While a truly enduring representation of American journalism at its finest, Ida Minerva Tarbell contributed much more than her 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company. Ida Tarbell stands as a woman who was successful at what many in her era were not, journalism. From childhood, Ida closely observed and with a profound curiosity questioned everything and anything and later applied this inquisitiveness to her life and career. A woman who dared to think beyond what was being presented to her by her friends, family, colleagues, ministers and the like set the ideals for honest journalism.

Of truly humble beginnings –even for mid-1800’s standards, Ida was to be born in a log house in Erie County Pennsylvania (Tarbell, 1939, p.8) With a story beginning like most other immigrants at the time, her parents strived for land of their own, for success, and a westward move that would occupy most family planning through Ida’s early years in which Ida’s father would work in Iowa while striving to earn enough money to bring his family along with him, yet this isn’t the most important part of her life, and there is no defining moment –only sets of moments, that in which she begins to notice the things in life that are out of place or wrong in her view, and question them. At the age of a year and a half Ida’s father, Frank Tarbell, moved back after success evaded him in Iowa, and as the story was told to and then by Ida “I deeply resented the intimacy between he strange man and my mothers so far my exclusive possession. Flinging my arms around my mother, so the story went, I cried ‘Go away, bad man.’” (Tarbell, 1939, p.8) As Ida’s childhood progressed, her farther took advantage of the Pennsylvania boom at the time and used his skills to build wooden oil storage tanks of which later opened opportunities to become an oil producer and refiner, she was growing up feet from her fathers work and witnessed success, tragedies of workers, wives, and news of presidents lost to an assassin –the world which would define her up-bringing. Throughout her 1939 autobiography All in the day’s work patterns other than her curiosity arise, yes she questions, but she also observed. In one case she wondered what exactly dictated whether objects tossed in the creek floated or sank to the bottom –to add one more to the list, she led her younger brother to a footbridge near her house and dropped him in, it turns out to her delight, even after being spanked she remembered “only the peace of satisfied curiosity in the certainty that my brother belonged to the category of things which floated” (Tarbell. p.8) Exhibiting her tenacity for getting to the bottom of things.

Be sure to read parts II and III.

References

Brevard, K. M. (2010). The story of oil: how it changed the world. Mankato, MN: Compass Point Books.

Somervill, B. A. (2002). Ida Tarbell: pioneer investigative reporter. Greensboro, N.C.: M. Reynolds..

Tarbell, I. M. (1939). All in the day’s work;. New York: The Macmillan Co..