and Slaght had no choice but to accost him on a Cleveland street and bluntly remind him that the World had fulfilled its end of the bargain; in exchange, he demanded the manuscript. “No, sir,” Frank snapped, “not one word of it.”133 Aghast, Slaght said the World would publish the inflammatory remarks Frank had made about John in his office. “If you publish that,” retorted Frank, “I’ll kill you.”134 However much he detested John, Frank must have feared that any published comments would dry up the loans from his brothers.
In August 1907, still baffled in its search for Doc Rockefeller, the World ran the interview with Frank recorded a year and a half earlier. “My father is alive and well,” a defiant Frank was quoted as saying. “He is dependent upon no man. He would scorn the proffer of financial aid from John D. and would not take it from me. He has means of his own, ample for all his needs.” Then he openly taunted his brother for his estrangement. “Go ask John D. where our father is: tell him that I sent you and that I dare him to answer.”135 By this point, the Pulitzer reporters labored under insane pressure to come up with fresh leads. When William Randolph Hearst also threw reporters into the search, Pulitzer (who referred to Rockefeller as “Grasping” in internal coded messages) could not bear the thought of being beaten and offered a handsome cash bonus to any reporter who broke the story. To bolster the burned-out Slaght, he assigned another reporter, A. B. Macdonald of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to the chase.
Before turning to the finale of this cross-country quest, let us fill in a few blanks about Bill’s life during these past years. Too old to travel, Bill had renounced his itinerant life and mostly remained in Freeport, Illinois. As garrulous as ever, he spent his days dabbling with his guns, telling hunting stories to whoever would listen, or boasting of his big ranch and fine horses in North Dakota. When he visited Frank’s ranch, he sat on the front porch and fired at targets Frank set up for his amusement. One night in 1904, the portly, ailing Bill, then ninety-four, lowered himself into a chair but missed it. As he tried to grab something to break his fall, he broke his arm near the shoulder, an accident so severe that his survival seemed doubtful, and it became necessary to contact his next of kin. Until this time, Margaret Allen Levingston had not known that her husband was a bigamist with five children and that one of them was among the world’s richest men. A proper lady, active in the First Presbyterian Church and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she must have reeled from this revelation.
There is reason to suspect that John D. met Margaret Levingston at this time. The nurse who treated Bill, Mrs. J. B. Gingrich, told of the arrival of a mysterious visitor from the East who came by private railroad car, slipped into the house discreetly by a side door, and only entered Bill’s room after she and the doctor had left. She remembered the sound of this visitor pacing up and down an adjoining room as Bill lay in pain. One suspects that John D. was the spectral figure, since William would not have asked for these special security precautions. If it was John D., it would have been the first time he ever set eyes on the wife whose legitimacy he had never acknowledged.
As he recuperated, Bill was often delirious, though still talkative. “Even as sick as he was he was jovial in his rational moments and in his delirium,” said Mrs. Gingrich. “He talked of his vast business interests in the East. He sang often a ditty about a frog in a well, and he sang often a lullaby which he said his mother used to sing to him when he was a baby nearly 100 years before.”136 As if shedding all the accumulated artifice of his double life, Bill’s mind frequently reverted to his early days as Doc Rockefeller in upstate New York. In the feverish mental state of his final days in early 1906, he repeatedly babbled the names of the five children from his first marriage—John, William, Frank, Lucy, and Mary Ann. And he would stare at the loyal Margaret and suddenly cry out, “You are not my wife. Where is Eliza?”137
It was to be a season full of bitter surprises for Margaret, who had been gulled by Bill’s braggadocio into thinking they were supremely wealthy. During his illness, Bill had trouble paying his medical bills and even contemplated pawning the big, gaudy diamond he had always stuck in his shirtfront. The night that Bill died, Margaret was unsure of the Rockefellers’ reaction and did not know exactly what to do. She apparently stored the body for several months at the City Cemetery, awaiting a request to have it shipped back to Cleveland. When word never came from the family, she transferred the body to the Oak Knoll section of the Oakland Cemetery. Though Bill is always said to have died on May 11, 1906, references to his estate suddenly appear in John’s papers in January 1906, suggesting that the burial may have taken place on that later date, not the death itself. Only Frank and Pierson Briggs attended the belated funeral in which Bill was entombed in a plain, unvarnished box in an unmarked grave. That Margaret was worried about her future financial state is confirmed by the fact that she paid the gravediggers three dollars, but could not afford the extra dollar for a brick vault—standard procedure at the time. It would be another five years, after Margaret’s own death, before a granite memorial bearing the Levingston name in raised lettering was finally erected on the site. Few—if any—Rockefeller descendants seem to know that William Avery Rockefeller is buried there under his assumed name.
The tangled skein of Bill’s life finally unraveled in early 1908, two years after his death, when a druggist in Madison, Wisconsin, told A. B. Macdonald that for years a friend and fellow druggist in Freeport named George Swartz had sold medical concoctions to a Dr. William Levingston. Swartz had always wondered whether the name was a fabrication, a suspicion confirmed when he saw a picture of Dr. Levingston gazing at him from Tarbell’s series. Acting on this tip, Macdonald traveled to Freeport. When he flashed a photo of Bill Rockefeller to neighbors, everybody agreed that it was Dr. Levingston. Then he rang the doorbell of a private home on West Clark Street. A refined, elderly lady in her early seventies answered, her white hair covered by a lace cap. When the reporter disclosed his mission, Margaret Allen Levingston lifted her hands and started to sob. “I have been wondering when one of you would come,” she said, sniffling. “And I have been dreading it, for I knew the secret could not be kept forever, now that my husband is dead.” When Macdonald asked whether William Avery Rockefeller and Dr. Levingston were the same person, she replied, “Go to the other side if you want the facts.” What other side? “To John D. Rockefeller. Let him tell if he will. It is not for me to talk. I lived happily with my husband for fifty years. He was kind and true. It is all I can say or will say. I must be a true woman to the end.” 138 She furnished pictures of both herself and her husband—in fact, over the mantel Macdonald saw a crayon version of the photo of Bill he held in his hand—then told her visitor in parting, “I wish it were possible for you to leave me alone with my dead.”139
To retire any lingering doubt, Macdonald went to the local library and found an obituary notice, dated May 11, 1906, for Dr. William Levingston, who had died at age ninety-six and was listed as the oldest man in Freeport. The death notice listed his birthday as November 13, 1810—the same date as Doc Rockefeller’s—settling the great mystery. Greatly relieved, Macdonald was at last liberated from Pulitzer’s obsession.
On February 2, 1908, the nightmare that had haunted John D. Rockefeller his whole life suddenly burst forth in bold print. On its front page, the World trumpeted the headline “Secret Double Life of Rockefeller’s Father Revealed by the World.” The story received the coverage ordinarily reserved for major elections or great natural disasters, with the single column on the front page followed by an entire page inside. Nothing in the text was quite so cogent as the proof provided by two adjoining, identical photos of William Avery Rockefeller and Dr. William Levingston. The article gave a sketchy picture of his double life, his fifty-one years as a bigamist, his footloose life as a mountebank in the Dakotas, and his burial in an unmarked grave. It was a story more bizarrely implausible than anything ever invented by the tabloid press. For Big Bill, who had always wanted to be somebody important, it was a queer sort of posthumous fulfillment.
Rockefeller’s archives do not reveal a single public or private reaction to the World article. His friends never dared to elicit his response, while his family pretended that the article did not exist. There were two noteworthy public reactions. First, Frank again decided to make mischief by publicly denying that his father had been a bigamist or even that he was dead. “Like others which have preceded it, the story is an unqualified lie. The whereabouts of my father concerns no one but his immediate family and it is precisely to protect himself from being hounded by cranks and others who would break in upon the peace and quiet of his retired life that he prefers to live in such seclusion as suits his convenience.”140
Second, the article brought an emotional response from Dr. Charles Johnston, Bill’s handsome, dark-skinned young disciple and traveling companion in the Dakota years. When he read the World exposé, Johnston was petrified that he would lose his license to practice medicine if it was shown that he and Bill had sold patent medicines illegally. Released from his pledge of secrecy by Bill’s death, he told the World, “For years I have wondered why the secret was kept so safely. For twenty-five years the secret has been locked in my breast, but it was well known to others, and I have wondered when it would become known.”141 To protect his professional status, he portrayed Bill sympathetically as a “natural healer,” not as a cunning mountebank. Years later, when he no longer feared legal reprisals, he gave a less sanitized history of their scams. Perhaps more than Bill’s real children, Charles Johnston retained a tender spot for him, telling the World that he still cherished the violin that Bill had given him when he was too old and gouty to play. And he made a public plea that the Rockefeller family should posthumously forgive this fallible man. “I think it’s time that John D. Rockefeller and his brother should acknowledge him as their father, because all the world knows it now.” 142
Deaf to Johnston’s plea, Rockefeller probably never forgave the father whose erratic ways had likely set him off on his exaggerated quest for money, power, and respectability. Bill’s body was never brought back to Cleveland and his granite tombstone was paid for from Margaret Levingston’s meager estate.
Frederick T. Gates, seated, with Dr. Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)