Excerpt from The History of the Standard Oil Company

By Ida M. Tarbell

Published in book form in 1904

Writer and editor Ida M. Tarbell (1857-1944) was one of the first great female journalists in the United States. Her best-known work, The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), exposed the questionable business practices of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust, which had been formed when Rockefeller combined all his corporations in an attempt to reduce competition and control prices in the oil industry. When Tarbell began researching the enormous company in 1902, it had already survived more than thirty years of criticism, state and federal investigation, and legal actions against it (see Chapter 11). The publication of her book helped result in a 1911 Supreme Court decision to dissolve Standard Oil and altered the future course of business in the country, surprising many who...