Ida Tarbell Begins "The History of the Standard Oil Company" in McClure's Magazine

Ida Tarbell began publishing her groundbreaking 19-part investigative series “The History of the Standard Oil Company” in McClure’s Magazine in November 1902, running through October 1904. Her meticulous research exposed the predatory business practices, illegal rebate schemes, and monopolistic control exercised by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust. Tarbell spent years investigating corporate documents, interviewing former employees, and documenting how Standard Oil systematically destroyed competitors through railroad rebates, price manipulation, and industrial espionage. Her first article was published alongside pieces by Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker, collectively ushering in the era of muckraking journalism.

The series was published as a book in 1904 and is credited with hastening the Supreme Court’s 1911 breakup of Standard Oil. Historian Daniel Yergin called it “the single most influential book on business ever published in the United States,” while the New York University Journalism Department ranked it the fifth-best work of twentieth-century American journalism. President Theodore Roosevelt gave Tarbell and her peers the label “muckrakers,” though Tarbell herself disliked the term and wrote an article titled “Muckraker or Historian” to justify her investigative work. This pioneering example of investigative journalism established the template for holding corporate power accountable through detailed, fact-based reporting—a standard that would be systematically undermined over the following century as corporate interests captured media outlets and defunded investigative journalism.